The Actual & Truthful Adventures of Becky Thatcher

by Iacopo Bruno

  I nodded.

  Sam’s eyes became twinkly. “I’ll tell you what, Miss Becky. If you tell me about your brother, I’ll do my best to write him into a story. And maybe if it’s good enough, that story will travel all over the world, so Jon will too.”

  “Put him in a book? You could do that?”

  “There’s enough characters in this town alone to fill a book. And that Tom Sawyer has told me a thing or two.”

  I fought a sudden urge to spit. “I’ll bet he has.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “I’ve claimed him as a friend, I guess. Truth be told, I feel a little sorry for him. He’s too scared to have adventures. A boy deserves to have adventures, doesn’t he? Even if girls aren’t supposed to.”

  Sam smiled at me, handed back the bag of marbles, and took a long pull on his pipe. He leaned in close. “Every man, woman, boy, and girl deserves to have a few exciting things happen along their path in life, Becky. Even if he has to make them up and put them into stories instead of living them. You just wait. The name of Tom Sawyer might have some adventures in it yet.”

  Well, I didn’t rightly know what to make of that. “I don’t know about Tom, but Mama and Daddy wouldn’t be too happy about Jon being in a book without their permission,” I warned him.

  “I’ll make it subtle. His name won’t even be Jon. I doubt anyone would recognize him or you either, if I happened to put you in.”

  “Don’t do that! I don’t want to be in a book. I got plenty of time for my own adventures.”

  “All right, just your brother then.”

  “You promise?”

  He raised his right hand and put the other one on his chest. “I swear not to undermine my own authority in matters of creating or not creating a fictional personality for you, Miss Becky Thatcher. I may have to slip you in somewhere, but trust me, nobody’ll see a character named Becky Thatcher and ever think to associate it with the likes of you.”

  Hmm. There was something tricky about that, but I couldn’t rightly make out what. “Well . . . good.”

  “I might even put a little romance into the book.”

  I thought of Mama’s books and Sid Sawyer drawing pictures for Rose Hobart on his chalkboard and that dumb poem Pinchy-face wrote to Joe Harper. “Don’t you go writing a romance book. Anything but that.” I wrinkled my nose. “Nothing gets in the way of adventure like mushy love, sir.”

  “Every book needs a little love in it. And you don’t need to call me ‘sir.’ ”

  “Should I call you Mr. Clemens?”

  He looked far down the river. “Well, how about you call me . . . Mark Twain. I like that. That’s what you call out when the water is deep enough to travel on. It’s where a steamboat can float free on the river and won’t get grounded.”

  It seemed odd, making up a name for himself when he already had one, but I didn’t argue. “Mr. Twain, you got yourself a sack a marbles.”

  “You keep the sack. I’ll take just one.” He thrust his hand out.

  I dropped the bag into it, wondering which he’d pick.

  He sifted through them all, lifting and throwing them back. Finally, his eyes lit up. He squeezed the green frog marble between his thumb and forefinger. “Making bets on a jumping frog.” He smiled. “I’d like to make sure I remember that.” He dropped it in his front pocket. “Now, tell me about your brother.”

  What was the best way to start, when it came to Jon? “Well, he used to call me Daisy.”

  “And what did you call him?”

  “I called him Huckleberry, on account of this one time he stained his hands so bad they stayed that way a whole week.” I felt myself relax and grin. “They called him wild, and he was. Got up to mischief, but he had a real good heart. He had the wildest, free-est heart in the world.”

  “Huckleberry?”

  “Huckleberry.”

  He wrote the word down.

  Then Mr. Mark Twain and me sat and talked until the sun was fully risen. Until the steamboat let out three big bursts, indicating it was time for both of us to be moving on with our lives and heading forward.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Resolution on Pinchy-faced toads and Dob-heads

  The next week was an all-out dust storm of lawful activity. It turned out that we would have more than just one week off from school. Mr. Dobbins got hauled into the jail and pleaded guilty the minute the sheriff threatened to put him in with the Pritchards. Word was, he squealed like a piggy when they pushed him inside a cell, saying he didn’t mean to be an outlaw, he just needed enough money to start over as a dentist in a new town. He claimed that teaching little snots day in and day out had driven him batty enough to get involved with the Pritchards. He was going with the batty defense, which Daddy was not partial to forgiving.

  The arrest called attention to the town and triggered a round of complaints from up and down the river. Apparently Mr. Dobbins had been traveling to do a little dentistry on the weekends. His tooth techniques were about as good as his teaching ones, it seemed.

