Compositions for the Young and Old

God Bless her little-black-voodoo heart. Now, this might sound a touch strange, like I was a farm-wife who had nothing else to do but talk about how hard it was to raise her offspring, but there was no preparing for the real thing.

Violet had told me the good stuff first. And the good stuff, the best stuff, was because Twain was freshly dead, I’d have access to everything that was in his head before he died.

It was only a matter of the gettin’.

But the how of the gettin’ was something that I’d have to figure out.

So I tried just about everything to squeeze a story kernel from Twain that I could use and build into a novel that I could claim as my own. Yes, just about everything. I started with questions, which of course he didn’t answer.

Not to say that he didn’t speak to me. Lord yes, he was a regular chatterbox if the situation was right. Mostly me saying a particular word would set him off. And I theorized that what he said was just something left over, ideas or thoughts already ground in his head before death.

Although, more times than not what he uttered were words he’d already written.

For example: The day after our return to Hannibal, I sat in the bedroom with ink and paper, just bustin’ to get at him. I ordered him to sit on the edge of his bed before mumbling a joke.

“So how’s death treating you?”

“All say, ‘How hard it is that we have to die’— a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.” Toneless, gravelly voice, with no inflection. Like air out of a balloon. A dead sound.

With shaking hands, I scrawled down his words. I asked more questions, and he only repeated himself. Even after I stopped talking, he kept on repeating. It was too much. I screamed at him to stop and ran from the room.

After sinking into a brandy-aided cup of tea, I realized his words were familiar and found the statement in Daddy’s leather-bound copy of The Tragedy of Pudd’n’head Wilson and the Comedy of the Extraordinary Twins.

So I gave up asking direct questions and tried reading him his own passages, then works of other writers including my own failed attempts.

I tried showing him pictures and newspapers. I tried evening and early morning walks along the Mississippi. I tried walking him by his childhood home.

I pleaded with Violet to help, but she wasn’t answering my telegrams.

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