Huck Out West(35)

CHAPTER XV


HENEVER WIDOW DOUGLAS grabbed me and scrubbed my face, she called it washing my sins away. She always said that some day we’d have to pay for our sins. The widow didn’t have no sins, so I judged it was only her way of bullyragging me. But paying for sins is like getting the bad luck a body deserves for doing what he oughtn’t done, like handling a snake-skin or stealing a dead man’s boots. So when the tribe and me packed up our lodges a few seasons ago and struck for the Montana border to chase after the few small buffalo herds still remaining, I should a reckoned on bad luck because it was partly my fault the buffalo was extincting. My soldier friend Dan Harper had told me that long ago, and I hadn’t forgot, I only hadn’t cared to remember.

Before we struck northards, the tribe sent one of Eeteh’s brothers to scout out what the calvary was doing, and he come back with the news that General Hard Ass was marching his bluecoats south into Comanche territory, so our route was clear. That seemed like good luck, but though the troops was maybe marching, General Hard Ass warn’t. I didn’t know that then. I was feeling light and easy. But we was heading up towards where Dan got himself killed and that was even a worse thing for luck than handling snake-skins, specially when Eeteh told me it was most likely his own cousins who laid the trap for Dan’s patrol. Learning that was like bad luck was already happening. When I asked Eeteh if he was there, he says maybe, and then he don’t want to talk no more about it.

We was many days on the move and finally set up camp in a grove of cottonwood trees on the banks of a river in the Wyoming Territory, up a-near the Montana border, about a half day’s ride to the fort where Dan was a soldier. Me and Eeteh was volunteered to scout the area, and as him and me was moving through a deep gully, he says this was where it happened. But he warn’t with the others. He didn’t want to kill nobody nor get killed, he says, so when he come on a dead soldier in the woods—he showed me where—he stayed there and killed the dead soldier again, shooting all his arrows in him so he couldn’t have no more to shoot. His brother come to examine the body and when he seen what Eeteh done, he hit him in the chest so hard he couldn’t breathe and he thought he was going to die.

“Did the dead soldier have any bullets in him?”

“No see. He your friend, Hahza. Sorry.”

“No, it’s all right. If Dan saved your life, even after he was dead, he’d a been happy to hear it.”

In mining and cow towns and in settlers’ villages along the railroad and wagon trails, I often done the trading for the tribe, having the natural words for it. When we was settled in Wyoming, I done the same, and in a saloon up there where I’d gone to buy the tribe a parcel of whisky and cured tobacco, I come on General Hard Ass’s old scout Charlie setting a barstool, his scrawny back to me.

Charlie had bolted from the army same time I did. His travels hadn’t treated him kindly. He looked well fried by the desert sun and he didn’t have no more meat on him than old Deadwood, just skin and bones and rags, that’s all he was. His whiskers was bushier’n before, but I could tell him by his twitchiness. I warn’t sure what kind of luck it was to meet up with him, but I judged it was most probably bad, so I set about to do my business as quiet as I could and sneak off before he seen me.

Charlie was telling the drunken loafers in the saloon about things that happened to him out on the desert, and the loafers was hooting and snorting and spurring him on. “I seen the mother a God out there, boys, nekkid as a jaybird and scratching herself,” Charlie says, scratching himself. “I was a-dyin’ a thirst. She lemme suck her tits’n saved my life. I been a true believer ever since.”

“Haw! What kinder tits did she have, Charlie?” one of the drunks asked. “Big ’uns or small?”

“They was like buckets,” Charlie says, and the loafers all hee-hawed. Charlie swung round to grab up his empty glass and seen me. His eyes looked like black pin dots in the middle of his thick brows and whiskers. “Why, I be damned! If it ain’t Huckerbelly Finn! I’d got wind you might show up. You come jest in time to rise a glass with me!”

“It’s the middle a the day, Charlie, I don’t—”

“I thought you was dead, Huckerbelly!” He waved one of his knotty sun-burnt fists at the barkeep and struck up two bony fingers. “And who’s t’say? Maybe you IS dead! I seen a power a mortalized bodies up bouncin’ round a late, like they’s a big party jest a-waitin’ to happen. Only last week I was drinkin’ in here with Aberham Lincoln, who’s been expired nigh onto ten years. You member him? Ole honest-to-God Abe! He was settin’ right where you’re settin’, stovepipe’n all. It’s the gospel truth! He was feelin’ low-spirited on accounta the desprit sinfulness of the nation, and was gittin’ well soaked t’fergit his stately keeres.”

“He was a good man, I reckon,” I says.

“Better one now he’s dead.” The barkeep set the whiskies down and told me I owed him for both of them. Charlie don’t have no money, he says. “Dyin’ improves EVERbody,” Charlie says, downing his drink in a single swallow. “Killin’ a body is a means a doin’ ’em a favor.”

“Well, don’t do me no favors, Charlie. I ain’t looking for improvements.” I took a sip and felt it burn a hole clean through me. When I could talk again, I says, “You ain’t down at the fort no more?”