  The Widow Douglas, of course, was cleared on the charge of grave robbing and apologized to by the sheriff. Even after she was proved innocent, the Bumpners were so mad by the lack of town support in their campaign against her (not to mention the lack of an available teacher for their precious Pinchy-face) that they decided to move.

  When Daddy told me that, I didn’t even ask where the Bumpners were headed. I was too busy whooping my way over to Amy’s house to share the good news. Having swiped Ruth’s secret journal from the Bumpners’ shed, I needed help deciding whether or not to give it back as a good-riddance gift. If I did return it, then I’d also need help gathering enough stinkbugs to put between the pages.

  When I got to the Lawrence place, Amy was writing a letter to her daddy. She said that my letter had inspired her to tell him she didn’t mind cleaning the house and getting meals ready, but she’d be needing a daddy whenever he could get around to it. She didn’t know where to stick that letter and I suggested nailing it to the privy door because everyone goes there before long and that’s where Mr. Dobbins always read the newspaper so it must be an all right place to read.

  All the stolen loot got returned, and at church the following Sunday, Mrs. Sprague hugged me and Preacher Sprague called me a good and brave Christian in front of everyone, including Mama and Daddy. It was the first time Mama’d ventured into town and church since our arrival. I knew she was nervous, so I grabbed onto her hand, mostly to be nice, but also to make sure she would stay put. Mama’s face was fixed with an expression that was more anxious than grateful, but she got a soft smile on her face when Preacher Sprague said my name during the sermon.

  Daddy’s big hand squeezed my shoulder and he whispered, “I’m awfully proud to see you growing up.” Then he squeezed harder. “That said, I found the can of red paint in the shed. You’re grounded for two weeks for painting those shovels and disturbing a legal investigation.”

  “But it was for a good cause,” I whispered back, waving at the Widow Douglas, who had decided to get out of her house more often. Amy and I had gone back to visit with her twice since the stealing night and it was nice to see her taking my advice on how it’d be good to let people know that she was a friendly kind of witch.

  “That’s why I didn’t give you a full month,” Daddy answered, dropping a kiss on my head.

  That same day in Church, the sheriff handed over the reward for catching the Pritchards, and with Amy’s blessing, I gladly split it with Tom Sawyer. It amounted to a couple hundred dollars each, which I had to put straight into the bank. Mama said it would partly go toward decent clothing for me.

  She planned on making my dresses herself, now that she was back to being a mama. Lots of dresses, she said, since most of mine were getting short in the ankle. A body can guess how I felt about “lots of dresses,” but I swore I’d wear anything she made me, as long as I could keep Jon’s clothes for special outings.

  After the Su
nday service, I told her how important it was for me to keep talking about Jon now and then, and how it made me feel close to him to go gallivanting around the woods in his overalls.

  She hugged me and said all right, as long as Amy was always with me and as long as I left a note telling where we’d be adventuring. We had ourselves an agreement, and a good one at that. Daddy warned me that Mama wasn’t going to change overnight and that she’d still have a good amount of bad days, but that didn’t bother me. I didn’t mind waiting.

  Miss Ada must have reckoned that I was fine and on my way to being grown, because she left for Chicago two weeks later. She and a friend of hers decided to open a blanket and clothing shop up there, and they’d both saved up enough money to make it happen.

  The last thing she told me was to keep Jon in my heart. “He visits you all the time, you just don’t know it,” she said, fidgeting with her suit jacket. “Your brother’s not here, but he’s not gone either.”

  “I know he’s not, Miss Ada.” I pictured the daisies dangling from Charlemagne’s mouth.

  “Well, you make sure your mama knows that too.” She smoothed my hair and sighed.

  “I will, Miss Ada.” I kissed her good-bye, feeling a selfish kind of sad that she no longer smelled like hotcakes, only like soap.

  “I got to go,” she said, digging at some dust in her eye. She touched my head again, her hand drifting down to cradle the side of my face before she left my life to catch up with her own.

  I didn’t even remember that stack of dollars and load of quarters until I dug the cornmeal sack out of my closet the same evening Miss Ada left. Wish I could say that the Good Lord prevailed upon me to turn it in, but the Good Lord was too busy with other business. Then I figured maybe that was God’s way of saying I’d done good, so I kept it. A whole bag of quarters comes in awful handy when you like to make bets and you got extra time because your town can’t find a replacement for the schoolteacher. As for that wad of dollar bills, I had plans for it.

