“Please, miss,” he began. “Where am I? What is this place?”
His gray uniform was soiled and torn, the rifle in his hands caked with mud.
“A Rebel!” screamed Sarah.
He sprang at her, clasping his hand over her mouth. She struggled to free herself but a moment later he collapsed. Just then Margaret Baker came in and gasped at the sight of the soldier sprawled on the floor beside a trunk.
“Oh my God!” she cried. “Did the South win the war? Hallelujah!”
She leaned out over the windowsill and gave a Rebel shout. Then she slammed the window shut and turned to Sarah.
“Why there’s nothin’ but damn Yankees out there.”
Sarah curled her small hands into fists. She had always tried to be fair, to understand another’s viewpoint and never knowingly hurt anyone. But Margaret’s allegiance to the Confederacy was too much. Margaret could scarcely be otherwise. She was born and raised in Little Rock, and her father, in lieu of paying his daughter’s tuition, sent two of his slaves to the college—Lucy Evans and Elijah Patterson. They cleaned, cooked, served, and worked in the school’s laundry.
The young women’s innate kindness took over their indecisiveness, and they knelt on either side of the soldier, loosening his uniform to check for injuries. He did not appear to be wounded; at least there was no blood anywhere. Sarah put smelling salts under his nose and the soldier quickly regained consciousness.
No, he was not ill or wounded, he said, only weak from hunger. The girls helped him into a chair. Margaret summoned Lucy and Elijah and ordered them to smuggle a tray of food from the kitchen and to say nothing of the soldier’s presence.
After the soldier had eaten, he introduced himself as Corporal Isaac Johnson, Fifth Cavalry, Mississippi section. He had fought at Pea Ridge and had just escaped from Camp Douglas, Illinois, traveling by night and hiding by day. His father had been killed in General Grant’s bombardment of Nashville. Isaac was seeking to avenge that death by sneaking into Columbia to kill General Halleck.
Sarah’s eyes filled. She understood his bitterness; her own father fighting for the Union had been killed by Robert E. Lee’s troops. She was so devastated by the loss that she twice attempted suicide.
Perhaps that is why she agreed with Margaret to hide this man, not that many years older than themselves.
In the coming days, Sarah busied herself in ways her mother never would have approved of. Keeping Isaac safe and secure in her room was a constant strain.
Whenever anyone knocked at the door, Isaac leaped into the closet to hide behind rows of crinoline dresses or rolled under the bed. Sarah was popular, and her many friends liked to congregate in her room because it was the largest and most beautiful room in Senior Hall. It was directly beneath the bell tower.
Although Sarah enjoyed these visits, she feared Isaac would be discovered. Margaret and the slaves had been sworn to secrecy, yet Margaret often spoke thoughtlessly.
Sarah remained with Isaac as much as possible, often feigning a headache at meal times in order to be with him, requesting that a tray be sent up later. Although she had never before talked to a Confederate soldier, they argued bitterly over slavery. Sometimes he would defend his cause, but more often he would smile and sit down at Sarah’s piano to play the old songs he had learned growing up in Senatobia, Mississippi. His gray eyes would sweep over the piano keys, then search Sarah’s face. When she knew the songs, she sang along.
In the music and in the softness of his eyes, Sarah found a tenderness, a warmth she had never known before in a man. She was only moderately taken aback when he declared his love for her.
One day, Elijah, tired of colluding with Sarah, told her it was her duty to turn in the soldier. But she assured the slave that Isaac meant no harm.
Finally word somehow reached General Halleck that a Rebel soldier was on the loose in Columbia. Knowing the attraction that young pretty girls held for bored soldiers, the general suspected that the Rebel might be hiding at the college. Perhaps even the college administration was providing protective custody, he thought, for Southern sympathies ran high in the city.
Halleck paid a call on President Williams and Dean Armstrong and warned them both that he would shut down the college unless the soldier was captured.
That evening the president gathered his young female students together and delivered the general’s ultimatum. His face was pale, his voice strained. The students were stunned.
Sarah was frightened. Had she been betrayed?
