Twain
The river tells me
I'm a long way from home.
***
Weeks have passed since my wife and I took a short trip through the Mississippi Valley and yet segments of the trip, as if reappearing having been obscured by trees, remains impressed upon my mind.
. . . . Why do I return to the empty house we toured, the benighted manor on the cliff abandoned for forty years to dust and ghosts? Why do I run amok there in my imagination as a child up from its cloistered bible-black wine cellar, through the winding and cobwebbed mad-dash-dare of dusky landings and ill-lit dubious stairs to its eerie third-floor school room where large scrolls, maps of the world, hang in dirtied tatters? Why do I always return in my nightmare having seen something supernatural, tendrils of a hovering apparition in the corner, something horrific and ungodly in the thin air? Why upon return do I find myself, will myself, to look down at my hand, my hand squeezed into a tight, sweaty little boy fist, and why once my grip relaxes does from my palm spring a shard of Siam?
***
The river tells me
Beyond lays golden filament.
***
We traveled for a three-day bed and breakfast tour of the Mississippi Valley region, in the eastern most part of our newly adopted state – Missouri – as respite from work and study. Unlike Texas, our former home, when you drive four hours in one direction here, east or west, you can actually get somewhere other than an oil derrick or an icehouse. Our latest trip east took us first to Hannibal, childhood home of Mark Twain, and then southeast along the Mississippi River to Sainte Genevieve, the oldest town west of the big river.
. . . . Dyan has for the past decade become quite the explorer; she enjoys setting out to take in new places. It wasn’t always so. When I met her in the early 1990s, she’d left her home just the once to visit Hawaii with her parents. In comparison, I was a Bedouin. I’d lived in Scotland, Australia and had traveled extensively throughout North America. My folks were immigrants and their wanderlust borne of Scottish Grifters and the Irish Diaspora runs through my and my siblings’ veins thicker than water. Over the years, my yen for traveling widely had diminished considerably, while my wife’s want had proportionally increased. It appeared we’d exchanged our yearnings. She was Don Quixote now while I held the reins as her squire, Sancho Panza, plying my position for the promise of some distant isle, a locale in permanence. But while the actual journey does little for me, in fact it makes me nauseous, once I arrive at any given destination, I immerse myself in its displacing effect on me, opening my eternal consternations – some would say obsessions – to new possibilities. My gaze, once falling upon Scottish castles or South Pacific waves in stunned naivety now more so turns inward. It is as if the verities of nature are in intercourse with my soul. The conversation comes in bits and pieces, unprompted and without any throat-clearing, trumpets or resplendent swords of sunlight.
. . . . Whenever I travel I always find myself, unguarded and alone, seemingly, in a quiet place that fills my chest with a roaring silence, a gust, as if a rock has been slide away from the mouth of an enormous channel and I am facing the brunt of its might. What I see is not readily available to others; dragons to me are windmills to others. The air is suffused with holograms and fractals of light. Any din is distant, the immediate surroundings muffled, muted. The air in my lungs is fresh and enlarging my breaths. My tongue is thick and wet. It’s then that all of time behind and ahead of me is available; I can feel the earth tilting underfoot and everything I witness is as a second heartbeat, and the relentless thrum of my longing is subsumed with a prefix – be. It is a moment, and it doesn’t last. It has many names: The Now, Eternity, Satori, or The Deep Well. Buddhists call it Bardo. For me it lasts as long as it takes to recognize it and the word, “awe,” to scroll across my mind. The feeling subsides as quickly as the falling of a shiver. But for that briefest of time, X marks the spot and I am at its epicenter. The riven line between treasure and scavenging knight no longer exists. My breastplate heaves with diamonds and gold.
***
The river tells me
There are more than one river
And you never
Step into
The same river
Twice.
