Chapter 32
CHAPTER XXXII. When I got there, it was all still and Sunday-like and hot and sunshiny. The hands was gone to the fields, and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody's dead and gone. And if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because
you feel like it's spirits whispering, spirits that's been dead ever so many years, and you always think they're talking about you. As a general thing, it makes somebody wish he was dead too, but done with it all. Phelps's was one of those little one-horse-cotton plantations, and they all looked alike. A rail fence round a two-acre yard, style made out of logs, sawed off and upended in
steps, like barrels of a different length, to climb over the fence with and for the women to stand on when they're going to jump on to a horse. There were some sickly grass patches in the big yard, but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old hat with a nap rubbed off. Big double log house for the white folks, huge logs with a chink stopped up with mud
or mortar, and these mud stripes been whitewashed some time or another. Round log kitchen, the big, broad, open but roof passage joining it to the house. Three log smokehouse back of the kitchen, three little log nigger cabins in a row to other side of the smokehouse, one little hut all by itself away down against the back fence, and some outbuildings down a piece the other side.
Ash hopper and big kettle to vial soap in by the little hut, bench by the kitchen door, the bucket of water and gourd, hound asleep there in the sun, more hounds asleep round about. About three shade trees away off in a corner, some currant bushes and gooseberry bushes in one place by the fence, outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch, then
the cotton fields begins, and after the fields the woods. I went around and climbed over the back stile by the ash hopper and started for the kitchen. When it got a little ways I heard the dim hum of a spinning wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again, and then I know for certain I wished I was dead, for that is the lonesomest sound in the whole world.
I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come, for I'd noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth if I left it alone. When I got half way, first one hound and then another got up and went for me, and of course I stopped and faced them and kept still, and such another pow wow as they made.
In a quarter of a minute I was a kind of a hub of a wheel as you may say, spokes made out of dogs, circle of fifteen of them packed together around me, their necks and noses stretched up towards me, a bark in and a howling and more a coming, and you could see them sailing over fences and around corners from everywhere. A nigger woman came tearing out of the kitchen with a rolling pin in her hand singing out
begone you teague yee spa begone sa, and she fetched first one and then another of them a clip and sent them howling, then the rest followed. The next second half of them came back wagging their tails around me and making friends with me, there ain't no harm in a how no how, and behind the woman comes a little nigger girl and two little nigger boys without anything on but toe lin and shirts, they hung on to
their mothers gown and peeped out from behind her at me bashful the way they always do, and here comes a white woman running from the house about forty five or fifty year old, bare headed and her spinning stick in her hand and behind her comes little white children acting the same way the little niggers was doing, she was smiling all over so she could hardly stand and she says, it is you at last ain't it, I out with a yesum before I thought,
she grabbed me and hugged me tight and then gripped me by both hands and shook and shook and the tears came in her eyes and run down over, she couldn't seem to hug and shake enough and kept saying, you don't look as much like your mother as I reckoned you would, but law sakes I don't care for that, I'm so glad to see you, dear dear it does look like I could eat you up, children it's your cousin Tom, tell him howdy, but they ducked
their heads and put their fingers in their mouths and hid behind her, so she ran on, Lise hurry up and get him a hot breakfast right away or did you get your breakfast on the boat, I said I had got it on the boat so then she started for the house leading me by the hand and the children tagging after, when we got there she sat me down in a split bottom chair and set herself down on a little low stool in front of me holding both of my
hands and says, now I can have a good look at you and laws of me, I've been hungry for it many and many a time, all these long years and it's come at last, we've been expecting you a couple days or more, what kept you, boat get aground, yesum she, don't say yesum, say aunt Sally, where did she get aground, I didn't rightly know what to say because I didn't know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down, but I do a good deal
on instinct and my instinct said she would be coming up from down towards Orleans, that didn't help me much though for I didn't know the names of bars down that way, I see I got to invent a bar or forget the name of the one we got aground on or now I struck an idea and fetched it out, it weren't the grounding, that didn't keep us back but a little, we blew it out of cylinder head, good gracious anybody hurt, no mum, killed a nigger,