Perhaps Margaret’s loose tongue revealed Isaac’s presence?
Margaret had shouted the Confederate victory yell out the window after all. Had a Union soldier heard the cry and noted the room it came from? How much did General Halleck know?
Sarah urged Isaac to surrender. Escape was hopeless, she said; the city was ringed by Union forces. But Isaac had a better plan. He would flee to Canada disguised in a suit “borrowed” from President Williams’s own closet.
The next evening, after the students had gone downstairs to dinner, Elijah crept along the corridor, the president’s clothing draped neatly over one arm. Sarah waited in her room. Under the cover of darkness Isaac would be on his way to safety.
But at the close of the dinner hour, throngs of young women barged through Sarah’s door, screaming, “Turn him in, Sarah! Turn him in!”
Someone had seen Elijah delivering the clothing to Sarah’s room. Sarah’s thin shoulders trembled and she slumped against the piano.
Sarah searched the crowd for a friendly face. Margaret, her color ashen, pushed her way through the group and put an arm around her roommate.
“Silence!” Margaret yelled. Her classmates paid no attention.
The clamor rose until President Williams and Dean Armstrong burst in. General Halleck was at their heels.
“This college is closed—absolutely finished!” roared the general. “Now, pack up and leave—everyone!”
Isaac threw open the closet door, faced General Halleck, and introduced himself.
“I am the soldier you are looking for, sir. I beg you to let the students stay. I have been hiding here without their knowledge.”
General Halleck stepped forward. “I arrest you as a spy,” he said.
“But I am a soldier, sir.”
“That may be, but you are attired in civilian clothes.”
“What does that mean?” asked Sarah.
“It means the firing squad,” replied Halleck.
Three nights later, at twilight, Corporal Isaac Johnson was executed in the street beneath Sarah’s window. When the last shots rang out, the tower bell slowly rang. Above its tolling, Sarah thought she heard her lover’s voice. It grew louder and louder, telling her to join him in the bell tower.
Sarah rushed out her door and climbed the steps. The air blew fresh and cool against her cheeks. She took the bell cord in her hands.
“I’m coming, Isaac. I’m coming!” she called.
Her lifeless body was found hanging in the tower, the stout bell cord coiled around her neck.
Margaret put aside the newspaper, leaving thumbprints in the ink. She rose from her chair and walked to the window. Stars spangled the sky and a full moon had risen above the treetops, illuminating the cluster of soldiers in the street below. Although the Union troops were bivouacked up on the hill, a night patrol continued to keep guard in the street by Senior Hall. The men’s voices rose and fell and now and then broke into laughter.
Margaret lingered for a moment, then turned away. The tower bell began to toll. And the ghost of Sarah June Wheeler, searching for her Rebel, began its ceaseless journey.
Mark Twain, Psychic
St. Louis
The literary father of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn was a dreamer. How else could one man have created characters so authentic that they have become part of the American experience? The mind of Samuel Clemens, known to all as Mark Twain, roamed continents and centuries to create his fictional narratives.
>
But Sam Clemens also had nightmares. In one, he foresaw the tragic death of his own brother Henry Clemens.
In 1856, at the age of twenty-one, Sam left Missouri for New Orleans, determined to embark on the next steamer heading to the Southern Hemisphere. He had just finished reading a graphic account of Army Lieutenant William Herndon’s 1851 expedition to the Valley of the Amazon, and he dreamed of visiting Peru. Unfortunately for him, but perhaps providential for literary history, no steamboats left New Orleans for that port of call.
With no friends and even less money, Sam turned to a relatively new acquaintance, Captain Horace Bixby, a pilot on the steamer Paul Jones, which had brought Sam to New Orleans. Sam had struck up an acquaintance with Bixby on the journey, and the captain had let him take a few turns at the wheel. Now Sam asked his friend to take him on as an apprentice pilot. Bixby agreed—for a fee of five hundred dollars, one hundred of which was to be paid in advance.
