“I’m glad you got away, Grace, truly. Which one’s your wagon?”
“That one over there. It’s a real boneshaker. I never knew Pa’s wagons were sprung till I rode in that old rattletrap.”
“Who owns it?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Shaughnessy. He used to be a printer till he sold his press and shop to join the rush. Mrs. Shaughnessy is none too happy about it. She wanted to stay behind but he made her come. If I had of been her I would of run off from him years ago, he’s so stupid and boring and full of himself. Still, I never met a man that wasn’t.”
“Me neither,” says I, still wanting to keep her sweet.
“She’s taking her revenge, though, pretending to be sick. She lies on a mattress in the wagon and every time it goes over a bump she groans and says her insides are being shook out of place. She never lets up, just keeps on and on at him about how they should never have left home. She’ll nag him clear to California. Who are you with?”
I told her about Mrs. Ambrose and she says:
“You’re lucky. I saw you riding up and down on your horse. I wish I had one so I could get away from Mrs. Shaughnessy’s tongue. She’s driving me to distraction.”
“I reckon you can borrow him from time to time,” says I.
“I should just hope so. After all, I know something that’s worth a thousand dollars.”
“You do? What is it?”
“Why, the secret about who you are, you little idiot, what else?”
“But I’m only worth five hundred.”
“Not any more. Didn’t you see the posters that went up in St. Joe the day before we left? The reward got doubled. You’re mighty valuable for someone so skinny.”
“I can show you the horse right now, Grace. You can pat him and feed him a sugar lump.”
“Don’t think you can get around me that easy, Huckleberry Finn. I’ll call in the debt whenever I please and not before. You just better be nice to me, that’s all.”
“Anything you say, Grace.”
If she got me any more under the thumb I would of had a hole in the top of my skull, but there ain’t nothing I can do except smile and be polite. Tom Sawyer says a woman with a grudge against you is a fearful thing and you got to be careful how you tread. Maybe if I’m lucky she’ll fall off the wagon and get squashed by the wheels. Says I:
“How did you come to be with the Shaughnessys?”
“Mr. Shaughnessy hired me for a dollar a week to tend his wife, even if he knows she’s not truly ailing.”
“If he knows, then it’s a pure waste of money. It don’t make sense.”
“Oh, yes it does,” she says, patting her hair into shape. “He never intended to hire a nursemaid, but when I came along, why, he just changed his mind.”
“But why?”
“Oh, fiddlesticks. Can’t you guess? Are you stupider than you look? He thinks I’m pretty is why. I just had to bat my eyes a little and he made me an offer on the spot, just like I knew he would. Men are so predictable. Mrs. Shaughnessy never liked the idea at first, but then I sung her a song and looked all innocent the way Ma taught me and she says how sweet I am and I can sing her to sleep at night so she won’t feel the pain in her gizzard. They’re both so blockheaded. Still, it’s the only way I’ll ever get to California.”
“I reckon I’ll be getting back now,” says I. “They’ll be expecting me.”
“Well you just run along like a good little boy, but don’t forget I’m watching you. If you play any mean tricks like the last time I’ll tell all. Maybe I’ll tell all anyway, I just haven’t made up my mind,” she says.
“Did I tell you before how pretty your hair is, Grace? It’s a real picture.”
“I know it is, now scat, you little judge-murderer.”
And I did, all meek and humble and doggish. It made me squirm inside to do it, but when your leg’s in a bear trap you got to walk with a limp. I hunted out Jim and give him the details and his face went all slack.
“She de las’ person we needs on dis trip, Huck. We ain’t goin’ to get no peacer mind wid dat girl aroun’ our necks. Someone put a hex on us for sure. Das de onlies’ way I kin figure we gettin’ so mucher de bad luck.”
“What do you know about hexing, Jim? Maybe we could put one on Grace to make her drop dead or get struck by lightning.”
“I knows a fair amount I reckon. Dere was a conjure woman I knowed one time an’ de niggers was all scareder her on accounter she had a tame crow sat all de time on her shoulder, an’ was uglier’n sin too.”
