by Jon Clinch
“You can’t?”
“No. I can’t.”
“You ain’t inviting me home.”
“No.”
“What then.”
“The Judge’d never have you.”
“Nor I him.”
“I’m taking a place of my own, and I thought you might do the same.”
“I already done it.” Indicating the frigid room and its fire-blackened walls by means of a hand thrust out into the cold.
“This. Honestly. I can help.”
“I don’t require it.”
“He’d let you die.”
“I won’t die.”
“I know it. Still.”
“I’m obliged for your concern.”
Will jams a hand into his breast pocket and draws forth an envelope folded over many times and wrinkled into illegibility. He shows it to his brother as if in itself it has meaning. “I’ve arranged a place for you.”
“What.”
“That’s right.
“With you.”
“No.”
“Where then.”
“A house. On the river. Maybe a half-mile from here.” Will is beginning to shiver in the cold shack.
“Have a blanket,” says his brother, and he throws him one, diminishing the pile strewn upon himself and the girl. She has been witnessing all this in silence, wearing a look of studied uninterest.
Useless though it is, Will throws his brother’s ragged castoff over his shoulders. He returns the deed to his pocket and prepares to go on.
“What house?” asks Finn.
“The Anderson place.”
“That old fool.”
“He’s dead.”
“When’d it happen?”
“Maybe a month ago.”
“It’s no loss.”
“Still.”
“I know it.”
“He was a squatter, it turns out. After he passed on one thing led to another, and certain opportunities presented themselves.”
“I reckon money changed hands.”
“It did.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“I hope my own brother didn’t do nothing unethical.”
“As I said, the Judge would let you die.”
“I know it.”
“He’s through with you. Absolutely. But I’m not.”
“I reckon I’m obliged.”
“I can’t help myself.”
“I know it.” For what individual can.
Will lowers himself to a crouch so as to look his brother dead in the eye. “One thing. You can never tell a soul how this came about.”
“I don’t rightly know myself.”
“Good. And it had nothing to do with me.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“You will.” With which he removes the blanket from his shoulders and picks up his lantern and excuses himself from the shed for the walk home. Come morning Finn and the girl will awaken shivering in a thin cloud of their own exhaling, and wonder for a moment each of them if Will’s appearance before them was dream or vision.
ANDERSON’S OLD PLACE IS FIT only for dying in, as lately he has had the misfortune to demonstrate. One room downstairs with a riverfront porch and an iron stove, one smaller claustrophobic one upstairs with a pair of gabled windows looking out upon the river. It rises from the water on rotten pilings, to one of which is yet tied the painter of Anderson’s sunken icebound rowboat. In the rising wind this habitation creaks like a sailing vessel on the high seas, and snow swirls up from between the downstairs floorboards. Rats have infested the place, lured by food scraps and other leavings, and on account of their plenteous excrement and occasional corpses the squalid rooms smell worse than does the outhouse at the edge of the woods for being less thoroughly ventilated. Yet there is a pile of kindling by the stove and a stack of split logs beneath the house where the snow eddies in the wind and is less deep, and Finn and Mary make themselves at home without hesitation.
“Your brother is a very kind person,” she hazards once the fire gets going. She is on her hands and knees, packing straw from an old tick into the worst of the gaps between the floorboards.
“He has his good points.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“We ain’t never had much in common.”
She salvages what she can from the kitchen and puts the blankets on the pallet in the upstairs room, while he complains that he ought by rights to move his trotlines down this way even though the fishing may not be as good here as it has always been in his usual spot. Anderson left some rusty iron stakes driven into the ground with chains attached and then ropes and then his old poorly mended lines, the lot of which Finn reckons he can now make his own just as he has made his own the house, although his usual things are no doubt superior to these and it will mean a good bit of work and a day’s lost fishing to bring them down here when he gets around to it.
In the early evening a steamboat goes upstream, not the Santo Domingo but its equal for all earthly purposes, its tall stacks steaming doubly in the cold.
“Don’t you get any ideas,” says Finn as he chews at a piece of corn-bread she has made up from meal sifted clean of rat droppings.
“What kind of ideas?”
“You know what kind.”
She does, but she cannot confess them even to herself.
He passes his arm across the river scene before them, magnanimous. “Not after all I done for you.”
She can tell that in his way he means it. And because he cannot help himself, as the months and years go by he is faithful to her as to nothing else in this world.
