Wrestling with Tom Sawyer

by L. L. Samson

  Perhaps you have a relation who thinks he or she can play the violin so well and then volunteers to provide special music in front of the church at least once a month—even though it sounds like fighting cats when he or she plays. If so, you know what I mean.

  They delivered Kyle to his room at The Pierce School so his caretaker, a pleasant young woman named Nan, could ready him for bed. Only an hour remained until 11:11.

  As Ophelia relaxed on the floor in the middle of the enchanted circle, Walter dropped for a set of push-ups, and Linus settled himself on the sofa.

  “So we’re all agreed then.” Ophelia crossed her hands over her stomach. “Tom Sawyer this time.”

  Walter stood. “Let’s see how we handle a kid like him. After Captain Ahab and the Countess de Winter, a boy should be easy.”

  Obviously, Walter had never read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  Ophelia winced at his words. Was Walter ever in for a surprise.

  four

  Some Quandaries Are Merely Huge Problems in Disguise

  or Ophelia Doesn’t Necessarily Think of Everything

  Ophelia discovered the secret of the enchanted circle quite by accident. While innocently reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame in the attic one evening, her eyelids decided a brief vacation was necessary. The comfortable blue couch with the gold fringe must have conspired with her eyelids because Ophelia fell asleep. And then the novel slipped from her fingertips and landed just inside the circle.

  That happened three 11:11s ago, and the thrill of that first time they’d watched the circle pulsate through the light spectrum, like it was doing presently, never dwindled (lessened). Of course, they all knew what to expect by now. But watching the brilliant green turn into a host of blues, then purples and violets, and pinks and reds and oranges and yellows (imagine autumn leaves in all of their glorious hues glowing and winking) exhilarated them anew.

  Upon completing the rainbow, the circle emanated the purest of white lights. (Nothing akin to those anemic (weak) new Christmas lights that people have taken to using in the past few years. Oh, the horrors of those eerie things. And at Christmas too!) The most exciting part arrived next: great fountains of sparks sprayed toward the ceiling as if nozzles were pushed through the floorboards.

  “It never gets old,” Ophelia whispered to the boys.

  “Never,” said Linus, his light blue eyes reflecting the scene before him.

  “And it always amazes me that it doesn’t incinerate (burn) the attic,” said Walter.

  They laughed as the sparks ceased, leaving a cloud of smoke behind that gathered itself in a twist and then disappeared with a snap. If you’ve ever snapped a towel, you’d recognize the sound.

  But the most fantastic part of the event happened inside the circle. Curled up dead center rested one of the cutest little boys (don’t let his looks fool you) that Ophelia had ever seen. Tom Sawyer, with mud on his clothes and a soft snore on his pink lips, looked as if he had been asleep for days.

  “Asleep? Already?” asked Walter, disappointed.

  Ophelia knelt down next to Tom. “I figured with his still being a child, we didn’t want to scar him with the journey between Book World and Real World. So we fetched him while he was asleep.” She lowered her voice. “Actually, I tried something new this time.” She leaned over and grabbed the book. Flipping to the last page, she handed the book to Walter. “I’m surprised it worked, to be honest.”

  The boys examined the page. Just before THE END, Ophelia had written in black ink, AND TOM SAWYER, AFTER A DAY SPENT PLAYING IN THE WOODS, FELL ASLEEP.

  Walter chuckled. “Brilliant, O. J.! But why?”

  Ophelia liked that Walter had taken to calling her by her initials. “There’s a life-and-death situation he needs to take care of.”

  “His?” asked Linus.

  “No. Injun Joe’s.”

  Linus mouthed the words Injun Joe, then said, “Seriously?”

  “Engine Joe?” said Walter. “Who is Engine Joe?”

  “Injun. Like Indian, Walt,” said Ophelia. “They didn’t exactly use the terms ‘Native American’ or ‘First Nation’ back then.”

  “First Nation?” asked Walter. Clearly he hadn’t grasped North American culture as well as he fancied.

