Huckleberry Fiend

by Julie Smith

  What he found on arrival was as merry a carnival as this country has ever seen. “The sidewalks swarmed with people… The streets themselves were just as crowded… So great was the pack that buggies frequently had to wait half an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street… Joy sat on every countenance and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plentiful as dust and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen.”

  Then came a list of what was available in the seething city of 18,000 people or so— “brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy houses,’ wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whisky mill every fifteen steps,” etc., etc., etc., etc., “and some talk of building a church.”

  It must have been as much fun as the Haight-Ashbury in the sixties (though in a different way): “Every man owned ‘feet’ in fifty different wild cat mines and considered his fortune made. Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!… Money was wonderfully plenty. The trouble was, not how to get it— but how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it.”

  How, one might ask, did all this apply to a humble reporter on a $25 salary? It was simple— the currency of the day was mining stock and the denizens, if Twain is to be believed (and Linda McCormick says he is, mainly), were as generous as they were rich. First, there was the custom of giving stock to reporters in order to have one’s claim “noticed.” And then there was another curious social more: “If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a few. That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the ‘flush times.’ Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends without the asking.” Thus, “we received presents of ‘feet’ every day. If we needed a hundred dollars or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot.”

  In such a freewheeling atmosphere, it was no wonder that Clemens learned journalism rather informally. Upon inquiring how to do the job, he was told to go all over town, ask questions, make notes, and write them up. After five hours of following instructions, he found out that no one knew anything, and once again returned for instructions. “Are there no hay wagons in from Truckee?” asked his boss.

  The young cub proved a quick study. “I canvassed the city again,” he wrote, “and found one wretched old hay truck dragging in from the country. But I made affluent use of it. I multiplied it by sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen different directions, made sixteen separate items out of it, and got up such another sweat about hay as Virginia City had never seen in the world before.”

  The reporter’s temperament, so much abhorred by non-newsfolk, came easy to him. After the hay extravaganza, he found things dull till a desperado killed someone and “joy returned once more… I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret— namely that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work him up too.”

  Finding he still had a column to fill, he heard of some emigrant wagons that had recently come through hostile Indian territory. Clemens felt he could make the story much more interesting if only reporters from other papers weren’t on it as well (a feeling I’d often had at press conferences). But, by exercising what I can only think of as territorial enterprise, he managed to find a wagon that was about to leave and whose proprietor, therefore, “would not be in the city the next day to make trouble… Having more scope here, I put this wagon through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.

  “My two columns were filled. When I read them over in the morning I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last.”

  I feel I should mention here that the Indian-fight story, if indeed he really wrote it, didn’t survive, though I fully expect Booker to turn it up in a burglary someday. Clemens did rather specialize in hoaxes, though, sometimes as vehicles to get back at his enemies. Two of the most famous were the “Petrified Man” and “Massacre at Dutch Nick’s,” a gorier tale than Poe ever dreamed of. Clemens said he meant them as satires, but found an unappreciative audience received them “in innocent good faith.”

  Nonetheless, in the course of his first writing job, he succeeded in making enough of a name for himself that when he left, the paper ran an editorial noting that he had “abdicated the local column of the Enterprise, where by the grace of Cheek, he so long reigned Monarch of Mining Items, Detailer of Events, Prince of Platitudes, Chief of Biographers, Expounder of Unwritten Law, Puffer of Wildcat, Profaner of Divinity, Detractor of Merit, Flatterer of Power, Recorder of Stage Arrivals, Pack Trains, Hay Wagons, and Things in General.”

  He made a name for himself in another sense too. On January 31, 1863, he wrote a dispatch from Carson City and signed it “Mark Twain.” For scholars, that was the real importance of his stay in Virginia City. I figured Tom Sawyer had taken it to heart in a big way.

  I rented a car in Carson City, promising to meet Crusher at one o’clock, and headed for the hills. The countryside around Virginia seemed like the middle of nowhere— and was. Most authorities say the population during the flush time eventually reached 30,000 or so, but it had dwindled over the years to about 750. Though billed as a ghost town, it isn’t, really. It’s both the Storey County seat and a thriving tourist spot. Supposedly, many of the permanent residents are artists, writers, and musicians, but a recent incident that had put the old burg back in the news indicated a more conservative Comstock vein. The incident, appropriately enough, involved none other than the Territorial Enterprise, which was bought by city slickers who attempted to restore its former satirical glory. Unfortunately, they made such mistakes as attacking God and deer-hunting, employing such Twainian devices as having a theologian expound the theory that man is descended from the dough of an anchovy pizza, and “interviewing” twenty-five deer. The argument that the paper was merely harking back to the days of freewheeling frontier journalism was met with such unmitigated hostility that eventually the Territorial Enterprise became a magazine, the once-glorious paper metamorphosing into the bland Virginia City News.

  That was all I knew about the current sociology of the place when I drove into town. I wasn’t there five minutes before I understood what had so amused the Fiends about the novel idea of a Mark Twain Museum in Virginia City— every other business on the main drag seemed to be the Mark Twain something-or-other.