“Well, crows ain’t generally held to be handsome except to other crows.”
“De woman de ugly one, Huck. De crow was a mighty fine bird, de bigges’ I ever seen, an’ he talked some too.”
“What kind of things did he say?”
“I rec’llect he was pow’ful fonder sayin’ ‘Pass de peas,’ an’ ‘Sweep de flo’,’ an’ suchlike.”
“That don’t sound too devilish to me, Jim.”
“I reckon he got it off’n de woman when she’s givin’ her husban’ orders aroun’ de house. He was all de time watchin’ his step so’s she never put a hex on him an’ turn him into a cockroach, or maybe a bat. He was de miserablest man I ever seen. It don’ do no good to marry a conjure woman, Huck. Dis one done run her man downter a shadder.”
“But what did you learn off her?”
“Dere was a time I had a bad pain in de belly an’ she tol’ me how to get it fixed. You got to take a leaf off’n a willer tree das hangin’ over still water, an’ a blader grass das been stomped on by a bull, an’ a wood splinter from a house where someone died jest recent, an’ a hunker beeswax from a tree das got two forks, an’ you ties it all up in a hair off’n a virgin’s head, den you puts it under your piller an’ sleeps on it.”
“Did it work?”
“It sure did, Huck, I slep’ wid dat charm five nights an’ de pain went away.”
“Well Grace don’t have a bellyache that I know of. What we need is a hex that’ll give her one so bad she dies of it. Can you remember anything like that?”
He rubbed his hand along his jaw and the beard he’s growed rasped away, then he says:
“She tol’ me one time de certaintest way to kill a body outside of a gun or axe is to get holder a piecer cloth from de person you want dead’s shirt or britches, an’ a coupler hairs off de head, an’ jest a smidgin of shit dey dropped, an’ you mix de turd an’ de hair wid clay an’ make a doll, den you wraps de cloth aroun’ it an’ say de spell an’ poke a pine needle in it an’ bury it on de nex’ full moon.”
“I reckon it’s possible to do all that, but the turd’s a problem. Does the spell work without it?”
“It’s de prime section, Huck. You got to get holder some.”
“Well, I’ll work on it and get the rest meantime. Do you recollect the words of the spell?”
“Le’s see now.… It’s comin’ to me.…
Doller clay, doller hair
Make your owner soon beware
Shinin’ moon, full an’ bright
Kill dis man at dead of night”
“We’ll do it soon as we can, Jim. I don’t trust Grace not to tell. She’s awful changeable and contrary.”
“You sure you wants to do it, Huck? I reckon it’s murder.”
“No it ain’t. Where in the Bible does it say ‘Ye shall not hex a body to death’?”
“Nowheres I kin rec’llect.”
“Well there you are.”
“It do say ‘Thou ain’t allowed to do de killin’.’”
“So it does, but we won’t be doing no killing, Jim. It’s the hex that’ll do it for us.”
“If you reckon so, Huck.”
“It’s her or us as I see it. Don’t the Bible say ‘Thou shall not allow thyself to be delivered into the hands of thine enemies’?”
“Do it? I Don’ rightly know dat piece.”
“Well it’s in there somewhere, and if I had a Bible I’d look it up for you. I n
ever killed the judge and I got to protect myself.”
That night the bulldog come chomping his way into my dreams again.
11
Building a Doll—Two False Alarms—A Lecture from the Colonel—Unsettling News—Hopes and Dreams—A Sense of Smell
The train got settled into ways that never changed from one day to the next. Get up at dawn, cook breakfast, hitch the teams and travel all day except for a break around noon, but you kept the teams hitched while you fed and watered them a little, then on again till near dusk, pull the wagons into a circle, unhitch, feed and water, gather in dead brushwood for fires, feed yourselfs, talk some, then sleep. It was godawful dull. Colonel Naismith worked out a schedule for guard duty to get the men used to it by the time we reached Injun territory, which is any day now. Thaddeus says they’ll be Pawnee hereabouts, and most likely friendly, but the colonel says we got to be prepared anyway.