  Here, my dears, is a quandary that the modern-day reader might experience when reading literature written long ago. Sometimes the society in which the author lived, or the one in which he or she is writing about, is different from our own. A reader must sometimes simply decide to read on, knowing that at least what they’re reading about is authentic. What is considered acceptable by society changes. Someday, a perfectly reasonable first name of a friend, say Brian, might end up being a name for only heaven knows what. But the classics survive for a reason, and the reason varies from book to book.

  And (to please your parents) just because someone behaves in a certain manner in a book (even in the Bible or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) that does not give you permission to act in the same manner. Ask King David. Ask Edmund.

  Onward!

  “What’s the deal with this Joe bloke?” asked Walter.

  “He died of dehydration and starvation in a cave system.” Ophelia stood and stretched her back. “Joe isn’t a good person, but nobody should die like that, you know? But Tom needs to know about Joe’s death so the need for change becomes important to him.”

  “Right, then,” said Walter, stretching his arms and yawning. “If you’re going to let the lad sleep, I’m going for a run before bed.”

  Walter had signed up for the Kingscross 10K. All of the monies raised were slated for the Bard River Camp for Kids.

  “I’ll keep watch,” said Ophelia.

  “Me too,” said Linus.

  And Tom Sawyer, his head now pillowed and covered by a quilt, slept on.

  And on, and on.

  “Thank goodness it’s Saturday,” said Ophelia the next morning.

  The twins had slept as they always did. Ophelia, on the sofa, snoozed like Rip Van Winkle. Linus, on the other hand, was in a sleeping bag on the floor. He’d woken up at least ten times during the night, after having strange dreams of breathing under water in a submerged shopping mall, or trying to run in a field where the grass was as sharp as swords.

  Genius has its trials, I suppose. Perhaps sleeping on planks that had not been scrubbed in decades had something to do with it. Who knows what germs and filth people dragged in on their shoes … what slime, what sickness, what …

  Moving right along!

  Already dressed for the day, the siblings happily rid themselves of their school uniforms for an entire weekend. How did they come to be students at a private school when they had no money? Madrigal Pierce, in gratitude for their catching her no-good pyromaniac brother, had offered them a tuition-free education. (She’d heard about their parents, too, and figured how much could two more students really cost?)

  “Why isn’t he awake yet?” Ophelia checked her watch. It was 7:45 A.M. “I thought kids got up earlier than this.”

  “They do.” Linus knelt down beside Tom just as Walter entered the attic wearing black athletic shorts, a yellow T-shirt that said “Stop Looking at My Shirt,” and, as Walter would call them, trainers. (You’d call them running shoes.)

  “Still asleep?” Walter asked, wiping the sweat from his face with the hem of his T-shirt. “That’s odd.”

  Ophelia sat on the couch admiring the heightened color of Walter’s complexion, the way his hair curled next to his temples with perspiration. (Ugh!) “Maybe because there’s nothing else written in the book, he’ll just stay asleep,” she posited (put forth a possible explanation).

  “Then let’s wake him up!” said Walter, pointing to Linus’s glass of water sitting on the lab table. Linus nodded.

  “But what if that damages him? What if it makes him fizz away like the Wicked Witch of the West?” she asked.

  The thought horrified all three of them. You see, the circle possesses a downs
ide. The traveler must get back inside the circle by 11:11 A.M. on the third day after he or she enters Real World, exactly sixty hours after arrival, in order to make the return trip to Book World. If they don’t, well you’ve just read the terrible consequences straight from the lips of Ophelia. In his detailed notes, Cato Grubbs dubbed it, “dissolving in the acids between the worlds.”

  Cato also coined the terms Book World and Real World, by the way. Could he not have spent a little more time and employed a bit more imagination? Perhaps Literaria and Presentia, or Fictivus and Modernia would have been somewhat intriguing. Of course, he didn’t ask for my help. No one ever does.

  “You have to try and think about all of the possibilities ahead of time when you conduct an experiment,” said Linus, revealing yet another reason for his sleepless nights.

  Ophelia screwed up her face. “Thanks, Linus. That’s just what I needed right now.”

