Huck Out West(45)

Time kept Sun and Moon apart, they lived in separate lodges and warn’t noway allowed in the same one together. Only one a them was let out into the sky at the same time, though Moon sometimes lurked about like a shy ghost in Sun’s sky, wishing Sun would look her way. Wishing didn’t do her no good. Sun was only in love with his own self. This was before Coyote sent Turtle diving down in the ocean to bring up earth for people to live on, Eeteh says, so the world was still slopped over with water, and Sun spent all his days smiling down at his own reflection. He would a kissed it if he could. Moon stared at her reflection, too, but only because her sky was dark and there warn’t nothing else to look at. Her reflection was pale as death, a-floating in pure blackness, and it only made her feel more lonelier’n ever.

I says I thought it was Duck dove down. Eeteh, making a sling out a some loafer’s muddy shirt, says he didn’t know for sure if Coyote ordered Turtle down or else it was Duck or Water Beetle or Muskrat, or even if he went himself, like Kiwi always said. Kiwi was a Crow and Eeteh reckoned the Crows knowed more about the beginnings and endings of things than the Lakota done, so he thinks maybe Coyote swum down himself. I says that either way it sounded like right down bullwhacky to me, even though it warn’t near so foolish as the stories folks back in St. Petersburg took stock in, declaring them to be the Gospel Truth, and Eeteh says stories is stories and got their own rules about the truth.

The tribe was most always all asleep when Moon was let out in the sky, and people never even seen her, Eeteh says, easing Deadwood’s shoulder bone into its socket with a crunchy noise, but Coyote he stayed up and watched. We put the broke arm in the sling and strapped it to his chest and Eeteh set about working on the fingers. They was most all busted. Sun was proud like a warrior chief, Eeteh says, and he lit up the water world like it was on fire. He lorded it over everybody and didn’t need nobody else. But Moon she was lonely and sad and was always chasing after Sun, Coyote seen that.

Eeteh made a little ball out a mud and leaves and fitted Deadwood’s fingers round it, pinching each bone carefully into place. It was like he could see Deadwood’s bones with his own fingers. The problem, Coyote judged, was dawn. It there warn’t no dawns, people wouldn’t have to die no more. So he stitched up a curtain of rain and fog so’s Sun couldn’t see himself on the waters no more and nobody couldn’t see him. That was how clouds and rain begun, Eeteh says, wrapping a rag round Deadwood’s balled hand and settling it into the sling. His hair, hanging loose and tangly from the headband, kept getting in his face, but he let it.

Then we set about working on the busted leg, which was a good sight harder. Deadwood was a sinewy old bird, and pulling his leg bones apart to refit the broke ends was most more’n we could do. We needed eight hands, not only four. Sun was terrible lonely, Eeteh went on, grunting from the stretching work, and he went hunting around for that bright face he admired so. He couldn’t find it. It had plain disappeared. But Sun seen a face looking like it, Eeteh says, only ghostlier and sadder and beautifuller in a less showy way, and he could not only look at it, he could kiss it, and he knowed then he warn’t never going to be lonely again.

We was both straining hard and could feel the bone pieces fitting back. There was a little click like maybe the bone ends was coming together and maybe they warn’t. Maybe they was only breaking off worse. Meantimes, Eeteh grunts, reaching for the splint, Time kept stubbornly plodding on, too stupid to be able to change his ways. Like most a the Great Spirits, he didn’t really have no brain of his own. Without Sun and Moon to help, he was lost and fuddled and didn’t know where he was.

It was desperate hard work, but we somehow got Deadwood’s thigh bone put together and the splint tied up and we set to work on the lower part, while Eeteh, stubborn as Time was, kept on with his story. Moon knowed twenty-eight ways of hugging and kissing, Eeteh says, and she learned Sun all of them, showing him a different piece of herself each time to rouse him up, and then she learned him them all again, and all over again, and again, and that was how the stars was born and the year was made. If she’d knowed a hundred ways to do that, then months would have been even longer, and lives, too, Eeteh says, but she couldn’t think up no more. Sometimes she made Sun think up one of his own, and they added that in, but mostly he choosed things he used to done by himself when he only had his own reflection to stare at, and he let her do it to him, and that’s how the Spirit Road got made. “You have better name for Spirit Road,” Eeteh says.

Then one day, Moth was out nibbling at the world like that pest always done if you didn’t watch him, and he et a couple a holes in the curtain. Time seen then who was behind it and what they was doing. He tore up the curtain in a furisome rage and throwed Sun and Moon back in their own lodges. Time was the boss. He was stupid maybe, but he didn’t give nobody no choice.

We didn’t have none nuther. The trees around us was commencing to show theirselves more like pictures than shadows, and that meant that dawn’d be a-breaking soon. We had to clear out before that happened, so what was done was done and we couldn’t do no more for the old man.

We throwed his old rags on top of him, picked up the plank with him strapped on it and scuttled in a hurry down the ravine, alongside of the crick, and up to his shack. The hollering and groaning and gunshots was all stopped. Fog was a-rolling in and, except for the distant rumble of snores, it was so quiet you could hear toads burping and the far-off howls of wolves. The moon was swimming in the fog and glowing in her grievous way, and Eeteh, looking up at her as we clumb, says that after Time broke them up, Moon went on showing herself in twenty-eight ways as a meloncholical rememberer of the beautiful time when they done them all together. Sun could see her from his lodge on t’other side the world and he was grieving, too, though every day he got up and pretended he warn’t, not to give Time no satisfaction. I says I most wished he’d show a little more spine and not get up today.