by Jon Clinch
“I aim to find out.”
“You never will.”
“We’ll see. So what’s the rule on that professor?”
“You won’t like it.” He goes back to daubing the floor with his rag. “Six months to claim.”
“He ain’t here six months.”
“I know it.”
“I claim him, I’d even sell him back to that Ohio college they like him so much. He don’t look like a worker to me.”
“You can’t do it, Finn.”
“You sure about the six months?”
“I am.”
“That long?”
“That long.”
“A man could starve.”
“Or work.”
“I’ve run up against the law before.”
“I know it.”
“I don’t mean this.” Indicating with a flick of his eyes the cell, the crust of vomit still visible upon the bedframe, the recent past. “I mean the Judge.”
“I know.”
“Him and my own rightful inheritance, which it looks like I’ll never get as long as I live.”
“Stealing a nigger ain’t the way to fix your problem.”
“I reckon.”
But Finn is not without alternatives. When evening comes he takes up a position in the doorway of the Reform Church, where Professor Morris will be speaking, and assumes the pose of a mendicant, hat in hand and cheeks hollow and eyes brimming with woe. To the forward-looking faithful he is the veriest picture of need, unbesmirched by such associations as his figure may possess for those acquainted with the taverns and the marshal’s office and the courts, and they do unto him as they would have others do unto themselves.
He is gone before the professor climbs the steps to the pulpit, and on his tramp back to the cabin he stops at the riverside redoubt of a bootlegger for a gallon of whiskey that will hold him until he has an opportunity to use the rest of his newfound riches to lay in proper supplies.
JUDGE THATCHER PERMITS the boy three dollars and before he can make use of it Finn has claimed it for his own. He awakens in the marshal’s office to discover that Thatcher is riding the circuit and he’ll be seeing a new man instead.
“This one a kindly sort?”
“Don’t know. Mostly he’s on the circuit.”
Finn looks as if he’s just been cheated at poker. “Time served’s always enough for Thatcher.”
“I know.”
“A person gets in the habit.”
“I know it.”
“Ain’t there a law on that subject?”
“Not that I know.”
“How one of them has to do like the other’n already done?”
“You mean following precedent.”
“Think I’d be smart to mention that?”
“I wouldn’t. No.”
Stone is the new judge’s name and he has a house in the village where he lives with his wife and his son and his daughter, a fine Christian gentleman presiding over a fine Christian family, and for Finn he has nothing in his heart but forgiveness. “I believe that a fellow such as yourself can be improved,” he says, careful not to say “saved” although “saved” is what he means.
“I do too. I believe it.”
Stone looks childlike to Finn, cherubic as a soprano in a boys’ choir. Tall and thin and pale, his high forehead crowned by a frill of swept-back hair the color of rust, he eyes Finn with the look a gardener would use upon a hedgerow that he means to prune.
“I have made a promise to myself, Mr. Finn. A promise that I shall never permit myself to give up on so much as a single soul. And I have kept that promise, regardless of how much evil and criminality I have witnessed.”
“You ain’t been a judge long.”
“No.”
“You giving me time served or some other?”
“Time served,” says Judge Stone, “with the admonition that rather than visiting a tavern tonight you spend the evening dining with my family and myself.”
In order to make Finn presentable to his wife and children the judge takes him to a dry-goods store and has him fitted with a new suit of clothes and a sturdy overcoat and a felt hat and a pair of boots, all at his own expense. Finn observes out loud that he will need to bedeck the left boot-heel with a cross of nails in order to keep away the devil, an idea that Stone receives as if it were the quaintest superstition from out of some impenetrable African jungle. “Don’t you worry about the devil,” he says. “He’s not permitted across the threshold of my house.”
Finn knows better but he will not say.