All the while I planned for the hex doll, and it was hard work. First I got the hair, which was the easy part. I just stayed around Grace in the evenings till she got used to me being there like a faithful dog, which is how she treated me anyhow, and one night I said her hair is looking kind of snaggled and dirty and she got huffy and took out her brush and give it a good going over till it shone. Then when she was putting ribbons in it, I snitched a few hairs out of the brush behind her back and shoved them in my pocket.
The piece of dress was harder, but I figured a way. I knowed now what time the Shaughnessys went to bed, and what time Mrs. Shaughnessy finally quit using her mouth for talking and just used it to snore through, about an hour later generally. I had to wait till it’s all silent and safe. Grace slept in the tail end of their wagon behind a blanket partition Shaughnessy set up for the sake of maidenly modesty, as he puts it. What I done was I hooked a pair of shears out of Mrs. Ambrose’s sewing box and snuck through the camp and climbed up into the back of the Shaughnessy wagon quiet as an Injun, which Thaddeus says don’t make no sound at all when they’re fixing to sneak into the enemy camp.
The tailboard creaked some when I hauled myself up and over it, then I’m inside and stood over Grace, only it’s so dark in there I never seen a thing, only heard her breathing. I felt around careful so’s I don’t wake her, then I can feel dress material under my fingers and whipped out the shears and cut off a chunk. There still ain’t no sound except for Grace breathing and the Shaughnessys snoring over the other side of the blanket. Then I snuck out again and went back to our wagon and whispered to Jim I got the stuff we needed.
“Das good, Huck,” he whispers back. “Now we halfway done an’ only needs de clay an’ de turd. You figured a way to get it yet?”
“I been thinking on that, Jim, and I reckon we got to make do with horse or oxen turd. It ain’t dignificated to mess with the human kind.”
Jim says he ain’t sure the hex works without the genuine makings but he’s agreeable, and next day I stole a handkerchief of Mrs. Ambrose and got a pile of oxen flop and took it down into a little gully to mix it up with clay and dirt. I rolled it into a ball and tied all of it in the handkerchief, then stuck it in the back of the wagon and waited for night to come.
About the time everyone went to sleep Jim and me snuck off with the handkerchief, which was round and heavy as a cannonball. We took it away from the train past the guards strolling around and off over a rise. The moon was three-quarters full so there’s plenty of light to see what we was doing, and I untied the knot and rolled out the turdball.
“Well, Jim, there it is. Just you go ahead and make the doll and I’ll keep a lookout.”
He sniffed and looked at it kind of doubtful and says:
“I reckon you got more cleverness in de han’s, Huck. You kin make it.”
“That ain’t right, Jim. It was your idea in the first place.”
“No it warn’t, Huck. It was you sayin’ we got to put de hex on Grace.”
“But we never would of had the chance if you hadn’t of remembered the mixture and the words.”
“Dere’s somethin’ else, Huck. I been meanin’ to tell you de las’ few days now. I’se startin’ to get de rheumatiz in my han’s. Dey gettin’ to be awful hard to move. I cain’t hardly ben’ my fingers at all. See here,” he says, and shows his hands all clawed up like a dead bird’s and knocked them together like they was made of wood.
I seen there warn’t nothing for it but to make the doll myself, so I set to and begun it before I had a change of mind. It never took but a little while. I mixed the hair in with the rest and there she was, legs and arms and everything, only the head’s kind of small so it looked more like Chastity than Grace, but Jim says it don’t matter. We wrapped the cloth around it, then came the needle sticking part. There warn’t no pine trees in hundreds of miles so we used a knitting needle I snuck out of Mrs. Ambrose’s sewing box. Then it was done, all except for the burying at full moon which is two days off yet. It’s the ugliest, stinkingest doll you could ever see, and I wrapped it up careful in the handkerchief.
