Huck Out West(8)

The next morning, Tom was up and out well before the sun was, but I waked slower and stayed for bread and coffee with the preacher by the light of his whale oil lamp, setting at his rough-hewed pine table with him. He was scrawny and old, fifty year and more, with stringy gray hair down to his shoulders and dark pouches under his eyes like empty mochilas. He had a way of talking about Jesus and his friends like they was close kin of his, and praying come more natural to him than breathing done. He wore a raggedy black suit and peered over bent spectacles festooning the tip of a nose so thin and bluish it looked like a dead man’s nose.

He seen that I warn’t in no hurry to attend the day’s revelments and, after mumbling a few more praise-the-Lords, he let it out that he’d preached against the hangings and all his congregation had upped and walked out on him. He knowed he shouldn’t a done it, and he was sorry about it, but he couldn’t help it. One of his deacons told him he resked getting lynched himself and he should best get out a town. He would a done, too, but he didn’t have no place to go. He’d been waiting for them to come after him ever since and was scared to answer the door when me and Tom knocked the night before. But he was glad that he done so. He wondered now if maybe we could stay and help protect him. He couldn’t pay nothing, he says, but he would pray for our souls three times a day, or even up to six times, if we wanted.

I told him we’d be leaving before them poor devils was even cold, and he shuddered and muttered that it was an ungodly thing they was doing, and the baby Jesus only a day old. He said them fellows and their families was starving to death. The federal agents wouldn’t let them have no food without the govment paid them and the govment was too busy and broke fighting a war, so they could just starve, they didn’t like them anyway, and it would be the govment’s fault. Them poor people was always getting pushed around and most didn’t have no place to live no more. Finally, they got desperater than they could stand and they fought back and, when it was over, hundreds of Santee Sioux was taken prisoner and put straight on trial by the army without no lawyers nor jury, not even no one to translate for them so they could know what everyone was yattering about. As the preacher laid open the story, his nose flared up in splotches and a kind of sparkly light come into his pale blue eyes. You could see there warn’t no hope for him.

The little town set on a shallow river like a shrinked-down version of St. Petersburg back home. The walk to the middle of it shouldn’t of took more’n a minute, but there was thousands of people to squeeze past on the streets. The night before, the streets was frozen mud. That morning, with all the tramping of them, they was just plain mud. It was the most people I ever seen clumped up together in one place. Some of them was locals, but most warn’t. A few was looking scared, others angry, most was laughing and cussing. The saloons was all shut till after the hangings, but most everybody was carrying flasks under their coats, which they sucked at from time to time and whooped for the pleasure of it. They was having a grand party. I hain’t seen nothing like it since in that river town when everybody come running to watch old man Boggs get shot dead by the Colonel.

The gallows was a giant open box with nooses hanging like Christmas ribbons, ten to a side, and it was set on oak timbers eight foot high so’s there’d be room for the bodies to drop without hitting the ground. It also give everybody all the way down to the river a good view when it got light enough. It was the lonesomest thing I ever seen. It turned out from people talking that another prisoner had been pardoned, so there was a spare halter for whoever wanted it, and folks was volunteering each other and shoving them towards the gallows and hee-hawing. They said they better hurry and string up the rest of them devils, or they’d all get off and go back to killing and raping decent white folk again.

I didn’t have no trouble finding Tom. He was standing on a special raised platform next to the gallows hobnobbing with the quality. Now and then the crowd let out a big cheer and the man standing alongside of Tom in a black swallowtail coat raised his top hat and smiled and waved at everybody, and Tom he smiled and waved, too. Tom had trimmed his moustaches and scraped his cheeks clean. He was wearing his slouch hat and doeskin shirt and was smoking a seegar somebody must a gave him. He looked a western gentleman all over. When he took notice of me, he made a sign to come up and join him, but I shook my head. I seen all I wanted to see. He said something to the chap in the hat beside him and stepped down off of the platform, the slicked-up spurs on his boots shining bright as new silver, and made his way over to me. The crowd respected him and opened up to let him through.

“Huck! Where you been? It’s about to start! I got us the bulliest place to watch, so close you can almost reach out and touch a body a-hanging there. But you got to come now. It’s starting up!”

I could hear them, somewheres further off, making some awful racket which might a been singing. “I seen you up there with all them high hats and was wondering what lies you had to tell to get invited.”

“Lies! Huck, how you talk! I only let them know we was famous scouts and injun fighters from out west and showed them the parson’s letter and I mentioned that you was the legendry H. Finn, breaker of wild horses, and all that was nearly mostly true.”

You could see the prisoners by then, past the caps of the soldiers standing in two lines leading to the gallows. They was tied up and wearing what looked like rolled-up muslin meal sacks on their heads, which give them a comical aspect. They warn’t moving too slow, but they warn’t moving too fast nuther. Their faces was painted and they was singing to beat the band, but you couldn’t hardly hear them because of all the hooting and hollering of the crowd.