The food at Judge Stone’s table is not elegant but it is rich and varied and there is plenty of it. Mrs. Stone has even baked a pie, not because they have a guest for supper but because she bakes a pie most every day of the week. For Finn, whose diet changes month by month as the year unwinds, the preserved huckleberries speak of a season long gone and hitherto irrecoverable. As he chews, methodical as some old ruminant, these baked-black berries beneath the latticework of their pale and tender crust speak also of innocence undisturbed, of childhoods spent around tables like this and around others less elevated and bountiful, of secrets buried beneath time and earth and flowing water; and even in the forced absence of whiskey a vision passes before his eyes unbidden not of snakes or of spiders but of the turgid Mississippi beneath his window on the Illinois side crossed and recrossed with a cumulative ghostly weavework of fishing boats’ accidental paths and steamboats’ cautious trajectories achurn with white foam beneath which and supporting all lies dark water and darker history.
Only the children fear him. The boy is perhaps seven or eight, his sister older than that by a year, and they are formally dressed in a way that distinguishes them from the ordinary run of children, a condition that has made them disdained on one hand and elevated on the other but has nonetheless left neither unbaptized by the river of rumor that laves all of St. Petersburg’s children, a river heavy with detail about the hideous habits of Pap Finn. All the same their father is present, and their visitor is well enough dressed and better behaved, and they are safe by their own homefire, so by the time Finn has loaded up his plate with his third piece of pie and drunk his second cup of coffee the boy works up sufficient nerve to ask him a question.
“That dead body that came down the river awhile back: Did you know some folks thought it was you?”
Finn holds his fork in his fist like a club, and he freezes with it poised over a dessert plate clotted with syrup. For some seconds he does not move, not so much as an eyelash, and his presence at the table takes on by its very stoniness a kind of fearsome potency, like a mountain lion coiled to leap or a hunter waiting behind some leafy blind for the inevitable moment when his prey will step into full and vulnerable view. He is pure potential, dead silent and for all human purposes outside time, and as he hangs there during those few interminable seconds the boy realizes that he has made a dreadful mistake—until with a visible effort the dinner guest slides his lips back over blue teeth as tipsy as tombstones and gives the boy a ferocious smile and moves his head toward him just perhaps a quarter of an inch or even less, a cobra lining up his strike, and returns question with question: “What body?”
“There was a woman,” says Stone with a certain disinterest.
“Well,” snorts Finn. “I sure ain’t no woman. And I reckon I ain’t dead.”
“Where on earth did you ever hear such talk?”
But the boy apprehends neither his mother’s question nor Finn’s grim reassurance regarding the obvious. His ears pound with urgent blood and he grips his chairseat with both hands to keep himself from toppling off or running.
Finn decides to pursue a course of nonchalance, so he pensively addresses himself again to his pie and watches from underneath his shaggy brows to see what sort of punishment is about to unfold before him. His own boy he has horsewhipped for daring to enter a school spelling bee, and he is certain that in this house of judgment the child’s stoic refusal to answer h
is mother’s direct question will unloose consequences most immediate and dire. But Stone reaches not for his belt, and after a moment the woman answers her own question on behalf of the tongue-tied boy, saying to her husband something that by the sound of it she has repeated a thousand times prior: “Those children at school are a poor influence on him.”
“Amen,” says Judge Stone, which remark leaves the boy reprieved and the dinner guest both dissatisfied and stunned, as if he has been expecting a mouthful of honey and received a bee sting instead.
After supper the adults arrange themselves around the fire in the parlor, where Judge Stone speaks of temperance and charity and the overwhelming redemptive power of Christ Jesus. He folds his hands in his lap and squeezes them together until his knuckles go white as bones and Finn cannot decide whether his impulse is to pray or to prevent himself from snatching up his guest by the collar and baptizing him in the washtub. The room grows warm and Finn grows comfortably drowsy, until after a while it seems to him that Stone with his inverse-named Christ Jesus has turned the world upside down and back to front, making it over from the hard place he has understood since childhood into a place altogether different, a place where forgiveness is not merely possible but indeed the expected order of the day. Warm and full of supper and his head aswim with sleep he sees his own hands in his lap as unclean things yet things not fully beyond redemption, and he elevates them in the firelight as if they desire on their own to perform an act of invocation or some other arcane magic.
