Huck Out West(26)

We was passing tales about when we was little, him here in the Hills, me on the Big River. Mostly we talked about all the bad things that happened, and how we sneaked through them best we could. Eeteh says that both of us growed up too early and missed a lot, so really didn’t grow up at all, just only got older. I says that’s probably better’n growing up and Eeteh was of the same opinion. Eeteh spoke passable trading-post American and by then I’d lived for a time with his tribe, so we gabbled away in both languages at the same time, hashing them up agreeably and understanding what we was saying near half the time.

I got to telling again about how me and my friend Tom finally just upped and run away one day without telling no one, and Eeteh says he always wanted to do that, too, but the only friend who thought like him got caught and beheaded by white bounty hunters when he was out fishing. If he busted all on his lonesome into places where mostly white men was camped, they’d shoot him or lock him up, and if he crossed into where other tribes was, he could end up a slave or a human sacrifice. I didn’t know they done that, I says, and he says they did, some did. I sejested we could try Mexico where he’d match right in. I didn’t know nothing about it, but the Mexicans I’d met was mostly thieving rascals, liars and loafers, so we’d be comfortable in their company.

That somehow led us to talking about the generl stupidness and meanness of the whole human race, and what a body was to do to survive amongst the vicious creturs. I guess our jabber was booming along out in the mainstream by then, even if we was still dragging all the old rubbage with us.

I told him about the murdrous Fighting Parson, the Minnysota hangings, and General Hard Ass’s slaughter of all them families whilst they was sleeping. I says it was enough to make a body shamed of the whole human race. Eeteh nodded and showed me a scar he says he got from his own brother Rain-in-the-Face, and he told me then about the day him and his cousins tried to make a warrior out of him by fetching him along to the massacre of a wagon train of emigrants from the east. Settlers was swarming into the land of the Great Spirits like a mortal fever, his brother said, and to make the land pure again, the white devils had to be killed or drove out, ever last one of them. And all the nation, even fools, was obleeged to help do that. Them particular emigrants took to praying ruther than fighting back, and that throwed his cousins into an awful rage because they thought the emigrants was using magic against them, so they emptied out their guts, scalped them, and spiked them on spears stuck in the ground. Eeteh says he turned away from the sickly sight and his brother shot an arrow into his side. “He can kill me, Hahza, but only want hurt. Remember me who I belong.”

I asked him when that was, if I was already living with the tribe, and what the settlers looked like. But stead of answering, Eeteh says how Coyote taught him the trick of seeing without seeing. He says Coyote took him to where the Great Spirits was celebrating their Every-Hundred-Moons People Slaughter. “I think more often,” Eeteh says, peeping out through the long black stringy hair hanging in his eyes and over his shoulders, “but Coyote call it that.” When him and Coyote got there, the Great Spirits was already hard at it, there was burnt and chopped-up flesh everywheres, and Coyote says to him to stare straight into the middle of it and tell him what he seen there. It was horrible, but he done what Coyote asked and told him what he seen, and Coyote says that’s not the middle, keep staring. So he done that and Coyote says that’s still not the middle, look harder. Eeteh says he was looking as hard as he could and he kept naming things and Coyote he kept saying that’s not the middle. Eeteh stopped like it was the end of his story, and relit his pipe. I asked him did he ever find it, the middle? He shrugged, shook his hair out of his eyes, took a pull on his pipe, let the smoke curl out through his heavy nose, and says, “No middle, Hahza. But I look so hard, middle not only nothing I not see.”

I understood Eeteh pretty good, but Coyote was trickier. I thought we might be having difficulties by consequence of the different kinds of words we spoke, because after all Eeteh’s talk I still didn’t know nothing. But I judged it wouldn’t do no good to ask again, he warn’t going to say no more about that wagon train. Maybe he’d just made it all up to answer my own stories, you couldn’t never tell with Eeteh. But though Coyote taught him how not to see nothing, I was seeing too much. There warn’t no warrant for me to s’pose the wagon train in Eeteh’s story was the emigrant missionaires I was traveling with, but there warn’t no warrant not to, and my head was spinning in that direction, seeing things I most wanted not to see. I was specially worried and feeling bad about Jim. I had broke my promise to him. The worse thing is he probably forgive me.

It had been a whole flock a moons, as Eeteh would say, since I bolted that wagon train without even no time, except for a last desperate shout to Jim to say goodbye. The first thing I noticed galloping off that night was I didn’t have no boots on. They was old and tattery with rundown heels and holes in the soles, but they was the only boots I had and I didn’t have no money to buy new ones. I shouldn’t never have took them off to wash my feet, but I done it and there warn’t no taking it back. I never wanted nothing on my feet, but a body couldn’t live out there without boots, so I was in a pickle, as Tom’s Aunt Sally used to say. But it was my fault, like it most always was. I shouldn’t noway have kept them boots. They was the ones Tom bought me with the money from selling Jim.