The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Undead Read online

  “Tragic!” says the duke, who seemed to think there was a lot of that walking around. “Was it a large family, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Naw. It was maw and paw, then Sweet Betsy, who was the oldest, then Ike, then me, then James – who was the baby.”

  “Sweet Betsy? Was that her name?”

  Says I:

  “You know: from the song ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike’? Maw liked the name, and that’s where it came from, so we all got to calling her Sweet Betsy; and she was a sweet one. But like I say, they’s all gone.”

  “Murderous Zum!” the duke says.

  “Sioux,” I says. “At least that’s what paw said. He said you could tell by the arrows stickin’ out of ‘em.”

  “Murderous Sioux!” the duke says.

  “So paw and I couldn’t make it by ourselves any more, so he says we’ll pick up and go live with our Uncle Ben, who’s got himself a nice little farm forty miles past Orleans. It was paw and me, and Jim here; paw owned Jim. Well, there warn’t any money to get us there by steamboat, so one day the river rose up and paw ketched this piece of a raft. So we reckoned we’d go down to Orleans on it. But our luck didn’t hold, and a steamboat run over part of the raft one night. Jim and I came up, and got back on the raft, but paw never surfaced. Well, the next day or two, people was always coming out to us on skiffs and trying to take Jim away from me, saying they believed he was a runaway and there was probably some reward on him. So we don’t run daytimes no more; nights no one bothers us.”

  The duke says:

  “Let me cipher out a way we can run in the daytime if we want to. I’ll think it over, and invent some way to fix it.”

  Towards night it began to darken up and look like rain; the heat lightning was down low in the sky and the leaves was beginning to shiver, and it was going to get pretty ugly, you could see that. So the duke and the king went to overhauling the wigwam, and told Jim and I to watch the river. About ten o’clock, it begins to rain and blow and thunder like anything; so the king sticks his head out and says maybe we better both stay on watch till the weather got better; then him and the duke turned in for the night.

  My soul, what a blow it was! The wind did scream along, and every few seconds there’d come a glare that lit up the white caps for half a mile round, and you’d see the islands far off, looking dusty in the rain, and the thunder would go rumbling and grumbling away, and then up comes another flash and another sockdolager. The waves almost washed me off the raft some times, but I held on, up by Jim on the oar. We didn’t have no trouble with snags; the lightning was fluttering about so constant that you could see them soon enough to throw the head of the raft one way or the other and miss them.

  At one point I got pretty sleepy and crawled into the wigwam, but the king and the duke had their legs sprawled around so there warn’t no more room, so I laid outside – I didn’t mind the rain, because it was warm, and the waves warn’t running so high now. Then I took the next watch, and Jim laid down next to me and snored away; by and by the storm let up for good, and the first cabin-light that showed, I woke Jim up, and we slid the raft into a hiding place for the day.

  After sun-up, we all had breakfast and the duke and the king said they was going to ‘lay out a campaign’ as they called it. The duke went into his carpet-bag and fetched out a number of printed hand-bills and read them out loud. One bill said “The celebrated Dr. Arnaud de Montelban of Paris” would discuss ailments of the body and present “new and exciting remedies.” In another bill, he was the “world-renowned Shakespearian tragedian, Garrick the Younger, of Drury Lane, London.” He said that acting was his higher calling, and that everything else just paid the bills.

  By and by he nudges the king and says: “When the muse is upon me, it is the finest feeling in the world, don’t you agree, Royalty?”

  The king seemed like he didn’t quite know how to answer. “What’s that mean – the ‘muse’? Don’t believe I’ve ever had one on me.”

  “Acting,” says the duke. “Theater.”

  “Never done it,” says the king.

  “You shall then, oh fallen one!” says the duke. “The first good town we come to we’ll rent a hall and do a few scenes – from ‘Richard III’, perhaps, or perhaps the balcony scene from ‘Romeo an Juliet’. How does that strike you?”

