Huck Out West

by Robert Coover

  Meantimes, the tree with the rube still hanging in it got cut down and dumped upstream in the Gulch where all the other dead trees was. The coffin-maker had already built sections of the new gallows, and now he set to hammering it all up together where the tree had stood. A lantern-jawed picture-taker in a billed cap and black frock coat was setting up his camera in front of it.

  The bran-new street out a-front was so packed with emigrants, wagons, horses and oxen, you couldn’t hardly move. The men was all excited and grinning ear to ear about the chance of watching a body get stringed up. Fingers was pointed at me in Zeb’s shack. They didn’t know who I was nor what I was s’posed to be hanged for, but that warn’t no matter. Eyepatch was right: the gallows was going to make the Gulch more sivilized-looking.

  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?

  From up on the platform I could see all the tents and lean-tos, the muddy streets, the half-built shanties and storefronts, the long line of incoming wagons stretching back into the hills. Many of the new-comers was hopping out a their wagons and running towards us with big grins on their faces. Others was galloping in on horses. They didn’t know what was happening, but they didn’t want to miss nothing.

  Pegleg stood me onto the trapdoor and fitted the scratchy rope round my neck. “Kin I have the next dance?” he asks with a mean grin. I warn’t able to grin back. I was feeling desperately lonely and wished there was somebody to hold my hand. But I was all alone. Did you ever notice, Eeteh says to me one day, how making a world always begins with loneliness? The Great Spirits could invent all the suns and moons and rivers and forests they wanted, but it warn’t never enough. They was still lonely. There warn’t nobody to talk to and nothing was happening. So, they had to make us loafers to kill so’s to liven up the passing days.

  One of the arriving emigrants was galloping in on a high white horse with a passel a friends behind him. He was fitted out in bleached doeskin and a white hat, with white kid gloves and a red bandanna tied round his throat, gleaming silver spurs on his shiny boots. He had big bushy moustaches ear to ear and long curly hair, twinkling eyes. Puffing on a fat seegar. Coming for a laugh. “HANG HIM QUICK!” Eyepatch shouted. Pegleg drawed his pistol with one hand and reached for the lever with t’other and I dropped. My throat got snagged and then there was a shot and I kept on dropping, landing hard on the ground under the gallows. Then more shots, and Pegleg come falling through the trapdoor and landed on top of me. That seegar-smoker must a shot the rope!

  Only one man I knowed could do that. He was grinning down at me from his white horse. “Hey, Huck,” he says, flicking some ash off his seegar. It was Tom Sawyer! His own self!

  CHAPTER XXI

&nb
sp; OM SAWYER ALWAYS did know how to throw on the style. Except for his ear-to-ear moustaches and fancy white duds, he warn’t changed a whit. Eyepatch and Bill broke off on a run, and Tom flung out a rope straight off of his horse and lassoed both of them with one throw and hauled them in. Everybody cheered and howled and clapped their hands like they meant it. The two pock-faced robbers was heeling it out through the crowds with the plump yaller-whiskered judge, but Tom hollered out “GRAB THEM DESPERADOS!” and the emigrant miners snaggled them and rassled them to the mud and give them a few licks just for fun. Then they fetched them up to the gallows, and Tom’s pals tied them up.

  “We don’t have no bull pit yet to lock them in,” Tom says with a sadful look. “If they’re guilty, I allow we’ll just only have to hang them.” Everybody says, “Yay!” They was all pining for a hanging. But Eyepatch warn’t of the same opinion, and says so in so many cusswords. He pointed out Zeb’s shack where they’d held me, and Tom put on his boss’s face and give Eyepatch a long look and nodded and posted a guard with a rifle in charge of keeping them all in there. The guard was a big fellow named Bear with thick black brows and a warty nose, and he warn’t the sort that a body’d care to argue with.

  The ropes was cut off my wrists and I was helped to my feet. I was wobbledy and my throat hurt. My heart was still a-thundering in my ears. But I was standing in a world that still seemed real, or mostly real.