10
FINN HAS TORN a rusted hasp from a barn door floating downriver and fashioned a nail into a loop that serves well enough, and with these and his venerable lock—relic of his months in the hired man’s cabin with the woman, relic of his subsequent days in the squatter’s shack with the boy—he secures the door to the bedroom stairs before going out to steal whiskey from old blind Bliss.
“Ain’t seen you around, Finn.” Bliss pricks up his ears and speaks these words without irony the instant his visitor emerges from the treeline.
“I been busy.” Crestfallen at having been discovered, but making the best of it.
The bootlegger, teetering on a broken rocking chair, laughs until his shoulders jump. “I know my customers, don’t I?”
“You do.”
“How much you be needing?”
“Some.”
“Help yourself.” Throwing his head back and to one side, toward the trail that leads to his cache. “I guess I know you’re good for it. What with that boy of yours and all.”
“I reckon.”
Bliss’s sharp hearing is not limited to the crackling of twigs and the barking of foxes, and in Finn’s voice he detects uncertainty. “Something happen to the money?”
“No.”
“You can tell me.”
“It’s tied up.”
“How so?”
“Legal business.”
Finn sounds so in need of comfort that the bootlegger’s charitable instincts get the better of his business sense. “Help yourself anyhow,” he says, uncertain of how dearly his generosity may cost him for he cannot assess the capacity of Finn’s empty jug. “Help yourself, you poor benighted bastard.”
“Poor benighted bastards ain’t all saddled with the Judge.”
“Amen to that,” says Bliss.
When Finn returns Bliss has fetched a pair of canning jars so that he might share in his own largesse. “Speaking of your daddy,” he begins.
“Don’t.”
“You still free of that woman?”
“I am.”
“How’s that suit him?”
“I can’t say.”
Bliss rests his drink on the arm of his chair and leans toward Finn as if his customer’s hearing has gone bad, as if Finn is an imbecile who does not fully understand the English
language. “What’d he say when you told him?”
“I didn’t.”
Bliss sticks a finger in his ear and runs it around, probing for something, incredulous.
“I ain’t worried. He’ll find out one way or the other.”
“What’s wrong with you, Finn?”
“Folks talk.”
“You can’t trust folks.”
“I know it.”
They drink for a while, the two of them, on that falling-down porch in the woods.
“I ain’t been back long,” Finn says after a while. “Ain’t seen Will yet.”
“So maybe the old man knows.”
“Could be.” The woods are filled with birdsong and he attends to it while he drinks. “For a while I didn’t think I cared no more, what with the boy and all.”
“The six thousand.”
“The six thousand.”
“That kind of money’d go a long way.”
“It would.”
“It ain’t bugdust to the Judge,” says Bliss, shaking his head like a woeful old horse.
“I know it.”
“Still. It’d go a long way.”
Finn refills his jar. “With six thousand in my pocket,” he says, “I believe I might never give that Judge another thought.”
“Could be.” Bliss creaks forward and back in his rocking chair, pushing his lips together and ruminating upon Finn’s fate. “If you don’t mind my saying, enough whiskey’ll give you that same advantage.”
“I know it,” says Finn.
After Finn leaves, old Bliss troops back to his cache and despairs over the damage. This is the last time, he says, the last time that he will ever take pity upon that individual. And although he knows that he is lying to himself he takes some comfort in the idea all the same.
FINN SITS DRINKING on his old horsehair couch above the river with his hair drawn back in a tangle and his beard brushing his bare chest, wondering if perhaps old blind Bliss is correct and he ought to brave the Judge in his lair after all. How much time has gone by since he told Will that he’d finished with her he cannot say, but with a brain full of forty-rod he reasons that it must be weeks at the very least or even months. Long enough for him to have gone downriver and rescued the boy and run into trouble with Judge Thatcher and that other judge, the new one with his ideas of improvement. Long enough for him and the boy to have passed a certain number of days together in that squatter’s shack where the river ran slow and time seemed as if it would go on forever. Long enough to have alarmed the widow Douglas and set her and Judge Thatcher upon the task of not only taking from him his rightful fortune but taking from him his child.
He resolves that come morning he will walk up the hill to the white clapboard mansion alongside the limestone courthouse on the finest block of the highest street in town and find therein his father. The Judge is old now, nearly as old as judgment itself, and as the years have passed he has come to see his son only obliquely if at all. How an impoverished riverman such as he might maintain that house upon the water he cannot tell and does not ask, for he knows without doubt that the answer would require certain adjustments. The cabin behind his barn stands uninhabited, lair of snakes and spiders, and the current hired man resides in his own tidy house in town, living high upon the extravagant wages that the Judge pays rather than let any other set foot in that accursed place again.
