“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. When 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.