  Then Tom jumped onto the gallows platform direct out of his saddle. He told the crowd his name and they all give off a mighty cheer. He pointed down at me, and, in a big voice so’s everybody could hear, he says, “There stands afore you the daredevilest rider of the famous Pony Express, one of the greatest heroes of all our country’s injun wars, and the best scout and horse wrangler I ever knowed ANYWHERES!” They was whooping at every word he says. “The legendry Huck Finn and me rode together at the battles of Glorieta Pass and Sand Crick, Circleville, Skull Valley and Skeleton Cave, and HUNDREDS MORE! He saved my life I don’t know HOW many times! He was the best pard a body COULD EVER HAVE!” I warn’t none too pleased with his stretchers, but I ain’t never been so happy as I was to see Tom Sawyer again, so I just grinned and let him blow. I was still his pard. He said so. “He has been holing out here in the Gulch because Sitting Bull HIMSELF is after him! And not for no reason! Huck Finn has took more’n three hundred injun warrior scalps, and five of them was CHIEFS!” These emigrants was new arrived and didn’t know nothing, so Tom could say whatever he wanted to. “And that’s NO SITTING BULL!” Tom hollers out. Maybe he didn’t say “sitting.” The miners all roared and hooted and stormed and haw-hawed. It was a first-class show. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer when it come to unloading a speech in the grand style. “Huck Finn was born modest, so he’ll try to say it ain’t so, but DON’T YOU BELIEVE HIM! Them thieving scoundrels was trying to lynch a NATIONAL HERO! They don’t deserve NO MERCY!”

  They cheered Tom and they cheered me, too. He raised up his white hat and waved it at them, winking down at me. He might a been elected king right where he stood, if kings warn’t gone out a style. He held the hat up long enough for the picture-taker to get his photograph. His moustaches was the happy sort and made it look like he was always smiling. When his hat was lifted off his head, I seen his long curly hair was sneaking back on top towards the shiny place at the back of his scalp, and that was a sad thing, to think that even Tom Sawyer was a-growing old.

  He declared he was sent here by the govment in Washington as a federal overmarshal with a legal jury’s diction over the whole Territory. I didn’t know what an overmarshal was, but I didn’t doubt but what Tom would learn me. “The United States is a-going to take over this Territory to itself and kick out the blastemous cannibal redskins—who ain’t even completely HUMAN!” he says. “And from here on, the American army is a-going to protect ALL legal emigrants and miners! WHEREVER you want to go!” They was all cheering like crazy. “I tell you, friends, there ain’t going to BE no more injun massacres nor no more mob trials nor lynchings nuther! Everything is going to be LEGAL and on the UP’N UP, accorded to the BOOK! The AMERICAN book! Highwaymen and hoss-tiles and claim-jumpers will be PERSECUTED! Everything’s going to be like it OUGHTER be! We’re making the first ever perfect nation out here and there ain’t no damn injuns going to stand in the way, nor not no kings nor no sentimentery Quaker tomfoolery nor foreign bankers nuther! It’s going to be a paradise on earth where everybody’s RICH and nobody’s trying to take away what’s rightfully YOURN! It’s the new ELDERAYDO!”

  Then Tom set about putting things in order—and people let him do it! They was grateful and done what he said! He ordered Pegleg to be laid out in the box meant for me to have his picture took. He pointed to a naked hill a ways off with a pine stand at the foot and says that will be the Gulch’s burying place, but that Pegleg warn’t good enough for it. He says they should take off the wooden leg afterwards and save it, and handle the body over to Doc Molligan for his scientific purposes. He ordered up new nooses for the scaffold and vittles for the prisoners. He says he’s using his own money to pay for them. He announced an election for mayor-govner of the Gulch and himself as a candidate, and everybody yay’d again and elected him on the spot and he says he was honored to serve.

