Huck Out West(10)
It had growed ever so still. In the silence, the revolver click was like a mountain cracking. There warn’t nobody breathing. Maybe they was counting. It was like that moment of the three drum beats up in Minnysota just before the floor of the platform dropped away. Probably less’n a minute went by, though it seemed like a century before Deadwood finally reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the rock. A soldier pried it out of his gnarly fist and handled it up to the general. The general holstered his revolver, hefted the rock to judge its weight, and showed it to his officers. They nodded and the general dropped it into a leather pouch hanging from his saddle.
“That’s MY rock!” Deadwood yelped. “I found it! I own it!”
“You own nothing,” the general says softly. Everywheres there was the smell of cinnamon. “Not even your poor sad arse.” The old prospector stared up at him defiantly and the general, still smiling his sorrowful smile, stared back, until Deadwood, cussing to himself, turned and stamped away. One of the troopers shot his hat off, and they all brayed like mules. He’d at last took my advice—or had my advice took for him—and had passed the bad luck on, but he hadn’t got shut of all of it. There was worst to come.
The general was right to want to hang me. When you done something as wrong as I done, you can’t expect no better. A body who hires himself out to generals has a bounden duty to do what he’s asked, even when it ain’t his druthers. Dan Harper, that young soldier I met on the wagon trail, learned me that, though I most likely already knowed it. The general had trusted me and I let him down. I won’t say it was the shamefullest mistake I ever made, I made so many there ain’t no smart way to rank them, but it’s clean at the top for the troublesomest. When I done it, I set myself up for everlasting ducking and running, and what was worst, it was probably a mistake I couldn’t stop making over and over. Can’t you never learn nothing, Huck? Tom would say. The years rolling past just seemed to pile on more stupidness.
When I turned my back on Tom and history all them years ago, I seen the Minnysota River a-front of me, and it called me down to walk it a stretch like rivers do. It still warn’t yet noon and, soon as the hangings was over, I was aiming to saddle up and light out whilst there was still daylight, but Tom was having a high time and I misdoubted he’d want to leave till he’d lined out a few more adventures.
I felt comfortabler down by the shore. A river don’t make you feel less lonely but it makes you feel there ain’t nothing wrong with being lonely. The Minnysota was a quiet little wash, near shallow enough to walk across without getting your knees wet, but a flat-bottom steamboat run on it, and it was setting out there then with a passel of whooping gawkers on it, watching the hangings through spyglasses. It had started freezing up at the shore, and soon walking across it would be all a body COULD do.
Past the steamboat landing, the shore was low and woodsy like a lot of the islands in the Big River back home, and it got me to thinking about other ways a body might blunder through life. By piloting a riverboat for a sample. That would be ever so splendid, and just thinking on it lifted some my sunk spirits. But probably I warn’t smart enough. Well, I could do the loading. Folks running away from the war was saying the whole river back home was on fire and the bullets was flying like mosquitoes in August, but in this nation a body can get shot anywheres, and getting shot on the river beats getting shot in the desert every time.
The day warn’t hardly more’n begun when I got back to the church, but it was already growing dark and puckering up like it might snow some more. The preacher warn’t around. Maybe he was hiding somewheres from all the right-minded townsfolk. I found a morsel of bread on his pine table and, though it was at least a week old and worse even than the hardtack we got fed at the army forts, I borrowed it and went and stretched out on a pew under a heap of blankets to gnaw on it.
The next thing I knowed, Tom was setting there talking to me. I judged it was Tom. He seemed more like a spirit, appearing so sudden like that and in such a place. He had a candle, and the light from it made his face come and go. “What I wanted to tell you, Huck, is that there is two kinds of injuns,” Tom says, if it was Tom. “There’s the ones who slaughter white folks and roast them for supper, and there’s the ones they call friendlies who ain’t cannibals. The friendlies respect the white man and try to act just like him, which is why some of them keep slaves and eat with forks, and lots of them is even Christians.” I believed Tom like I always done, but I didn’t believe him. I was glad he come back, but I didn’t know why he’d waked me up to tell me that. Then I seen the others. Becky Thatcher. The preacher. Tom’s horse. “Huck, I’m gonna leave you for a time,” Tom says.
It turned out him and Becky was getting hitched by the preacher, and me and the horse was the witnesses. Tom was giving the horse to the preacher as pay for marrying them, and him and Becky was taking the steamboat upriver the next day on its final journey of the year to connect up with the big riverboats headed down towards St. Petersburg. “You can come and see us off,” he says.
The news shook me up considerable, but I done my best not to show it. Neither me nor the horse didn’t say nothing, though the horse wagged his head about like he was looking for the way out. Well, he’d never been to church before and he didn’t know how to act proper. It sure warn’t the place to be dropping what he was dropping, but he didn’t know that. Becky had bought some beer with her pappy’s money to celebrate the wedding with and after the preacher had went and took the horse with him, the three of us set there in the church and drunk it. She’d also found some doughnuts and jelly somewheres to go with it. The hotel was jam full, Becky said, but a gentleman give up his room for them. She was staring at Tom like he was the most amazing thing she ever seen.