Tom Sawyer and the Whitewashed Fence

Saturday morning arrived, and all the summer world was bright and fresh and brimming with life. If you had stood on the edge of the little town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, on that particular morning, you would have felt a song in your heart. And if your heart was young, the music would have spilled right out of your lips. The hills beyond the town were green and inviting, capped with thick forests that seemed to whisper of secrets, caves, and hidden treasures. The great Mississippi River, nearly a mile wide at this point, rolled its lazy, muddy water southward, shimmering like a sheet of silver under the brilliant sun. It was a day for freedom. It was a day for kicking off your shoes, running down to the sandbar, and forgetting that there was ever such a thing as school or chores or shoes or Sunday clothes. But as Tom Sawyer stepped out of his house and onto the dusty sidewalk, the song in his heart died a sudden, painful death. The brightness of the morning seemed to vanish, replaced by a heavy gray cloud of despair. In his right hand, Tom carried a long-handled brush. In his left, he dragged a large wooden bucket filled to the brim with white watery paint. Or, as the folks in this part of the United States called it, whitewash. Tom stopped and looked at the task before him. He did not merely look. He stared with a hollow, aching heart. Aunt Polly's front fence was not just any fence. It was an absolute monster of a fence. It stood nine feet high, constructed of thick, rough-hewn wooden boards, and it stretched along the dusty road for 30 yards. 30 yards! That was 90 feet of raw, unpainted wood waiting to be covered. Tom dipped his brush into the white mixture, lifted it, and passed it along the top plank of the nearest board. He looked at the wet white streak he had made. It was about the size of a postage stamp compared to the vast, dry continent of wood that remained. He sat down on a tree box, let his chin sink into his chest, and groaned. This story, which has been told and retold in dozens of ways since it was first written down by the great American writer Mark Twain in the late 19th century, is a tale of a boy, a brush, and a very long fence. But more than that, it is a story about the strange and wonderful way our minds work. It is a story from the heart of the United States, a place of wide rivers and big dreams. And it captures something true about every human being who has ever lived, no matter where they call home. On this glorious Saturday, Tom was a prisoner of his own mischief. The day before, he had skipped school to go swimming in the river, and he had very nearly gotten away with it. But his half-brother, Sid, a quiet, goody-goody boy who took great pleasure in getting Tom into trouble, had pointed out that the black thread Aunt Polly had used to sew Tom's collar shut had miraculously turned into white thread. Tom had re-sewn it himself after swimming, but he had used the wrong color. Aunt Polly, a stern but deeply loving woman who felt it was her Christian duty to discipline her orphaned nephew, had seen the trick. She had declared that while other boys were enjoying their holiday, Tom would spend his Saturday working. "I'll bend him," Aunt Polly had said to herself, "or I'll break him. It's a terrible thing to make a boy work on a Saturday, but he's got to learn." And so, here Tom stood. The world was full of joy, but he was condemned to hard labor. Just then, the small gate at the side of the house creaked open, and Jim, the young boy who helped Aunt Polly with the heavy chores around the house, came skipping out. Jim was carrying a tin pail, and he was singing a lively tune. He was heading to the town pump, which was a few blocks away, to…

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