  He borrowed the land surveyor’s pine table standing there in the middle of the street and set up what he called the first legal claims office. “All previous claims is dull’n void,” he says. The miners who’d already staked some claims warn’t happy, but Tom asked me who was here before the Rush begun. I pointed them out, and Tom he give them first dibs on their old claims or new ones for free, so they was well pleased. “But only one free claim each, the rest has to be paid for with goods or money, just like everybody else. There’s lots of deserving folks has come to the Gulch and more is on the way. Caleb here is a licensed court reporter and official recorder of claims and deeds, and he’ll make sure everything’s fair and square and that all the right words get used.”

  Caleb, a scrawny gent hiding his balditude under an orange too-pay, with stringy whiskers on his chin and a Colt revolver on his hip, nodded solemner’n a preacher at a tomb-laying, and set down behind the table alongside of a bespectacled assistant, spreading out his charts and maps, the prospectors squirming and scrouging to get in line. Knives and guns was quickly out, but Tom’s other pals took the weapons away, breaking arms when they had to.

  I begun to breathe again, and I told Tom about the old whisky-maker who’d been murdered by Eyepatch and his gang and who was now laying dead up in the shack. Tom says he’ll be the first registered resident of the new graveyard, and he ordered up a proper funeral for that very afternoon, with Caleb’s goggled assistant Wyndell doing the preaching, that being one of his trades on the side. There was objections from some of the emigrants who’d got deathly sick on Zeb’s vegilanty brew and was still not getting over it, but those that was here before all agreed that old Zeb was a genius legend and rightly deserved the honor, never mind he also near killed them all. They missed him and his mother, they says, more’n their own mothers, who they didn’t even hardly remember, and whose hearts warn’t never so pure.

  Tom bought some corn-bread and grilled wild pig sausages at a food stall in the main street. People cheered him wherever they seen him, and he tipped his white hat at them. Sometimes he grinned, but he tried not to. I et one a the sausages he bought and Tom et the rest. “You don’t weigh no more’n you done in your Pony days,” he says. He asked me who it was discovered the gold here that the colonel wrote up about, so I told him some of what had happened and took him to see Deadwood.

  With the trees cleared away, Deadwood’s old shack seemed closer into the middle than it was before. New streets was winding every which way around it, with tents and shanties popping up alongside of them like locoweeds. The streets was jam full of wagons, animals and restless miners, lugging picks and rifles. A blacksmith had set up a forge and smithy. Saw-logs was stacked up in the mud, and loafe
rs was setting on them. The ghost-town scavenger had a sign on his new storefront that says he has pump handles, a pitchfork, gold pans, guns, and used pants for sale. The Gulch was already a town and everybody in it was strangers.

  Deadwood was laying in his union suit on his old straw tick. The union suit looked like something his mother might a wore long ago. He’d took off his splints and slings before things had got healed, and I was sorry to see it. His arms and legs now angled ever which way. The shack was mighty fragrant, which was probably why nobody warn’t bothring him. When Tom seen his awful injuries, he got madder’n the devil. “Who DONE this to you, old man?” he barked, his dander up. “I’ll see personal he’s HUNG for it!” The old prospector lifted his working arm and pointed a feeble finger at me.

  “Me and a friend found him in a ravine after he’d took his hiding,” I says. “He was ruined with drink and he thought we was busting his bones stead of setting them. Them two pock-faced robbers you got penned up in the old whisky shack is who done it to him.”

  “He stole the watch them rileroad bosses give me,” Deadwood whimpered faintly out the side of his crooked jaw, his bruised cross-eyes trying to find Tom. Without no teeth, nothing come out clear. “I don’t know now what’s a-goin’ to happen NEXT!” He sounded like he was fixing to cry.

  “He was showing off a fob watch all night from some truck them two robbers stole that he found in a cave,” I says, “and they wanted to know where the rest a their loot was. The old fellow ain’t got no real memories left, so he didn’t even know what they was talking about. They might a killed him right out, but probably they was having too much fun beating on him.”

  “Robbers, eh?” says Tom. He was grinning in an ornery sort of way. He settled a seegar butt in under his moustaches and went over and made Caleb into a judge. Then he turned the claims table into a courtroom bench so’s Caleb don’t even have to get up out a his chair. The photographer come over and took his picture.