by Jon Clinch
“I don’t know how I could manage it.”
The muscles in Finn’s jaw bunch.
“He knows where everything goes. Every nickel.”
“Not every.”
Will angles his head a few degrees from level and looks steadily at his brother. “So just because I lie about one thing, I’m supposed to lie about another.”
“I didn’t say nothing.”
“That house of yours. That house of yours is different. The paperwork says it’s in Pike County, for one thing, on a riverbank that flooded back in ’32. Strictly uninhabitable. A total loss.”
“I know it.”
“And do you know what it cost me to set that up?”
“How much?” As if dreaming that he could recapture it and spend it on food and drink.
“It cost me more pride than you’ll ever possess.” He steams where he sits. “At a risk far greater than any you’ll ever know.”
“I wouldn’t be so certain as all that,” says Finn, with the air of a man who possesses a secret idea of his own superiority.
“Have an apple before you go,” says Will with a gesture that includes both a bowl on the desk and the door itself.
“Don’t mind if I do,” says Finn. “I see you’ve got plenty to spare.”
A LITTLE BLACK BOY WHISTLES through missing teeth as Finn approaches down the far side of the snowy street and his mother draws him to her hip instinctively, muffling his music with her long strong fingers. Nothing about the boy commands Finn’s attention, including the possibility that he may be the child whom he struck for purloining his fish so many months back. Not even this living potential for absolution draws his attention to the boy, for he has lost not so much as a moment’s sleep worrying about the child and his fate. But the boy’s mother seems to know everything, even things she cannot possibly know, and she pulls him close to her flank as Finn approaches on the other side of the street, harmless or at least too distant for trouble.
Finn has eyes only for her. She is tall, elegant of movement, haughty of aspect. The only parts of her skin that he can see are her face and her ankles and that one strong hand with which she has restrained the boy, but even that much is sufficient to set his imagination afire. He pauses on the boardwalk and squares himself perpendicular to the frozen-over street, reaching the apple to his mouth. In spite of his rags and his blanket and his broken slouch hat he studies her slow passage with the proud indifference of a proprietor, giving his apple one great cracking bite that unleashes juice to trickle down his chin and nearly freeze there. She pauses not nor looks up. Only the boy, whether or not he recognizes the man who might or might not have been his assailant those months ago if assailed he was at all, turns his head beneath his speckled straw hat in acknowledgment of Finn’s presence.
DESPITE THE BITTER COLD in the house Finn drops his overalls and sits on the horsehair couch with its view of the river and thinks of the woman, not his Mary but the woman in the street with the boy he’d barely noticed, and even though he can conjure up all of the usual details in a mind sufficiently fevered to warm the premises with a kind of sickly heat he can find no pleasure in them. He sighs and throws his head back and tries again, baring himself to the cold with his mind aboil, beneath his bony ass his ragged blanket spread and by his haunch a stack of castoff newspapers that he collects for sanitation and kindling although for the most part their words are to him the most impenetrable of mysteries. After a while he succeeds and cleans himself with newspaper and sleeps.
