SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 22 (of 78)
Guilty of Being Lucky (1858)
Chapter 22
Guilty of Being Lucky (1858)
The second person I killed—after the tramp in the Hannibal jail—was my brother Henry. As would always be the case when I killed somebody, I did not do it deliberately, or directly, but nevertheless it was as a result of my actions that Henry’s unblemished career came to such an early conclusion.
When Henry died, he was on the verge of twenty, and I was still just twenty-two. If only I had not urged him to join me on the River! He had been working for Orion in a print shop in Keokuk. I thought that I was ushering Henry through a golden door of opportunity, one that opened on to a more exciting life than the provincial one he had been experiencing in Iowa—and certainly one which would lead to more financial reward for him—but instead I was opening his crypt and conducting him down into it.
If I had just let well enough alone, Henry might be alive yet. But then, maybe I did him a favor … not our mother, though. What a devastating blow it is to lose a child! She lost several, as eventually I did myself.
I may have even inadvertently turned out to have been doubly guilty of Henry’s death, because shortly before the disaster, I had occasion to spend an evening with him as he served as night watchman over the freight on shore prior to our departure.
During that night, as we sat up talking, I advised Henry that in the case of shipwreck—which was not an uncommon occurrence in those days—he must think not only of himself and his own safety, but to be of assistance to the passengers in peril. I told him it was his duty to save them first, before thinking of his own escape. I said:
“In case of disaster to the boat, don’t lose your head—leave that unwisdom to the passengers—they are competent—they’ll attend to it. But you rush for the hurricane deck, and astern to the solitary lifeboat lashed aft the wheelhouse on the port side, and obey the mate’s orders—thus you will be useful. When the boat is launched, give such help as you can in getting the women and children into it, and be sure you don’t try to get into it yourself. It is summer weather, the river is only a mile wide as a rule, and you can swim ashore without any trouble.”
A third way in which I was guilty of Henry’s death was that I allowed my temper to get the best of me, and was dismissed from the Pennsylvania and was thus not around to be able to look after him.
The events which, linked together, caused this to come about were this:
My chief Bixby had left the boat we were on together for more money piloting a steamboat on the Missouri River. He left me with a certain William Brown, a horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault-finding, mote-magnifying tyrant; save those entertaining peccadilloes, Brown was a fine fellow indeed.
Henry was a mud clerk with me on Brown’s boat, the Pennsylvania, at this time in 1858 (a mud clerk is an assistant to the assistant to the assistant of the purser). It was not a place of profit, it was only a place of promise—there was no salary, but put the clerk in the line of promotion. The nomenclature of the position stems from the fact that its duties sometimes necessitated that the clerk leap ashore even in spots where there was nothing but water-infused dirt on which to alight.
Brown mistreated my brother Henry badly. When Henry came up to relay a message from the captain, Brown had ignored it. So later, when Brown had not acted on the message Henry had delivered, the captain stormed up and wanted to know why. Brown claimed that Henry had delivered no such message. I knew better. I intervened, and set matters straight regarding that. Rather than confront me, though, Brown picked up a large piece of coal and jumped for my brother. Abandoning the helm and leaving the boat to its own devices in navigating the river I, in a blind rage, grabbed a stool without knowing what I was doing and knocked Brown to the deck with it. We wrestled around on the floor for a while. It was the only time in my adult life that I physically attacked someone.
After losing my temper that way and pummeling Brown first physically and thereafter verbally, it gradually dawned on me what a serious thing I had done. I reported to Captain Klinefelter about what had happened, expecting to be discharged in disgrace, and possibly barred from ever getting work as a pilot again—or even receiving a prison sentence for my insubordination and dereliction of duty, having put the ship and its passengers in danger that way.
To make a long story short, the worst of my fears—for myself—were not realized, and I simply ended up on another ship, whereas Henry remained behind on the Pennsylvania.
Eight days later, as my new ship was heading north up the river, news came that the Pennsylvania had exploded, on June 19th.
At each river town, I searched the local papers for news of the disaster—who was listed among the dead, who among the missing, who among the injured, and other survivors.
The intelligence gathered from these sources, though, was inconsistent. One report would say that Henry was injured, but not seriously, and then the next would say his injuries were life-threatening or even that he was already dead.
There were still bodies floating everywhere in the river when our vessel finally reached the scene of the disaster. On exploding, the ship had spilled some of its human cargo into the river, and had catapulted others on scalding hot plumes of steam either into the river or even all the way across it and onto the banks of the Mississippi.
Coming ashore, I frantically searched the makeshift hospitals and found Henry alive, but just barely. He had done as I had instructed him and, after having been blown into the river, swam back to help in the rescue of others.
In the initial blast, Henry had swallowed super-heated steam and, although he looked whole and sound from the outside, the doctors told me he was bound to die from his internal injuries. The prognostication changed for the better later, though, when it was determined he had a good chance of survival after all. But then a harried and hurried physician administered to him an overgenerous dose of morphine for his pain, which proved to bring on, or at least hasten, his demise.
