Finn

by Jon Clinch

  “By my measure, Mr. Finn, you’ve come a very long way from it. A very long way indeed.” To gauge by how his smile wrinkles backward into his sunken cheeks, the idea lightens Judge Thatcher’s heart.

  “Don’t remind me,” says Finn, but everything about the judge and his house and his lawbooks and the row of tintypes arranged like mathematical theorems on his great walnut desk reminds him. These reminders, these and the presence at his elbow of the marshal with his gun, are powers that keep Finn bound to his chair as none else could.

  “It does a man good to remember his beginnings,” says Judge Thatcher. “Even Satan remembers his beginnings. And therein lies the root of his eternal torment.”

  FINN SITS against a fencepost in the sun and studies St. Petersburg with a kind of magisterial detachment, distant as a wild beast or some grim god beyond petitioning. Even more than his brain desires the six thousand, his heart burns with shame over a single remark made to Thatcher—over how, at the commencement of their interview, he’d said that the boy’s intelligence derives exclusively from his mother—for this is precisely the kind of self-effacing lie that any fawning nigger might produce so as to deflect blame and curry favor. Beast or god, he desires little at this moment beyond eradicating this remark now cemented into his history by time’s passage, for as he has said it to the least of them he may as well have said it to the greatest.

  Beyond this and perhaps as manifestation of it he desires to return home rather than linger penniless and disgraced in St. Petersburg or even in the woods at the squatter’s shack. He pictures his riverside house and the open ladderwork of stairs leading up to it and the nailed-up doorway to the bedroom. Behind the nailed-up door he sees the stairway and above that—above the first floor just as the mind is above the body and as the spirit is above the flesh—above that he sees the painted-over and rectified room.

  He sees it now not as he has left it but as it once was: her clothing strewn over the chair and his bottle standing empty upon the windowsill and starlight from the river casting a recondite message upon the far wall, and the woman asleep alongside the depression he’d made over the years in that sagging straw tick laid hard upon its homebuilt frame (for her, he’d hammered that frame together for her, as if she required or deserved better than the mere plank-thrown pallet that would have suited him well enough). He sees her sleeping there as content and enduring as a stain upon bedlinen or history or heart and he kneels beside her as if meaning to utter some confessional prayer and instead reaches out to cradle her neck and press his thumbs against the softness of her throat and thus put an end to it.

  The starlight fades and the sun comes up and he has all day. He takes himself downstairs and brews coffee and fries salt pork for breakfast and then he goes outside down the open ladder of steps to the ground where late summer has dampened the hardpacked earth with dew. At river’s edge he unbuttons and fishes himself out and sends a long tense stream arcing into the moving water, not the last time today that he will return to the river some of that which it has given him. His trotlines prove strung with catfish great and small, and by noon he is done harvesting them and back home with money in his pocket. He lays out a tarpaulin on the bedroom floor and step by lumbering step walks an old empty barrel up the stairs to stand centered upon it, and then he throws a rope over a high beam and with the rope he binds her feet and from the apparatus thus arranged he swings her ceilingward over the waiting barrel. His knife stinks of fishguts but he keeps it honed sharp as the Judge’s vengeance, and as her red blood drains into the barrel and fills the hot room with the smell of iron he steps to the open window and coaxes the last drop or two of whiskey from the bottom of the bottle and out onto his parched tongue. Then he raises the other window and hauls the body down and lays it on the tarpaulin. Like a supplicant he kneels and applies the knife in a straight line unwavering from clavicle to crotch, and thinking of fox and beaver and deer and other beasts whose pelts he has learned to separate from their edible or worthless meat he extrapolates the details of this new chore with some atavistic portion of his brain. Thus with brutal thrust and tender prod does he remove all trace of skin, arranging it in strips and sheets beside him on the tarp for disposal in Bliss’s fire. Fastidious in his methods, he arranges each portion upside down or inside out, its inner surface made outer to show red and slick and fibrous but never allowed to reveal the dark curse of its hidden face. He arranges the pieces thus to speak of death and death only without particulars, as if by such transformation he can alter all that has gone before and begin anew, clean and pure and washed in the indiscriminate blood. By nightfall he is finished and he walks the barrel down the stairs and tips it into the dark river. He returns to the upper room and wraps the woman in the tarpaulin and stows the leavings in a tow sack and carries her down the stairs likewise and likewise tips her into the river with a silent ominous unfurling as of one great bloody wing.