***
By turns the errant knight or a faithful sidekick, my sojourning often finds me on two simultaneous journeys – one outward, suffused with ennui, through the geography ahead and another, an inward journey much the way a river runs wide and long as it does deep. It is my belief that we all travel this way, in practice runs, if you will, or in some instinctual repetitive mode, for the cycle of our lives. The first journey, that outward one, is immediately satisfying. We see beautiful things and we point them out, we take pictures of them. The second journey takes a little longer to process. For me, whenever I am engaged with the world, I glimpse that second journey, the one that drills down, opens up, one that loosens my will and imagination. The way is clear.
***
The river tells me
Fabulists come in two.
***
Our first stop was in the small riverside town of Hannibal, which is heralded as the boyhood home of Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens, author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckelberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson, to name but a few. The town is set on the western banks of the Mississippi River. Similar in approaching New Orleans from the west, Hannibal doesn’t rise as crooked teeth on the eastern horizon, rather motorists sink into it, cutting through glacial craggy sediment and barren blonde landscapes, like water circling a drain. The town, borne by the river and busted by its fluctuating economy too, is not without beauty: Victorian mansions – lovingly restored or otherwise weathered and leaning – former bordellos, red brick storefronts and twinkling lights, tree-lined streets, hills and the river make Hannibal beautiful, but she’s an old dame whose age shows in dereliction and neglect – like one of your crazy aunts who wears purple and speaks as Bolshevik on speed. Buildings lie vacated, nothing but viscous windows staring out at you. Old homes sink into the loam. The bordello was closed down by the persnickety over fifty years ago. Even the Mark Twain Bridge, rococo concrete and presidential declaration notwithstanding, up on Cardiff Hill (the domain of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn) is no longer used; it is a bridge that goes nowhere. It has been razed and replaced with a more modern version to the north, an engineering wonder of steel and cable crossing from Missouri to Illinois above the Mississippi.
***
The river tells me
Bridges come and go.
***
Samuel Clemens got out of Hannibal as fast as he could, but townspeople won’t let him nor his proxies leave again. He’s everywhere you turn. Here they have his father’s justice of the peace office; replicated homes for fictitious Twain characters; museums; gift shops and his boyhood home – a small gussied white house off the main street a half a block from the mighty Mississippi. Inside is a labyrinth of staged environs protected with Plexiglas. Each of the some four small, low-ceiling, rooms contains the dubious ephemera of his boyhood; a selection of his texts professionally stenciled on large display; and each room contains a life-sized, pure white plaster, Mark Twain – he fits, standing, for he was not a tall man. He is found in various poses and in aggregate his presence, his doppelgängers, in the rooms, contain a whiff of the ignoble garden gnome pilfered from front gardens the world over. Like the gnome, Twain is positioned for maximum viewing pleasure, and chagrin, much in the same way the wayward gnome is pictured near Saharan dunes or Time Square before being plopped back in with your Rhododendrons. It is somewhat disquieting. The boyhood home is designed to funnel you through his meager childhood abode into the gift shop – every museum planner’s terminus. There is no doubting the town’s love for their hero and there is plenty to see. Clemens didn’t live long in his boyhood home; he left when he was eighteen, but his home lived long in his soul fueling most of Twain’s notable work, which he wrote from afar in Hartford, Connecticut. His first work was published when he was thirty-four: The Innocents Abroad. He left Hannibal by way of the river, but the river continued its flow through him and incidentally, gave Clemens his pseudonym: “M-a-r-k three! … M-a-r-k three… Quarter less three! … Half Twain!”
. . . . “This was frightful! I seized the bell-ropes and stopped the engines.”
. . . . “Quarter twain! Quarter twain! Mark twain!” he wrote in a story, “A Pilot’s Needs” of his time on a riverboat. To “twain,” is to gauge the depth of the river and find it safe, “mark twain,” for passage.
***
The river tells me
Around the bend
Down the falls.
***
I am haunted by place.
. . . . Every writer’s got their geography. John Grisham has Mississippi; Annie Dillard has her Tinker Creek; William Faulkner set his work in fictional Yoknapatawpha County; Stephen King writes about the horrors of New England and Twain the Mississippi.
