The Actual & Truthful Adventures of Becky Thatcher

by Iacopo Bruno

  Ruth Bumpner let out a harrumph in Sam’s direction. “You’re not a teacher, you’re that steamboat pilot.”

  “I can’t be a boat pilot with a grounded boat. Mr. Dobbins will be back tomorrow, so never you fear.”

  Ruth narrowed her eyes. “My mama saw you talking to the Widow Douglas. You were sitting right on her front porch.”

  Sam turned and nodded at her. “I needed something to curse the warts off my hands and heard she might be able to help. Cost me a dollar and a piece of my soul, but the warts are gone.” He held up his hands, displaying clear palms.

  Tom Sawyer craned his neck for a closer look. “I don’t remember you having any wa—”

  “Anyway, the name’s Sam Clemens,” Sam said, shooting Tom an annoyed glance, “and I wasn’t always overly fond of my own schooling process, which I believe makes me qualified to teach. And while I despise subtraction, particularly when it comes to my own money, I do love to read and write. So we’ll be talking about words all day.”

  “If you hate school, let’s go have a fishing lesson,” Joe Harper sang out. The other boys exchanged hesitant grins.

  Sam clapped his hands and rubbed them together, taking a seat on the edge of Mr. Dobbins’s desk. “Sure, we can go fishing. Or climb mountains or go dancing or play poker with elephants. We’re gonna come up with a story and it can have as many adventures as you want.”

  Pinchy-face, not having any imagination to speak of, made her eyes into slits once again. “My mama says poker is the game of the devil.”

  “It is not,” I told her, pocketing the dirty look she gave me so I could use it on her later. Jon was always partial to poker.

  Joe Harper put on a sour pout. “I meant real fishing. I’m no story writer,” he mumbled.

  “No, but you’re a liar,” I pointed out. “That’s all stories are—just a bunch of lies you think up and tell people.” I peeked at Sam to see if he knew I was stealing his line.

  “Tell you what,” Sam said. “It’s a nice day, so let’s head down by the river to concoct our tale. Mr. Dobbins wouldn’t object to a little fresh air, would he?”

  I had a good spitball ready for Tom Sawyer, and the second he raised his hand to say that yes, Mr. Dobbins would surely throw a hissy fit if he knew we were doing anything that smelled of enjoyment, the wet wad of paper got him right on the neck.

  “Hey,” he said, turning in his seat.

  “Let’s go, everybody,” I said, getting up.

  And that’s just what we did.

  Amy and I kept toward the back of the group, her talking about what a lucky school day it was and me thinking about the “riped to shreds” note. The way I figured things, Billy Pritchard had done that to cover his behind and he wasn’t likely to follow through on anything. Besides, I wasn’t gonna say a word about them robbing that grave, which meant he’d have no reason to “ripe” me to shreds or otherwise. I brightened considerably at the revelation.

  We passed the Widow’s place and Pinchy-face’s house. Mrs. Bumpner was in her front yard, all red-faced with both hands on her hips, frowning between her dead flower patch and the Widow’s house and, now, the sight of Sam Clemens walking by.

  Weaving along a river-bound path, me wishing I had Jon’s overalls and a fishing pole, I soon realized our destination was somewhere near Sam’s grounded steamboat. Sure enough, Sam settled on a log next to the burned-out fire pit where I’d first seen him. We all piled around him, the boys much distracted by a knife and candy wrappers a crew member had left behind.

  “The Pritchards have been here,” Sid said, waving the wrappers in Ruth’s face.

  She wrinkled her nose and shoved him away, but I felt Amy stiffen beside me.

  “He’s just foolin’,” I told Amy, giving Sid the stink eye.

  “He is not!” Joe Harper jumped on a log and pointed his finger at all of us. “See all the candy wrappers? Candy is probably the only thing those Pritchards eat and that’s why they ain’t got teeth left in their mouths.”

  “I wish you didn’t have a mouth left in your mouth,” Junie Todd told Joe.

  I made a note to myself to get to know Junie better.

  Sam laughed and pocketed the knife. “Hey now, that’s just junk left over from river boys. Let’s have a lesson,” he said. All of us piped down and waited for him to tell us more. “The first thing you need for a story is characters and the second thing is something for them to do. Gimme a few names and we’ll get started.”

