He seemed quite proud of his standing, and told me that he had always taken care to understand the nature of the ships at his command. On such journeys, he would not only know the exact tonnage of the craft itself but also learn the number of passengers and the weight of its cargo from its manifest, such elements being pertinent to many a split-second calculation, such as the amount of time it would take to avoid a coal or timber barge (such as the one I had been on) suddenly appearing out of the mist.
Mainly he had enjoyed the important responsibility of presiding over the destinies and safety of the rich cargoes and many human lives left in his charge; and he relished the grand respect accorded him on such ships. A luster of youthful accomplishment emanated from his being—a kind of light; his days, unfolding before him in the warmth and promise of youth, counted as the happiest he had experienced in his life once he’d left Hannibal, Missouri.
And, he told me, there were the glories of calm nights, when the stars were clear in the sky and the moon shone over the water and the river seemed to go on forever in its reflected light, such a fine scenario turning one’s thoughts to many fanciful speculations about God and destiny and Providence. The mystery of a universe spreading endlessly onward, as if emanating from one’s self, making the pilot feel grand and, at the same time, as if he were nothing at all. (The times I have since experienced such thoughts in Africa are innumerable.) I could not help but ask him if he believed in the Deity.
“Can’t say that I do, when I think about it. But on the right kind of day, when everything is wonderful, you can’t help but wish that you could thank somebody for it all. On the evidence of this river, and this sky, the fact that you and I can more or less think, talk, and walk around with our senses taking in a million things, I would say that you can’t help but wonder how it came about. But no, despite my righteous Presbyterian upbringing, the mystery of it all seems to me to have a physical explanation beyond our scope to understand. Though I sincerely wish it were otherwise. Since you are a Bible-reading man, I am assuming that my words do not fall easily on your ears; if so, I render my apologies, but I won’t be dishonest with you.”
Then he asked me, “How old are you, anyway, Henry?”
“Nineteen.”
“That was my brother’s age. He was a clerk, like you…. Your face is like his—eager for new experiences and wanting no more than a tad’s worth of earthly pleasures…. He was all innocence, the poor soul.”
And then, as if he wanted to unburden himself of some deep agony, he told me the following.
“About a year ago,” he began, “my younger brother, Henry, had been living up in Keokuk, Iowa, out of a job. He had been working for my older brother, Orion, who ran a press and published his own little newspaper there, the Keokuk Journal, a good-for-nothing operation. As this enterprise had folded, like everything else Orion ever worked on—he wasn’t much for business—I told Henry to come down to St. Louis to get into the steamboat business. I got him a job for no wages as a clerk—what we called a mud clerk—on a side-wheeler, the Pennsylvania, where I was a second pilot. I figured that starting out as a clerk, Henry, with time, would end up as a purser, a profession that he seemed well suited for. His was drudge work on the ship, but mainly he seemed to enjoy the river life. We’d made a few voyages up the Mississippi when…”
Then he dropped off into silence, the cigar in his mouth sending up clouds of smoke, as if he were meditating on the next thought. It was some minutes before he spoke again.
“We had made a number of trips up-and downriver, but our finest times were spent ashore, enjoying the local attractions—the circuses and theaters and minstrel shows of the major towns we visited; often at night we walked along the levees of such towns speaking quietly about the river life. I’d always inform him of the precautions he should take in the event of emergencies, to never panic and to keep his head at all times. Why I told him this I do not know, Henry, but I had had a premonition one night, in the form of a dream, in my sister’s home in St. Louis. I saw him laid out in a lead coffin, in one of my suits, with white and red roses placed upon his chest. Though I had dismissed it as a passing nightmare, I could not, as a brother who’d had such a dream, feel anything but concern for him whenever our steamboat entered into some difficulty—the jostling of the ship sometimes becoming violent with the swell of waves from passing boats or turbulent waters, bringing to mind the possibility of Henry being swept overboard. Often I found myself rushing down to the lower decks to find him. Generally I felt a great discomfort at having him out of my sight.
“One day, we were coming downriver from St. Louis when the steamer hit some very high winds, and the captain sent Henry up to the pilothouse with instructions for the senior pilot, a rough fellow named Brown, to put into shore. But the pilot, being somewhat deaf and disdainful of lowly hands, ignored the order and continued on his way. Shortly the captain came to the pilothouse to accuse the pilot of disobedience, but, denying it all, once the captain left, the pilot took it out on my brother. With a piece of coal in hand he lunged at him: I had come into the wheelhouse at that moment and, seeing Henry thus assaulted, picked up a stool and clacked it over the pilot’s head. Then I pounded him with my fists, and very justifiably so. At the end of that unpleasant affair, when the Pennsylvania had been put into port in New Orleans, I was transferred to duty on another steamboat, the Alfred T. Lacy, which was to follow the Pennsylvania on its next journey upriver to St. Louis.
