The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Undead Page 16

  When I heard that, it made me think of Aunt Polly and the Widder Douglas and how they made me want to believe in things that others thought was stupid and foolish. Says I to myself, this is a girl I’m letting that old reptile rob of her money!

  So Mary Jane finally wears down her sister, and she tells Joanna to ask for my pardon, and Joanna says – fine. She done it, too; and she done it beautiful. There was no crackin’ and eye-rollin’. It was so beautiful it was good to hear, and I wished I could tell a thousand lies, just so I could hear it again.

  And then I thinks to myself, this is another one I’m letting him rob of her money. I felt so ornery and low-down and mean that I says to myself, my mind’s made up. I’ll get their money back for them or bust.

  When I get by myself in my cubby and set for a moment, I get to think this thing over. Shall I go to that doctor, private, and blow on these frauds? No – that won’t do. The king and the duke could make it warm for me. Shall I go to Mary Jane and tell her the whole story? No – even if she believed me – her face would give her away, sure. They’d see something was wrong and glide right out and get away with it. No; there warn’t no good way but one. I got to steal that money somehow, and get it back to the girls. Those two got a good thing here, though, and they ain’t a-goin’ to leave till they’ve played the family and the town for all they’s worth.

  So, thinks I, I’ll go and search their rooms. I didn’t even have to bother with the duke’s room. The king wouldn’t let anyone else take care of that money but himself. So I went to his room and began to paw around, but soon enough I hears footsteps coming, so I jumped in Mary Jane’s closet and snuggled myself in as far as I could with her frocks. Then I stood perfectly still.

  The king and the duke came in and shut the door. Then they sits down and the king says:

  “Well, what is it? And cut it short, because it’s better for us to be down there grievin’ and getting’ drunk than up here whisperin’ like school girls and givin’ the rest of ‘em a chance to talk us over and compare notes.”

  The duke didn’t say a thing – he couldn’t by now; the lockjaw had gotten that far. But I heard him grunt, then write on a piece of paper. Soon the king busts out laughing.

  “What! You want to skip out now! Oh, and just ignore the rest o’ the property! March off like a bunch o’ fools and leave eight or nine thousand dollars worth o’ property layin’ around just beggin’ to be scooped up?”

  The duke grumped and wrote something else.

  The king says: “Oh my, you’re a sweet one. Don’t want to rob a bunch of precious orphans out of house and home. But looky here, mister soft head, they won’t be outta nothin’! The people who buys the property will be the sufferers here; because as soon as it’s found out we didn’t own it – which won’t be long after we’ve slid – they’ll realize we can’t sell it neither. The sales won’t be valid. Your precious orphans’ll get their house back, and all the rest of it, too! They ain’t goin’ to suffer at all. Bless you, they’ll just be the butt of some embarrassment.”

  The duke wrote something short.

  “Cuss the doctor!” says the king. “What do we care for him? Ain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a simple-minded majority in any town?”

  So they get done and prepare themselves to go downstairs again.

  “We’ll put the gold under the mattress,” the king says. They took and shoved the bag through a rip in the straw tick that was under the feather bed, and crammed it in a foot or two, in case someone came in to tidy up and make the bed, then plumped up the blankets and straightened the comforter.

  Just as they was ready, and putting their grievin’ faces on, there came a horrible shriek from down below. I could hear the moving of furniture and the shattering of glasses and plates, and then there was several people screaming, and shouting to each other, and people saying “Peter! Peter” and I figured I knew what was going on. The experiment with the ice hadn’t been so successful after all.

  “Well, Bilgewater, I believe our late brother has come from beyond the pale for one last visit. We should get down there to make sure nothin’ goes awry.”

  They went out the door and slammed it behind them, then made their way down to the scene. I stuck my head out and stared at the place they hid the girls money, and listened until the two were on the first floor.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Peter Gets his Gold

  As soon as I heard them clumber completely down the stairs, I went to the mattress and fetched my hand into the ticking as deep as it could go and moved around until I found the gold. I smoothed back the blankets so it looked like no one had touched it, then took the bag up to my cubby and stuffed it into a corner and put an old hat box in front of it. Then I went downstairs too just to witness the riot.

  All the wires from the front of the coffin had been pulled loose and the coffin was empty, tipped partly over, a trail of water leading into the kitchen, where the dead Peter Wilk was standing hunched over the cook stove. He had gone Zum, and I guess it had surprised everyone. All the women were hanging back, whispering and sobbing to themselves, as were some of the men. A few of the men were in the kitchen with drawn weapons or butcher knives, but none warn’t that eager to start the action in his own home.

  The king was off to one side and nudged one of the other men. “Someone should go get the good doctor and tell him an urgent decapitation is needed. Tell him he must come immediately!”

  The dead man stood next to the cook stove, and besides the soaking clothes and a rouged face, fit in perfectly with the other mourners. He looked up into the king’s face with a doleful expression and only said one word:

  “Cold.”

  The king jumped back a step, partly because a dead person had just spoken to him, but as I reckoned it later, more because a dead man had looked him in the face and said ‘gold’. It might have meant the end of things. But the dead man was just cold.