After I wiped my hands clean on grass we headed back to the wagons, but when we’re still a ways out there come a challenge out of the dark.
“Halt! Who’s that out there?” hollers a guard.
We never wanted to get catched with the doll so we ducked low and run for the train.
“Halt!” he yells again, and followed up with a shot. I felt the ball go humming past my head and heard it smack against one of the wagons, then there’s people yelling and more shots and general noisification through the whole camp. Men come tumbling out of the wagons in their nightshirts with guns in their hands, all wanting to know who’s attacking us. By then Jim and me was inside the circle and just mingled in with the rest. I grabbed a man by the arm and say:
“Is it Injuns? Oh, Lord, I’m scared.…”
He flung me off and aimed his rifle out into the dark, where there’s voices calling in all directions wanting to know who fired the first shot, and we snuck away under our wagon to let them argue it out between them. We got our own problem, which is where to hide the doll till the time come to use her. Inside the wagon is no good on account of the smell, so we wrapped it around in bunches of grass and tied it to the axletree underneath. Then Mrs. Ambrose stepped down and she’s got my Hawken in her hands.
“What’s all the ruckus?” she says.
“Injun attack I reckon, ma’am,” says I.
“Well what are you hiding under the wagon for? Here’s your gun, go kill a couple.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll do it directly.”
I took the Hawken and pointed it out into the dark like the others was doing, but it never satisfied her.
“Don’t just lay there,” she says. “Go on out and get ’em, sneaking heathens.”
“It’s safer this way, Mrs. Ambrose ma’am.”
She give a snort that says I’m a coward and got herself armed and ready with the frying pan, all set to sell her life dear if the Injuns take a run at us. We stayed like that till the guards finally settled it warn’t nothing but a wild animal that started the scare, and everyone went back to bed with a lot of cussing about trigger-happy guards that’s blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. Jim and me fixed our bedding so our feet was close to the doll and not our noses and pretty soon was asleep.
Next morning after the train was rolling for awhile I reined in and let it pass by till the last man in line come along, and he’s still miserable about it. This time he give me his name, which is Connelly, and he started in moaning again same as before, but I only give him half an ear on account of when I looked back along the trail I seen there’s men on horseback following us. The country was wide and open without trees, just runty brush here and there, so I seen clear for miles. The riders was still a fair-distance off, too far to tell if they’re Injuns or white. Mr. Connelly seen where I’m looking and spied them too and went all pale, changing fast from his usual color which is red.
“Is it Injuns?” he says, his voice all shaky.
“I can’t rightly tell,” says I. “I best let the colonel know.”
I give my horse some heel, and off I headed for the front of the train, just cantering, but when I turned around I seen Mr. Connelly whipping his horse and following along quickish behind me and yelling loud as he can:
“Injuns! Injuns behind us!”
He flied past me like the wind and the people in every wagon he passed got scared too and swung out of line and whipped up the teams and joined in till there’s thirty or more all rushing along. I had to get out of the way or get stampeded over in the rush, then I kicked my horse into full gallop and passed all of them again, and got to the front of the train just in time to see Mr. Connelly’s buggy hit a rock with one wheel and go bouncing off sideways and flip right over. The shafts snapped and he got flung through the air and come down in a tangled heap while the horse dashed on past where Colonel Naismith and Thaddeus was reined in and looking back to see what all the noise is. The colonel’s jaw dropped a mile when he seen the way everyone is racing to get away from the end of the train and he pulled out his pistol and fired in the air a few times, but it never stopped a thing. The wagons kept right on going past him, at least half the train by now, and they kept going all of three miles till the teams got winded and brung it all to a halt.
I give the colonel my story about the riders following behind and how Mr. Connelly started things off. He fumed and raged at the stupidness and sent Thaddeus off to fetch them back, then rode along the first half of the train that’s still in place telling everyone not to panic. Mr. Connelly’s arm was broke and he’s howling with the pain of it, but the colonel just ignored him and we went on back to where we can see the riders. He pulled out a telescope and trained it on them and says: