by Dave Mckay
But I had time. Aunt Sally she stayed in the sick-room all day and all night, and every time I seen Uncle Silas going around looking sad I stayed away from him.
Next morning I heard Tom was a lot better, and they said Aunt Sally was gone to get a rest. So I goes to the sick-room, and if I found him awake I thought we could put up a story that would wash with Aunt Sally. But he was sleeping, and sleeping nicely, too; and white, not fire-faced the way he was when he come. So I sat down and waited for him to wake. In about half an hour Aunt Sally comes in, and there I was, up a tree again! She made a movement for me to be still, and she sat down by me, and started to whisper, and said we could all be happy now, because all the signs were good, and he’d been sleeping like that for ever so long, and looking better and more at peace all the time, and ten to one he’d wake up in his right mind.
So we sat there watching, and by and by he moves a little, and opens his eyes very relaxed, and takes a look, and says: “Hello! -- why, I’m at home! How’s that? Where’s the raft?”
“It’s all right,” I says.
“And Jim?”
“The same,” I says, but couldn’t say it with much confidence.
He never saw that, but says: “Good! Wonderful! Now we’re all right and safe! Did you tell Aunty?”
I was going to say yes; but she cut in and says: “About what, Sid?”
“Why, about the way the whole thing was done.”
“What whole thing?”
“Why, the whole thing. There ain’t but one; how we set the runaway slave free -- me and Tom.”
“
Good land! Set the runaway -- What is the child talking about! My, my, out of his head again!”
“No, I ain’t out of my head; I know all what I’m talking about. We set him free -- me and Tom. We planned it, and we done it. And we done it well, too.” He’d started, and she never pulled him up, just sat and looked with her eyes wide open, and let him go on talking, and I seen it weren’t no use for me to put in.
“Why, Aunty, it cost us a power of work -- weeks of it -- hours and hours, every night, while you was all asleep. We had to take candles, and the sheet, and the shirt, and your dress, and spoons, and tin plates, and table-knives, and the warming-pan, and the stone, and flour, and just no end of things, and you can’t think what work it was to make the saws, and pens, and writings, and one thing or another. You can’t think half the fun it was too. We had to make up the pictures to put under the door, and secret letters from the robbers, and get up and down the lightning-rod, and dig the hole under the shack, and make the rope ladder and send it in cooked up in a pie, and send in spoons and things to work with in your apron pocket -- “
“Mercy!”
“ -- and fill up the shack with rats and snakes and so on, for company for Jim; and then you kept Tom here so long with the butter in his hat that you come near destroying the whole business, because the men come before we was out of the shack, and we had to hurry, and they heard us and started shooting, and I got my bullet, and we jumped out of the footpath and let them go by, and when the dogs come they weren’t interested in us, but went for the most noise, and we got our canoe, and made for the raft, and was all safe, and Jim was a free man, and we done it all by ourselves, and wasn’t it great, Aunty!”
“Well, I never heard the likes of it in all my born days! So it was you, you little devils, that’s been making all this trouble, and turned everybody’s brains clean inside out and scared us all almost to death. I’ve as good a reason as ever I had in my life to take it out of you this very minute. To think, here I’ve been, night after night -- you just get well once, you young fox, and I’ll whip the Old Harry out of both of you!”
But Tom, he was so proud and happy, he just couldn’t hold in, and his tongue just went at it -- she a-cutting in, and shooting fire all along, and both of them talking away at once, like a cat party; and she says: “Well, you get all the fun you can out of it now, for if I catch you talking with him again -- “
“Talking with who?” Tom says, dropping his smile and looking surprised.
With who? Why, the runaway slave. Who’d you think?”
Tom looks at me very serious, and says: “Tom, didn’t you just tell me he was all right? Hasn’t he got away?”
“Him?” says Aunt Sally. “The runaway slave? You can be sure he hasn’t. They’ve got him back, safe and whole, and he’s in that shack again, on bread and water, and covered with chains, until his owner comes or he’s sold!”
Tom sat square up in bed, with his eyes hot, and the holes in his nose opening and shutting like the openings on a fish, and sings out to me: “They ain’t no right to shut him up! Go! -- and don’t you lose a minute. Turn him loose! He ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any animal that walks this earth!”
“What does the child mean?”
“I mean every word I say, Aunt Sally, and if someone don’t go, I’ll go. I’ve knowed him all his life, and so has Tom, there. Old Miss Watson died two months ago, and she was feeling guilty that she ever was going to sell him down the river, and said so; she set him free in her will.”
“Then what on earth did you want to set him free for, seeing he was already free?”
“Well, that is a question, I must say; and just like a woman! Why, I wanted the adventure of it; and I’d a walked neck-deep in blood to -- Why, I never -- AUNT POLLY!”
If Tom's Aunt Polly weren’t standing right there, just inside the door, looking as sweet and happy as an angel half full of pie, I wish I may never!
Aunt Sally jumped for her, and almost hugged the head off of her, and cried over her, and I found a good enough place for me under the bed, for it was getting pretty hot for us, it seemed to me. And I looked out, and in a little while Tom’s Aunt Polly shook herself loose and stood there looking across at Tom over her glasses -- kind of chewing him up, you know. And then she says: “Yes, you should turn your head away -- I would, too, if I was you, Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh, my!” says Aunt Sally; “is he changed so? Why, that ain’t Tom, it’s Sid; Tom’s -- Tom’s -- why, where is Tom? He was here a minute ago.”
“You mean where’s Huck Finn -- that’s what you mean! I think I ain’t brought up such a devil as my Tom all these years not to know him when I see him. That would be a pretty big mix-up. Come out from under that bed, Huck Finn.”
So I done it. But not feeling very brave.
Aunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest-looking persons I ever seen -- all but one, and that was Uncle Silas, when he come in and they told it all to him. It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn’t know nothing at all for the whole day, and preached things that night that the oldest man in the world couldn’t a understood. So Tom’s Aunt Polly, she told all about who I was, and what; and I had to up and tell how I was in such a tight place that when Mrs. Phelps took me for Tom Sawyer -- she cut in and says, “Oh, go on and call me Aunt Sally, I’m used to it now, and it ain’t no need to change” -- that when Aunt Sally took me for Tom Sawyer I had to stand it -- there weren’t no other way, and I knowed he wouldn’t mind, because it would be nuts for him, and he’d make an adventure out of it, and be perfectly happy (and so it turned out,) and he let on to be Sid, and made things as soft as he could for me.
And his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about old Miss Watson setting Jim free in her will; and so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took all that trouble and work to set a free black man free! I couldn’t ever understood before, until that minute and that talk, how he could help a body set a black man free with his bringing-up, but now I knew.
Aunt Polly she said when Aunt Sally wrote to her that Tom and Sid had come safely, she says to herself: “Look at that, now! I should have known it, letting him go off that way without anyone to watch him. So now I got to go and travel all the way down the river, eleven hundred miles, and find out what that boy is up to this time, as long as I couldn’t seem to get any answer out of you about it.”
“Why
, I never heard nothing from you,” says Aunt Sally.
“Well, that’s strange! Because I wrote you two times to ask what you could mean by Sid being here.”
“Well, I never got ‘em, Polly.”
Aunt Polly she turns around slow and serious, and says: “You, Tom!”
“Well -- what?” he says, kind of innocent like.
“Don’t you what me, you rude thing -- hand out them letters.”
“What letters?”
“Them letters. Be tied, if I have to take a-hold of you I’ll -- “
“They’re in the suitcase. And they’re just the same as they was when I got 'em out of the post office in town. I ain’t looked into them, I ain’t touched them. But I knowed they’d make trouble, and I thought if you weren’t in no hurry, I’d -- “
“Well, you do need skinning, there’s truth in that. And I wrote another one to tell you I was coming; and I should think he got -- “
“No, it come in yesterday; I ain’t read it yet, but it’s all right, I’ve got that one.”
I wanted to lay two dollars to say she hadn’t, but I thought maybe it was just as safe not to. So I never said nothing.
Chapter 43
The first time I caught Tom away from the others I asked him what his plan had been if it had all worked out right, and if we had been able to set a black man free that was already free before? And he said, what he had planned in his head from the start, if we got Jim out all safe, was for us to run him down the river on the raft, and have adventures clear to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about his being free, and take him back up home on a river boat, in the best way, and pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the slaves around, and have them dance him into town with a torch-light parade and lots of musical instruments, and then he would be known all over, and so would we. But I thought it worked out just as well the way it was.
We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when Aunt Polly and Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally found out how well he helped the doctor nurse Tom, they said a lot of nice things over him, and fixed him up nicely, and give him all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and nothing to do. And we had him up to the sick-room, and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patiently, and doing it up so good, and Jim was pleased almost to death, and broke out, and says:
“Dere, now, Huck, what I tell you? -- what I tell you up dere on Jackson island? I told you I got hair on my chest, and what’s de sign of it; and I told you I been rich once, and gwyne to be rich again and it’s come true; and here she is! Dere, now! don’t talk to me -- signs is signs, mind I told you; and I knowed just as well that I was gwyne to be rich again as I’s a-standing here dis minute!”
And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, let’s all three get out of here secretly one of these nights and get the right clothes, and go for great adventures with the Indians, over in their part of the country, for a week or two; and I says, all right, but I ain’t got no money to buy the clothes, and I think I couldn’t get none from home, because pap’s probably been back before now, and got it all away from Judge Thatcher and drunk it up.
“No, he ain’t,” Tom says; “it’s all there yet -- six thousand dollars and more; and your pap ain’t ever been back since. Hadn’t when I come away, at least.”
Jim says, kind of serious: “He ain’t a-coming back no more, Huck.”
I says: “Why, Jim?”
“Never you mind why, Huck -- but he ain’t coming back no more.”
But I kept at him; so at last he says: “Don’t you remember de house dat was going down de river, and dey was a man in dere, covered up, and I went in and uncovered him and didn’t let you come in? Well, den, you can get your money when you wants it, because dat was him -- your pap.”
***
Tom’s almost well now, and he has his bullet around his neck on a cover for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is. So there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am dirty well glad of it too, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a started it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I think I got to head out for the Indian country ahead of the others, because Aunt Sally says she’s going to make me part of her family and teach me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