So for the second time in my life, I had lost my closest friend; first my big brother Ben, back when I was six years old, and now my little brother Henry. I was yet to lose more best friends and family members in the years and decades to come, but thankfully I did not know this at the time, because I could not have withstood a single iota more of despair and heartbreak.
And it was my own fault that Henry lost his life, and that our mother lost her youngest child. My long and industrious career of being the cause of death of my loved ones thus commenced.
Henry served as the model for Tom Sawyer’s younger brother “Sid” in my book about Tom’s adventures. But Henry was a much better boy than Sid. He was growing up to be a fine man. He would have certainly become such, had not his career been curtailed by that string of circumstances that can be traced back to my advice to him to join me on the river, further back to my aborted journey to South America, further back yet to my father’s decision to relocate us from Tennessee to Missouri, and further on, back and back, all the way to Adam’s decision to eat of the apple proffered by Eve.
Henry’s death could not have been hindered once Adam took a bite, but I rue that I was unwittingly a part of it all. People called me “Lucky” after hearing how I escaped being on the Pennsylvania when it exploded, but that nickname rankled. I would have gladly died in Henry’s place; in fact, I fervently prayed for that to be the case as I was at his side on what turned out to be his deathbed. But my prayer was not answered.
Upon the explosion, Brown was catapulted higher into the air than Tom Quartz. His body was never found. My bitterness against Brown has faded away and disappeared; I feel only compassion for him now, and if I could send him a fan I would.
EDITOR’S NOTES: In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recounted the night he and Henry had their fateful conversation, and the accident itself:
The night before the ‘Pennsylvania’ left, Henry and I sat chatting on a freight pile on the levee till midnight. The subject of the chat, mainly, was one which I think we had not exploited before—steamboat disasters. One was then on its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water which was to make the steam which should cause it, was washing past some point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked;—but it would arrive at the right time and the right place. We doubted if persons not clothed with authority were of much use in cases of disaster and attendant panic; still, they might be of some use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fell within our experience we would at least stick to the boat, and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way. Henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came, and acted accordingly. …
When Mr. Wood and Henry fell in the water, they struck out for shore, which was only a few hundred yards away; but Henry presently said he believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!), and therefore would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded. So they parted, and Henry returned.
Twain had arrived in the wee hours of the morning at the makeshift hospital which had been set up at The Memphis Exchange. A local reporter recorded what he saw:
We witnessed one of the most affecting scenes at the Exchange yesterday that has ever been seen. The brother of Mr. Henry Clemens, second clerk of the Pennsylvania …arrived in the city yesterday afternoon, on the steamer A.T. Lacy. He hurried to the Exchange to see his brother, and on approaching the bedside of the wounded man, his feelings so much overcame him, at the scalded and emaciated form before him, that he sunk to the floor overpowered. There was scarcely a dry eye in the house; the poor sufferers shed tears at the sight. This brother had been pilot on the Pennsylvania, but fortunately for him, had remained in New Orleans when the boat started up.
To one observer, Twain appeared to be “almost crazed with grief.” So mentally distraught was he, in fact, that the Memphis authorities insisted that a man accompany him as he took the coffin to St. Louis.
In a letter to his sister-in-law, Orion’s wife, Twain wrote about Henry’s death:
O, God! This is hard to bear. I, even I, have humbled myself to the ground and prayed as never man prayed before that the great God might let this cup pass from me, that he would strike me to the earth but spare my brother, that he would pour out the fullness of his just wrath upon my wicked head but have mercy upon that unoffending boy. The horrors of three days have swept over me. They have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. Mollie, there are gray hairs in my head tonight. For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair. Men take me by the hand and congratulate me and call me “lucky” because I was not on the Pennsylvania when she blew up! May God forgive them, for they know not what they say!
Mollie, you do not understand why I was not on that boat. I will tell you. I left Saint Louis on her but on the way down, Mr. Brown, the pilot that was killed by the explosion (poor fellow), quarreled with Henry without cause, while I was steering. Henry started out of the pilot house. Brown jumped up and collared him—turned him half away around and struck him in the face!—and him nearly six feet high—struck my little brother. I was wild from that moment. I left the boat to steer herself and avenged the insult. And the Captain said I was right, that he would discharge Brown in New Orleans if he could get another pilot, and would do it in St. Louis, anyhow. Of course both of us could not return to St. Louis on the same boat. No pilot could be found, and the Captain sent me to the A.T. Lacey with orders to her Captain to bring me to Saint Louis. Had another pilot been found, poor Brown would have been the “lucky” man.
As for the fight with Brown, Twain relates an expanded version of that event in the same book (Life on the Mississippi), in the following chapter (19).
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The mention of Tom Quartz is an allusion to a fictional cat from Chapter LXI (that’s 61 to you and me) of Roughing It.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.