Guilt and cold and darkness awaken him. He shakes the grate and starts the stove with the newspaper he has lately used, which flares damply and dies but catches the kindling nonetheless. Drawn back from the ash his hand bears a stain that catches his interest likewise. Down his bare chest beneath the blanket he draws one finger, marking a line from sternum to navel, halving himself thus, and thus cloven he proceeds to mark his leftward portion with signs and signifiers in charcoal drawn from out of the ash. Crosses to keep away the devil and charms to ward temptation. Strange native markings geometric and spiral. They overlap and merge and bleed into one another with a dark pro-creative fury until only he might know where one ends and the next begins and he is halfway all over dusty dusky black. By firelight he makes a raging discovery and returns again to the couch for another go with that blackened right hand, watching as he does certain lights make their slow passage along the river at his feet until he finishes and grows restless and desires whiskey. The great jug is nearly full, two gallons from old Bliss, corn transubstantiated by heat and cold. Finn dresses and puts flame to his one lamp there upon the table and sits by it with a glass, the jug within reach. He vows to drink just so much and no more, but when the warmth of the whiskey finds its way down his throat and into his belly and out into his arms and legs, some of those extremities still residual white and the others blackened beneath his clothes—when the warmth penetrates his body as first it penetrated Bliss’s cool complex works in the alchemy of transmuting raw corn into raw whiskey—he yields as he always does. Motes swim in his vision as the night progresses, black spots the inverse analogues of the lamps that drift by upon the river below. They persist for a moment, dart from one corner of his vision to another, and vanish in the furtive manner of spiders. From time to time he slaps at one of them, suddenly certain that the phantom thing is an arachnid indeed for the house is after all inhabited by hundreds of their worldbound brethren. His movements grow wilder the longer the night goes on, and before he corks the jug and thumbs out the lamp and crawls to the horsehair couch he has begun seeing snakes.
3
THIS PLACE HAS BEEN HERE from the beginning and it will be here in the end: Adams County, hacked from the wilderness by naming’s brutal baptism long before Illinois was a state or a territory or even so much as a dream. This single overwhelming certainty has belonged to the Judge for as long as he can remember, accompanying him in his youth and uplifting him in his adulthood and sustaining him in his old age. From his vantage point in the great white clapboard mansion alongside the grand white limestone courthouse on the finest block of the highest street in Lasseter, the most cosmopolitan village in the county and by nature its seat, the place has become the Judge and he has become the place in return.
He was born here, born James Manchester Finn on a straw pallet in a one-room shack in the Year of Our Lord 1762. His own father, adrift in an unnamed wilderness where every turning in every trail concealed a rattlesnake or a grizzly bear or a bloodthirsty Indian of unappeasable appetites, his own father before him had been a drunk just like his son. The one he hated for it and the other he pities but not enough. Drink he understands, the Judge tells himself, because it is a thing of vast and nearly indomitable power—like the law, like the wilderness, like history itself. Like them it makes certain promises and keeps others, warping the world according to its own mysterious will.
HIS WIFE HAS ALWAYS BEEN one to keep her own counsel, and she has profited greatly thereby. See her in the early years of their marriage, seated upon the porch or working in the garden or idly poking the keys of the piano while her mind returns unbidden to the Philadelphia of her youth, its streets crowded with life and its air still redolent of revolution. The Judge knows how she misses it. He can see it in her downcast eyes and in her pale cheeks and in the listless way she pumps water or works her needle. In truth he detects this drear longing more often than she feels it and by this subtle indirect means she conveys over time the entire burden of her past to her husband and in so doing frees herself of its weight but not its import. He read law in Philadelphia, between the sea-bound Delaware and the winding Schuylkill, and when at last he knew all there was to know he sought again the broad Mississippi of his youth. “I’d learned enough to know where I belonged,” he says to anyone who will listen, theatrically perhaps but with so much practiced earnestness that his overwhelmed listeners decide that he could not but mean it. They smile and nod at his late-gained wisdom and bask in the bright glow that it
casts upon their own, for they have never been so foolish as to leave at all. He is the only man in the county with clean hands in these early days, the only one to earn his living by means of paper and pen, and all on account of his implacable aim of re-creating for his wife a brilliant cosmopolis in these dark woods of his youth regardless of how widely he might need to travel in order to accomplish it. Adams County lacks a sufficient number of property disputes and bankruptcies for his liking and so he sets out southward into Pike County and eastward into Brown and Schuyler and even northward into Hancock until he is well known everywhere and well accustomed to the life on horseback that will be his even after he rises to the judiciary. It serves to elevate him over other men, and thus elevated he rules that his house unlike any other in the village shall employ not ordinary black servants but a white hired man, an extravagance that doubles the demands upon his finances and his time. “I’d rather be gone four days of five and know that my wife and boys are in proper society,” he likes to say, “than stay at home and have us all live among common niggers.”
THE SILENCES OF THE JUDGE have as many shades of significance as uttered speech in the way of assent, of doubt, of negation. He speaks not a word nor makes the slightest sign when his wife reports how the younger boy, her fine obedient Will, has been in bed all week long with a fever, and only by evaluating his silence and his fixity of expression can she gauge his possible opinions regarding the boy’s health and faithfulness and fate, opinions that may lie almost anywhere upon a multifarious web strung from extremes of mistrust and sympathy, pity and apprehension. Soon, having arrived home weary from his weeklong horseback pursuit of the usual round of trouble and woe across counties far and wide, he will climb the stairs and see about the boy for himself. But not now. He is in no hurry.
The older boy is healthy as a goat and twice as energetic and nearly as flexible in matters of conduct and digestion. These nights, listening to Will’s rasping breath and his sad weary cough and his repeated cries for the ministrations of their mother, he has lain awake upon his adjacent bed in a perpetual state of stoic puzzlement. The doctor has come and gone and come and gone again and despite the august old man’s best efforts Will has steadfastly refused to improve, which seems to his brother a failure of strength and imagination. The boy must desire nothing more than this, he thinks; his own younger brother must want nothing more in all the world than to toss in his bed and cry into his pillow and be fussed over by his mother and clucked at by the ancient white-haired doctor with his shuffling walk and his tobacco-stained fingers and his goiter the size of a cannonball. Twice the boy brings Will’s assignments home from school, but when his brother cannot find strength to complete them he gives off and does not bother returning to the schoolhouse himself for the rest of the week since it is springtime and he yearns like some fenced animal for the restoration of his utter and unproscribed freedom.
Long after dark the Judge comes up the stairs as if still bearing upon his shoulders the weight of every issue set before him for counsel, and he lights the candle on the bedside table and sits upon the quilt and draws a single small breath as he lays his square hand upon the boy’s hot forehead. The older boy can read concern in the set of his shoulders but the younger, poor burning Will, can detect nothing in his implacable face of stone.
“Buck up, young man.”
The Judge rises and steps out to the head of the stairs, where he calls down for his wife to prepare the boy a good hot bath in keeping with his understanding of certain homeopathic principles. She disputes with him for a moment or two, arguing that the doctor has been here twice already and has on neither occasion ordered such treatment, but the Judge prevails in this as in all things—for after all the boy is not yet well, and thus the doctor’s recommendations are of suspect value at best.
The older brother, the brother for whom a bath under any circumstance is a painful indignity, records in the book of his life yet another reason to congratulate himself upon his fine health and strong will. The younger brother, the enervated brother, who possesses no choice in the matter of this treatment or any, endures the bath and is returned to his bed in a gasping agony of debilitation like some fish half boiled alive. In the morning he will be some improved, and the Judge will take credit, but another week will pass before the doctor pronounces him fit to return to school.
The child will in fact prove susceptible all his life long, prey to influenza and catarrh and neurasthenia and the vapors. He will require attention. His brother, the elder Finn, will learn to do without.
4
DIXON’S WIFE, from the back room, pitching her voice above the noontime sizzle of catfish in oil: “You tell him we’ve got all we need today. I won’t be encouraging that one.”
Finn cannot help but hear, for whatever his other faults and failures he is not deaf, and Dixon lifts his shoulders in apology but takes the best of the man’s reed-wrapped bounty all the same, making a note of where this transaction has left the complex calculus of their financial entanglements.
“I done read about that boy of your’n.”
Finn decides he’s misheard, nods toward the whiskey jug, and ignores the man’s words for all his recent generosity and demonstrated, if sub-rosa, willingness to defy the instructions of his wife, a harridan as famous for her temper as for her fried catfish.
“Quite a fortune he’s landed himself in.”
Which gets Finn’s attention at once and allows Dixon’s earlier sentence to coalesce in his mind all over again, properly this time and with undeniable weight. “Where you been reading about Huck?”
Dixon draws the weekly newspaper from underneath the bar and places it square before Finn, where it would serve better as a placemat. With a stubby finger he points to a black funnel of headline and subheadline and boldfaced text the gist of which Finn can make out despite his youthful avoidance of the schoolhouse and his willful lifelong neglect of such book-learned skills as he could not help but have acquired: Boys, Gold, Fortune, Caves, Indian, Murder.
“I ain’t heard.”
Dixon places his whiskey on the bar. “Guess he’s fixed, that Huck.”
“I guess.” Finn sips at the whiskey.
“Him and that other boy, that Sawyer.”
“So they say.”
“Found a regular fortune in gold, they did.”
“How much?” He draws the index finger of his left hand down the page as though he could locate the figure even if he hunted for it all night, as though his finger were a divining rod tuned to dowse the facts from this dry desert of language.
“Six thousand.”
“Go on.”
“Right there, boss.” Pointing to the number. “Twelve altogether between him and the other’n. That makes six each.”
“Good God.”
“I know it.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Them old caves, south of St. Pete.”
“I seen them.” Finn drinks the whiskey in silence, shakes his head, and studies the paper. After a while he speaks. “Funny.”
“What?”
“Looks like I’ll be getting my inheritance after all, don’t it? Only it come upstream instead of down.”
“Looks like.”
Finn tilts his head back and closes his eyes and pours the whiskey down his throat like the veriest medicine. Then he sits up straight, deposits the glass on the bar, and indicates a bottle on the backshelf. “I believe I’ll be drinking the good stuff from this day forward.” He touches the glass with a finger or two, urging it toward Dixon. His eyes are watery.
“I’ll stand you one, Finn.”
“By way of celebration.”
“By way of celebration.”
Dixon pours.
“Leave that bottle.”
“Now Finn.”
“Just leave it.”
“I oughtn’t.”
Finn looks past Dixon toward the back room. “Suit yourself,” he says, with a cracked smile that lasts too long and the
n vanishes too suddenly. He turns his attention to the whiskey and works on it for a while, methodically as a banker. He labors over it without any special appreciation, but as if he means to burn its impression into his palate for use under circumstances when such drink as he can get is of far lesser quality. “That boy,” he says after a while.
“That boy.”
“God love him, Dix.”
“I know it.”
“He’s lucky I didn’t sell him a long time ago.”
“Reckon you both are.”
“That’s a fact,” says Finn.
SOME OF THE LUMBER that drifts downstream has squarecut nails still in it and as the wood burns the iron falls out and settles down through the ash like panned gold and gets caught in the grate. Over the years Finn has made a collection of the best and straightest and least rusted of these siftings. Some of them he employed to mount the doorframe at the foot of the bedroom stairs and now another handful he hammers out as straight as he can on a flat rock one by one, his breath blowing smoke. When he is satisfied he puts them in the pocket of his overalls and returns to the house.
On the floor he has laid out everything that he will require. Hooks and lines. A jug. A shotgun he stole from somewhere, more useful in the summer and the fall than at this time of year but still. The last of a carton of shells in a tow sack with dried beans and salt pork and some bread. A blanket and a tarpaulin. He kneels among these, touching each element in turn like an alchemist of old, and then he rises and opens the door and goes upstairs to the room he has painted white. The pale sunlight on the painted-over windows glows like moonbeams on milkglass and merges the details of the room and its furniture into a single soft undifferentiated blur against which Finn, his own skin gone fishwhite with the winter and his hat and coat as black as sin, comes and goes like an illusion. He drifts around the perimeter, trailing his fingers along the whitewashed plaster from wall to wall to wall, humming to himself in a low guttural singsong. Twice around he goes as if casting a spell upon the place. He stops just once, at the peg where hang the woman’s calico dress and her secret underthings and her old sun-bonnet, and he stands rapt for a moment to bury his face in them and breathe in what remains of her scent. Then he goes ’round one more time, slowly and thoughtfully and with an altogether dreamlike air, before descending at last to the room below.