  The tourist activity was concentrated here— on C Street. The place was said to draw half a million visitors a year, and I could believe it. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock and already the ancient boardwalks were straining under the weight of hordes in shorts and sandals. I took a spin around to get the feel of the place. Offhand, I’d have to say it felt like the rest of Nevada. Sardis claims the fact that prostitution is legal there says it all, in a metaphorical sense. As for me, I think of it as the only state where a good meal has nothing to do with the food, which is universally indigestible— it’s one in a restaurant with no slot machines.

  These were a few of the sights on C Street— the Sundance Saloon, the Pioneer Emporium, the Old Washoe Club (“Virginia City’s Oldest and Most Famous Saloon”), the Silver Queen (which houses a fifteen-foot picture of a western belle dressed in a gown made of more than 3,000 real silver dollars), Grant’s General Store and Museum, the Territorial Enterprise building (housing gift shop and basement museum), Mark Twain’s Museum of Memories, the 1869 Territorial Prison War Museum, the Crystal Bar, the Old Sazerac Saloon, the Ponderosa Saloon, the Bucket of Blood Saloon, the Delta Saloon and Cafe, the Wild West Museum, the Nevada Trading Post, and the Virginia City Trading Post. What fun.

  Tom Sawyer, I learned, was the proprietor
neither of Mark Twain’s Museum of Memories (which boasted Mark Twain’s old desk) nor of the basement museum of the Territorial Enterprise Gift Shop (which boasted another of his old desks). His establishment, it seemed, was called Tom Sawyer’s Mark Twain Museum and could be found only by the appropriately enterprising tourist, being situated, as it was, several streets up, at A and Carson. But there was a further problem— according to the locals, it had been closed more often than open lately, Tom having taken to spending most of his time at the Bucket of Blood. Though it was midmorning, I was advised to seek his company there.

  And I was not disappointed. He seemed so firmly ensconced at his bar stool I practically had to brush off the cobwebs to get a look at his face. A lugubrious visage it was, too. I told him I’d been sent by the Fiends, who’d sworn he was the country’s primary authority on Mark Twain outside the Bancroft Library— a white lie, but he needed cheering. It didn’t work. “They lied. They’re amateurs at the Bancroft.”

  He reminded me, in a funny way, of Clemens’s own description of himself when he arrived in Virginia City: “I was a rusty-looking city editor, I am free to confess— coatless, slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered down to the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt.”

  Sawyer had foregone the gun, his beard was hardly more than breast level, and he wore his jeans over his work boots, but otherwise the description came close— particularly the rusty-looking part, and I figured it was no accident.

  “Mark Twain,” he told the barkeep, who promptly furnished us each a beer. “Twain drank at John Piper’s,” Tom said, as if in explanation, “but I’ve got ’em trained here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t know how the old boy got his name?”

  “Sure. From the river sounding for two fathoms.”

  “Apparently, you don’t even know the ‘official’ version.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Let me educate you, my boy. He claimed the name was used first by a Captain Isaiah Sellers, who employed it as a nom de plume to write river news for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Clemens said after he died he ‘laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor’s remains’.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “It’s a tall tale, anyhow. Point One: Sellers did write river news for the Picayune, but he never used the pseudonym. Point Two: He was still alive when our man first used it.”

  “Oh. Well, why do you think he said that?”

  “That wife of his, probably. She might have found the real story too embarrassing. Why, he was known as Mark in this town before he ever used the name in print. Think about it. He liked to use river talk, didn’t he?”

  “Um-hm.”

  “And he liked his beer, didn’t he? So wouldn’t it seem natural he’d stand a friend to a brew now and then? Over at John Piper’s, they’d chalk down drinks on the wall like running a tab.”

  “I get it— he’d say ‘Mark Twain’ when he meant ‘put two drinks on my tab’.”

  “I’m surprised the Fiends didn’t mention it. How are they, anyway? Still going strong?”

  “They sent you their best.”

  At that, he did seem to cheer up a little. He spoke dreamily into his beer: “I used to think of them as my gang. We almost named ourselves Tom Sawyer’s Gang, as a matter of fact. But some of the fellows thought that was too childish. They missed the whole point, of course. Remember what Howells said about Twain?”

  “Plenty, I should imagine.”

  “He said, ‘He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time as just the boy he was’.” He was getting morose again. “I thought I could live like that.”

  “As a boy?”

  “I guess everyone’s got to grow up sometime.”

  “You sound like a man in a mid-life crisis.”

  “I’m nearly fifty, Paul.”

  I remembered what Huck had said about Pap, and Sawyer read my thoughts. “ ‘He was most fifty, and he looked it’,” he quoted. He sighed and stared into his glass. Seeing it was empty, he sighed again. “Would you like to see the museum? I guess that’s what you’re here for.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to open it just for me.”