  “I’m in for anything that will pay, Bilgewater, but you see, I don’t know much about play-acting. Do you reckon you can learn me?”

  “Easy!”

  “All right then. I’m all ready for something fresh, anyway. Let’s commence as soon as we’ve finished with breakfast.”

  The duke was beside himself. He got out some costumes from his carpet-bag and put one on himself and one on the king. The king was satisfied; so the duke brought out a book and read all the parts himself in the most splendid, booming, spread-eagle way, prancing around and talkin’ at the same time; then he gives the book to the king and tells him to learn his part so he won’t have to have the book open on opening night.

  There was a little one-horse town about three miles down the bend, and after dinner, the duke said he had ciphered out how to run in the daylight without it being dangerous for Jim; so he allowed he’d go into town and fix the thing. The king allowed he would go too, to see if he couldn’t happen on something. I went along with them, just to pick up some coffee and some other supplies.

  When we got there, there warn’t nobody stirring; streets empty, quiet, and perfectly dead. I knew what that might mean, and started looking for bodies and smelling for spoilt meat. We found a slave sunning himself in a back yard, and he said it warn’t Zum, but rather a camp-meeting about two miles back in the woods, and that everybody that warn’t too young or too sick or too old – save maybe a guard or two keeping an eye on things – was gone there. The king got the directions and allowed he’d go and work the camp-meeting for all it was worth.

  The duke said what he was after was a little printing-office. We found it, too – empty, but there warn’t no doors locked. The duke called out a few times, but seemed pleased when no one answered, then shed his coat and winked at us and said he would be fine. So me and the king lit out for the camp-meeting.

  We got there in under an hour. There was as many as a thousand people there from miles and miles around. The woods was full of teams and wagons, and there was people walking all about, and stands that had lemonade and gingerbread to sell, and piles of watermelon and green corn and such-like truck. Everywhere you looked, you’d see armed guards – there must have been dozens of them – all dressed alike with black armbands that I guess meant they were there to protect the camp-meeting people who had Jesus and eternal life on their minds and couldn’t be bothered to watch out for Zum.

  The first tent we go to the preacher was lining out a hymn. He lined out two lines, then everyone sung it, and it was kind of grand to hear it, there was so many of them, and they done it in such a rousing way. The people woke up more and more, and sung louder and louder; and toward the end some began to groan, and some began to shout, and whoop, and fall to the ground. Then the preacher began to preach, and went weaving from one side of the platform to the other, shouting his words out with all his might, and every now and then he would hold open the Bible and spread it open and kind of shake it at people, shouting “Look upon the word!” and people would shout back “Oh, glory! Amen!” and he went on and on, the people groaning and crying and saying amen, amen, until he signaled to people on either sides of the tent, and fifteen or twenty people who were dressed up to look like Zum trotted out with baskets and everyone wept and threw money in. These people wore armbands too, so they was just employees, and I guess the message was that god could make the Zum knuckle under any time he wanted, as long as there was enough faith; and the armbands was there so they wouldn’t be taken for real Zum and shot, and ruin the whole afternoon for everyone else, specially the preacher.

  Well, the king sees what’s going on, and first thing you know he goes a-chargin
g up to the platform, and the preacher begged him to testify to the people, and he done it. He told them he had been a godless pirate in the Indian Ocean for thirty years, but he had changed his ways and come home, where he’d been robbed of every cent to his name, but he didn’t care, because he was a changed man now and happy for the first time in his life, and he was going to go back to the Indian Ocean, and spend the rest of his life trying to turn whatever pirates he come across to the true path. He said he could do it better’n anyone else, being acquainted with pirates and all, and though it would take him a long time to get there without money, it didn’t matter. Every time he turned a pirate to Jesus, he could say to him “Don’t thank me, no, give me no credit; it all belongs to them dear people in Parkville, natural brothers and sisters and benefactors of the true faith, and that dear preacher there, the truest friend a reformed pirate ever had!”