Sam steered for Bixby north to St. Louis, where the fledgling apprentice borrowed one hundred dollars from his sister Pamela’s husband, William A. Moffett. The balance was to be paid out of Sam’s earnings as a cub pilot.
For the next eighteen months, Sam learned the art of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi River, first with Bixby aboard the Paul Jones and later with a pilot named William Brown aboard the Pennsylvania.
While apprenticing on the Pennsylvania, Sam found a job aboard the steamboat for his brother Henry. It was not nearly as glamorous as life seen from above in the pilothouse and it did not even pay a salary, but Henry was content to be a “mud clerk,” a sort of apprentice. The name derived from one of his duties, to secure all the landings, which meant the person ended up in the mud. But there was the promise of promotion, perhaps all the way to first clerk, or purser. Henry signed on early in 1858, his long hours including the time the boat spent in dock at New Orleans or St. Louis, the far ends of its usual Mississippi River run.
Pilots did not have any duties when the steamers lay in port. In St. Louis, Sam stayed with his sister and brotherin-law. Henry usually visited at dusk each evening, returning to the boat later that night. The mud clerk worked from dawn until nightfall seven days a week.
Sam’s eerie dream of death came one night before the Pennsylvania was scheduled to return to New Orleans. Henry left the family about eleven, more solemn than usual. He shook hands all around, as was the custom. His mother, who was staying with the Moffetts, said good-bye to Henry in the upstairs sitting room. Something made her follow him to the head of the stairs, where she again bade him farewell. Henry’s seriousness was unusual, and his mother noticed it.
Sam awoke before dawn the next day with horrifyingly clear pictures from a nightmare he had playing in his mind’s eye: his brother was laid out in a metal casket balanced on two chairs in the Moffetts’ sitting room. He wore one of Sam’s suits. His hands clasped an arrangement of roses to his chest. All the flowers were white, except for one bright red rose in the center.
Sam dressed quickly. Was his brother dead? His dream seemed so real. So real that he avoided the sitting room, where he feared his brother’s body lay, and left the house. The cool air bathed his face as he strode down Locust and then onto Fourteenth Street. He suddenly stopped. Henry was not dead, he realized. Of course, it had all been a bad dream, a nightmare. He sprinted back to the house, ran up the stairs, and burst into the sitting room. There was no casket. Although he still felt a chill about what he dreamt, Sam’s joy was profound. Yet he could not shake his memory of the dream, even on what turned out to be an uneventful trip downriver from St. Louis to New Orleans.
On that trip, Sam Clemens had an argument with his master, Mr. Brown, that led to his dismissal from the Pennsylvania on June 5, 1858.
Fortunately Sam had a backup job in New Orleans for the times when he was forced into idleness between river trips. He worked as night watchman on the freight dock, his pay three dollars for each twelve-hour shift. Henry often joined him on his rounds.
A few days later, the Pennsylvania left the port of New Orleans for St. Louis with Henry on board. Sam remained behind.
On June 13, 1858, near Ship Island, a few miles below Memphis, the Pennsylvania’s boilers exploded, killing over 250 passengers and crew and seriously injuring three dozen people, including Henry Clemens.
Remarkably, Clemens’s loss of his job aboard the steamboat may have saved the life of this future American author.
Sam was on another steamer about a day behind. At the towns they stopped in as they traveled north, he began hearing the news of the explosion aboard the Pennsylvania. But there was little news of the survivors, including, of, course Henry Clemens.
Once he reached Memphis, Sam Clemens worriedly searched for Henry. He finally found him on a mattress in a large Memphis warehouse, which had become a makeshift hospital and morgue. Around him were the burned and maimed survivors of the explosion, the screams of the dying echoing off the high ceilings. Henry had inhaled scalding steam during the explosion and was among the most critically injured. Doctors and nurses, forced to pay more attention to those they thought would live, told Sam that Henry’s scorched lungs gave him little chance of survival.
