Chapter 9
The Weight of the Bible (1845)
Later, in 1845, Hannibal merchant William Owsley, a neighbor of ours, shot and killed Samuel Smarr, a local rancher who had threatened him.
The shooting down of Smarr in the main street at noon-day supplied me with some more dreams; and in them I always saw again the grotesque closing picture—the great family Bible spread open on the profane old man’s breast by some thoughtful idiot, rising and sinking to the labored breathings and adding the torture of its leaden weight to his dying struggles.
For many a night, I gasped and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book in my nightmares.
Looking back on it now and cataloging all the episodes of early deaths and deaths by violence I saw in Hannibal, it makes it seem as if our normally quiet little village was sporadically a hotbed of mayhem. Whatever we grow up with we consider normal, and so I became in some respects accustomed to these sorts of things as I advanced towards adolescence.
Many of these incidents appear in my books, with names and settings altered to fit the story being told. For instance, I adapted the Owsley/Smarr incident in “Huck Finn,” in the scene where Colonel Sherburn guns down Boggs in the street. Translating some of my life experiences in this way seemed to somehow get the bad memories of them off my chest, as it were.
And there were many such events that I witnessed. All within the space of a couple of years we experienced two or three other tragedies in our village, and I had the ill luck to be too nearby on each occasion. There was the slave man who was struck down with a chunk of slag for some small offense; I saw him die. And the young drifter who was stabbed with a Bowie knife by a drunken comrade; I saw the red life gush from his breast. And I have never been able to forget the sight of the rowdy young brothers and their harmless old uncle—one of them held the old man down with his knees on his breast while the other tried repeatedly to kill him with an Allen revolver which wouldn’t go off. I happened along just then, of course.
EDITOR’S NOTES: To be more specific, the slaying of Smarr by Owsley is fictionalized in chapters 21 and 22 of “Huck Finn,” where Colonel Sherburn shoots down Boggs in the middle of the street. Recasting events from his youth seemed to be Twain’s way of cauterizing the emotional wounds they had imprinted upon his psyche.
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