“Though there was in my gut a sense that Henry should have stayed with me, I made no fuss over the matter: Henry already knew the run of the side-wheeler, and, as each ship had its own system, he had not wanted to make a change, which made sense at the time.
“Two days after his steamship left New Orleans, I followed, aboard the Alfred T. Lacy. We were at Greenville, Mississippi, when I heard a rumor that the Pennsylvania’s boilers had exploded by Ship Island, near Memphis: The side-wheeler had gone down, it was said, and some one hundred and fifty lives were lost. I immediately thought of Henry and despaired, though my apprehensions were somewhat dispelled when we docked in Napoleon, Arkansas, and I read a Memphis newspaper that did not list my brother among the casualties. The next day, however, farther upriver, I read another ‘extra’ and saw my brother’s name among the ‘gravely injured and beyond help’ list.
“It was not until we arrived at Memphis that I heard the full details of what happened: As the steamship had been racing along, to make good time, four of its boilers had overheated and exploded. It was six in the morning on a hot day, and my brother was asleep in a hammock on the aft deck at the time. Some seven hundred people were aboard, and the explosion lifted the first third of the boat into the air and tossed about all the passengers within the ship; the chimneys collapsed, spewing sparks and causing a fire; and the boilers rose up onto the deck, shooting scalding steam and objects everywhere—a Catholic priest was said to have been impaled upon an iron crowbar that nearly cut him in half. And while the force of the explosion flung my brother and many an injured passenger a considerable distance into the water, Henry, deeply wounded but unaware of it, had chosen to swim back to the disaster to see whom he could save, for many people, blinded and barely able to breathe, were tottering along the deck in agony or else caught under burning debris, miserably crying for help.”
Mr. Clemens, who had maintained his composure to that point, paused to draw from a flask.
“Want a swig?” he asked me.
I felt it would have been improper to refuse him; the harsh and musty-tasting liquid burned in my throat, and immediately the room took on a more intimate quality. Then he continued:
“Attempting to help others, my younger brother was rendered senseless by a second steam explosion, his lungs and body scalded. He fell onto the deck, and the wooden parts of the ship burned down around him. Shortly a fire brigade came out by barge to find which persons were still living, Henry among them, and these they gathered on stretchers and carried to their boat. Wh
en another steamer came upon the scene, all who survived were taken from the barge by firemen and transferred to a hospital in Memphis, where they were laid out on pallets along the floor of a great hall—by then Henry’s injuries had been examined, and he, wrapped all over in a dressing of linseed oil and raw cotton, had been put into a separate section, of the dying.”
Then he looked at me again.
“I was there for six days and nights, and of the general misery I will not report. But I had lingered long enough in that gloomy hall to watch my brother’s nerveless fingers grasping after an object that was invisible upon his chest, many times over. That I could not speak words to him that he could hear told me most directly that there is no God who answers prayers. What say you to that?”
I had no answer.
“When he went to sleep, for good, he was dressed in one of my suits and put in a lead coffin: As he lay in his repose, some sympathetic locals came along and placed white and red roses upon his chest—my little dream having, sadly, come true.
“You can’t understand my misery over the whole affair—I put him on that steamboat, even when I knew the potential for such disasters… It was my fault.”
When he was relieved of his post, the river before us was serene. As we descended down into the lower decks, he stopped to ask me: “Would you, judging by what I have said of that situation, find reason to hold me at fault?”
“I would not.”
“Do you judge me to have been a good brother to him?”
“Yes.”
“For that consoling thought, I thank you,” he said before leaving me and retiring to his cabin, somewhere on the deck.
ON THAT VOYAGE, MEETING HIM on several occasions, I told him, in some detail, more about my father’s business dealings—he seemed particularly interested by Mr. Stanley’s trade in Cuba, for it seemed to him another of those places where an adventurous and resourceful man could do well for himself. The name of that island sparkled in his mind with the allure of other distant places—from Brazil to China—places that he, with his unabated wanderlust, hoped to see one day for himself: “As much as I enjoy the kingly and unfettered position of riverboat pilot, and the good wages, I can’t imagine staying put in one place for long when there is so much of the world to be visited.” And he would ask me a great many questions about England—another place of legend in his mind—home to Shakespeare and Milton.
“With ink in my veins, it would be a surely fine proposition to write of such places, but I’ve got to get the Mississippi out of my system first—I suppose I will, sooner or later.”