  “Can we use real names?” Rose Hobart asked.

  Sam nodded. “You can. Sometimes it’s easier and more honest that way, especially if you’re telling a tale with some truth to it. But it’s fun to make them up, too. Now to start, we need a good fella and a bad one. Ideas for the good fella’s name?”

  “How about David,” Tom suggested. “Like in the Bible story of David and—”

  “Goliath!” Sid shouted. “Let’s name our good guy Goliath.”

  Sam scribbled on his tablet. “All right, let’s have a girl, too. Becky, any ideas?”

  My stomach was grumbling too much for me to think. I’d skipped out on seconds at breakfast. “Pancake Sally,” I suggested.

  “Good. Villain?”

  “How about Mr. Lawrence.” Pinchy-face smirked at Amy. “Never mind. He’d be stumbling around too much to do any damage.” Her smug face changed to a serious kind of mean. “As my mother says,” she whispered right to Amy, “what a waste of a family.”

  Even Mary and Alice Green had the sense to look shocked, and they were friends with Ruth.

  A wad of tears gathered in Amy’s eyes. Her fingers clutched my side, holding me back from leaping up and giving Ruth a whooping in front of God and Sam Clemens and everyone.

  “Don’t,” Amy whispered, wiping at her cheek with a fierce swipe. “She’s not worth it.”

  I disagreed. I thought Ruth Bumpner was very much worth a few of my scraped knuckles, if it was her nose doing the scraping. Waste of a family. That was it—now the whole Bumpner family had made it onto my special list.

  “I got a villain. How about Mr. Dobbins!” Joe shouted gleefully, prompting those around him to applaud.

  Sam laughed, but shook his head. “You can do better than that.”

  So with Sam Clemens pointing to each of us in turn to shout out a sentence of story, Goliath and Pancake Sally had soon defeated the evil Mr. Smobbins by tying him to a raft and sending him downriver where he was subjected to torture by the Gritchard brothers, the most terrible pirates known to sail the Mississippi. Just as the Gritchards were going to hunt down Goliath and Pancake Sally as well, Hurricane Mo, Goliath’s long-lost brother, entered the scene. We broke for lunch, with three young lives hanging in the balance.

  Amy and I found a nice tree to set our backs to, speculating about Hurricane Mo’s chances of saving the day while we poked holes in four lima beans each.

  “This’ll give us protection from the north, south, east, and west,” I said, passing her a piece of fishing line. “String your beans on that and we’ll stick the necklaces in this Bible.” I patted the Good Book. “Then we’ll take turns sitting on it.”

  Amy’s eyes filled with a considerable amount of reproach. “Isn’t it an awful sin, sitting on the Bible?”

  “Course not,” I told her, finishing my necklace with a fishing knot. “It puts you that much closer to God, doesn’t it? And it’ll squeeze the Holiness right into those beans. Jon once snatched six watermelons with the help of holy beans.”

  Amy let out a soft sigh, accepting half of my ham on white bread. “Must’ve been nice having a brother. When did Jon die?”

  Nobody had asked me anything about him in a real long time. Felt nice to hear his name from someone else. “End of last summer.” It’d been the beginning of August, just short of his favorite season. I sure hoped God had changed it to look like autumn in Heaven the day Jon died, so he felt good and welcomed.

  “How’d he die? Mama died from pneumonia. I nearly caught
it, but I’m not carrying it around with me or anything.” She looked at me anxiously.

  “I’m sure you’re not,” I assured her, taking her hand in mine to let her know I wasn’t scared of old pneumonia germs. “Say, if you feel like someone’s gonna make you sick, know what you do?”

  Amy’s eyeballs got real wide. “What do I do?”

  A memory flashed of Jon in his bed, frail and faded, weakly whispering his secrets to me. Like he was already a ghost. I changed the memory and put some color into his cheeks. “That’s better.”

  “What’s better?”

  “Nothing.” I leaned against the tree, trying to remember exactly what Jon had said. “Here’s what you do. You go outside and find something living in the ground. Could be a flower, a piece of grass, or a worm. Harder to find living things in winter, but you got to anyway. Then you bring the thing inside, dip it in flour, and fry it in oil.”