well it's lucky because sometimes people do get hurt, two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from New Orleans on the old lally rook and she blew it out cylinder head and crippled a man, I think he died afterwards, he was a Baptist, your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well, yes I remember now he did die, mortification set in and they had to imputate him but it didn't save him, yes it was mortification
that was it, he turned blue all over and died in the hope for glorious resurrection, they say he was a sight to look at, your uncle's been up to the town every day to fetch you and he's gone again, no more than an hour ago, he'll be back in a minute now, you must have met him on the road didn't you, oldish man with a, no I didn't see nobody on Sallie, the boat landed just at daylight and I left my baggage on the wharf and went looking around the town and out of peace in the country to put in the
time and not get here too soon and so I come down the back way, who'd you give your baggage to, nobody, why child it'll be stolen, not where I headed I reckon it won't, I says, how'd you get your breakfast so early on the boat, it was kind of thin ice but I says, the captain see me standing around and told me I better have something to eat before I went ashore, so it took me in the Texas to the officer's lunch, give me all I wanted, I was getting so easy I couldn't listen good,
I had my mind on the children all the time, I wanted to get them out to one side and pump them a little and find out who I was, but I couldn't get no show, Mrs Phelps kept it up and went on so, pretty soon she made the cold chills streak all down my back because she says, but here I was running on this way and you ain't told me a word about sis nor any of them, now I'll rest my works a little and you start up yarn, just tell me everything, tell me all about
them all, every one of them, how they are and what they're doing and what they told you to tell me and every last thing you can think of, well I see I was up a stump and up it good, Providence had stood by me this for all right, but I was hard and tight to ground now, I see it weren't a bit of use to try to go ahead, I got to throw up my hand, so I says to myself, here's another place where I got to risk the truth, I open my mouth to begin, but you grab me and
haul me in behind the bed and says, here he comes, stick your head down lower, there that'll do, you can't be seen now, don't you let on your hair, I'll play a joke on him, children don't say a word, I see I was in a fix now, but it weren't no use to worry, there weren't nothing to do, just hold still and try and be ready to stand from under when the lightning struck, I had just one little glimpse of the old gentleman when he come in then the bed hit him, Mrs Phelps she jumps for him and says,
has he come? No says her husband, goodness gracious she says, what in the world can't have become of him, I can't imagine says the old gentleman and I must say it makes me dreadful uneasy, uneasy she says, I'm ready to go distracted, he must have come and he's missed him along the road, I know it's so, something tells me so, why Sally I couldn't have missed him along the road, you know that, but oh dear dear what will sis say, he must have come, you must have missed him, he,
oh don't distress me anymore and I'm already distressed, I don't know what in the world to make of it, I'm at my wit's end and I don't mind acknowledging, time I write down scared, but there's no hope that he's come, for he couldn't come and we miss him, Sally it's terrible, just terrible, something's happened to the boat shore, why sadless look yonder up the road, ain't that somebody coming, he sprung to the window at the head of the bed and that gave Mrs
Phelps the chance she wanted, she stooped down quick at the foot of the bed, give me a pull and out I come and when he turned back from the window there she stood beaming and smiling like a house of fire and I standing pretty meek and sweaty along the side, the old gentleman stares and says, why who's that, who do you reckon sis, I ain't no idea who is it, it's Tom Sawyer, by jigs I most slumped through the floor, but there weren't no time to swap knives, the old man grabbed me by
one hand and shook and kept on shaking and all the time how the women did dance around and laugh and cry and then how they both did fire off questions about Sid and Mary and the rest of the tribe, but if they was joyful it weren't nothing to what I was for it was like being born again, I was so glad to find out who I was, well they froze to me for two hours and at last when my children were so tired they couldn't hardly go anymore, I had told them more about my family,
I mean the Sawyer family, than ever happened to any sick Sawyer families and I explained all about how we blowed out a cylinder head, the mouth of Wipe River and it took us three days to fix it, which was all right and worked first rate because they didn't know what it would take three days to fix it, if I'd called it a bolt head it would have done just as well, now it's feeling pretty comfortable all down one side and pretty uncomfortable all up the other, being Tom Sawyer was easy and
comfortable and it stayed easy and comfortable till by and by I hear a steamboat coughing along down the river, then I says to myself suppose Tom Sawyer comes down on that boat and suppose he steps in here any minute and sings out my name before I can throw him a wink to keep quiet, well I couldn't have it that way it wouldn't do it all, I must go up the road and away lay him, so I told the folks I reckon I would go up to the town and fetch down my baggage,
the old gentleman was for going along with me but I said no, I could drive the horse myself and I'd rather he wouldn't take no trouble about me.