In those days I came to respect and admire him, for he was a largely self-taught man—and far more intelligent than most one would ever hope to meet, his memory, like my own, “sharp as tacks,” as he would put it. Among the subjects we good-naturedly discussed on such evenings were the origins of chess, which was apparently an Arab innovation passed on to the Europeans during the Crusades. He thought it the best thing to have come out of those conflicts besides the introduction of the orange to the West. In his affable way, he told me that he had once been hit in the head by an orange that had fallen out of a tree—“To think that we have the Crusades to thank for that!” he said. Then, too, in the way that we spoke of many arcane things, he marveled at the invention of the compass and other such intricate objects, including clocks. He always carried a watch, which he kept in his vest pocket, and he loved to look at it. The tiny gears and latches and springs were of such fascination to him that he could not help but pry open the back of the metal shell to show me the mechanisms. He then held forth on the history of clocks, marveling at the leap from sundial to hourglass to water clock, which somehow led to the marvelous modern invention. Machinery in general fascinated him, and he wondered aloud whether such clocklike mechanisms could be applied to the process of printing. Before becoming a steamboat pilot, he had experienced firsthand the dreary careers of compositor and typesetter; altogether, it was as if he believed that many of mankind’s problems could be solved through mechanical techniques. I thought him clearly some kind of natural genius.
Such musings led, by and by—a phrase he often used—to further discussions of theology. It seemed to him that the whole of the heavens functioned under one “inventive” intelligence, in the way that the gears of clocks have their own unwavering patterns. The few times I tried to expound the religious point of view he would snort or snore, as the man had no patience for such ideas; though he allowed that the order of the universe could not be an accident or the result of arbitrary events—“What that amounts to, I cannot say.”
It happened that he had recently read portions of a book by someone named Darwin called The Origin of Species, which held that modern man was derived from the apes. Based on his experience with men—no better than apes—he had no trouble believing this. I often laughed as he held forth, turning every thought into a matter of humor, a skill that intrigued me. He seemed to find it impossible to take his own erudition seriously—I thought him far better cultured and knowledgeable than most men, save for Mr. Stanley, yet he seemed to have a disdain for pretension: “I am just a lucky fellow from Hannibal, Missouri, nurtured by the dreams that come with growing up on the banks of a great river, the Mississippi. If there’s a heaven, it’s behind us, in early youth… mine was a paradise, to be sure.”
On several occasions during the day, he would come looking for me in the general meeting rooms, where I often sat beside Mr. Stanley and some businessmen, drawing up invoices and making entries into our accounting ledger books as my father went about his commerce. Usually, if he saw that I was occupied, Clemens would simply tip his cap at me, but one afternoon, as I had wanted him to make the acquaintance of Mr. Stanley, I asked him to join us. My father was cordial enough, commending Mr. Clemens for his many skills and thanking him for having taken an interest in me.
“Well, sir,” Mr. Clemens said, “you have a fine boy on your hands.”
“And he has spoken highly of your befriending him.”
They shook hands, my father looming over Clemens, the pilot looking him over carefully and coming to some appraisal of mind.
“Well, good day,” Clemens said.
Afterward, gentlemanly as he had been with Mr. Clemens, my father looked at me askance, and he shook his head ever so slightly, as if to remind me of the discussions we had had in the cabin about the dangers of assuming friendships with strangers on riverboats.
“Just remember,” he told me. “Riverboats are places for commerce and fleeting relations; a hundred other men you will befriend before long, and few, if any, will care for you as I do.” It had not helped that I had let drop, in my description of his character, that Mr. Clemens was not one for religious thoughts: “Such men, fine as they may be in many other respects, are lacking in the fundamental virtues. To mingle with such folks can only have a detrimental effect on your own pious thoughts; to be in the company of doubters is to open the door to doubt itself,” he told me one night in our cabin.
“Your job,” he continued with bite in his voice, “is to care after the books and accounts and to make all the arrangements pertaining to what dealings I undertake: whereas mine is to create a congenial atmosphere for such things to happen.”
The very afternoon he met Clemens, my father and his business acquaintances had sat drinking steadily between the hours of noon and five o’clock, at which point I had to escort him from that public room to our cabin. It was a remarkable thing to see how such a profound change of personality could take place because of these liquors, for the very man who, at some riverside settlements, felt the need to gather a crowd around him and speak of the “Word,” and who had often mentioned how proud he felt that I was his son, told me that his business was his own and that it would be best for me to keep my objections over “some harmless social tippling” to myself. Mindful of my promise to his wife, as she lay like an angel on her deathbed, I told Mr. Stanley that, as he had saved me from some inglorious fate, I wou
ld save him from his own lapses, no matter his objections. For a moment, my words seemed to have a good effect upon him. He sat on his bed.
“Just allow me some peace… leave me alone in my mourning.” Then: “Go off and do as you please—and forget all this, for whatever I am now, I will be as sound and good as I have ever been tomorrow.”