Huck Out West(61)

CHAPTER XXV


N JACKSON’S ISLAND, when me and Tom and Joe Harper run away to be pirates and didn’t have nothing else to do, we laid on our backs at night, looking up at the stars, and Tom and Joe discussed about time and space. They couldn’t agree if the two, if they WAS two, run on forever or if they didn’t, and IF they didn’t, what was on t’other side a them. Joe argued in the Sunday-school manner for sudden bust-out beginnings and horrible ends, and he says that heaven and hell was out there past where the stars run out. The stars, he says, was like a huge sparkly curtain that God slung up for privacy. What was he doing back there, I says, that he don’t want us to see? GLORY, says Joe. It burns your eyes out. Tom says that bust-out beginnings and horrible ends was sure-’nough true about people, but the universe seemed more like a clock that had got wound up and then forgot, and people was just caught between ticks, which he says was the scientific idea about it. I says I couldn’t see no advantage about arguing, it was most awful beautiful up there, all speckly and grand, and it was enough to only lay back and watch it. Joe says that was plain stupid and only showed how ignorant I was. Tom defended me, saying it warn’t my fault, I hain’t never been to school and learnt how to tell true from beautiful.

Now that Tom’s growed up, time don’t really happen for him no more. It’s just always NOW, nor else nothing. That’s probably because he’s always at the center of everything. The Amaz’n Tom Sawyer. For a body out at the edge like me, watching time go by’s like laying back and watching the stars. Mostly don’t nothing happen, but now’n then a star falls and streaks up the sky for a second. And it don’t matter if you seen it or not, it still happened. And will go on happening when you ain’t around to watch. But Tom’s right, I ain’t never really learnt how to think proper. He’d probably say something crazy like stars DON’T fall, even though any fool can see them do it, and yet the Amaz’n Tom Sawyer’d be right again like always. It was too many for me, really. Tom was mountains smarter. I should give him all the thinking to do for me and him both.

I was laying on my cot, muddytating on all this, and wondering what Coyote would say about it, when Tom, suited up in his bleached doeskin, busted in like Joe’s universe to roust me out. He wanted me to come to a meeting in the public square to talk about the tribe’s peace offer. I didn’t have no pep yet and I was still a ripe shade a yaller, but I could stand up without falling down, so he allowed I was well enough to come help him out. “I been thinking about it, and I AGREE with you, Huck, peace is BETTER’N war,” he says, helping me to my feet and setting a hat on my head. “I BELIEVE in peace. I don’t believe in nothing MORE! People have fun killing, but they don’t care to GET killed, so that’s how you make peace. But these emigrants is stubborn as mules. You got to HELP me. Come on. Le’s go see what you’n me can do.”

The crick shore was a-filling up. There were more tents, more people, more horses and mules, more fires, more smoke, more rubbage. The crick was wider and rushing faster like to echo the persons’ rush into the Gulch. Peewee and the others was still panning for plasser gold at the water’s edge, and they give Tom and me a nod when we passed by. There was a horse path now up to Zeb’s old shack and we walked up it, climbing towards all the shouts and hammering. We passed some log cabins on the way with plank roofs and cooksmoke rolling out their mud-brick chimbleys. The forest that used to hide Deadwood’s shack from Zeb’s was mostly gone, but other shanties and tents and lean-tos had raised up round them, and the empty spaces between was full of wagons and animals. It warn’t clear where any more could be squeezed, but they was still rolling in like the first day, you could see them far out into the hills. They wouldn’t know nothing about what had happened. They had to learn everything all over again. If they wanted to. They mostly didn’t. They only wanted people to move over and let them in.

The gallows out a-front the shack was bigger’n when I broke it in. There were nooses now for three necks and Tom says they may need more. The sad truth, he says, is that these new emigrants warn’t all decent citizens, come to get rich in honest hardworking American ways. Fact is, many of them was right down thieves, swindlers, highwaymen, rabble-rousers, crooked gamblers, gunslingers, thugs and murderers, and they had to be weeded out like the hateful pests they was. “I can see where this country is going,” he says, proud as pie, “and I can help it get there.”

I asked him how many he’d hanged so far, and he says only about four a day, though some days was busier than others. I asked him if he thought they all qualified, and he says there might a been an exception or two, but he was pretty sure most of them did. “Anyways, Huck, EVERYTHING’S a hanging offense. Being ALIVE is. Only thing that matters is who’s doing the hanging and who’s being hung.” The judge and Eyepatch warn’t yet amongst the hanged pests. I could see them peering out Zeb’s door over Bear’s shoulders, Yaller Whisker’s two eyes wide open and panicky, Eyepatch’s one eye full of dark fire like a wild animal’s.

We slopped over to the claims registry and Tom told Caleb and Wyndell to shut down till the meeting was done. Their pine table was moved out a-front the ghost-town scavenger’s generl store onto a new wooden sidewalk hoisted up three feet off of the gumbo and the horse and ox muck. The store had a shingle front now and a new sign. At first, it was stocked mostly with secondhand goods left from disappeared miners, but now there were saws and hammers and guns and boots carted in from outfitting towns around. They fetched a camp chair out from the store and set me on it, and I was grateful for that. I was tired all the time now and the climb up from crickside had clean wore me out.