  And then he busted into tears, and someone sings out “Take up a collection for him! Take up a collection!” Well, the preacher shrugs his shoulders like there really ain’t no way to talk people out of it, and beckons to the Zum who are now sitting on some chairs on the sides of the tent, taking a break, and they all jump back up and come back with their baskets, but the king is already going through the crowd with his hat, swabbing his eyes and blessing them and thanking them for being so good to the pirates way out there in the Indian Ocean.

  When we get back to the raft, he counted up the money and found he collected over eighty-seven dollars. He had also snagged a three-gallon jug of whiskey, too. The king said it was the best day of missionarying he’d ever done, and that hands down, it was a stroke of genius to bring in the pirate angle. He said that people probably had just about enough of the Zum and needed to be miserable about something new. The Zum, he said, was yesterday; pirates was tomorrow. With eighty-seven dollars in his hat, I didn’t think anyone could have convinced him otherwise.

  The duke came back thinking he’d been doing pretty good until the king showed him his hat; after that, he didn’t think so so much. He had printed up a picture of a runaway slave with a bundle of sticks on his shoulder and a “$200 REWARD” underneath it. The reading was all about Jim and just described him to a dot. It said he had run away from St. Jacques plantation, forty miles below New Orleans, and whoever caught him could have the reward and expenses.

  “Now,” says the duke, “after today we can run in the daytime if we want to. Whenever we see anyone coming we can tie Jim up with a rope, lay him in the wigwam, and show the handbill and say we captured him up the river, and we’re going down to get the reward. Handcuffs and chains would have been a nice touch, but ropes will have to do.”

  While he was printing up the handbills, two farmers came into the print office and bought some advertising in the paper, and the duke offered them a discount if they could pay in advance. Well, he took in nine dollars and a half, and said it was a pretty good day’s work, and the king sat there with a pipe in his mouth, all smiles, and just nods.

  We all said the duke was pretty smart, and there wouldn’t be no trouble running daytimes. We judged we could make enough miles that night to get out of reach of the pow-wow we reckoned that was going to happen soon enough in the print office.

  Ten o’clock that night we slipped out, and didn’t hoist our lantern till we was well downriver from the town.

  When Jim called me to take watch at four in the morning, he says:

  “Huck, does you reckon we gwyne run across any mo’ royalty on dis trip?”

  “No,” I says, “I reckon not.”

  “Dat’s all right, den. I doan’ mine one or two kings, but we’s got enough. De one we got heah is powerful drunk, en de duke ain’t much better.”

  I found Jim had been getting the king to talk French, just to hear what it sounded like; but the king said he had been in this country so long, and had so much worry in his life, he’d forgot it.

  Chapter Twenty

  Difficulties in Arkansas

  It was after sun-up now, but we went right on drifting and didn’t tie up and hide. The king and the duke turned out in a bit and looked pretty rusty; but after they’d jumped overboard and took a swim it chippered them up a good deal. After breakfast, the king took a seat on the corner of the raft and let his legs dangle in the water, so as to be comfortable, and lit his pipe, and went to getting his ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by heart. When he got it pretty good, him and the duke begin to practice it together. The duke had to learn him over and over again how to say each speech; and he made him cast his eyes a certain way, and made him sigh, and put his hand over his heart, and after a while he got it pretty good.

  Well, next they got out a couple of long swords that the duke had made out of oak laths, and begun to practice the sword fight; and the way they laid on and pranced around the raft was grand to see. But by and by the king tripped and fell overboard, and Jim and I busted up laughing, which was not the emotion they was going after, so they took a rest, and talked about all kinds of adventures they’d had in other times along the river.

  The first chance we got, the duke had some show-bills printed; and after that, the raft was an uncommon lively place as we floated down, for there warn’t nothing but sword-fighting and speechifying going on all the time. One morning, when we was down the state of Arkansas, we come in sight of a little one-horse town by a big bend in the river, so we tied up about a half-mile above it, and all of us but Jim went to see if there was a chance to have our show in that place.

