Thread: Mark Twain

while reading a biography on Mark Twian, I found something I thought was interesting....it gave me chills actually.

(this took a damn long time to type)

In the spring of 1858, Orion's mismanaged newspaper and printing business in Iowa had collapsed, and Sam's nineteen-year-old younger brother, Henry, was in need of a new job. Sam, now a cud pilot on the swift side-wheeler Pennsylvania, persuaded him to sign on as a clerk. He was greatful for Henry's companionship and happy to get him started on a career, despite a disturbing dream he'd had. In it, he'd seen Henry's corpse in a metal coffin, dressed in one of Sam's own suits with a bouquet of white roses and one red rose on his breast.

On the next trip downriver, Sam got into a voilent quarrel with the chief pilot, who he believed had mistreated Henry, and when they arrived at New Orleans Sam was transferred to another riverboat. The brothers agreed to meet at their sister's house in St. Louis, then Henry set out on the Pennsylvania.

Sam followed two days later aboard another steamboat, the A.T. Lacey. At Greenville, Mississippi, someone shouted from the shore that the Pennsylvania's boilers had blown up and she had gone down near Memphis. Some 150 people were said to have perished. In Arkansas, Sam was relieved when he got a newspaper that listed Henry among the uninjured. But further upriver, he saw corpses bobbing in the water, and another paper listed Henry as hurt beyond hope.

When he finally reached Memphis and rushed to the makesfit hospital where the survivors of the disaster had been taken, Sam found his brother on a pallet on the floor, still alive but badly burned and not expected to survive. Henry had been blown into the water, his lungs scalded by the inhaled steam, but had swum back to help save the wounded before a second explosion engulfed him in flames. Some bystanders at the makesfit hospital tried to console Sam, calling him \"lucky\" because he had not been on the Pennsylvania during that fateful trip. \"May God forgive them,\" he wrote his sister-in-law, \"for they know not what they say.\" Instead, he blamed himself bitterly-for having lured Henry onto the river in the first place, and especially for not being on the scene when his little brother had needed him the most. :Long before this reaches you,\" he wrote to his sister-in-law on June 18,

my poor Henry, my darling, my pride, my glory, my all, will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness...O, God! this is hard to bear....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 fourty-eight hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother, and then my star of hope went out and left me in the gloom of dispair.
...Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother.
Your unfortunate brother,
Saml. L. Clemens

Sam looked on helplessly as his brother drifted in and out of sleep. A physician urged him to ask that and eighth of a grain of morphine be administered if Henry began to toss and turn too much-rest was essential if he was to survive his burns. And so, when the patient awakened and began to writhe in pain on the evening of June 21, Sam stopped a passing doctor-\"hardly out of medical school,\" he recalled, who initially refused to give him the drug because he had no means of measuring out the proper dose. Sam insisted, and the doctor finally poured what Sam rememebered as a \"vast quantity\" of morphine onto the blade of a knife and fourced it to Henry's lips. Henry soon drifted back to sleep, then slipped into a coma and finally died. Again, Sam blamed himself, convinced somehow that it was his call for morphine, not the terrible explosion, that caused his brothers death.
When he came to collect Henry's body for the long, sad journey home, he found that all the dead victims of the disaster had been placed in unpainted pine coffins-all but one: the women of Memphis had been so moved by Henry's story that they had raised sixty dollars to buy him a metal casket. Because his clothes had been badly burned, they had asked for some of Sam's clothes to lay him in. And just as Sam began to recognize this imagery fomr his earlier dream, an elderly woman appeared bearing a bouquet of white roses with a single red one in the center, and gently placed it on Henry's breast.



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