. . . . My ghost is Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. A prairie town named after some French trapper hauling a canoe. It’s a community known for its hockey team; as once being home to a Canadian Air Force base and home to Arthur Meighen, the absentminded former Canadian prime minister of the 1920s who once showed up in parliament sporting his bedroom slippers. My body holds physical scars from that place. When asked, “where are you from?” Portage la Prairie is on the shortlist.
. . . . In two of my three books, the home of Meighen and wheat fields has been where I have set my circus down. In the Jenny Muck, Mary returns to Portage la Prairie with her daughter Nancy. She opens a tearoom on the main street and gets her life back into perspective. In that book, in my mind, I kill off flesh and blood citizens, close businesses and open new ones; I inhabit homes the inside of which I’ve never seen, only viewing the facades from the street. In Get Back, Michael, the main character, returns to Portage la Prairie to settle down. He and his daughter, Hope, drive through a town perhaps only Mary my first novel’s main character would recognize. Hope and Michael travel the furrows of my imagination. All lead home to Portage la Prairie, a homecoming motif to be sure.
. . . . In a way much like Twain, I have imagined the place of my childhood having lived for some time in self-exile. Writing both books my memory has been Sherpa. When guided by memory geography becomes less tactile, and more ethereal—buildings move and morph, streets meander of their own accord; houses rise up out of empty spaces. Place becomes not a shared domain, but rather a carbon copy of its author’s ethos. When pain first strikes, it leaves an impression, a furrow harvested for seasons to come. When seeds of hate or love are planted, a garden is staked, quartered in our mind. The past becomes the cartography of its own mapmaker. I can trace back any deeply planted emotion to my hometown. Pride, belonging, longing—they all have a natural resting-place. X marks my spots. Time was my longing was for escape routes out of town. I only wanted to leave and never return. This couldn’t be the world I’d thought, never realizing we tend to take our worlds with us wherever we go.
. . . . As a writer, I return to Portage la Prairie out of love and nostalgia; but not for a mayoralty bid. Once I’d imagined returning to serve as parade marshal during the summer strawberry festival. But not to live, no. I don’t think I could live there today—too many ghosts perhaps—mine included. I would run into myself. Back there I would always be the young scapegrace who tried to saw down the corner candy store; the guy who mooned soccer referees; worked the potato-pruning line at the local factory; the boy who turned up drunk at too many junior and senior high school dances. At one time returning there was easier.
. . . . On family vacations my drive always takes me down its main street. I drive slowly, hoping to see someone familiar, someone who’d yell out, not for “Hey, you’re making a name for this place!” bur rather for, “Hey, it really happened here.” But it doesn’t happen. A part of me, ironically, can’t wait to get through and on my way. Writers are haunted by place, yes, but also time, their own. But, the Portage la Prairie of my books doesn’t exist, it might have once, but it doesn’t anymore, because its architect lives elsewhere building new bridges.
***
Near the end of Twain’s life in 1902, the hero of Hannibal returned to his boyhood home and stayed and spoke at the town’s infamous Rockcliffe Mansion – a home built to exacting standards of a Scottish lumber baron, John Cruickshank. Today you can tour the mansion. If you go and stand on the third step from the landing, on the expansive lobby staircase dappled with light shining through the impressive Tiffany window you are standing where Twain gave a rousing lecture to the some three hundred assembled to hear him speak – his last appearance in Hannibal.
. . . . The Cruickshanks lived in the house for twenty years before the family’s demise. From 1924 until 1967 the three-storey, 13,000 square foot-home sat empty, abandoned to the elements and myth. For the forty-three years of neglect the house, high above town on a cliff it was dragged to, became in lore a haunted house. Children dared other children to enter the house clandestinely through a wine cellar window. Once inside the brave or ignorant deviant was double-dogged dared to run up to the third floor where in the eastern wing there was a schoolroom, complete with desks, chalkboard and maps of the world. As evidence of their guile and guts children were told to bring out with them a shard of Cruickshank history – a piece of one of the maps. Today several map rolls show signs of utter shred. But no ghosts, at least, not during the daytime where from the rooftop observatory an unfettered view of the Mississippi can be seen slinking toward the south.
***
The river tells me
It’s hard to discern
An angel
From a ghost.
***
If I had but a few pages to leave this world, to take from a hurricane-ravaged house; a car in the path of a tornado; to save before drowning, to take a bullet for; to write in blood, my last ounces; I would write of love and it would be all about you.
. . . . What is so important that you want it to outlast you and your kin? What is more than bone, heavier than blood and worth the air in your lungs? What is worth the water in your eyes and the marrow of your arms? What is worth the rush, the last minute, before the fire consumes you and your clothes? From where would these pages, the words upon them, originate, from what book, diary or tome would you tear them thus defacing the depository of their first love?
. . . . When we speak of dreams, we speak of something dear, but nearly impossible to prove or make tactile to another, a person who is willing to sit and listen to the story of wonder, the last one, the one clutched from oblivion; listening to you speak of angels, ashtrays and ships ground ashore beaches of bleached skulls and unfurling manuscripts written in illuminated letters speaking of how it is wrong to sail under uncertain conditions, but that is all we have all of us, these uncertain waters and warnings in the sky above the sail of our own fidelity and hope clutching but a few pages scratched upon them our undying, immortal words of love at last thrown, scattered, upon the water to leave a trail in the wake.
***
Twain wrote that the Mississippi River is well worth reading about, and it is well worth driving along (I can imagine it is a joy to navigate by boat). It is “remarkable,” said Twain that the Mississippi instead of widening towards its mouth, actually narrows. Also, he says the river dumps four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico annually. Having swum in gulf waters both Dyan and I can attest to the presence of mud. The river meanders and cuts its way from Minnesota all the way down to the gulf. It was first seen by explorer De Soto in 1542 and later fully discovered by LaSalle. Barges and riverboats would bring commerce to the towns along its route. A scenic byway, which rims the mighty Miss is called the Great River Road, or the 50 Miles of Art, given that the road is dotted with small town artisans. There are plenty of views of the river and there are rest stops for quiet walks through the forest. The Great River Road unrolls and flows along with the Mississippi, which alternatively draws near and vanishes amongst the undulating hills, forests and swaths of farmlands. State marketers have labeled the byway “50 Miles of Art” for in towns like Louisiana and Clarksville artisans have set up their studios and shops to sell their work. Clarksville, and its extraordinary homes, sit high above the river and boast a studio row of restored storefronts and studios a stone’s throw from the river. We ate at a café owned by the great-granddaughter of a Confederate soldier. In the converted house, we sipped sodas and sketched roses using the flowers found on the blue and white china sugar bowl. Around the corner artisans offered twig furniture, handmade jewelry, hand-blown glassware and paintings.
. . . . A feisty wire-hair Jack Russell greeted us at one store and showed us through the wares to the one spot on the hardwood floor where one could listen to Aaron Neville warble from the store’s sound system and where one could dream laying in blades of sunlight. Around the corner, one artist told us they’d moved from California after Enron utilities there were raised from costing hundreds to thousands. They moved east and restored the shop and studio, complete with studio seating for viewing of glassblowing. I walked the studio row, glancing from time to time at the Mississippi dark and flowing, and imagined what it would be like to live there, to open a store and sell art – my store would be for writing, though and I thought of bringing in my old typewriters and having pages of work hanging all over the store and then … gosh, how would we get people to come… Too much work, another day, I said to myself, another life… Stealthily, Dyan purchased a glass heart for me, of the clearest glass whose center holds flecks and splashes of rose madder red emanating outward. We took to the road, for Sainte Genevieve, on the banks of the river south of St. Louis, our stomachs, minds and hearts full. Through warmly sunlit countryside we drove listening to Sibelius as we traveled past sod farms, grazing cows and the Grassy Creek Cemetery its memorials and tombstones dotting hill and dale on a gentle turn of the road. The elegiac light and classical music purred within us and we drove pensive and happy. Nearer the city we turned on NPR and cut through the suburbs oohing and ahhing over tony clothiers and coffeehouses, but did not stop eager for our arrival at the oldest city west of the Mississippi.