  “C-ooo-l-l-d,” he said again.

  This time the king knew what he was saying, so he found a blanket and threw it over the dead man’s shoulders.

  “Cold,” the dead man said.

  “Oh, quite welcome,” the king said.

  When it appeared there wasn’t going to be any violence, the women went into the parlor and began reading scripture to each other out loud. A few of Peter Wilk’s friends got him out of his wet clothes and his daughters went to find something suitably dry and warm. The duke sat on a kitchen chair and said nothing, and I noticed that Peter Wilks only looked a little worse than the duke, whose face was damp with sweat and settling into an unnatural greenish-gray.

  The king ordered people about in a friendly, mostly useless way, and said he thought as soon as the dead man had been changed into something more comfortable, we should see about shepherding him back into the drained coffin, and perhaps put a few precautionary nails into the lid. This was when I had my idea. When Doc Robinson finally arrived, almost everyone said their goodbyes and scattered. Peter Wilks was walked back into the parlor and laid back into his coffin. The king and the duke said it was too much for one day, and went out onto the porch for seegars, and to talk about happier times with the girls. I went back to my cubby and retrieved the bag of gold. When the doctor went out to the barn to find some long nails, I put the bag of gold in with Peter Wilks.

  He looked at me hopelessly from his position.

  “Cold,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” says I, and tucked one of the old blankets around him, hiding the gold. Then the doctor returned and drove in a half-dozen nails and said that was all he could do for the time. Next Mary Jane came to the coffin, very soft, and I could see she begun to cry. The doctor looked like he wanted to say something, but he stopped himself and went out into the night.

  I slipped back up to bed, feeling ruther blue, on account of the unusualness of how things played themselves out. I’d never seen a Zum like that before. He warn’t crazy, nor vengeful, nor anything
bad; he was just sad, and cold. But I figures if he can stay where he is – and I didn’t think anyone had plans on opening the coffin back up again – we could get down the river a hundred miles or two and then I’d wrote to Mary Jane and tell her where the money is. I figured the doc would help her get it back.

  When I went downstairs the next morning, things were all put back together again. The parlor was shut up, the water from the ice was all mopped up, and there warn’t nobody around. Toward midday, the undertaker came out with his men, and they set up a bunch of chairs, and they borrowed more from the neighbors till the whole dining room was full. I could hear a thunk every now and then coming from the coffin, but the undertake borrowed an old melodeum, and as the place began to fill up with mourners, a young woman sat down and worked it. It was pretty skreeky and colicky, but it made noise, and that was the main thing. Unless Peter Wilks started banging on the lid with his fists, I figured we’d be fine.

  When the place was packed, the undertaker he slid around in his black gloves and his softly smothering ways, putting on the last touches, and getting people and things all ship-shape and comfortable, and making no more noise than a cat. He never spoke; he moved people around, he squeezed in the late ones, he opened up passageways, and done it with nods and signs of his hands. Then he took his place against the wall. He was the softest, glidingest, stealthiest man I ever seen. People liked it though; and most warn’t even aware of the show we’d had the night before.

  Then the Reverend Hobson opened up, slow and solemn, and began to talk; and almost straight off the most outrageous row busted on in the cellar a body ever heard, and the girls – whose nerves were pretty much shot at this point – just fell apart. It was only a dog down there, but it was such a powerful racket you couldn’t hear yourself think. It was downright awkward, but the undertaker nodded to the woman on the melodeum, and made a sign to the preacher as much to say, “Don’t you worry – just depend on me.” Then he went along the edge of the room and disappears down the cellar. Then in about a minute we heard a whack, and the dog finished up with a most amazing howl, and then everything went dead still. In a minute more, here comes the undertaker again, and he rose up and stretched his neck toward the preacher, over the people’s heads, and says, in a kind of a coarse whisper “Dog got his hands on a turned rat.” Then he drooped back down and glided along to his place. You could see it put everybody’s mind at rest, because naturally they wanted to know. A little thing like that don’t cost nothing, and it’s just the little things that are so important to a business. There warn’t no more popular person in town than that undertaker.

  Well, the funeral service was very good, and Peter Wilks did nothing to ruin it. The king shoved in and got off some of his usual rubbish, and the assembly sang two bully hymns about faith and believers and lambs and shepherds and such, and then they took him out and buried him.

  That evening, the king visited around and sweetened everybody up, and he gave out the impression that his congregation over in England must be in a sweat about him, so he must hurry and settle up the estate right away and leave for home. He was very sorry he was so pushed, and he said course him and William would take the girls home with them; and that pleased everybody, because then the girls would be well-fixed and amongst their own relations. It tickled the girls, too – pleased them so they clean forgot they ever had a trouble in the world. He told them all to sell out as quick as they could, and they’d all soon be on their way. Them poor things was so glad and happy it made my heart ache to see them getting fooled so, but I didn’t see no safe way for me to chip in and change the general tune.

