"Rebel With a Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs" — Chapter 5
Tuesday Serialization of the fact-based biography masquerading as an autobiography
Lover’s Leap outside of Hannibal, Missouri
Chapter 5
Ben Dies at Nine (1842)
In 1842, when he was nine and I was six, my bosom companion and older brother Benjamin died.
I had now lost both an older sister, Margaret, and an older brother. That left Orion, Pamela, myself, and Henry (who was then four).
I began to worry for the rest of my siblings. Would Pamela be next? Orion? No, not Orion, he was too old; it was plain to me that it was only young children who were taken. First we lost Margaret, who was nine years of age at the time, and then Ben, at the same age. Orion was seventeen—a full-grown man, from my perspective then, and apparently out of danger that way.
I wondered if maybe it was me who would be next. If nine was the fateful age for Clemens children, I only had three more years to live. What would I do with the years remaining to me?
There was another reason I wondered whether I might possibly die at the age of nine—due to the fact that I did not gather with the Millerites atop a local mountain. Actually a hill, but I considered it a mountain at the time.
You see, a group of these, who had expected the world to end, had gathered atop Lover’s Leap, outside of Hannibal, to be in the right place at the right time when the faithful were taken from earth to heaven. I did not join them there; my family did not join them there; my friends did not, either. Even if the Millerites were right, I did not want to go alone—that is to say, without my family and friends. The climate may be better in heaven, but if my family and friends were to go to the other place, I preferred their company there to that of strangers up above.
As is probably evident, the Millerites missed fire and were left disappointed. They had made ready to fly up into heaven at the first blast of the trumpet. But the angel did not blow it.
I didn’t know it at the time, but when sweet-tempered Ben died, it would be the only time that I would ever see my parents kiss.
I will enlighten you on the reason for that later.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Twain’s brother Ben died a mere five years after the death of Benjamin Lampton, his maternal grandfather, for whom he was named. Twain was named for their other grandfather, Samuel B. Clemens.
In the passage below, Twain wrote that he was eight at the time of Ben’s death, but in actuality he was six-and-a-half (as Ben’s death occurred in the middle of May, 1842, and Twain had been born in late November, 1835). His memory sometimes failed him, his math was not always sound, and perhaps above all, he didn’t always care too much about the particulars, as long as a story was true “in spirit.”
Writing of his mother at the time of Ben’s death, Twain had this to say:
What becomes of the multitudinous photographs which one’s mind takes of people? Out of the million which my mental camera must have taken of this first and closest friend, only one clear and strongly defined one of early date remains. It dates back forty-seven years; she was forty years old then, and I was eight. She held me by the hand and we were kneeling by the bedside of my brother, two years older than I, who lay dead, and the tears were flowing down her cheeks unchecked. And she was moaning.
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