by Jon Clinch
He takes up his hammer and fits the nails into his mouth like jagged teeth and working swiftly seals the door against intruders. His errand downstream may take days or weeks or the remainder of his life if he is lucky, and should good fortune or bad prevent his return to this place he desires that no man should desecrate it. The fire is dead by the time he finishes and he steps outside into the greater cold to run his trotlines one last time and bundle the gutted fish in wet icy reeds for the trip downstream where they will serve him as either meat or trade. The skiff finds the current, a river within the greater river. On either side the trees stand bare and the brush juts raw from the mudbanks. The sun is at its peak, a faint glow through high overcast luring the skiff downriver. Finn follows it with no will of his own. How long since he has seen Huck? A year and more, at the very least, and under circumstances that he cannot recall.
He stops at a waterside trading post just north of St. Petersburg to exchange catfish for beans and sugar and a bottle of better whiskey than is his usual. Black letters on the bleached piling spell the name Smith but Smith is not here. The man behind the counter has one withered arm and he lists to the right when he walks and he eyes Finn as if he’s found himself trapped in a cave with a bear. “Where you bound?” Hoping it’s some distance from this lonesome spot.
“Where’s Smith?”
“Died last week.”
Finn grunts. “St. Pete.”
“Nice town.”
“I reckon.”
“Business or pleasure?” He ventures a tentative smile and then puts it away.
“Business. Might take me a little pleasure in it all the same, though.” His eyes are unreadable. “Depends.”
“You suit yourself, then.”
“I will.”
“And good luck with it.”
“It’ll come out just fine,” says Finn.
HE TIES UP just below town in a little copse of willow and conceals the skiff as best he can behind dry brush. He recalls a cabin not distant, an abandoned pile of wood and stone far past human habitation, built by some woodsman or hermit or lunatic long gone. He tramps the woods until he finds it again and then he moves the skiff to a place nearer by and hauls his poor goods inside, wishing that the boy were here to do the work but satisfied that he will be along soon enough, satisfied moreover that with the boy’s newfound wealth his own circumstances are even now upon the threshold of reversal.
In the afternoon he collects firewood and sets out some lines in the river and sits on the bank drinking whiskey from the bottle. Fish bite and he catches some and cleans them, throwing the loose ropes of their guts spiraling back into the river and wiping his hands on the snow that clings to shady spots here and there beneath the evergreens. He buries the fish in the snow, not caring if they’re found by dog or wolf or fox or some other, for the river remains crowded with their shining brethren and his son possesses six thousand dollars and he is himself drunk on whiskey.
By dark he decides that he ought not wait until morning to question the boy. Better to surprise him by night, there in whatever room he inhabits in the Douglas house where the widow has imprisoned him out of the goodness of her heart, than to abide alone here in the woods and permit more time to pass without commencing negotiations over that six thousand. By night he’ll have the advantage of surprise in addition to strength and pure mean fury and whatever vestige of paternal respect he can cause to flourish in the boy’s heart either by argument or by force. He corks the bottle and takes up his blanket and strikes off through the woods toward St. Petersburg in his black coat and his broken hat as a thin dusting of snow begins to drift through the arms of the evergreens and the leafless maples like flour from a sifter.
He skirts the cottages at the margin of the village, edging past them remote as a wolf from the haunts of man. Behind the village rises Cardiff Hill, its summit commanded by the Douglas house, its green sward lightly blanketed, its near slope from this southerly direction cratered with diggings. The quarry has been here forever but Finn has forgotten about it. Not until he stumbles across the whitened mounds of its tailings does he remember and take note of it, and then he lifts his hat to give his head a scratch and sits down upon a pile of rock to uncork the bottle. The whiskey passes down his throat with a welcome heat and settles in his stomach like home comfort long remembered. He pants some for the walk has been long and lately steep, settles the blanket upon his shoulders, and looks uphill where the lights of the Douglas house have either been extinguished for the night or merely vanished behind an outcropping. The longer he sits the wearier he grows and the less sense it makes to be carrying this bottle all the way up the hill and down again, so he finishes it directly and throws it over the edge into the quarry where it lands with a distant suggestion of breakage and the snowflakes turn to spiders lowering themselves on threads of moonlight and he sleeps.
COME MORNING he awakens beneath a blanket crusted over with snow and he shakes off a loose flurry of it in his struggle to rise. His breath comes slow and makes a cloud that drifts toward the precipice as he labors erect, cold air passing in through his mouth and downstream through his lungs to gather warmth and then out again steaming with the conveyed heat of his body, for Finn has become as any man will an unstoppable engine of change and transformation. He leans back upon his elbows for a while and then lies prone again, this time with his forehead in a little patch of snow that cools his brain and warms by contrast the remainder of him.
A thin patch of trees stands behind the widow’s house and he materializes from the post-dawn dimness of them with a great show of stealth, crooked so far over that he needs to take one hand from his pocket to keep his hat from falling off, studying the blank windows from beneath lowered brows. A fence stands before him and a gate, and he lingers there with one hand freezing in his pocket and the other hand freezing on his hat brim and the cross in his boot-heel warning away any devil save himself. He takes a few tentative steps in either direction, craning his neck for any sign of which bedroom window might belong to the boy, and when he spies one with the markings of unclean hands on the mullions and a littering of thrown gravel on the windblown shed roof below it he knows that he has found his mark. The boy will be off to school or elsewhere soon if he is not gone already. The woman for her part will be busy in the kitchen or in the parlor or somewhere else, roaming around the house with a rag in her hand and a song in her heart and her ears wide open.
Understanding that he has arrived too late to take up that six thousand with the boy, he curses the whiskey and the long walk and the sudden stoneworks that interrupted his purpose. Then he gives the fencepost a kick for good measure, knocking loose a soft sheet of snow from a crossbeam, before turning his back on the blind house and retreating to the woods from which he came.
He returns at suppertime to conceal himself in the trees behind the house, where the shadows are their longest. The boy leaves on some errand after supper and the man loses him in the woods and curses his luck but climbs upward on the drainpipe to take his place, over the shed roof and in through the window without a sound. With his hat on his knee he sits in the chair behind the door and waits patient as stone for his son’s return. Night comes on and the house goes quiet save the opening and closing of the front door and some murmuring between the boy and the widow. Listening to their voices Finn neither tenses nor worries himself, but crosses one leg over the other and rocks back on the chair in his pitchdark corner, fully at ease. He is relaxing thus when Huck enters with his candle and his carelessness, and not until the boy shuts the door does he stir. Huck, despite his city airs, has retained enough of his father’s woodland stealth to freeze at his sudden threatening presence.
“How much you miss your old pap?” Holding out his hand not for a greeting or God forbid for an embrace but for that other, of which he knows the boy has plenty.
The boy leans on his rearward foot and backs away edgewise. He once crept beneath a tent to see a lion tamer in a traveling show and to lo
ok at him now in this dark room with his candle clutched in one grubby hand he may have copied this slow sly movement direct from that slender man in his brilliant clothes, with his gun and his whistle hung gleaming about him like charms against mortality.
“Come on, boy. Give. High time you was good for something.”
“I’ve only got a dollar.” True, because this very day he has assigned his fortune to Judge Thatcher for safekeeping and received only that much in consideration.
“I didn’t bring you up a liar.”
“I ain’t one.”
“They teach you that in school?”
“I ain’t no liar. I told you.”
“You drop that school now, hear?” For he has reminded himself of one of his favorite subjects of conversation, more beloved even than money or whiskey for about these last two there is little to say.
“The widow makes me go.”
“Ain’t nobody can make you put on airs over your own flesh and blood. Not unless you want to.”
“I.”
“Your own mother couldn’t read nor write before she died,” Finn interrupts.
“I know it.”
“So you leave off.”
“I will.” For he has had this conversation before.
“Now give.” Holding out his palm.
The boy burrows in his pocket to produce a fishhook and a bone and the dollar, which the man snatches away.
“But I wanted it for.”
“I’m thirsty, boy.” As if he needs to construct an argument. Still he is the boy’s father and there may be some useful sentiment to be mined there. Moreover the urge for whiskey has worked its weakness upon him and at this moment he is feeling for the stuff a kind of paternal tenderness that anyone could perceive, even this child. “Now where’s the rest?”
“I give it to the judge,” says the boy, and Finn’s blood turns cold.
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“No. He wouldn’t have it.”
“I swear.”
He unsheathes his belt, drawing it forth snakelike from under his coat and sending his stove-in hat tumbling to the floor as he does. “He wouldn’t have it nor nothing else. Not from you.” Rising to his feet in the dark corner of the dark room, his shadow cast large behind him by the light of the boy’s receding candle.
From out of his other pocket the boy produces a thick sheet of vellum, densely lettered and sealed and signed, and in his high ringing voice he reads it off to his father like a lesson.
“Judge Thatcher,” says the man when he has finished, understanding this much at least. A different judge entire.
“I told you,” says the boy.
“I’ll see about him,” says Finn, and out the window he goes with the dollar clutched tight in his fist.
DOWN THE FROZEN CENTER of the street he marches like some mud-formed golem drawn by revenge or moonlight until the lamps of a tavern catch his fierce eye and he turns at once, lighter on his feet than any observer might guess, and mounts the steps to the door and enters into the place accompanied by snow and black wind.
“You Finn,” says a voice from the darkness. “You old dog, you.”
And welcomed thus, without so much as responding or even looking to respond, he steps to the bar and presents the dollar with ceremony befitting a magus and the barman brings the bottle. “There’ll be plenty more,” says Finn grandly. “You’ll see.” But as the night wears on and the whiskey dwindles he offers up no further proof of his assertion, and so having kept his apocryphal riches to himself by morning he awakens in the village jail with his head afire and his dollar used up and his black coat stained with vomit.
The marshal works a splinter of firewood between his teeth and leans backward in his chair. “You’ll be seeing Judge Thatcher.”
“I know it.” As if he has planned it this way from the beginning.
“That boy of yours.”
“What of him?”
“You know what of him. I’m surprised it took you this long to get down here, is all.”
“I come as quick as I could.”
“I’ll bet you did.”
Finn washes himself and eats a breakfast of fried eggs and flapjacks swimming in butter and syrup brought over from the Liberty Hotel and he wonders for the briefest moment if it might be worth giving up whiskey to luxuriate in a fancy start like this every day of the week for about the same money. Then he remembers the six thousand and comforts himself that he will no doubt be enjoying the twain of these luxuries before long, both the whiskey and the cooked breakfast too and God knows what all else besides. But the eggs go straight to his gut and the marshal has to escort him out back to the frozen-over jakes before they head out to see Judge Thatcher, who isn’t holding court today but is instead sitting peacefully in his study at home surrounded by lawbooks.
“We haven’t seen this one around for a while,” says the marshal by way of introduction. He is still working the splinter in his teeth, only now he’s grinning around it as if he and the judge are playing a lovely joke upon their guest.
“Time served for the drunkenness,” says the judge, who needs no more evidence in the case than Finn’s wasted appearance and high acrid smell. “And open that window a crack if you insist on bringing foul creatures like this into my presence.” Pointing imperiously.
The marshal leaps to do his bidding. A girl skips past the study door on her way to school, oblivious to the men within. She has two long braided pigtails the color of caramel, and Finn takes subtle note of her from the corner of his eye.
“You,” says the judge, marking Finn’s wandering attention, one finger aimed straight between his eyes like doom.
“Your Honor.” Finn’s attention regathers itself into a fine point and he blinks away the last tatters of his headache. He can’t remember if he needs to call him Your Honor here in the house but he figures it can’t hurt.
“I’ll thank you to keep your mind where it belongs.”
“Sir.”
Thatcher tamps tobacco into his pipe and puts flame to it. “I don’t know where that son of yours got his intelligence.”
“His mother, Your Honor.” Sycophantish, though the judge seems not to notice.
The marshal laughs through his teeth, a single wheeze like a dying concertina, the gasping end of merriment in spite of itself. “He got that right, Judge.”
Thatcher blows smoke, theatrical. “What of that woman, Mr. Finn? What does she think of your habits? Does she know what to do with you?”
“No sir. I reckon she don’t. Not no more.”
A clock ticks in a room down the hall and Thatcher sucks on his pipe, considering, letting time pass as if he owns all of it in the world, as if in fact he runs the manufactory where it originates and owns the patent for it too. He is a small man, neat and unprepossessing as a country parson, with a pale thin thatch of gray hair and sunken cheeks. Finn wonders if there is a connection between the meager proportions of some men and their grandiose desires.
“At least that boy of yours has some intelligence. More than I had imagined, if you want to know the truth.”
“That’s why I.”
“I have not yielded you the floor, Mr. Finn.”
“I know it.”
“As I was saying, the boy has some intelligence. Perhaps even wisdom.”
Finn bites his tongue.
“Which came as an altogether unexpected development, as I was saying.”
Finn composes his face into a blank.
“An unexpected development with unexpected implications.”
No reply from the well-behaved Finn.
“By which I mean unexpected implications for you, Mr. Finn. Including the fact that however greatly you might desire otherwise, the documents that he and I signed yesterday make it impossible for you to lay so much as a finger upon that wise little boy’s fortune.”
Down below the desk, out of Thatcher’s line of sight, Finn balls his fists upon his knees l
ike a pair of nine-pound hammers. The marshal braces his feet square beneath him but nothing comes of it.
“Not so much as a finger—at least until he reaches his majority, should you be fortunate enough to live that long. And by that time I suspect that he will have matured into a figure quite beyond your grasp.” Thatcher levels his gaze at Finn and draws thoughtfully on his pipestem, indicating that he is for the time being not only finished with his argument but quite satisfied with it and with himself and with the balance of the universe as well.
“It ain’t right,” says Finn.
“Oh, but it is.”
“It ain’t right that the widow takes the boy and you take the money and his own father his own goddamn flesh and blood gets left with nothing.”
“I did not take the money, as you suggest. I have merely become, at the boy’s request, its trustee.”
“Same difference.”
“Not at all, I assure you. I have merely taken upon myself certain fiduciary responsibilities—not limited strictly to the estate but also in fact to the boy himself, which the evidence of my senses”—here he sniffs—“the evidence of my senses tells me is more than his own flesh and blood has ever done.”
A nerve in Finn’s cheek commences to twitch. “I’ll sue.”
“A protracted lawsuit costs money.”
“I can get it. I come from it.”