  5

  OUT OF PURE MEANNESS the boy takes down some underthings from the neighbor’s washline and douses them in the shallows and hangs them up again muddy to dry, and when the question comes he blames the mischief on his brother, Will. Which everyone, including the boy himself, knows is so far beyond possible as to qualify as a confession.

  The neighbor, a narrow-jawed halfwit named Tyrell, stands in the parlor door with his wife’s brown drawers bunched in one fist. Muddy water runs down his arm to his elbow where it gathers like blood and drips down onto the freshly polished floor. The track that it leaves down his forearm is by some small measure cleaner than the remainder of his skin, for Tyrell has been digging potatoes and bringing in hay since before sunup, but this irony is entirely lost upon him.

  “My hired man seen him do it,” he says. Fixing his eyes upon the boy but speaking to his mother.

  “Your Lester. Your Lester saw him.”

  “Yes’m. So don’t you pay that boy no mind when he denies it.”

  “Your Lester’s word against that of my son.” She does not doubt for a moment that the boy is guilty, but the specifics of this means of indictment are to her so abhorrent as to require refutation. “Your black Lester’s word.”

  “Yes’m. A man sees what he sees. Color don’t make no difference.”

  The boy stands in the corner barefoot, willing himself to merge into the shadows gathered there.

  “Go get your shoes, boy.” Squeezing the damp drawers as if to wring out a confession. “We’ll see from their bottoms where you been.”

  “That will not be necessary.” She speaks like some old Divine Right royalty, and from across the room she fastens the boy to the wall with the thrust of an imperious finger. “The Judge will decide this matter when he returns at the end of the week.”

  “I reckon he will,” says the halfwit, for by his lights this is surely the best resolution imaginable.

  In the family Finn, justice delayed is justice magnified. Two days of stony looks and silent recriminations from his mother are two days more than the boy is prepared to endure, although as he grows into manhood he will learn to suffer such treatment by the yearful. With equal intensity he yearns for and dreads the moment when his father will return, and he desperately seeks out the words to tell his mother so.

  “You’ll get such punishment as you get when you get it.” She repeats this formula any time he lifts up his fears before her, either these selfsame words or others equally well calculated to suggest the unknowable and ineluctable qualities of his fate. From time to time she adds, “There’s no use in borrowing trouble,” for she knows that there is indeed plenty of use in borrowing trouble, so long as she is not the one doing the borrowing.

  In a shameful hidden chamber of her heart she desires that the Judge will wreak upon the boy some kind of rough frontier justice. At home in Philadelphia the decorous Quaker boys of her youth told stories of men staked out by Indians to suffer and die in the hot sun of places far deeper into the wilderness than Adams County, places populated by rattlesnakes and venomous insects a
nd mountain lions and worse. In marrying the Judge she tied her fate to a land where such barbarity, whether the accidental work of animals or the calculated work of man, is not only possible but inevitable, and she believes that the day will surely come when through no knowable fault of her own the Judge will turn brute despite the veneer of his Philadelphia education and set about establishing an ancient and uncompromising justice in this fierce Eden to which he has delivered her. Everything decays. In this move westward with the dying sun she has taken within her breast the universal principle of dissolution, whether as cause or by effect she cannot say and does not wonder, although she does know that here beneath her feet she detects both the dawn of primordial rule and the ultimate destruction of everything and to her they look quite the same.

  The boy begins to ask. “Will he.”

  “I can’t say what he’ll do, and I can’t say what he won’t.”

  “But.”

  “It’s not your place to know the mind of the Judge, nor is it mine.”

  “I’m just.”

  “Everything happens for a reason.” Which to her is an article of doomed faith and to him is an explanation of the webwork of causality in which he finds himself trapped.

  RETURN THE JUDGE DOES, in due time and burdened down with his own ideas and understandings. He drags a divisive trail of misery behind him as a mule drags a plow, and by its passage the landscape in his wake is altered day by day. The Judge’s reputation, a reputation long and fairly earned, is that none save himself shall be satisfied by his rulings. Some say that even he despairs with each grim final blow of his gavel, for the harsh justice that he measures out can neither sufficiently punish the guilty nor fully restore the wronged. Some say this, gathered muttering in damp prison cells or sipping tea in the parlors of great houses, but they cannot know for certain and the truth is more likely that they are manufacturing ordinary human emotions to overlay upon his transient and inscrutable self and make him thus both knowable and known.

  The boy returns from a rare and contrite day at school to find the Judge’s black bowler hat already brushed clean and hung upon its hook in the entryway like some inky aperture in the white wall, and his dizzy dreamlike urge is to escape by squeezing through it and out the other side into a place where men are neither parted nor linked by such fierce impassive implements as the Judge shuttles day by day across the virgin hills of Illinois.

  His mother is in the kitchen and with the blank thin expanse of her back she instructs him to linger not but instead to go direct to his father’s study, which he does, and when the door opens to expel him later like the whale casting out Jonah he is neither in the mood for sympathy nor likely to receive it. He is to do the neighbor’s laundry for a month, and moreover he is to do this penance and everything else in purposely muddied drawers of his own, donned damp and sticky and permitted to dry into a harsh scratchy encrustation upon his legs and his ass and his privates. The halfwit Tyrell finds this punishment amusing to no end, a circumstance that might refute the Judge’s alleged belief that justice, though necessary, is never fully possible, and he lingers about the laundry room when he should be at his chores, eyeing the boy’s leaking shorts.

  “You shit yourself again today, boy?” With an inquisitive sniffing that makes his narrow face look even more like a rabbit than usual.

  “No sir.”

  “Then what you got up there?”

  “Nothing.” Bent over the washboard.

  “You hiding a nigger up in there somewheres?” His head cocked.

  “I don’t reckon I could.”

  “You don’t know much.”

  “I know enough.”

  “Next time, you have that nigger take a bath a’fore he climbs in.”

  The boy rakes Tyrell’s things across the washboard as if to abrade them down to nothing but scraps and buttons and loose wet fibers of homespun. Some residual urge causes him to wish that the Judge were present to defend him against Tyrell’s weirdly troubling innuendo, but in his heart he knows that this is precisely the punishment or some variant thereof that the Judge has had in mind from the beginning. And so he steels himself. “I don’t have no truck with niggers,” he says. “Filthy or clean.”

  “They’s only one kind.” Tyrell laughs with a kind of fierce hiccup, the halfwit proudly superior to the boy. “They’s only one kind of nigger. That’s the first thing you got to know.”

  “I know it,” says the boy.

  6

  FINN LINGERS at his fencepost and permits the heat of the sun to draw him back from his reverie of that upstream house sloping riverward under its burden of remembrance. Two men stroll past his resting place, one black and one white, each of them paler and more bookish than the other. Head to grizzled gray head they converse like a pair of old philosophers. The black man is by a slight degree the more fastidious, dressed like a diplomat in a gleaming white shirt and a woolen suit the color of a chestnut, balancing upon his head an elegant brown bowler and bearing in his right hand a silver-headed cane that he uses only sparingly, as if he is loath to soil its chalk-white tip upon the ground of St. Petersburg. He walks with his shoulders thrown back and his narrow chest cutting the Missouri air like the prow of a ship, his slender hands are gloved in a pale off-white only shades lighter than his yellow skin, and from time to time he opens his mouth wide and laughs a deep round laugh from between bright white teeth as if everyone within earshot were appreciative of his refined sense of humor. Finn squints at him as he would squint at a bright light or the arrival of apocalypse.

  The two men pause a little distance away to greet another gentleman, this one known to the white but not to the black. Once their introductions are complete and their gloves have been removed as needed to permit the shaking of hands and then donned all over again, the third gentleman tips his hat and proceeds on his way with an appreciative nodding of his head—while the other two continue toward Finn.

  “New in town?” says Finn from his seat by the fencepost. “Your friend I mean.” Looking straight at the white man and the white man only, with an intensity that makes a show of excluding the other.

  The white man has been so long so far beyond contact with an individual like Finn that he accepts his question without reservation and stops as eagerly as if he has been invited to dance. “Why, yes,” he says, and again: “Why, yes indeed.”

  “Thought so.”

  The white man folds his hands at his sternum and begins to declaim. “Professor Morris is visiting from Ohio, where he teaches at Kenyon College. He’ll be speaking tonight at the Reform Church.”

  “You fixing to sell him?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Not that he’s likely to fetch much.” Here he permits his gaze to wander over the black man’s regally slim figure. “Not by the look of him.”

  “Sir.”

  “Ain’t nothing worth any less than a puny nigger. Other’n a puny nigger in a ten-dollar suit, putting on airs.”

  “Come along, Professor,” says the white man to the black. “We’re late for your introductions at the church.” He takes his associate by the elbow but finds him immovable, for the professor has been turned to stone by Finn’s effrontery. He spreads wide his legs and cocks his head to one side and leans forward upon his cane, transfixed by their interlocutor as he would be by a Siberian tiger in a circus parade.

  “You mind your master,” says Finn with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Git along now, boy.”

  “No man is my master,” intones the black man, with the theatrical air of an individual winding up to deliver a lecture or a sermon.

  “Is that so?” Addressing the white man, parting his knees to scratch at his crotch.

  “If you please, sir,” interrupts the black man with a schoolroom kind of sarcasm, “you may direct your questions to me. Dr. Bale here is my colleague, not my translator. And above all he is most assuredly not my keeper.”

  “I told you,” the white man puts in, “he’s a college
professor. From Ohio.”

  “I got ears.”

  “He’s a scholar.”

  “I heard.”

  “He comes from an extremely progressive state—a state where a man like Professor Morris is not only free, but free to vote.”

  “Bullshit,” says Finn.

  “Not at all.”

  Finn grunts.

  “You have a lot to learn,” says the professor.

  “I might.”

  “Change is afoot.”

  Finn cogitates for a minute. “If a nigger can vote,” he says, “then I don’t reckon I’ll ever vote again.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I don’t care what state.”

  “Time and events will overtake you.”

  “Maybe they will.”

  “Perhaps they already have.”

  As the gentlemen go on their way Finn has an idea. He returns to the jail where he finds the marshal on his knees in the one cell, bent over a bucket and bearing a rag, cleaning up after Finn’s own mess of the night prior.

  “You tell me something?”

  “What is it?”

  “What’s the rule for claiming a loose nigger in this state?”

  “Depends.”

  “What on?”

  “Where he’s from. Certain conditions.”

  “From Ohio, let’s say.”

  “You be talking about a free man?”

  “So far.”

  The marshal drops the rag into the water and sits back upon his heels. “Anybody particular in mind?”

  “I won’t lie to you. That professor.”

  “The one over to the church tonight.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Finn, you’re either the smartest man in this town or the stupidest.”

  “I need money. You heard that judge same as me.”

  “I did.”

  “Lawsuits cost.”

  “I wonder how much you’d need before you couldn’t spend every bit of it on whiskey.”