by Jon Clinch
She brings in the laundry and folds it and begins to prepare the fish. She slides a spoonful of lard into the pan and puts it over the heat and while the lard melts she dredges the fillets in flour and then in milk with a beaten egg and then again in cornmeal, and then she arranges them in the pan and steps away while they sizzle. The heat in the cabin is stifling, but she knows better than to ask directly why they cannot build a fire in the yard and cook out there when it gets this way. The less she is outdoors the better as far as he is concerned, and smoke would only increase the risk.
“Your father,” she hazards as they sit before their plates.
“The Judge.”
“Why does he.” Pausing to compose her thoughts.
“It’s his way.”
“But.”
“Nobody knows.”
“What would he do if he knew about me?”
“Don’t ask.”
This night he tells her to come to his bed rather than sleep on the pallet she has made up in the corner. Why he has waited this long she cannot say although she has begun to think that he might have a good heart. She obeys without hesitation for she lacks alternative. Before bedding down he swung wide the door for ventilation and propped open the shutters, so now a small breeze moves through the cabin bearing upon it the sound of crickets and the smell of the barnyard and bearing away the scent of fried catfish and the ticking of the woodstove as it cools.
When they finish he groans and rolls upon his back and places a proprietorial hand upon her thigh. In the shifting fragrant dark he keeps it there, a burning token constant while the moments pass and the air around them faintly cools and their bodies cool likewise.
She considers, lying there beneath that brand, what use she might make of the door that he has left open. A hundred schemes run through her mind, each one possible and each one faulty and each one rejected in the end. She requires her things, which would mean gathering them up from where they have gone scattered in this short time and restoring them in utter silence to her bag. He might rouse up during this operation, an eventuality that she might overcome by means of the chamber pot, but still. Obviously she must leave with only the barest of essentials. But where would she go? All she knows of Illinois is Rock Island and of Rock Island she knows only that Mrs. Fisk has people there whose names she either did not hear or does not recall. She has no means of transport beyond her own two legs. She does not even know which way the river lies, for she came to this place in darkness and has been kept in darkness ever since.
Ultimately he removes his hand and turns his shoulder away, leaving her to concentrate upon remaining alert until he should fall asleep. The night goes fully still and the breeze dies away, and she settles her own breathing to its most shallow. Some small creature, mouse or rat or other, scuttles past the doorway and as she hears its furtive steps muffled by grass and dust and then considers such noises as Finn himself might detect even from the depths of his sleep, such small courage as she has managed to collect in her heart diminishes and dims and dies. She nonetheless takes in air and reaches with her toe for the floor as gingerly as she can just to see, and it takes no more than that to bestir the man, who rises up cursing himself for a fool and stalks over to close the door and secures it with the lock.
FINN TOOK TO DRINK early in spite of his father’s counsel. “You can rely upon whiskey to destroy a man,” the Judge would say to no one in particular, waiting at the head of the table for Petersen’s wife to serve him his supper. The Judge’s own father before him had possessed a boundless appetite for drink, and as a result the Judge was by inclination more sympathetic to the lowest sneak thief than to any drunkard who happened before his bench. “Make no mistake,” he would say then and he still does, “I am always unstintingly fair to the tippler. I can be counted upon to be perfectly just in hearing his plea and gauging his punishment. But I must confess that such judiciousness brings me no pleasure.”
Thus Finn now takes a certain habituated thrill in sitting upon the porch of the cabin that he secretly shares with the girl and enjoying there in public his jar or two of whiskey. It comes from a bottle and is therefore of known quality and fair repute. His parsimonious father pays him little enough to maintain the place but between his simple needs and his patience with a trotline he gets by and routinely has more than enough extra to spend on such an extravagance as this. “That’s the Judge’s dollar right there,” he will say to Dixon as he completes his transaction, and surely enough it is, for he is fastidious in his accounting and careful to use his father’s funds for such purchases as this, which would break any such heart as the elder Finn may yet possess.
“Whyn’t you plant a kitchen garden back there come spring?” he asks of the woman who sits in darkness behind the door as if the cabin is her confessional. No remark could be calculated to produce in her heart more hope, or more dread for that matter, for in it she detects both a promise of some small eventual relief and a far more dire promise of a lifetime spent imprisoned nonetheless. At least until the Judge passes on and she can emerge from her cocoon.
She asks: “Would it be safe?”
“We’ll see.”
“It would surely ease your burden.” For she knows his habits and has read his mind.
“Put it over toward the barn, close to the fence as we can.”
“Where I’d be out of sight.”
“Mostly.”
“Mostly.”
This night she dreams herself trapped within the fenced yard by a terrifying personage who can be none other than the Judge himself or else plain Justice personified. He appears to her alternately as an enormous white man pale as death and as some ordinary inconsequential thing become animate, laundry or line or ax, and in whatever form he chooses to be made flesh he seeks to corner her and overwhelm her in some manner that her dream does not dare make specific. She awakens in the dark, pounding her fists upon Finn’s chest and clinging to him at the same time, and crying out into the empty stillness of the cabin and the farm and all of Adams County surrounding that place where once there was none such as her and now there is but one and it is she and she alone.