  “Well, we can’t very well just leave him asleep,” said Walter, setting down the glass he’d just drained. “He can’t go for sixty hours without water. And if we try to give him some, it would wake him up. So our only choice is to—”

  “Wake him up,” they all said together.

  “Let me.” Ophelia joined Linus down on the floor by Tom’s side. He really is a cute little boy, she thought, touching his tousled hair and cherubic (angelic) face. But in this case, she knew looks could be deceiving, as the old saying goes.

  She placed her hand on Tom’s shoulder and shook it, just barely.

  Not a movement, not a peep.

  A little harder this time.

  Nope.

  She turned to her brother. “Oh no! What if I can’t wake him at all?”

  Walter decided enough was enough. They could postulate (make guesses) the morning away if somebody didn’t do something. He clapped his hands next to the boy’s head, shouting, “Oy! Oy, mate!”

  Ophelia winced. Linus jolted with a start, and Tom Sawyer opened his eyes.

  five

  A Reaction Like No Other Requires an Opposite and Equal Reaction Much the Same

  or Why “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie” Is Good Advice … for the Most Part

  The boy jumped to his feet without hesitation. Walter followed suit.

  Tom balled his small hands into fists and took a wild shot, aiming for Walter’s nose. But the wily (tricky) Brit easily deflected the blow, hooking Tom’s wrist with his hand in one movement. In a split second he’d spun the boy around and locked him smoothly in a choke hold.

  Thank you, Mr. Yang! he thought.

  Ophelia shrieked. “Walter! You’re hurting him!”

  “Nah. He can still breathe. Can’t you, Tom?”

  “Why you! I’ll git you!” Tom started wriggling like a toddler who wants to be put down.

  “See?” said Walter in a calm voice. “Now Tom, I’m bigger than you, stronger than you, and most likely a better fighter than you. If I let you go, do you promise not to punch me again?”

  Tom paused a second, then nodded his head as best he could given Walter’s forearm under his chin.

  Walter let go. Tom stepped forward, and then he wheeled around and punched with more speed than accuracy. But not enough of either, for Walter had him back in a choke hold even quicker than the first time.

  Real-life application, he thought. Brilliant! Thank you again, Mr. Yang. And he hadn’t so much as hurt a hair on Tom’s head.

  Walter and Tom repeated this little dance again and again until by the fifth time, Walter finally took Tom down to the ground.

  Ophelia, feeling as irritated as a blistered heel stuffed inside a brand-new shoe, stomped her foot. “Enough!” she cried. Then she leaned over Tom and shook her finger in his face. “Look here, young man. Get a clue. If he lets you go, it means he isn’t going to hurt you. What part of this don’t you understand?”

  Tom’s eyes grew wide and he nodded, swallowing his anger.

  “Let him go, Walt,” she said.

  Walter eased up slowly and Tom stayed put. He reached out a hand and helped the boy to his feet.

  “Good,” Ophelia said. “That’s Walter. I’m Ophelia. And the tall guy there is my brother Linus.”

  Tom looked around him, taking note of his surroundings for the first time since he’d woken up. Confusion passed across his eyes like storm clouds in a stiff wind. “Where am I? This ain’t like any place I ever seen.”

  Ophelia winced at his horrendous grammar. (And who can blame her?)

  Surely I can do something about that in the next two days, she thought.

  Linus read her mind.

  Poor Tom.

  “I have ever seen,” Ophelia corrected.

  “You ever seen what?” asked Tom, bewildered.

  “And it’s not ain’t. It’s isn’t,” Ophelia said slowly, annunciating each syllable.

  “What ain’t what?” asked Tom. “Are you crazy?”

  Linus stifled a bark of laughter with his hand.

  She sighed and tried again. “It’s not ‘I ever seen,’ Tom. It’s ‘I have ever seen.’ Your grammar is atrocious!” (Even worse than horrendous.)

  Oh great, thought Linus. Ophelia is going to be even bossier than usual.

  Walter was thinking the same thing. When the other fictional characters had traveled through the enchanted circle, they’d always learned something in the process—something important, like matters of love and honor, life and death. But if Ophelia, cute as she may be, had brought Tom over to Real World to teach him better grammar, then the next couple of days promised to be a real snooze.

