Huck Out West(13)

“You’d better rein in your cousin,” the chief says coldly, fingering the little gold cross hanging round his neck.

“That won’t be easy,” I says. “He suffered a dreadful head wound at Vicksburg a-near where our families’ plantations is, and he’s been crazy like that ever since. You can see how he was half blinded by it. I hope, sir, you can forgive him his trespasses.”

“I can, but her father probably cannot.”

He couldn’t. He clove Ben’s head in with a tomahawk. They brung the body, throwed it over his horse, and chased us out of there with war whoops and horsewhips and gun shots.

So I rode out in the desert and dug a hole for Ben’s remainders and told the hole I’d let everybody back home know about the Missouri Kid. If I ever got there. Then I rolled him into it and kicked some dirt in to cover him up and went back to killing buffalos and guarding wagon trains. My bandit days was over.





CHAPTER VI


OOKIE TOLD ME about the bad man whilst we was taking a bath. Baths warn’t something I was partial to, but she done things with her spidery fingers that made them more favorable. It was like sometimes she had an extra pair of hands. Maybe she used her strange unregular feet with the wiry little toes. She could do most anything with them, including licking them like a cat or lacing them behind her neck. But they warn’t so good for walking. I done more baths with Nookie than all the rest a my life piled together. I knowed they could do a body harm, so I been cautious to mostly stay away from them, but I ain’t sorry for the ones I had with Nookie.

Her painted tin tub was just big enough to stand or set in, with a little ledge on one side. I never seen nothing like it before, generly using rivers and rain to get wet in. Nookie would squat at the edge with me raired up on my knees in the tub and sponge my backside with a soft squshy soap she made herself, and then she would crawl in at my feet when it was the other parts’ turn. She made a whiny sound whilst she done it, which was maybe Chinese singing. She says she was muddytating. The tub was made for one body to set in, but we was so skinny there was room for both of us, so when she poured warm water over me to wash off the stink of the soap, she got in, too.

Then it was Nookie’s turn. Helping Nookie soap herself was one a the comfortablest things I ever done. The Widow Douglas always used to learn me that it was better to give than to receive. You couldn’t credit nothing the widow said, but it was maybe true about baths. Of course, there warn’t much of Nookie to wash, we was both slathering up skin stretched tight like wet wrapping paper around bones, and hers was most like bird bones. If she’d been bigger, maybe it’d seemed less agreeable. “You rike my bluzzer, Hookie,” she says, looking sorrowful at me. “He skinny, too.”

When Nookie called me Hookie, it sounded like cookie, both our names did the way she said them. She says it was the bad man who named her. She told him her real name, but he couldn’t never learn it. He told her Nookie was what her name meant in English or some other language. “He say, I am Rooskie, you are Nookie. Is only time I hear he laugh. Zen he hit me. Har-r-r. Like he mad bout sumssing.” She says Nookie was sort of like her real name, but when she told me the real one, it warn’t nothing like. It was more like a bee in her nose. I couldn’t learn it neither.

She says her brother was “a Chinaman coo-leee,” which seemed mostly a way to die before you catched old age. She says all the men in their village come to America on the same ship they did. Things in China was “so-o-o ba-a-a,” she says. “Many trub-oh.” Women was s’posed to stay back to take care of the old people, but their mam and pap was killed in the troubles, and her brother didn’t want that to happen to her, so he brung her over with him. Girls warn’t allowed on the ship, so she had to pretend she was his little brother, though she was older’n him, and she worked alongside of him in the mines and on the railroad till they found her out, and since she warn’t legal, they done with her whatever they wanted to.

She says when her brother asked for water one day and got hanged as a troublemaker, the rail boss took her away and misused her every which way he could think of, then handled her over to the bad man who was working for him. The bad man horsewhipped her naked just for fun till she thought she was going to die, but he didn’t have nobody else to beat on so he kept her alive in a box in his lean-to and fed her potatoes and berries. She says he warn’t American, but wanted to be, so he joined the army to become one. Also it suited him. He liked shooting and hurting people. He dragged her along with him on his way to the war the first day or two, but she slowed him down, so he unloosed his orneriness on her till he was wore out and then he left her there to die on the trail. She hoped he’d get killed in the war, but now it was ended, she was afraid he might come back looking for her. “If I scleam at bad man, Hookie, don’ come herrp me!” she says. “Lide way fast an’ don’ come back!”

I was mighty surprised. “The war’s over? I didn’t know that,” I says.

“Rong time yestidday,” she says. “That nice plesident, man kirr him, too.”

I warn’t paying much mind to the rest a the world after I buried Ben Rogers. Except for saloons, I didn’t need the world and it didn’t need me. For beer money, I hired on with emigrant trains and wagons, taking on work wherever I could find it, me and Jackson drifting generly northards, and it was up a-near the Oregon Trail where I found Nookie, or she found me. Chinese ladies warn’t in much demand, but she’d struck a little abandoned sod cabin to move into and, like me, she didn’t have many wants. I seen her setting cross-legged outside her cabin in the sunset and she seen me and motioned me over and give me something to eat and we started having baths. She said she asked me because I was so skinny, but she was skinnier.