WEEKS PASS and they fall into habits these two like an old husband and wife. During the days she misses him, and not only because his mere presence in the cabin means a door swung wide if not to provide freedom then at least to suggest it. He arrives at day’s end like a liberating army, reed-wrapped fish in his arms and a bottle of whiskey in the crook of his elbow and the key between his teeth, and as he stands in the dusty dooryard she looks out through the tiny square of window and wishes that she were free to come outside and help him as he stands there juggling. When he finally springs the lock and gets the door open she greets him like a genie let loose from a bottle.
It must be during one of these moments that their peculiar joy is witnessed by the halfwit Tyrell. Other such moments there are, but with none to be their witness. In the dim candlelit evening, when she reads to him from a book of poetry he has found in the dry depths of a floating steamer trunk, she seems to him in her fluency a creature from some other place and time or an instrument shaped by the Almighty so that a long-dead cavalier poet might whisper his incomprehensible arcana into the mind of a benighted illiterate riverman. At night on the hard bed, as he explores her brown body with his fingers and with his tongue and with that other, she seems an astonishment and a mystery and a strange miracle, forbidden to him by his father the Judge but infinitely more precious for that.
These things Tyrell cannot see and cannot guess and would not treasure if he did. “I reckon the Judge changed his tune,” he says offhand to Finn when they meet on the mudflats by the river.
“I can’t say,” says Finn, for he does not care what the halfwit thinks about anything and if pressed would say that he most likely thinks nothing at all, certainly nothing orderly enough to merit acknowledgment.
“Changed his tune about that girl, I mean. She’s a pretty one all right.” Grinning, showing his teet
h. Tyrell has grown feeble with the passage of the years and his head bobs upon his neck like a lascivious sunflower.
“What girl.”
“Yours.”
Finn scans the river and waits.
“Your nigger girl.” As if Finn himself is the halfwit.
Finn turns to his interlocutor and blinks once, slowly as a cat, in either assent or disbelief.
Satisfied, Tyrell presses on. “I reckon even your pap can see the worth of a sweet thing like that.” He goes all moony and licks his lips as if the girl were Christmas dinner, and like a slug his tongue leaves behind a glistening trail.
Finn does not think before answering. “The Judge ain’t had no piece of that girl.”
Tyrell looks offended.
“He don’t know nothing about her.” Pointing a finger at Tyrell’s chest.
“I was only.”
“That girl ain’t none but mine.” Pushing at the halfwit with that finger hard enough to make him stagger backward a little upon his thin and bowed-out legs.
“I reckon,” says Tyrell.
“She ain’t no property of the Judge.”
“I know it.”
Had Finn denied the presence of the girl and offered the halfwit a glass of whiskey at Dixon’s or some other place he might have persuaded him that she was instead some vision or mere figment. Later he will blame this lapse upon his urge to defend her reputation against the repellent notion of her having lain with the Judge, although some might suggest that the opposite is more likely the case and he was defending instead the Judge’s inscrutable constancy. Regardless Tyrell shambles down the bank to his skiff, knowing what he knows and disputing within his mind what use he might make of it.
THE JUDGE TRIES THE CABIN DOOR and finds it locked from within, which he takes as confirmation. Neither knocking nor making any other signal he slips around to the back and pries loose the ax from the chopping block and returns to the front door, where he applies the weighty implement with a sudden fury. The raw lumber has weathered poorly and the door is instantly burst from its hinges and the Judge enters to find the two of them together in bed not even covered by a proper sheet, roused up naked and wide-eyed like a pair of nesting animals startled awake. He is even more appalled than he has prepared himself to be.
“I can trust that idiot Tyrell,” he says, “but I cannot trust my own blood.”
Finn eyes the ax and holds up both hands like a man accosted by a bandit. “Put that down.”
“You boy.” The Judge can think of nothing else to say and so has gone atavistic, reverting to the discarded locutions of his childhood. He has no further use for the ax but having been told to let go of it he hangs on.
“I’ll drop her.”
The woman listens and believes, and the Judge listens but does not.
“I swear I’ll drop her.” Negotiating either for his life or for his patrimony.
“You will.”
“I will.”
“But you won’t come back here.” He lets the ax hang down alongside his leg. “Neither in this life nor in any other.”
“However you see fit.”
“It isn’t my decision.” The Judge points briefly doorward with the ax and then stands watching in a kind of dull and horrified astonishment while his son and the girl dress and gather themselves up to depart. Adam and Eve would more likely steal apples from the garden than these two would dare take anything more than the clothing they wear and one or two necessities that come easily to hand: a hat, a clasp-knife, matches. Finn resolves to creep back later for the frying pan and the ax and a few things more.
Disheveled and displaced they proceed downward to the river’s edge where he knows of a raft hung up against a snag in the shallows and long unclaimed. Some of the logs are rotten and some others are broken in two but it will make shelter enough as long as the weather holds, so working side by side they haul it from the water and into the woods where they prop it against a tree and give thought to making themselves comfortable.
“You said you’d drop me.”
