Inspired by Max’s blog, ‘Old Steam Ships’ –
this is my story based on facts about the tragic
boiler accident on the steamboat Pennsylvania
which killed Henry Clemens, younger brother
of Samuel Clemens, AKA Mark Twain.
This is the last known photo of Henry, age 20.
© Brittanica
Hartford, Connecticut, 1907
Henry,
I don’t rightly know why I’m writing to a dead man, except that I’ve been writing tall tales to strangers my whole life and it seems only decent, once in a while, to write something true to somebody who’d know a lie if he saw one. You always could. You caught me out more times than Ma ever did, and you never told on me, which I have always considered the finest kind of brotherly loyalty a man can practice.
It has been forty-nine years. I have crossed oceans since then, buried a wife, buried children too, God help me, and outlived enough friends to fill a cemetery of my own choosing. And still, most nights, when the house has gone quiet and the lamp is the only thing awake besides me, I am twenty-two years old again, standing in a hot exposition hall in Memphis that had been fitted up with cots, looking down at what the Pennsylvania had left of you.
You’ll remember I wasn’t even supposed to be aboard her by then. Pilot Bill Brown and I had had our falling-out, and I’d been put off onto the A.T. Lacey, trailing a day behind you like a jilted sweetheart following a wedding party at a polite distance. I remember standing on that other boat’s deck and hearing, before I could see it, the sound a boiler makes when something goes horribly wrong and knowing, in the low animal part of a man that does the knowing before the thinking catches up, that it was her. That it was you.
I found you laid out among the others, breathing still, burned in a way I will not describe because you were there and do not need the reminder, and I was told there was hope. For six days I was, I think, useful …. I sat by you, I fetched, I hoped out loud so that maybe you’d hear it and do likewise. And then on the sixth night the doctors gave you, as I have always believed, too generous a dose of morphine, a merciful miscalculation that finished what the steam had started. I have made my peace with that, as much as a man can make peace with anything. But how impotent a man was I, unable to prevent this, which is a particularly bitter flavor of helplessness I would not wish on Satan himself.
I dreamed of you before it happened. Weeks before, in St. Louis, I dreamed you were laid out in a metal coffin in our sister’s parlor, wearing one of my suits, with a bouquet of white flowers on your chest and one red rose set in the center of it. I told myself it was nothing, the way a man tells himself a great many things are nothing right up until they are proven to be everything. In the end, when I came to view you, you were indeed in a metal coffin, in a suit that was …. I checked, I made myself check …. mine. Someone had set a bouquet of white flowers on your chest. As I stood there, a woman came in and laid a single red rose in the center of it, because the arrangement had seemed to her to need one. I have never been able to make light of that, not once, not even in forty-nine years of making light of everything else God ever handed me. Some doors a humorist simply does not open.
I expect you’d tell me, if you could, that it wasn’t my doing …. not the falling-out with Bill Brown, not the berth I lost, not the boiler, not the morphine dose. You were always the reasonable one; I was the one who needed reasoning with. But I have carried you like a stone in my coat pocket every day since, not because it was my fault but because you were the good one, Henry, the steady one, the one our mother didn’t have to worry after, and it has never once seemed a fair trade that the current swept off the good one and left the family scoundrel to do the living for both of us. I have tried to live loud enough for two men. I don’t know that I’ve managed it. I don’t know that anybody could.
I am an old man now, or near enough, with more sorrows behind me than I ever thought a body could carry and still walk upright, and I find that of all of them you are the one I return to, the first stone laid in a wall that time only kept building higher. I write books full of boys on rafts and rivers because the river gave me you for twenty years and then took you in an afternoon, and I have never once figured out how to feel about a thing that generous and that cruel at the same time.
Your brother, Sam
© Beliefnet
NAR©2026
Nancy’s Notes: I tried to keep my story grounded in what’s actually documented …. the falling-out with pilot Bill Brown that got Samuel Clemens bumped to a trailing steamboat, the six days at Henry’s bedside in Memphis, and the dream Clemens himself recounted later in life of seeing Henry laid out in a metal coffin with a bouquet and a single red rose, which he said came eerily true. I hope the voice sounds convincingly like Clemens’ own late-life reflectiveness rather than his broad comic register, since a letter to a dead brother calls for something a bit more reflective than Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
This is “Henry Twain” by Rookin
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
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