***
The river tells me
My heart is
Dark
Sometimes darkness
Is my friend.
***
As the sun began to dip away, we entered the terminus of our journey, a town named after a girl who once turned back one of the world’s most vicious soldiers – Attila the Hun. Genevieve was born in 422 near Paris, and moved to the City of Lights (candlelight then to be sure) to enter a life as Christ’s bride. In 451 when Attila threatened to ransack Paris (nothing more than a community on an island in the Seine), Genevieve assembled the women of the town in church to fast and pray. Attila, the Scourge of God, changed his rampaging course and bypassed Paris for which Genevieve’s vigil was credited in creating. When the French explorers and settlers floated down the Mississippi and founded a settlement on its banks they named it after the patron saint of Paris, a female mendicant who would protect them from the many trials and hardships they would surely face while homesteading the wild, wild, Midwest.
***
The river tells me
Attila The Hun died
An alcoholic’s death
A bleeding esophagus felled
The Scourge
In a river of
Blood
On his Wedding
Night.
***
Today Sainte Genevieve exists at what appears to be a small tear in the space time continuum – a wormhole to pass back through time to the late 1700s. The town, founded by Frontenac and LaSalle, two French Canadian explorers, in 1735, is the oldest non-aboriginal community west of the Mississippi – and contains the largest assemblage of French Colonial architecture in the country – a mix of Creole wooden cabins and stone stately homes. Its tight roads in the town center emanate in a square surrounding the Church of Ste. Genevieve an impressive Catholic cathedral of nearly fifty statues depicting saints and the holy family. The church, established in 1759, is 175 feet long, 70 feet wide and has an amazing robin’s egg-blue ceiling, which reaches fifty-five feet in height. We stayed just off the square in The Southern Hotel – a hotel converted into a bed and breakfast twenty years ago.
. . . . Our time there was spent walking around the town, an early morning trek on the outskirts of the town, working our way through the community and through an early morning fog. That afternoon we were the only two people in the church; we lit a candle and said a prayer for my deceased brother Kevin, an alcoholic, a genius, a kind sibling, a cracked vessel. The statute of Ste. Genevieve looked down from her most high perch and I returned her gaze.
. . . . Throughout our trip when people asked us where we were from there was a slight hesitation. Beyond the river. We signed the guest books saying we were from Winnipeg, Calgary, Houston and Columbia, MO. I think Twain would have got a kick out of that; our journeys being much like a river, carrying on its shiny surface shards of the world map.
***
The river tells me
Saints live.
***
As we head back home I still see her in my mind, fifth statue from the left up in the church sacristy bearing her name – and I see her staring down at me. Pray and fast. Divert Attila The Hun.
. . . . Her eyes are the hue of tea, of Mississippi mud wending its way to the sea.
. . . . She is with me, floating, as I scamper up through the haunted places, my eyelids partially shut, my heart beating red madder red, arms akimbo, hands at the ready for clutching just a shard; running, gunning, using my feet to mark twain, to snatch some kind of proof I had been there at all. Reaching....
***
I’m told
The sea refuses
No river.
As God
Refuses no
Raptured soul.
Wm. Anthony Connolly is the author of three novels including The Obituaries (Behler 2005). He is a doctoral student in English at the University of Missouri. “Twain” is an excerpt from a dissertation in progress entitled The Eight Leaves. Connolly would love to hear from readers and fellow writers; you can contact him at wconnolly@centurytel.net.