“Those hands once belonged to a beast,” says Judge Stone.
“I know it.”
“But they can be washed clean.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Rest assured.”
“Then so be it.”
The judge rises and takes Finn’s right hand and shakes it without reservation. “Will you do us the honor of staying the night? It’s a good long way back to your cabin.”
“I will.” All that he desires is sleep.
Around midnight he awakens faceup on the sofa with the fire banked and his new boots on the floor and his new coat draped neck to knee like a blanket. His mouth is dry and his stomach is sour and one arm lurches out from beneath the coat to arrest his dead weight as he falls and falls and falls in the last remnant of a dream until his knuckles crack against the hardwood floor and the shock draws him full awake. He lies still for a time listening to his own ragged breathing and his own panicky heartbeat and the stealthy slow rearrangement of coals in the fire, trusting that he will sleep again soon, but sleep will not come no matter how hard he tries. The coat collar tucked beneath his chin smells powerfully of lanolin and he envisions sheep which he attempts to count but to no avail, for his numeric skills are as limited as his wakefulness is vast. Finally, temperance and redemption notwithstanding, he decides that in order to get a proper night’s sleep he is going to require a drink.
He laces up his boots and dons his coat and hat and lets himself out through the front door and onto the porch, where a light dusting of snow has covered everything over. His tracks, tracks that by dint of his newly unmarked heel the devil himself might follow, go straight down the hill to the nearest tavern in the village, one about to close up for the night until Finn presents himself at the bar.
“Throw another log on, Willis,” says the barman to a huge figure bent low over a table by the near-dead fire. “Look who’s come in.”
“Whiskey,” says Finn.
“Turn out your pocket.”
Finn fishes therein with an apologetic look, as if he has somehow neglected to transfer his wealth. “New drawers.”
“Should have saved your money for the finer things.” With a nod toward the back bar.
“I know it.”
“You’ve run out your credit.”
“But my boy.”
“Bring him in and bring his six thousand too and then we’ll talk.”
“How about the coat?” He shucks it.
“Got no use for a coat.”
“It don’t resemble your usual,” says the giant Willis from his place near the fire.
“It ain’t. Brand new.” Showing it off adangle from one finger, like some odd and desperate haberdasher.
Willis rises like a breaching whale. The coat will no more fit him than it will fit his horse. “Give you a dollar for it.”
“Paid three and a half just today.”
“Not likely.”
“Shows what you know.”
Still the coat is clearly worth something. “I’ll give you two. Take it or leave it.”
Finn calculates not the true value of the coat but the duration of the walk back to Judge Stone’s as measured against such a quantity of whiskey as he can acquire as fortification, and upon reflection he decides that two dollars is not only a fair price but the highest bid that he is likely to get anywhere at this time of night. He folds the coat as meticulously as it stands to be folded ever again and lays it over the back of the chair opposite Willis and holds out his hand.
“Put the two on his tab,” says the giant to the barman, simplifying the transaction for all concerned.
“I ain’t open all night,” says the barman.
“I know it,” says Finn.
“Whiskey, I reckon.”
“Just bring the bottle and leave it.”
“I can’t leave it for long.”
“I should have gone somewheres else.”
“Willis ain’t somewheres else, and then you’d be out of luck.”
“I know it,” says Finn, and he commences to drink.
When he has used up two dollars’ worth and the barman has restored the cork and Willis has thrust his arms into the arms of his new coat like paired sausages and gone happily home, Finn trudges back up the hill to Judge Stone’s. The powdering of snow has become an inch and he moves as rapidly as drink and footing will allow, stumbling to his knees once or twice and recovering with a curse. The cold amplifies his purpose and assists his concentration but at journey’s end the slick fresh-painted boards of Judge Stone’s porch conspire with the fresh snow to trip him up and so down he goes, ass over teakettle, arms aflail and hat taking wing, to land hard on the flagstone walk. He is there still when Stone comes upon him in the morning, dead asleep or else merely dead, covered over with snow, his left arm oddly bent and buckled beneath his fallen weight.
The doctor, an ill-tempered hogshead of a man awakened far too early for his liking, has nothing in the way of sympathy. “This should teach you to handle your own anesthesia,” he says to Finn with a glance toward the judge. Neither one of them is amused.
For a while he squeezes and pokes the broken arm like a joint of meat, and when he’s satisfied he commences twisting it this way and that like a pump handle, and once Finn has finally had enough the doctor instructs him to take a seat in a straight-backed chair and plant his feet squarely upon the floor. He removes his belt and ties it around the patient and the chair both, and he orders Stone to kneel behind the chair with his arms around Finn’s chest. At last he takes Finn’s wrist in both his hands, and with a curse and a grunt he throws all of his considerable and compacted weight in the opposite direction.
Finn deflates like a balloon and his shoulder nearly separates and the pain in his arm screams louder than any whiskey could possibly mitigate, much less whiskey drunk six or eight hours previous, but the arm goes straight or nearly so. The doctor mops his forehead with his sleeve and ties Finn’s arm to a splint, and in the aftermath he presents his bill.
“If this is yours, Judge, I’ll forgive it. If it’s his, I reckon you’ll have to lock him up before I get so much as a nickel.”
“Now, now, that’s not fair to you.” Reaching for the paper.
But just as death outpaces justice the doctor is faster than the judge, and he snatches up the bill and tears it to bits.
Judge Stone: “Do you see that, Mr. Finn? Do you recognize basic human kindness when you see it?”
“I see it,” says
Finn, testing his arm. “I’m obliged.”
“Damn right you’re obliged,” says the doctor, “not that I’ll ever see any good from it.”
“Where’s your coat?” The judge.
“Drunk it.”
“So this is where my kindness leads.” Indicating the arm.
“I reckon.”
“Pray that I never see you in my courtroom again.”
“I will.” With a little dip of his shaggy head. Then he turns to the doctor. “Obliged.” And he shambles out, holding his arm across his chest like a baby child.
“You gave him a coat?”
“I did. And a suit of clothes and a pair of boots and a hot supper and more. Never again.”
“He has limitations, that one.”
“I see.”
“The earlier you learn that, the better.”
“I’ve learned it now.”
“The only way you’ll ever improve him,” says the doctor, “is with a pistol.” A locution which the judge finds so very amusing and insightful that he repeats it at every opportunity, until at length it enters the common lectionary of the village and becomes thereby Finn’s calling card and his sentence and his fate.
FINN WORKS SOME NAILS out of a piece of lumber that’s come floating down the river and caught on a snag upstream of the cabin and he straightens the nails upon a rock and then with another rock he drives them into the heel of his new left boot to keep away the devil. Thus girded he scrubs out his breakfast dishes in the river and sets them upon the bank to dry and climbs aboard his skiff with a two-gallon jug and a couple of empty sacks and a mess of fish gutted and wrapped in reeds. With his one good arm he poles upstream to St. Petersburg and ties up at someone’s dock just as bold as if he owns it and half of the others strung along the waterfront too. With the jug adangle from his forefinger and the reed-wrapped fish bound up neatly in a sack he makes for the white double front door of the Liberty Hotel but thinks better of it at the last second, his cross-heeled boot barely on the threshold. So down the boardwalk he goes toward the river again and then up a narrow alleyway to a weed-grown yard aswarm with feral cats and mined with fishbones and dotted with the inverted skeletons of ruined rowboats. Beyond the jakes and the overgrown garden he finds the kitchen, and he kicks open the door with the toe of his marked left boot and heaves the sack of fish up onto a counter within. “Where’s Cooper?” He addresses a black woman of middle age, her name unknown to him despite years of nodding acquaintance.