  “You don’t eat it!” Amy cried.

  “You do eat it! But not yet. First you find the darkest room in the house. That’s usually a closet. You take a glass of water and your fried living thing in there and you spin around twice one way, twice the other, then sit down and take your salt. Did I mention the salt?”

  She shook her head.

  “You need a quarter cup of salt. And a glass of water. You sit down and you pour the salt into the cup. You stir it around with a dirty spoon. Did I mention the dirty spoon?”

  She shook her head again. “What if they’re all clean?”

  “Then you drop one on the floor a few times or shove it under the cook stove.”

  Amy wrinkled her nose. “It’s got to be dirty?”

  I nodded firmly. “Got to be. Anyway, you stir the salt into the water and say,

  Salt water, fried thing, do your best,

  Don’t let sickness jump in my chest,

  Pollywog, johnnycake, syrup in your eye,

  I’ll drink you, if you don’t let me die.”

  Amy waited for more. “Then what?”

  “Then you eat your fried living thing and swallow all the salt water.”

  She frowned. “Does that really work, Becky Thatcher?”

  Finishing off my sandwich, I shook the crumbs from my dress. “I didn’t get sick, did I?”

  “Well, could it have helped my mama? Ooo, skitter on your neck!”

  I slapped the sneaky bloodsucker, wiping my hand on my fishskin and hoping the stain would make it unwearable. Maybe Mama would give me a scolding if she ever came close enough to notice. I mushed the body around real good, just in case.

  “No,” I told Amy, “that chant couldn’t have helped your Mama. Jon said it doesn’t do any good if you’re already sick. That’s how he died. Just got sick. Then he got sicker. Couldn’t even come down to the stream to fish. He said that he would’ve skipped school every day he’d ever gone if he knew he’d be seventeen and too weak for running around the woods. Told me that he would have had adventures all over the place.” I stuck my hand inside my schoolbag, touching his marble bag. “Said he would have gone all the way to the ocean.”

  Amy shifted beside me. “Is that why you act wild sometimes and wear his clothes?”

  If anybody else had asked me that, I might have got offended, but Amy was my bosom friend. “Miss Ada thinks that I want to be like him.” I dug my shoes into the ground. “I miss him so much some days that my chest hurts, Amy. It feels like someone’s just pressing and squeezing on me. But if I put on a shirt of his, it’s like he’s the one holding me instead, doing the squeezing his own self.” I scraped my fingers along the tree, feeling the bark get good and lodged under my fingernails. “He used to pick me up from the floor and call me a daisy.”

  “He called you what?”

  “He called me Daisy.” I started to feel sniffly and needed something else to talk about. “Your kitten dead yet?” Immediately, I regretted the question. Amy looked ready to bawl and school is no place for crying. “Never mind,” I said. “Don’t tell me. But hey, think about it like this—if it dies, that kitten’ll get the glory of helping us.”

  She looked at me strange for a second, then sighed. “Oh, Becky, maybe you’re right. I sure do feel bad, though. He looks near about dead. I even tried soaking one of Daddy’s holey socks in milk and feeding him that way, but nothing worked.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Say, when it dies, you can keep that dead kitten in your room until we need its witch-repelling powers. Maybe keep it on your bed pillow. Then it would feel nice and taken care of.” I smiled real big to show her how kind that would be.

  Her mouth twitched like she was in pain or she’d eaten a bad piece of fish. “What if it’s got maggots?”

  “You pick ’em out.”

  Amy still looked a little sick, but she nodded. “You’re right.”

  I clapped her on the back. “Sure I am.”

  Down by the river, Sam Clemens waved his hands and shouted for us to gather back together. The Mississippi was busy with freight boats and fishing skiffs mingling together, making a much nicer background for learning than a chalkboard. In a fit of bad manners, I found myself wishing that Mr. Dobbins would stay good and sick so we could have riverside school again tomorrow.

  I stood and reached for Amy’s hand. “Let’s go see how the story turns out.”

  “I hope those boys and Sally get away,” she said, picking up the Bible. “I don’t want to hear about anybody getting their toes sliced off by Gritchards. I don’t much like this story.”