“Go on leave anytime you want. I can’t stop you.”
“Where would I go?”
“I meant to do you a favor.” Thinking of the Santo Domingo.
“I know it.”
She gathers up some pine boughs and finds a straight stick and then with line salvaged from the raft he binds them all together into a passable broom. With it she sweeps out a smooth place and she makes up in the center of it a pallet of more boughs while he runs his lines more urgently than usual and wonders where he might acquire some tomatoes or beans to go with the bluegills now that the garden behind the white mansion is surely off limits.
“You hungry.” Arriving with fish wrapped in reeds.
“How am I to cook that?”
He turns his back and walks off through the woods to the river again and poles his skiff up to Dixon’s place where he trades the fish for whiskey, and then he returns to the lean-to and lies down to sleep the afternoon away. In the early evening he runs his lines again and puts the fish into a sling made of rope and hangs them from a limb out of reach of such wildlife as may pass this way. “We’ll need a fry pan,” he says to her and she follows him up the hill into their own retreating shadows while the sun finishes setting.
They gather what they can from the cabin and bundle it up into a blanket, certain that the Judge will never discover their thievery and not caring if he does. When they finish they slip down the pathway between the Judge’s property and Tyrell’s until Finn takes note of the halfwit himself silhouetted in his parlor window smoking a corncob pipe as contented as a sultan.
“Wait,” he says. Lowering the bound-up blanket to the grass in a single smooth movement and slipping away catlike.
The house is ramshackle and swaybacked and he enters through the back door as if he owns the premises and is free to dispose of it in any way he sees fit.
“You Tyrell.”
The halfwit takes the pipestem from his mouth and surveys his visitor with the offhand grace of bemused royalty. “Now what brings you here?” As if Finn’s appearance upon these premises is a common thing but one that never ceases to bring him delight.
“You know.”
“Need somewheres to bed down?”
“I don’t.”
Tyrell luxuriates with his pipe for a moment.
The visitor asks his question. “Why’d you tell him?”
“Why not?” For there is no other reason or at least none better.
Finn strides to the old man and takes the vegetal stalk of his neck in one hand and presses upon it. With the other he knocks the pipe to the floor and covers the old man’s mouth lest he cry out. Through the window he sees Mary waiting and he presses harder taking no pleasure in it but hanging on to the old man as he would to a rattlesnake got likewise by the throat or some other dangerous beast desirous of doing him harm. When he is finished and Tyrell lies limp he locates a jug of coal oil and empties it upon the halfwit and his threadbare couch and scatters red embers from the corncob pipe thereon rather than waste matches.
Under full dark they crouch in the woods along the margin of the property and together they watch as Tyrell’s house burns to the ground. They have barely gotten themselves settled when the halfwit’s wife hobbles shrieking from the front door in her nightgown bereft of home and husband and flings herself full upon some sympathetic neighbor. Finn has forgotten about her entirely and he is taken aback to witness her standing there big as life and solid as denunciation, describing no doubt the atrocity she discovered upon the parlor couch when she came down to call the old man to bed.
Mary cherishes the inch or two of space between their crouched bodies and she brushes away a tear with the back of her hand. But for their shining eyes the lurking two of them are invisible in the dark woods, she in particular, despite the light cast roundabout by flames.
At the height of the blaze Finn bumps against her and takes her forearm in his hand and speaks wit
hout turning away from this bright thing he has created. His voice comes to her amid the crackle of fire and the crash of falling beams and the roar of wind through flame as if from the throat of some reassuring demon. “I done this for you.”
She sits wordless but does not dare pull away.
“You remember that.”
THEY PASS THE REMAINS of the summer without difficulty and the autumn too, but soon enough winter comes on. He has kept himself alert for such floating timber as he may salvage from the river and added it piece by piece to the raft until their poor habitation has grown from a mere lean-to into a certain kind of disreputable-looking shed. The one original side supports some brushy overgrowth and has begun to tolerate the dense-furred encroachment of moss, with the result that the place has begun to look not so much lived-in as like an abandoned relic of some ancient civilization lost and long forgotten by the sons of man. Only the firepit provides a clue as to its inhabitance.
One deep snowfall after another pushes conditions toward the untenable. The woolen blanket that she hung upon found nails for a door no longer suffices to keep out the wind and needs reinforcement by pine boughs and a deadfall better used for firewood. They huddle outdoors around the firepit when they can and long for its warmth and light when they cannot. He experiments with building a fire inside for cooking, but as they lack proper material to construct a chimney of any sort or even tools to cut a venthole in the roof the trial ends without success. The shallows freeze over and Finn chops his skiff away from its moorings with the ax each day to run his impoverished lines.
When his brother finds them they are not so near death as he has feared but sorely afflicted nonetheless.
“Will.” In an astonished voice from beneath a pile of clothing and stolen blankets and pine boughs.
The brother’s instinct is to stamp off his feet before coming indoors but the margin between inside and out is so thin as to be past notice. He has come through the woods with an oil lantern for light and he places it on the frozen mud of the floor, where it sits at an angle and radiates a welcome incidental heat. “I can’t bear this,” he says.
