Huck Out West(49)
A preacher come to see me about my soul, and how I could save it by fessing up to murdering old Zeb even if I ain’t done it. It was that chubby land surveyor-banker-dentist-judge Yaller Whiskers again, only now he was a preacher. There warn’t nothing that fellow couldn’t do if he set his mind to it. He was wearing the hanged man’s floppy straw hat which was the same color as his bushy whiskers. With his dusty clothes, he made a body think of a small round haystack with eyes. He wanted us to pray together to some of the same dead people the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson was always carrying on with, and see if we couldn’t strike a deal with the Lord about my soul before I danced the hempen jig, as he called it, and flew off to Providence, or some place even more unpleasanter.
“Praying ain’t never worked for me, Reverend,” I says, “and I ain’t got no soul to barter with. Maybe I used to have one, but if I did, it got drownded on the Big River, nor else it was stole by a couple a royal bamboozlers like yourself who didn’t have none a their own.”
The preacher he got a little hot under the collar then like he done when he was a judge and says he won’t be talked at so disrespectable. He says he should a sentenced me to a hundred lashes besides only getting hanged—he would a gratefully laid on the lashes himself, before, during or after the hanging. He was going to go right now and fetch his horsewhip to the ceremonials, in case he got a chance to use it, and, given my rascally nature, he allowed he surely would.
The more Yaller Whiskers carried on, the madder he got. He remembered me of old Pap when he went to ripping and cussing like all fury, swearing to cowhide me directly as he got sober, and that made me smile, which made Yaller Whiskers so sore, he whiffed his pudgy fists around a-front my face till his cheeks was red and he throwed the rube’s straw hat at me and kicked at my knees and yelled, “What’re you laughin’ at, you goddam sneak-thief injun-lover?”
Then he ca’med down and picked up the straw and set it back on, saying he was sorry, and he went back to being a preacher again. Sin always got him riled up like that, he says, he just didn’t have no tolerance for it. But he had to learn himself more Christian forbaring, it went with being a man a the cloth, he says, though he probably didn’t know no more’n I done what cloth he was talking about.
It was nigh noon. Yaller Whiskers and Mule Teeth tied my hands behind my back and took me by the elbows and walked me out to the gallows, tromping through the gumbo and the thickening crowds. All the busy hammering and sawing and hollering stopped when we stepped out a the shack, and people begun running towards the gallows, pushing and a-shoving to get the up-frontest places. I warn’t customed to being much noticed of a rule, but they was all gaping at me and didn’t want to look at nothing else. Some was laughing or shouting out cusswords, but most was only staring with their eyes wide open like they was trying to eat me with their eyes.
That army drummer was at it again, banging out a march, and we was stepping along to it, the crowds opening up as we come on them. Eyepatch was a-waiting for us by the gallows in his black shirt, his black bandanna knotted round his head, his gold teeth and earrings and tin star glinting in the midday sun. He looked like he might a washed his hair for the grand occasion, nor else he only greased it. His pals Pegleg and Bill was standing longside him, Bill with a nasty three-tooth sneer on his face.
The lanky coffin-maker in the tall black hat was there, looking monstrous proud of what he’d made. One of his empty body boxes was propped up against the contraption, and the picture-taker was aiming his camera at it. So I warn’t going to be throwed into the Gulch, after all. I was going to be a famous murderer and bandit with white eyes and a stretched neck, laying in a pine box. Maybe they’d even get to see me back in St. Petersburg.
The preacher he says he’ll ask for mercy because of middle-gating circumstances, if he could think of any. Though I knowed it wouldn’t make no matter, I hoped Mule Teeth might furnish some. “We fetched you the prisoner, Cap’n,” Mule Teeth says, and when Eyepatch asks him if I repented of my vilence whilst he was guarding me, Mule Teeth says I did not. “Fact is, Cap’n, he bragged about it, goddamming everybody and you in partickler. He’s a liar and a traiter and he pals around with hoss-tile hucksters. Got a squaw with a business that sucks a body in like quicksand.” That done it. Like my mean old Pap used to say, it’s the ones who talk lazy and drawly you got to watch out for. Eyepatch nodded. It was all up for me.
It was earless Pegleg who took over then and led me up the steps. The drummer had stopped his pounding and was commencing a drumroll. The drumroll was scary, but warn’t near so as the wooden peg knocking loud and hollow up the stairs ahead a me. Whilst climbing them, I recollected that crazy Indian in Minnysota who Tom said dropped his pants and wagged his naked behind at all the gawkers. I wished I could do something owdacious like that, but I was too scared and downhearted. I didn’t never want to die, and now that it was happening I didn’t want it more’n ever.
There was a powerful lot of steps to climb. The picture-taker in the long frock coat had moved his camera on its long skinny legs and was watching me through it. That chap with the fiddle was twanging away sorrowfully and whining through his nose something about jumping off into the other world. I was thinking about Ne Tongo, who won’t understand what happened to me or where I went off to. How do you explain that to a horse?