  Well, blessed if the king didn’t sell the house and property and all the owned folks straight off, just the day after the funeral. Long about noon on that day, the girls got their first jolt. A couple of slave traders came along, and the king sold ‘em all and away they went, the two sons up the river to Memphis, and their mother down to Orleans. I thought the girls and them servants would break their hearts for grief, them crying around each other, and the girls said they hadn’t dreamed of seeing the family separated or sold away from each other. I can’t get it out of my memory – them girls sobbing and them owned folks hanging around their necks and crying. I reckon I might not ‘a’ stood it at all, but bust out and tell on our gang, if I hadn’t knowed the sales warn’t no account and they’d all be back home in a week or two.

  This made a big stir in town too, and a good many of their friends and neighbors come out flatfooted and said it was scandalous to separate the mother and children that way. It lessened their opinion of the frauds some; but the old fool bulled right along and said it was all for the best – though whose best, he didn’t say.

  Next day they was going to auction off what was left of the property. Earlier in the morning the king and duke come up in the garret and woke me up, and I could see by their look that there was trouble. The king says:

  “Was you in the room night before last?”

  “No, your majesty” – which was the way I always called him when nobody but our gang was around.

  “Was you in there yesterday?”

  “No, your majesty.”

  “Honor bright, now – no lies.”

  “Honor bright, your majesty. I ain’t been in your room since Miss Mary Jane took you and the duke and showed it to you.”

  The king thinks a moment and says:

  “Have you seen anyone else go in there?”

  “No, your grace.”

  “Stop and think a moment.”

  I studied awhile and seen my chance; then I goes:

  “I seen the folks that got sold go in there once or twice.”

  But of them give a little jump, and looked like they hadn’t expected it, and then like they had.

  “Well, go on! What did they do? How’d they act?”

  “They didn’t act any way, as far as I could see. They shoved in there to do up your majesty’s room, or something. Then they tip-toed away, and when they seen me, they said they was clearin’ up all the rooms and I should go do something else awhile, or eat breakfast or such.”

  “Great guns, this is a go!” says the king, and both of them looked pretty sick and miserable. Then the Duke let out an awful moan and slumped forward in his chair, almost pitching completely to the ground, and the king shook his head in despair. “And here we’ve gone and sold them for a song.”

  Says I, kind of timid-like:

  “Is something gone wrong?”

  The king whirls on me and rips out:

  “None o’ your business! You keep to mind y’r own affairs – if you got any - long as we’re in this town. Don’t you forgit it – you hear?” Then he says to the duke “We just got to swaller it and say nothin’; mum’s the word for us.”

  I was starting to think everything would work out fine, but the duke raises himself off the ground and I see he has this enormous, twisted grin on his face, and he gives an awful, wet laugh and says:

  “Quick sales and small profits. That’s the life for me. It’s a great business we’re in.”

  The king snarls around on him, but he sees the duke’s grin and tones himself down and says:

  “I was trying to do the best I could in selling ‘em so quick. Is it my fault any more’n it’s yourn?”

  “Well, they’d still be in this house and we’d be gone if I’d had my advice listened to.”

  The king sassed back as much as was safe for him, but the duke interrupts him and puts a finger to his lips, meaning he’d had enough. Then he thinks of one more thing and stands in front of the king until the king looks up and meets his eye:

  “One more little thing, highness,” he says, all the more curious since he hadn’t said a peep for almost a week, and here he was making conversation. “This ‘Bilgewater’ thing; it was funny once, but that time has gone and expired. You won’t call me that again, will you? Hmm?”

  The old man looked at his feet and shook his head, and said he wouldn’t. The rest
of the morning the king lit into me, for not telling him I seen people in his room acting that way – said any fool would ‘a’ knowed something was up. Then he cussed himself for awhile, and said it all came of him not paying attention to things, and he’d be blamed if he’d ever do it again. He addressed the duke not at all, nor even looked in his direction, and the duke nodded in agreement, and kept wearing his grin, though there warn’t nothing funny about what was happening.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I Confide in Mary Jane

  By and by it was time to wake up. I got out of my cubby, but as I come downstairs, I see the girls’ room was open, and Mary Jane was setting on her trunk, which was also open, and she was packing things into it – getting ready to go to England. But she had stopped now and had her face in her hands, crying. I felt awful bad to see it, so I went in there and says:

  “Miss Mary Jane, I know you can’t a-bear to see people in trouble, and neither can I – tell me about it.”

  So she done it. And of course it was the owned folks – the family – that they had broken up and sent in both directions up and down the river. She said her beautiful trip to England was about to be spoiled for her, knowing that the mother and her two sons were never going to see each other again, and she felt it was on her head. She says:

  “Oh dear, dear, to think that poor family is now asunder and will never see each other’s face again, and I did nothing to stop it. But what could I have done?”

  “But they will see each other again – inside of two weeks, and I know it!” says I.

  It was out of my mouth before I could stop and think; maybe if I had thought a second I wouldn’t’ve said a word. But before I could budge, she throws her arms around my neck, all excited and happy, and I see I had spoken too sudden, and was in a close place. I asked her to let me think a minute; and so she set there, very excited and handsome, looking much relieved and eased-up.