Tom Sawyer on the joy of eating sawdust
Blazing Reader,
Last post, I talked about why the simple and easy way is often not the best metric for a happy and fulfilling life.
Mark Twain provided a great example of this through the character of Tom Sawyer in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (one of my all-time favourite novels). I just finished reading this to my son Jonah for the second time. In the story's final act, Tom and Huck have vowed to free Jim, a runaway slave who was recaptured by a preacher (who seems to believe enslaving black people is downright Christian).
Jim's locked up in an unguarded shed. Huck figures out how to get his hands on the key. It looks like it'll be downright easy to set him free under the cover of night.
But Tom has other ideas. First thing, he says they need a saw. And by that, he doesn't mean they need to find a saw. They need to make a saw.
“What do we want of a saw?” asks Huck.
“What do we want of it?" replies Tom. "Hain’t we got to saw the leg of Jim’s bed off, so as to get the chain loose?”
“Why, you just said a body could lift up the bedstead and slip the chain off.”
“Well, if that ain’t just like you, Huck Finn. You can get up the infant-schooliest ways of going at a thing. Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-maidy way as that? No; the way all the best authorities does is to saw the bed-leg in two, and leave it just so, and swallow the sawdust, so it can’t be found, and put some dirt and grease around the sawed place so the very keenest seneskal can’t see no sign of it’s being sawed, and thinks the bed-leg is perfectly sound. Then, the night you’re ready, fetch the leg a kick, down she goes; slip off your chain, and there you are."
So that's what they did. And eating that sawdust, well... Huck attests, "it give us a most amazing stomach-ache. We reckoned we was all going to die, but didn’t. It was the most undigestible sawdust I ever see; and Tom said the same."
But downing sawdust is just the beginning. Even though they can unlock the door, Tom has them dig a tunnel under the shed. And instead of shovels, they use knives. He also convinces Jim to write out a prisoner's diary on his shirt in his own blood. Then, to make his shed more like a "proper" prison, they introduce snakes, rats and spiders.
They even send an anonymous note to the plantation owner with the exact time of the attempted escape, so that armed men will try and stop them.
Tom ends up getting a well-deserved bullet to the leg, but he doesn't mind.
"Why, I wanted the adventure of it," he says, "and I’d a waded neck-deep in blood to—goodness alive..."
I admit, Tom's a bit crazy. Life has enough challenges, you don't have to go out creating them.
But I'd rather be crazy for a challenging adventure than crazy for comfort and ease.
That's essentially what I depict in Much Ado About Corona. Stefanie Müller was very much a Tom Sawyer character. If it wasn't for her, Vincent and the gang would have just gone along with the COVID mandates, ending up much the way Colin McAdam puts it in his essay from Canary in a Covid World:
"Here we sit, behind our masks and laptops, locked in the cages of our bandwidth and Zoom meetings, Amazon packages giving us comfort all around. Neither citizens nor soldier but customers."
That sure sounds like the makings of a boring novel.
Instead, Stefanie inspires Vincent, Matéo, AJ and Raj to oppose the stay-at-home orders and become heroes. But instead of fleeing COVID slavery on a raft on the Missisippi, they take to the Wingekisinaw River on ice skates in one of the most celebrated scenes from this truly Canadian novel. And before they know it, they're being shot at just like Tom, Huck and Jim.
So, if you haven't yet read my "unsafe and adventurous" novel yet, you can order copies for yourself, and all your sawdust-eating family and friends (Christmas is coming, remember) at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.com.
— John C. A. Manley
PS “I enjoyed Much Ado About Corona immensely," said Retired Constable Leland “Lee” Keane of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "The police interaction was bang on and the subtleties are not so subtle and portray an authentic realism to me."
PPS By the way, I'll be at the Do No Harm Symposium in Hamilton, Ontario this Saturday. Here's the event flyer.
John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/