  “I’d be delighted, actually.” It was funny, in a way, to hear the scholar’s words coming out of the mouth of someone who looked like a miner from the flush times. I remembered how much Huck had hated “them blamed clothes that just smothers me,” the ones he’d had to wear while living with the Widow Douglas. “It’s not every day I meet someone who can appreciate it. Except for the kids. The kids always like it. I like to think maybe some of them will stop watching television long enough to read a good book as a result of seeing it.”

  “Any particular good book?”

  “You know it.”

  He said his car was out of commission, so we took my rented one up to A Street, and, incidentally, on an extended tour of the town. Once off of C Street, we were in a different town— an astonishingly charming one, made up of Victorian mansions and old clapboard houses. In some windows hung tatters; in others lace curtains. Many of the houses (the ones with the nice curtains) had been lovingly restored. “I’ve always loved this place,” said Tom, “warts and all. If you stay off C Street, it’s almost like he’s here. You can almost believe—”

  He didn’t complete the sentence. “Believe what?” I asked.

  “You can identify with him. You walk the streets he walked, do the things he did. It’s as close as you can get to him.”

  “You must have a wonderful life here.” Obviously, he didn’t or he wouldn’t be spending his days at the Bucket of Blood, but I hadn’t forgotten how to dangle reportorial bait.

  “In a way,” he said grimly. “In a way it’s perfect. But Tom needs his Becky.”

  “You never found her?”

  “Oh, I found her all right. I knew I would too. When she walked into the museum, I recognized her on sight.”

  “But she didn’t recognize you?”

  “That,” he said, “would be putting it mildly. I guess it was all a mistake.” He emitted another of his miserable sighs. We pulled up in front of a perfectly lovely house with a wrap-around veranda, the sort of house, if it hadn’t had an old yellow car parked out front, you could easily have imagined in St. Petersburg, Missouri, home town of Tom and Huck. Crossing the threshold was like stepping into Disneyland. The living room was McDougal’s cave, in which Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher had wandered for three days and three nights.

  Near the center of the room were two wax figures of Tom and Becky, wearing their straw hats and holding aloft their candles. Fearsome stalagmites grew out of the black-painted floor, portentous stalactites hung from above. Horribly detailed and loathsome bats, suspended on nearly invisible wires, threatened them on all sides. A papier-mâché waterfall gushed out of one of the walls. Off to the left was Injun Joe’s Cup, a stone with a shallow hollow in it placed on the stump of a broken-off stalagmite, to catch the drop of water that fell every three minutes. On the far wall, lit subtly, was a cross made with candle smoke, marking the spot where the hapless half-breed had hidden the treasure.

  Tom had taken a bit of artistic license; in the book, all of those elements— the cup, the waterfall, and the cross— were miles apart, but who cared? The effect, as the real Tom might have said, was ever so splendid. “It’s wonderful,” I said, and meant it.

  “Isn’t it? If this doesn’t get them, I don’t know what will. You know when you walk down C Street, how you poke your head into all those ostensible museums and yawn and mosey on? I factored that in, you see. I wanted my museum to be irresistible.”

  “There’s just one thing that puzzles me— where do you collect your admission fee?”

  “I don’t. This museum is a loving memorial to Mark Twain and I wi
ll not charge money for it.”

  “Talk about your ‘irresistible’.”

  “Follow the arrows.”

  I noticed, for the first time, that he’d painted white arrows on the floor leading to what looked like a grotto in the cave, but was actually a door. Walking through the cave, I was brushed here and there by a batwing, but lightly, just enough for a frisson. The latter-day Tom had thought of everything. “Did you build this yourself? Surely not— it would have taken years.”

  “It did— and of course I built it myself. I put myself through Cal doing carpentry, and I do it, if I say so myself, with the precision of the librarian I am. I restored the house first— shored up the foundation, rewired, put in new plumbing— everything. I did every bit of it myself. Then I built this museum from scratch— except for the wax figures, of course. They cost me a bundle. I based all the scenes on the original illustrations when I could, sometimes combining them. Like the cave here— does it look at all familiar?”

  “I feel like I’ve been here before.”

  “As a boy, you probably had a book with the True Williams drawings in it. I took the scene from several of them, and had Tom and Becky copied too.”

  We stepped through the cave grotto into a small hall. “Right,” said Tom, and we turned into what used to be a small bedroom, and was now the Mississippi River. On the far bank grew a thicket of trees. We stood on the very edge of the near one, an embankment of real red clay. Tom had used blue paper or plastic— something that shimmered and moved— for the river, and had suspended Huck’s raft from the ceiling, so that it seemed really to be floating. Jim was standing, Huck sitting, behind them the wigwam, with two pairs of feet sticking out. Huck looked so cute you wanted to hug him.

  “They did a nice job on Huck, didn’t they? This one’s a combination of two of the E. W. Kemble illustrations, one with just Huck and Jim, like this, and one of the king and the duke asleep in the wigwam. Here I had Huck made very true to the original drawing, which is one of the most appealing of him, but I had Jim made a little more noble. Unfortunately, you can’t touch them, because you’ll mess up the river.”