  We struck it mighty lucky; there was going to be a circus in town that same afternoon, and the country-people was already beginning to come in to town. The circus would leave again before night, so it was perfect. The duke hired out the court-house and we went around that afternoon and stuck up our handbills.

  Then we went loafing around town. The stores and houses were most all old, shackly, dried up concerns that hadn’t ever been painted; they was all set three or four feet above the ground on stilts to be out of the water when the river overflowed, which I guess it did regular. The houses had little gardens around them, but none of them held a candle to Aunt Polly’s vegetable and flower batch back home. They had jimpson-weed and sunflowers, and a few tomatoes that warn’t staked so they lay all about the ground, and ash-piles, and pieces of bottles and rags, and played-out tinware. The fences was made of different kinds of boards, and they leaned every which way, and had gates that was generally hanging on by one hinge, the other one busted off or rusty. Only a few of the fences had ever been whitewashed, and the duke said it was in Columbus’s time, like enough. There was hogs in the garden, and not many people seemed to mind.

  All the stores and concerns was along one main street. They had white domestic awnings in front, and the country-people hitched their horses to the awning-posts and just stood in the shade. There seemed to be a good supply of loafers, sitting on boxes, whittling with their Barlows, yawning and chawing tobacco – a mighty ornery lot. They talked lazy and drawly – which I think sounded ignorant – and used considerable many cuss-words. There was about one loafer for every place to sit and lean, and they always had their hands in their pockets, except when they took them out too get another chaw of tobacco, or scratch, or wipe the sweat on their foreheads.

  “Gimme a chaw of tobacker, Hank.”

  “Cain’t, Luke; I hain’t got but one chaw left. Go an’ ask Bill.”

  This was the whole of their conversation. The duke called these people the salt-of-the-earth, but the way he said it, it warn’t a compliment, but a dig.

  All the streets and lanes were just mud; they warn’t nothing else but mud. The hogs loafed and grunted around everywheres. You’d see a muddy sow and a while litter of piglets just drop down in the mud in front ‘a’ one of the businesses, and people just walked around her. And pretty soon you’d hear a loafer sing out “Hiyo! Go boy! Sick ‘em, bull!” and away the sow would go, squealing most horrible, with a dog swinging on each ear, and a bunch more dogs a-comin’; and then you could see th
e loafers get up and watch the thing, and laugh at the fun and be grateful for the noise. Then they’d settle back down again till there was a dog-fight. Almost nothing made them so happy as a dog fight – unless it was putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pan to a dog’s tail and see him run himself to death. It seems civilization hadn’t come this far yet, and I wondered how the duke and king was going to do with their flowery speeches.

  The nearer it got to noon that day, the thicker and thicker the wagons and horses in the streets, and more coming all the time. Families fetched their dinner with them from the country, and eat them riding along in their wagons. There was considerable whisky drinking going on, and I seen three fights. By and by somebody sings out:

  “Here comes old Boggs! – in from the country for his monthly drunk; here he comes, boys!”

  All the loafers looked glad; I reckon they was either used to making fun out of old Boggs, or thought of him as one of their own. One of the loafers says:

  “Wonder who he’s a-gwyne to chaw out this time. If he’d a-chawed up all the men he’s been wantin’ to chaw up for the last twenty years, he’d have considerable reputation by now.”

  Another one says, “I wisht old Boggs would threaten me, ‘cuz then I’d know I warn’t gwyne to die for a thousand years.”

  Boggs came a-tearing down along on his horse, whooping and yelling like an injun, and singing out:

  “Clear the track, boys. I’m on the war-path, and the price of coffins is a-gwyne to raise.”

  He was drunk, and reeling about in his saddle; he was over fifty years old, and had a very red face. Everybody yelled at him and laughed at him and sassed him, and he sassed them back, and said he’d attend to them and lay them all out in their turn, but he couldn’t now because he’d come into town to kill old Dr. Wilder, and his motto was “Meat first, potatoes second.”

  He seen me, and rode up and says: