When not attending to my duties, I filled my spare hours not with books (it was often too hot and humid for that) but by learning to shoot a rifle and a pistol, old cans and bottles set out in the yard being my targets. Though I could not have imagined how such skills, honed over many hours, would serve me well in other places, I took to it quickly and, mastering the art of holding a barrel steady with the recoil, became a superb marksman and was able to shoot a sprig off a tree at twenty paces. In time, as was the custom in that place, I carried, as did my fellow clerks, a loaded Smith & Wesson revolver, its pearly white handle evident in a special side pocket. In those swamplands, to have no pistol on one’s person would have been the equivalent of a New Orleans clerk turning up to work without his trousers on, as a firearm was considered an indispensable accoutrement to manly attire.
NOW, IN THAT PLACE, MALARIAL AGUE was prevalent, a disease for which there was no explanation as to its cause. Local superstition placed its transmission on exposure to miasmic swamp gases, those will-o’-the-wisps that, capturing the moonlight in their swirls, floated in a ghostly way along the banks of the river and across the swamps at night.
Though I had asked a local doctor, a boarder in Mr. Altschul’s house, if there were any means to avoid this pernicious disease or if there were precautions to be taken against it by way of pills or medicines, he had wanly smiled at me and said: “Yes, there is. Leave as soon as possible.” That, however, was not in my makeup.
As I was attending to my duties in the store one morning, my hands began to inexplicably shake, and then my whole body began to violently tremble. With that came the chills. Helped to my room by the clerks, I lay in my bed shivering, as if I had been packed in ice. I remained in that state for several hours, until a spell of burning fever came over me, followed by delirium: I heard voices and saw the disembodied faces of persons I had known in the past floating before me. For a time I had the very strong impression of being somewhere else, as if I were in a cabin aboard a ship or in the room of a house somewhere in England. In my hallucinations I imagined a visitation from Mr. Stanley, my benefactor sitting by my bedside and reading me verses from the Bible, but no sooner had I taken heart at his presence than the vision went away.
The doctor had come to my bedside, administering to me some grains of quinine, so that within another six hours, around noon the next day, I had an appetite and was ravenously hungry. Within another day I went back to my duties in the shop, but then, as a week or so passed, I was suddenly overcome with the same sequence of symptoms. It was during my second convalescence that the doctor told me that I should expect such things to happen again, and the ague did return, at regular intervals, for as long as I remained in Cypress Bend and for some time thereafter.
HAVING BEEN THUS AFFLICTED, I wrote to Mr. Stanley in Havana, relating the particulars of my illness and my general dissatisfaction with my situation. And yet when I had finished writing down my complaints, I struck a more congenial tone, putting forth my continuing devotion to and affection for my father, my most hidden hope being that Mr. Stanley would instruct me to leave that place and resume my mercantile pursuits by his side in Havana.
But as the weeks passed I heard nothing from him, and though this had become a matter of concern to me, and even as fevers seemed to come back every ten days or so, I resolved to await his final word.
UNFORTUNATELY, MY PERSONAL DISTRESS had come at a time of mounting national disharmonies. During those months, as I lingered with my recurring illnesses in Cypress Bend, the issue of slavery versus abolition had boiled over, and war talk had become prevalent among the planters. Then it had become a fact. By March of 1861, a number of Southern states, among them Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, had formed a government separate from the Union, its newly appointed president being one Jefferson Davis. Several of these states had seized federal arsenals, forts, and men-of-war. Even the fortresses below New Orleans had been commandeered by Louisiana. The whole thing, Dan Goree — a planter — said, had come to a head the past November with the election of Abraham Lincoln, who’d promised, upon taking office, to free all the slaves, whereupon the planters and therefore the economy of the South would be ruined.
In the meantime, the local inhabitants of Cypress Bend, expecting that Arkansas would soon be joining the other states, had begun to form their own militias.
My first thoughts, upon hearing such news, had been to wonder how commerce would be affected by a war. Most river traffic would be disrupted, and, in any event, many of our provisions, ordered from Northern cities such as Cincinnati and Chicago, would be cut off. It was already being said that many a steamboat had been either requisitioned by Southern forces or was being held in port. Travelers coming into Cypress Bend from the big port towns told us that fewer steamboats were coming up-and downriver. Somehow I felt consoled by believing that this emergency had affected communications with foreign places such as Cuba: I reasoned that somewhere downriver there was a parcel of mail sitting in a postal warehouse and that a new letter from my father, reporting that all was well with him, awaited me: Yet on one of those days, in March, when I finally received a piece of correspondence, it was from Samuel Clemens. This is as I remember it:
Dear Henry,
These days I am knocking about New Orleans, mainly playing chess and games of whist in the pilots’ association rooms and winning more than losing; I have also had the opportunity of showing my mother around the city — but, truth be told, with all the war talk in the air, I am a little weary about my future as a steamboat pilot. When I hear the debates about the North versus the South, mainly over the central concern of slavery, I think it seems hardly worth it to go to war over such a thing. But it now seems inevitable. I go all which ways: My older brother, Orion, whom I told you about, is a dignified man who has always been an abolitionist and has his own strong opinion on the subject. He believes the Yankees are in the right. Then I talk to a plantation man who is on the verge of tears about losing his beloved (and profit-making) slaves — and his livelihood — and I am of another opinion. I go back and forth on the subject constantly: Mainly I, and the rest of my cohorts on the river, are afraid of being forced at gunpoint to pilot a ship for the Yankees — all the pilots are wary of that; I am not a Confederate or a Yankee yet. Most of us are cooling our heels and staying put: I do not want to be conscripted by either side—
In the meantime, I have decided to linger a bit in New Orleans, until the war fever has played out.
Yours fondly,
Samuel Clemens
I CANNOT SAY WHETHER IT was that letter from Samuel Clemens or the ague that prompted me to leave the store and head downriver to New Orleans, but by then, I reasoned that I might not be able to escape Cypress Bend at all once a war broke out. Approaching Mr. Altschul about the situation, I stated my case, and he, being aware of my distracted state of mind in regard to Mr. Stanley, allowed me some six weeks to attend to my business. Although I abhorred the mistreatment of the slaves, wanting to prove myself a good Southerner and American I had thought to eventually join up with one of the local militias upon my return. To become a soldier, fighting for a glorious cause, seemed a romantic idea filled with promise of adventure — and besides, to not do so would have marked me as a coward with a “yellow streak” among the locals.