  “You a teacher?” Tom crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  “Are you a student?” Ophelia answered him with a question, a sure sign of a teacher if ever there was one.

  “When Aunt Polly makes me.”

  “Well, you have to be one now, Tom. Because in the next two days, you have an awful lot to learn.”

  “Like what?” He jutted out his chin.

  And Linus believed he would have no trouble liking this kid!

  “Like how you woke up here in the first place. Let’s get you cleaned up so we can eat.”

  Tom pressed a hand to his stomach. “I am powerful hungry.”

  “Then follow me.”

  Ophelia led him out of the room.

  Walter threw himself on the couch. “This adventure isn’t going to be an adventure after all, mate. More like a nanny job for Ophelia.”

  “Yep.” Linus sat at his lab table.

  “Still trying to bring items over from Book World?” Walter asked.

  “Yep. And they keep disappearing after a while.”

  The previous month, Linus had summoned “the one ring to rule them all” through the portal (from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy). Unfortunately, an item can only be brought through once, no matter how many copies of the book exist. In essence, Linus managed to materialize an object so priceless to so many people who wish Middle Earth were real (and some who might actually believe it to be so) only to have it disappear for all eternity! I certainly wouldn’t want that on my conscience!

  Thank goodness Ophelia helped him choose less precious items for further experimentation: the crumbled wedding cake of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (inedible, of course), the wedding cake from Sense and Sensibility (not bad), and the pudding from A Christmas Carol. Feeling a little homesick that day, Walter had suggested it. It was delicious.

  “What do you think the problem is, mate?” Walter asked. He was more like Ophelia in the brain department. He loved to read. However, subjects like science, especially chemistry, felt like a foreign language to him. But he knew how important it is for people to talk things out. Solutions come more easily that way.

  “I don’t know. The outside temperature? Knowing Cato, it probably has to be either eleven degrees Celsius or Farenheit.”

  “Or both.”

  “Yeah …”

  Walter looked outside at the perfect September day. It was seventy-five degrees, t
he sky displaying a deeper, cleaner blue that only an autumn day can rally. “It could be a while.”

  “Yeah. But in the meantime, we can eat well.”

  “I’d fancy some of that chowder from Moby-Dick,” said Walter. “The only problem is that even if you stuff yourself full, fifteen minutes later you’re hungry again.”

  Linus laughed. “Disappearing food.”

  “The new diet fad. We could make a fortune,” Walter said. It trumped (beat) picking pockets.

  Once again, the flushing toilet was quite the cause for fascination. Tom, like Quasimodo, Captain Ahab, and the Countess de Winter, couldn’t get enough of it. Ophelia tried not to think of the ecological disaster they might be causing.

  “Look at this, Tom.” She ran her hand under the spigot filling the tub with water. “It’s warm!”

  Tom sucked in his breath. “And it’s coming out of the wall!”

  “Pretty cool, huh?”

  He put his hand under the stream. “No, it’s warm.”

  Ophelia laughed. “Good one. Now I’m going to find you some clean clothes while you take a bath.” She turned off the water. “You get on in.”

  Tom took the soap she offered. “Aww, all right, I reckon. But only ‘cause I’m powerful hungry.”

  Her hand paused on the doorknob. “And don’t worry about washing your hair.”

  Walter and Linus would have applauded her decision not to make Tom’s transition more difficult than need be; I, on the other hand, wonder if she’s lost her mind.

  six

  More Missing Books and a Surprisingly Good Speller

  or If It Isn’t Where You Put It, Chances Are Somebody Else Did Something with It Because It Could Never Be Your Own Fault, Now Could It?

  Ophelia set a plate of fried ham, scrambled eggs, and wheat toast in front of a thoroughly scrubbed Tom Sawyer. He’d found the shampoo and washed his hair by accident. And a can of shaving cream ended up all over his body—and the bathroom as well. Linus was out purchasing a new can as Ophelia made breakfast, hoping Uncle Augustus would be none the wiser.