Huck Out West by Robert Coover

Author:Robert Coover
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

CHAPTER XVIII

HILST WE WAS setting Deadwood’s broke bones in the moonlight, using sticks and branches tied with rags tore from the shirts of emigrants laying dead-drunk in the mud up the hill above us, Eeteh got to telling the story of how Coyote tricked Time. Deadwood was favorably busted up, but he warn’t feeling no pain. He didn’t know where he was and he probably wouldn’t never know again. His nose was squashed and Eeteh had molded up a new one, pushing his fingers up the nostrils to press the inside papery bits back together. We scooped up mud and grass to make a cast for it.

When Eeteh was resetting Deadwood’s toothless jaw, I sneaked back up to Zeb’s to pry the bar plank out from under the drunks who’d fell over on it. Things was still pretty crazy in there, but sinking towards a generl stupidness. The hooting and hollering and gunshots was mostly moved outside where it warn’t so crowded up with bodies.

We strapped Deadwood down to the plank like a litter, and betwixt the old prospector’s scrawny shoulder blades, we stuffed a shirt I’d hived off of a fallen emigrant. We stripped off his filthy old coat and pants, leaving him in a kind of handmade union suit he probably hadn’t took off since he put it on, and begun trying to do something about his busted bones. It was slow work, stretching all the bones apart and settling them back together best we could, then splinting and bandaging them up, and time was exactly what we hadn’t got near enough of. Which was why Eeteh was gabbling on about it. We was both scared, but we neither of us was trying to show it.

Eeteh says that Time used to be lost in empty space and nobody growed old, until Sun and Moon come along. Sun and Moon they worked for Time. Time was the boss. He could talk to you, mostly just to push you around, but you couldn’t talk to him. There warn’t no stars yet and Moon was always either shining or not shining, so there was only two days in each month and they flew by, tick-tocking back and forth like Deadwood’s fob watch. People growed old so fast they didn’t hardly have time to get born before they was dying. It was how Time wanted it. Dying warn’t a particular concern a his and he didn’t have to learn to count past two.

Coyote was feeling very sad about it, Eeteh says, so sad he thought he might kill himself to stop growing older, but he was a coward as bad as we was and couldn’t make himself do that. He reckoned the only other solution was to stop Time or at least stretch him out somehow like we was doing to old Deadwood.

Time kept Sun and Moon apart, they lived in separate lodges and warn’t noway allowed in the same one together. Only one a them was let out into the sky

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