Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

That was all fixed. So then we went away and went to the rubbish pile in the backyard, where they keep the old boots, and rags, and pieces of bottles, and worn-out tin things, and all such truck, and scratched around and found an old tin washpan, and stopped up the holes as well as we could, to bake the pie in, and took it down to the cellar and stole it full of flour, and started for breakfast, and found a couple of shingle nails that Tom said would be handy for a prisoner to scrabble his name and sorrows on the dungeon walls with, and dropped one of them in Aunt Sally’s apron pocket, which was hanging on a chair, and the other we stuck in the band of Uncle Silas’s hat, which was on the bureau, because we heard the children say their father and mother were going to the runaway enslaved man’s house this morning. Then we went to breakfast, and Tom dropped the pewter spoon in Uncle Silas’s coat pocket, and Aunt Sally hadn’t come yet, so we had to wait a little while.

And when she came she was hot and red and cross, and could hardly wait for the blessing; and then she went to sluicing out coffee with one hand and cracking the handiest child’s head with her thimble with the other, and said:

“I’ve hunted high and I’ve hunted low, and it does beat all what has become of your other shirt.”

My heart fell down among my lungs and livers and things, and a hard piece of corn crust started down my throat after it and got met on the road with a cough, and was shot across the table, and took one of the children in the eye and curled him up like a fishing worm, and let a cry out of him the size of a war whoop, and Tom turned kind of blue around the gills, and it all amounted to a considerable state of things for about a quarter of a minute or as much as that, and I would have sold out for half price if there had been a bidder. But after that we were all right again—it was the sudden surprise of it that knocked us so kind of cold. Uncle Silas said:

“It’s most uncommonly curious; I can’t understand it. I know perfectly well I took it off, because—”

“Because you have only one on. Just listen to the man! I know you took it off, and I know it by a better way than your wool-gathering memory, too, because it was on the clothesline yesterday—I saw it there myself. But it’s gone, that’s the long and the short of it, and you’ll just have to change to a red flannel one until I can get time to make a new one. And it will be the third I’ve made in two years. It just keeps a person on the jump to keep you in shirts; and whatever you manage to do with them all is more than I can make out. A person would think you would learn to take some sort of care of them at your time of life.”

“I know it, Sally, and I do try all I can. But it shouldn’t be altogether my fault, because, you know, I don’t see them or have anything to do with them except when they’re on me; and I don’t believe I’ve ever lost one of them off me.”

“Well, it isn’t your fault if you haven’t, Silas; you’d have done it if you could, I reckon. And the shirt isn’t all that’s gone, either. There’s a spoon gone; and that isn’t all. There were ten, and now there are only nine. The calf got the shirt, I reckon, but the calf never took the spoon—that’s certain.”

“Why, what else is gone, Sally?”

“There are six candles gone—that’s what. The rats could have gotten the candles, and I reckon they did; I wonder they don’t walk off with the whole place, the way you’re always going to stop their holes and never do it; and if they weren’t fools they’d sleep in your hair, Silas—you’d never find it out; but you can’t lay the spoon on the rats, and that I know.”

“Well, Sally, I’m at fault, and I acknowledge it; I’ve been remiss; but I won’t let tomorrow go by without stopping up those holes.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t hurry; next year will do. Matilda Angelina Araminta Phelps!”

Whack came the thimble, and the child snatched her claws out of the sugar bowl without fooling around at all. Just then the enslaved woman stepped onto the passage and said:

“Missus, there’s a sheet gone.”

“A sheet gone! Well, for the land’s sake!”

“I’ll stop up those holes today,” said Uncle Silas, looking sorrowful.

“Oh, do shut up!—suppose the rats took the sheet? Where’s it gone, Lize?”

“I declare to goodness, I haven’t any notion, Miss Sally. It was on the clothesline yesterday, but it’s gone: it isn’t there anymore now.”

“I reckon the world is coming to an end. I never saw the beat of it in all my born days. A shirt, and a sheet, and a spoon, and six can—”

“Missus,” said a young woman of mixed descent, “there’s a brass candlestick missing.”

“Clear out of here, you minx, or I’ll take a skillet to you!”

Well, she was just boiling. I began to watch for a chance; I reckoned I would sneak out and head for the woods until the weather moderated. She kept raging right along, running her insurrection all by herself, and everybody else mighty meek and quiet; and at last Uncle Silas, looking kind of foolish, fished that spoon up out of his pocket. She stopped, with her mouth open and her hands up; and as for me, I wished I were in Jerusalem or somewhere. But not for long, because she said:

“It’s just as I expected. So you had it in your pocket all the time; and as likely as not you have the other things there, too. How did it get there?”

“I really don’t know, Sally,” he said, kind of apologizing, “or you know I would tell. I was studying over my text in Acts Seventeen before breakfast, and I reckon I put it in there, not noticing, meaning to put my Testament in, and it must be so, because my Testament isn’t in; but I’ll go and see; and if the Testament is where I had it, I’ll know I didn’t put it in, and that will show that I laid the Testament down and took up the spoon, and—”

“Oh, for the land’s sake! Give a person a rest! Go along now, the whole kit and caboodle of you; and don’t come near me again until I’ve got back my peace of mind.”

I would have heard her if she had said it to herself, let alone speaking it out; and I would have gotten up and obeyed her if I had been dead. As we were passing through the sitting room, the old man took up his hat, and the shingle nail fell out on the floor, and he just merely picked it up and laid it on the mantelshelf, and never said anything, and went out. Tom saw him do it, and remembered about the spoon, and said:

“Well, it’s no use to send things by him anymore; he isn’t reliable.” Then he said: “But he did us a good turn with the spoon, anyway, without knowing it, and so we’ll go and do him one without his knowing it—stop up his rat holes.”

There were a great many of them down in the cellar, and it took us a whole hour, but we did the job tight and good and shipshape. Then we heard steps on the stairs, and blew out our light and hid; and here came the old man, with a candle in one hand and a bundle of stuff in the other, looking as absent-minded as the year before last. He went mooning around, first to one rat hole and then another, until he had been to them all. Then he stood about five minutes, picking tallow drip off his candle and thinking. Then he turned off slowly and dreamily toward the stairs, saying:

“Well, for the life of me I can’t remember when I did it. I could show her now that I wasn’t to blame on account of the rats. But never mind—let it go. I reckon it wouldn’t do any good.”

And so he went on mumbling upstairs, and then we left. He was a mighty nice old man. And always is.

Tom was a good deal bothered about what to do for a spoon, but he said we had to have it; so he took time to think. When he had figured it out he told me how we were to do it; then we went and waited around the spoon basket until we saw Aunt Sally coming, and then Tom went to counting the spoons and laying them out to one side, and I slid one of them up my sleeve, and Tom said:

“Why, Aunt Sally, there are only nine spoons yet.”

She said:

“Go along to your play, and don’t bother me. I know better; I counted them myself.”

“Well, I’ve counted them twice, Aunty, and I can make only nine.”

She looked out of all patience, but of course she came to count—anybody would.

“I declare to gracious there are only nine!” she said. “Why, what in the world—plague take the things, I’ll count them again.”

So I slipped back the one I had, and when she finished counting, she said:

“Hang the troublesome rubbish, there are ten now!” and she looked huffy and bothered both. But Tom said:

“Why, Aunty, I don’t think there are ten.”

“You numskull, didn’t you see me count them?”

“I know, but—”

“Well, I’ll count them again.”

So I swiped one, and they came out nine, the same as the other time. Well, she was in a tearing way—just trembling all over, she was so mad. But she counted and counted until she got so addled that she would start to count in the basket for a spoon sometimes; and so, three times they came out right, and three times they came out wrong. Then she grabbed up the basket and slammed it across the house and knocked the cat galley-west; and she told us to clear out and let her have some peace, and if we came bothering around her again between that and dinner she would skin us. So we had the odd spoon, and dropped it in her apron pocket while she was giving us our sailing orders, and Jim got it all right, along with her shingle nail, before noon. We were very well satisfied with this business, and Tom declared it was worth twice the trouble it took, because he said now she couldn’t ever count those spoons twice alike again to save her life; and wouldn’t believe she had counted them right if she did; and said that after she had about counted her head off for the next three days, he judged she would give it up and offer to kill anybody who wanted her to ever count them anymore.

So we put the sheet back on the line that night, and stole one out of her closet; and kept on putting it back and stealing it again for a couple of days until she didn’t know how many sheets she had anymore, and she didn’t care, and wasn’t going to bullyrag the rest of her soul out about it, and wouldn’t count them again, not to save her life; she would rather die first.

So we were all right now, as to the shirt and the sheet and the spoon and the candles, by the help of the calf and the rats and the mixed-up counting; and as to the candlestick, it was of no consequence; it would blow over by and by.

But that pie was a job; we had no end of trouble with that pie. We fixed it up way down in the woods, and cooked it there; and we got it done at last, and very satisfactorily, too; but not all in one day; and we had to use up three washpans full of flour before we got through, and we got burned pretty much all over, in places, and had our eyes put out with the smoke; because, you see, we didn’t want anything but a crust, and we couldn’t prop it up right, and it would always cave in. But of course we thought of the right way at last—which was to cook the ladder, too, in the pie. So then we got to work with Jim the second night, and tore up the sheet all into little strings and twisted them together, and long before daylight we had a lovely rope that you could have hanged a person with. We let on it took nine months to make it.

And in the morning we took it down to the woods, but it wouldn’t go into the pie. Since it was made of a whole sheet, that way, there was rope enough for forty pies if we had wanted them, and plenty left over for soup, or sausage, or anything you choose. We could have had a whole dinner.

But we didn’t need it. All we needed was just enough for the pie, and so we threw the rest away. We didn’t cook any of the pies in the washpan—afraid the solder would melt; but Uncle Silas had a fine brass warming pan with a long wooden handle, which he thought a great deal of, because it had belonged to one of his ancestors, had come over from England with William the Conqueror in the Mayflower or one of those early ships, and had been hidden away up in the garret with a lot of other old pots and things that were valuable, not on account of being any account, because they weren’t, but on account of their being relics, you know, and we snaked her out, privately, and took her down there, but she failed on the first pies, because we didn’t know how, but she came up smiling on the last one. We lined her with dough, and set her in the coals, and loaded her up with rag rope, and put on a dough roof, and shut down the lid, and put hot embers on top, and stood off five feet, with the long handle, cool and comfortable, and in fifteen minutes she turned out a pie that was a satisfaction to look at. But the person who ate it would want to fetch a couple of kegs of toothpicks along, for if that rope ladder wouldn’t cramp him down to business, I don’t know what I’m talking about, and lay him in enough stomachache to last him until next time, too.

Nat didn’t look when we put the witch pie in Jim’s pan; and we put the three tin plates in the bottom of the pan under the victuals; and so Jim got everything all right, and as soon as he was by himself he busted into the pie and hid the rope ladder inside his straw tick, and scratched some marks on a tin plate and threw it out of the window hole.