One of them, a Dr. Peyton, however, promised Sam he would take a special interest in Henry and try to save him. Miraculously, Henry responded to treatment. Within a week Henry Clemens was pronounced out of danger. However, Peyton warned Sam that his brother still needed much rest and must stay where he was. While Sam sat with his brother one evening, the cries of the injured were particularly disturbing to Henry. Dr. Peyton ordered a small amount of morphine for Henry to help him sleep.
Henry did not live to see the next sunrise.
The young physician on duty, whether due to a misunderstanding of Dr. Peyton’s instructions or the lack of measuring devices, administered too much morphine. Young Henry Clemens died within a few hours.
His body was carried into what was called the “dead room” and placed in the only metal coffin available, a gift from some wealthy Memphis women. That is where Sam found him. At once the dream he had weeks before in St. Louis came back to him in perfect detail. Henry even was dressed in one of the suits Sam had given him. As Sam stood near the casket, an elderly woman walked in and placed a bouquet of roses in the dead boy’s hands. They were white—with a single red rose at the center.
Sam Clemens took passage accompanying his brother’s body back to St. Louis. When the boat docked, he set off for his brotherin-law’s office, hoping to find him there, as the business day had just begun. Sam missed him, however, and by the time he got back to the boat, Moffett had already been there, recovered the body, and had it sent on to his own house.
Sam raced ahead, wanting to save his mother the trauma of viewing Henry’s morphine-twisted face. Undertakers made little effort to make corpses presentable in that era; wakes and funerals were often held in the home.
He arrived just in time to forestall the unloading while he went inside to comfort his mother. Upstairs in the sitting room, he found two chairs spaced a coffin’s length apart, waiting to receive their burden. If he had arrived a few minutes later, the casket would have been positioned on them, the final detail of his prophetic dream fulfilled.
This premonition of death stayed with Samuel Clemens for the rest of his life. Even as a very old man, more than fifty years after Henry’s ghastly death, he could still remember every detail of the nightmare—and its tragic, real-life counterpart.
Forever Mine
Kirksville
Henry Burchard and his wife, Harriet, were inseparable, she saw to that. She thought her farmer-husband was “too handsome for his own good,” as she put it. Harriet saved him from the lures of prettier women by accompanying him everywhere he went. Henry reacted with amused tolerance, although sometimes he complained that he could not even go out on the back stoop to cut a plug of tobacco without Harriet’s banging through the door after him.
Henry had never been unfaithful to hi
s wife. She simply was born a jealous woman. He did have the conversational habit of looking a person directly in the eye, and women usually responded warmly to such attention. He believed it was common courtesy, although an oversensitive husband observing his own wife speaking to Henry might have had other words for it.
Just after the couple celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary, Harriet Burchard got sick and died of consumption. Henry was shocked and saddened by his wife’s death, but he recalled her words, “Man was not meant to live alone.”
So five months after Harriet’s death, Henry married Catherine Webster, a pretty young widow whom he and Harriet had known for several years. After the death of her husband in a farm accident, Catherine had rented out the farm and moved to town, where she lived on her rental income and some small savings.
Three weeks after her marriage to Henry, Catherine was home alone when a tremendous crash that sounded like large rocks clattering across the metal roof shook the very foundation of the house. Catherine dashed outside. Sure enough, rocks of all sizes lay strewn everywhere. Where had they come from?
The nearest neighbor was half a mile away down the dirt road. Catherine gathered up her long skirts and picked her way across the rocks and around the farmhouse. She saw no one.
Then, to her amazement, the rocks at her feet rose slowly into the cloudless sky, hovered above the rooftop, and cascaded over the shingles again.
The poor woman, too frightened to move, stood rigid, her hands shielding her face.
That night when Henry arrived home from work in town, Catherine related what had happened. He told her it was nonsense, just her imagination, that she was just tired and overwrought from the excitement of the wedding. They went outside to look, but the rocks had disappeared. Only clumps of coarse grass edged the foundation. Catherine was more alarmed than ever.
The next night, while the couple slept, their sheets and blankets were snatched away. Shivering in his nightshirt, Henry leaped up to find them heaped on the floor at the foot of the bed. Catherine had slept through it.
Haunted Heartland Page 26