  I figured Amy and me would slip out early the next Saturday.

  I figured we’d have ourselves an adventure.

  I figured Mama wouldn’t worry too much if I left the right note.

  There was plenty of time to figure out the details. Life wasn’t moving that fast. And just because I’d decided back in the cave that the journey of growing up wouldn’t be so bad, that didn’t mean I couldn’t keep some things from my childhood and from Jon, just like Mark Twain said.

  And if I chose to keep a little mischief, that was my business.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Actual & Truthful Adventures of Becky Thatcher takes place in September/October of 1860, a time when the real twenty-four-year-old Samuel Clemens—better known by his pen name, Mark Twain—was actively working as a river pilot on the Mississippi.

  This novel is meant to be an origin story, suggesting that Clemens’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was actually inspired by a happenstance stop in a small Missouri town during the author’s river piloting days and, more specifically, by the adventures of a young girl he encountered there. The final scene with my Samuel Clemens character implies that, years later, he will write his most well-known characters (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) as a disguised tribute to that same bold girl and her beloved deceased brother.

  If you’ve read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, you may have noticed that Mark Twain’s Becky Thatcher character is a good deal different than the version I created. Like Becky, some of my other characters also exist in the original story in name, but their personalities and/or roles have been altered for my own purposes. The Widow Douglas is described in Mark Twain’s book as pious and generous; in my novel, she is a recluse labeled as the town witch. Twain’s Amy Lawrence was a past “love” of Tom Sawyer who makes Becky Thatcher jealous; in my novel, she is Becky’s best friend. And the depiction of my Tom Sawyer as a friendless tattletale allows for the possibility that Mark Twain deliberately named his famous novel’s lead character in order to give a lonely boy adventures as thrilling as the ones experienced by my audacious, mischievous, and morally-conflicted version of Becky Thatcher.

  While certain aspects of my Samuel Clemens character are factual (Clemens did enjoy a good pipe and he did have a brother named Henry who died of injuries from a steamboat explosion in 1858), his personality, mannerisms, and dialogue in this novel are purely the product of my imagination.

  Did my version of events really happen? Was Samuel Clemens truly inspired to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer because of interactions with an intrepid young female? Well, no. (And another confession: only one of the “spells” Becky mentions in my novel actually works.) But I have no problem imagining that there were plenty of girls like my version of Becky during the 1860s. Girls who longed to break free of their dresses. Girls who liked to spit cherry pits. Girls who ached for the adventure and spirit that was often expected of and delegated to boys.

  If you want to know more about who the real Tom Sawyer was based on, you might start by reading the Mark Twain’s preface to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. And while you’re there reading the preface, go ahead and read the entire book if you’ve never done so. It’s a mighty fine story, as is its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). I’d mention more of Mr. Twain’s fine stories for you to read, but I’ve got a sack of cherries sitting on my front porch and a daughter who’s ready to have her first pit-spitting lesson. And besides, I’ve got a feeling that you readers may have some mischief to attend to.

  Happy Adventuring,

  Jessica Lawson

  Jessica Lawson has worked as a preschool teacher, at a dude ranch, and on National Forest/Trail crews. She’s an advocate for wearing overalls and going barefoot, and lives in Colorado with her husband and children. This is her first novel.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Jessica Lawson

  Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Iacapo Bruno

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  Book design by Krista Vossen

  Art direction by Krista Vossen

  Jacket illustration and typography by Iacopo Bruno

  The text for this book is set in Adobe Caslon.

  Endpaper maps by Drew Willis

  The illustrations for this book are rendered in pen and ink.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lawson, Jessica.

  The actual & truthful adventures of Becky Thatcher / Jessica Lawson. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: In 1860, eleven-year-old Becky Thatcher, new to St. Petersburg, Missouri, joins the boys at school in a bet to steal from the Widow Douglas in hopes of meeting a promise to have adventures that she made her brother, Jon, before he died.

  ISBN 978-1-4814-0150-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-0155-5 (eBook)

  [1. Behavior�
�Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 3. Family life—Missouri—Fiction. 4. Mississippi River—Fiction. 5. Missouri—History—19th century—Fiction.]

  I. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910. Adventures of Tom Sawyer. II. Title. III. Title: Actual and truthful adventures of Becky Thatcher.

  PZ7.L438267Act 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013020560