  “No,” I agreed, “me neither.” That said, I was very glad that nobody had thrown a dug-up grave scene into the mix.

  Because while the class and Sam Clemens were busy thinking up pretend pirates and pretend torture and pretend escapes, I was thinking how somebody was bound to go to the cemetery sooner or later and find a real live dead body.

  Chapter Eight

  A rumored suspect

  The unearthed coffin of Mr. Amos Mutton was discovered three days after the grave robbing, and the story spread easy as warm butter. It was a curiosity, since Mr. Mutton had died five years back, and nobody knew of him being buried with anything particularly valuable. Preacher Sprague swore he’d been at the funeral and that not a thing went into that coffin except a body wearing pants, suspenders, a shirt, and new socks that someone had been kind enough to knit. It was the Church who buried him out of kindness, him not having a wife. The body still being there and Amos being fully clothed and such, it was a most mysterious happening.

  Every ounce of Law available surveyed the scene. Even Daddy was called to the graveyard to take a look on Tuesday afternoon. Amy and I kept our mouths shut tight. If the Pritchard brothers wanted to dig up some man who was already dead, it wasn’t worth us getting our guts spilled with that big knife of Billy’s. Amy and I were firmly against any of our body parts taking leave of our bodies.

  But there was a complication—a big one, in the form of my six-foot-tall-and-then-some Daddy sitting down at the kitchen table to make conversation on Wednesday morning over hotcakes, eggs, and bacon.

  I helped myself to the pans on the cookstove, scooping up eggs and all the bacon that was left and taking a seat next to my daddy.

  “Becky.” He nodded, pointing for me to pass the syrup.

  “Yes, Daddy,” I said cautiously, digging into my food and wondering why he didn’t want to eat in the dining room again. Maybe it was because Miss Ada was out back with the washing and he didn’t want to travel as far for seconds. Maybe he also liked it better in the kitchen since there wasn’t an empty Mama chair to stare at. “You eating breakfast again?” I asked him.

  “My stomach has taken to being soured by plain coffee, and I wanted to speak with you. Becky, I know you’ve made friends with Amy Lawrence, but have you gotten to know the Bumpner girl?”

  Oh. Well, that was unexpected. “No, I have not gotten acquainted with Ruth Bumpner,” I said, being diplomatic. “Why?”

  He took a big bite of hotcake and chewed w
ith his mouth wide open. Daddy had gotten away with rude table manners since Mama stopped talking enough to chide him. “Her parents are issuing a complaint of sorts, and I don’t know what to think of the family. Hard to ask questions without offending people in a small town. What about the Sawyer boys? Do you find them to be agreeable?”

  Hmm. Where was Daddy going with this? Did he know about the witchy bet?

  “The Sawyers seem very nice, Daddy. Sid’s more friendly than Tom. I’ll say that.”

  “They ever mention that fellow living with them?”

  This was about him. Whew, what a relief! I relaxed and drowned a piece of bacon in my syrup pool. “Sam Clemens? He’s the pilot of that grounded steamboat. He’s waiting on an engine part, I guess. He’s a writer, too. Seems friendly. Why?” That bacon with syrup went down like candy. Mmm.

  “Well, word around town is that he’s been seen talking to the Widow Douglas.”

  A hotcake wad went down the wrong pipe and I choked a few times before recovering. I didn’t like talk turning to the Widow Douglas. Did Sam Clemens turn into Tom Sawyer and tattle about the bet? I didn’t say anything. Daddy hadn’t asked a question, so I waited.

  “A shovel the deputy found at the grave of Mr. Mutton was traced to the Widow. It’s the same red-tipped one she gardens with.”

  Good Lord, there went another chunk down the wrong pipe. The Pritchards had stolen the Widow’s shovel. Not that I wouldn’t be participating in a bet that involved lifting an item from the Widow’s house on Saturday, but those were two very different things. That was for bragging rights and there was a five dollar pot at stake. “You think the Widow dug up that grave?”

  He shook his head. “It seems unlikely, but Mr. Bumpner heard about the shovel being found. He and his wife came to see me personally and said that the Widow’s not quite right in the head. She doesn’t attend church, keeps to herself a lot. Said they’d testify to her oddities if she went to trial.”