The Boy in His Winter Read Online Free PDF

to me was Tom Sawyer! He climbed down the ladder onto the lower deck and, shortly, was making toward us in a skiff rowed by two rebel sailors. Jim was in a panic, for he could expect nothing but the whip and the shackle from representatives of Jeff Davis’s government. And I couldn’t be sure that Tom hadn’t become a dyed-in-the-wool Confederate since I had seen him last; he came from Missouri and had grown up surrounded by slaves who called him “young master.”
    “Play dead, Jim,” I said.
    Jim fell facedown onto the raft, where he gave a convincing portrayal of a man departed from this earth. I never did fathom how, in that desperate moment, he had managed to suppress the natural shiver that comes to a human being in fear for his life. I threw a blanket over his head and laid a piece of fatback on his naked back. It looked just like mutilated flesh, and to complete the illusion, I pried open the tin can where we kept putrefied chicken gizzards, a sovereignbait for catching catfish. As the skiff pulled alongside, Tom and his crew hesitated in the presence of so formidable a stink. I had my knife and appeared to be cutting a strip of meat from Jim, as though hunger had driven me to the extremity of cannibalism.
    “Hello, Huck,” said Tom, eyeing me with a look of profound disappointment at how low I had fallen. “Are you eating that n———?”
    “I am, Tom,” I said. “Hunger’s made me do it.” I cut off another strip of pinkish meat, put it in my mouth, and chewed noisily. Jim never moved a muscle.
    One of the sailors vomited over the side of the skiff. I was pleased to see that my theatrics were appreciated. (Wasn’t the raft a kind of stage on which we played parts assigned to us by someone else?)
    “Might that be Jim you’re dining on?” Tom asked.
    “It is,” I said. “He keeled over day before yesterday of starvation. His last words to me were to eat him before he spoiled.”
    “Smells like he’s gone off some,” said Tom, his finely shaped nose hunting the air as if for the departing atoms of his childhood, instead of the deceased slave he’d frequently bedeviled.
    “Hotter than usual for the time of year—don’t you think so, Tom?”
    He nodded in agreement, and I admired how well he had grown into a man. He had dash, and his looks had ripened into a dark handsomeness. At thirty-eight, he looked about as striking as a man can in a Confederate uniform.
    “Jim was a good n———,” he said. “Makes me glad to see him dead, else I’d have had to hang him for a runaway.”
    I thought for sure Jim would scream or make acommotion, but he didn’t—aware, doubtless, of the gravity of his situation.
    “Care for some?” I asked, indicating the place on Jim’s back I’d been carving.
    “No, thank you, Huck,” said Tom, with the nice manners of an officer and a gentleman.
    “How ’bout you boys? Care for some dead n———?” I was sure Jim would forgive me for using that hateful word in the name of verisimilitude.
    I am not one to curry favor, but for Jim’s sake, I smiled at the pair of Mississippians; for so I knew them to be from the timbre of their voices. They refused me. Fortunately, not one of the three men in gray showed any desire to take a look at Jim’s face hidden under the blanket.
    “You don’t look a day older, Huck,” said Tom, who bore his early middle age splendidly.
    “I’m still only thirteen,” I said.
    “How’s that?”
    “Don’t know,” I said.
    Our conversation was suddenly becalmed, but Tom seemed reluctant to go. He and I had been the best of friends, and maybe he thought we should speak fondly of the days of our common boyhood on the wharves and mudflats of Hannibal. But apparently he could find nothing more to say. As for me, I was nervously waiting for him and his oarsmen to be gone. Just then, a bell rang out merrily on the General Sumter.
    “Lunch is ready!” said Tom, suddenly discovering his appetite. “Row us back to the