Finn lies down upon the horsehair couch and struggles toward sleep but sleep will not come on account of the whiskey. His head spins and he lies awake turning now faceup and now facedown over and over until the spinning in his head gives way to a pain like a railroad spike thrust through behind his eyes, and he falls in and out of sleep dreaming of the Judge, who upon less than half of the present evidence would condemn him for a drunk like his grandfather before him, both worthless and beneath contempt. A steamboat passes by lit up unearthly and it blasts its whistle at some other boat in the channel, and Finn holds his ears as if upon his willing it the world might vanish or at least accommodate itself to his desires.
A chill awakens him. The evening warmth is gone and the heat of the whiskey has dissipated itself likewise through his liver and limbs and out into the greedy atmosphere, leaving him cold where he lies there uncovered and alone on the couch. The sun has yet to rise but will.
He fortifies himself with an outsize breakfast. Coffee, eggs, and salt pork as usual, but also on this occasion a plate of biscuits made the way she used to. He is thinking not of the old paradisiacal days in his cabin behind the barn, a time when she had not yet learned the making of them or much else, but of the years that followed, after they had retreated to this place on the river. The biscuits in their dusting of flour sit white upon his blackened tin plate and he devours them.
Beyond his porch the river steams.
He licks crumbs from the plate and reflects upon the uselessness of her education with Mrs. Fisk, those brief irresponsible years that had left her with hardly the skills to fry a catfish, and he congratulates himself over having required her to come into her own after all. Whether she learned in the general store in Lasseter or in some other woman’s kitchen in darktown or perhaps elsewhere was no business of his as long as she had supper on the table.
He puts the plate away and checks the lock on the bedroom stairs and heads out. Up the sloping street he climbs into the sunrise with his long shadow astretch behind him all the way to the river’s edge as if it would cling there still and thereby ground him, and near the top of the hill he passes his brother’s shuttered law office before which the shingle, WM. FINN, ESQ., hangs without motion. A spider has fixed an egg case to one of the hinges and Finn considers its precariousness and walks on.
The house when he reaches it would seem to be asleep. Like an itinerant he knocks upon the door, tentatively and as if he does not exactly belong here, and the hired man’s wife comes to crack it open just the slightest and study him through the gap.
“Morning.” With a tip of his slouch hat, which would pass for comical were not his expression so fierce.
Behind the door her one visible eye narrows. Something about him is familiar but not sufficiently so or perhaps not in the proper way. These premises have been haunted previously by men of his type and better who have believed themselves wronged by the Judge and sought compensation at least or revenge at worst.
“The Judge in?”
“No.” She looks instantly as if she has made a dire mistake, as if in the absence of the Judge this man will surely have his way with her and with anyone else whose unlucky presence he detects on this besieged property.
He takes the latch in his hand and she flinches as if stung.
“Reckon I’ll have to see her then,” says Finn. “Seeing’s how I come all this way.”
“Your mother,” says the hired man’s wife, realizing.
“There any other about?” Stepping inside and trooping off down the long central hall toward the kitchen while she slumps against the plaster wall in the wake of fate forestalled. His mother is not in the kitchen of course but the coffeepot is, and he returns the cup to the sink before climbing the great circular staircase to her bedroom. There is a parlor adjacent and here she passes her days.
She speaks his Christian name as he enters but she stirs not from her chair. Save a small furtive gleam in the old woman’s eye, which she dares not expose to her son’s view, a person watching would suppose that he presents himself in her parlor daily. Time has diminished her, and when the undertaker comes to carry her out she will weigh no more than a wish ungranted.
“Where’s the Judge?”
“Sit.”
He stands his ground instead, wringing his hat in his hands. “He out on the circuit?”
“You know better than that.” Patting a vacant place on the settee. “It’s been two years since he rode the circuit.”
“I forgot.”
“No one even asks his opinion anymore. All of that learning gone to waste. All of that wisdom.”
“He’d be surprised to see you here.”
“I reckon.”
“It must be a special occasion.” The look that she gives him is sly and knowing and coquettish all at once.
“I guess he ought to know I’ve broken if off with that woman.”
The mother dares to speak her name, as if there could be any other.
“That’s the one.”
“After all this time.”
“I know it.”
“Your father knew you’d come around.”
“Did he.”
“He had faith in you.”
Finn gives off with his hat and turns to unlatch the shutter and look out. The view from this elevated spot is the finest in Lasseter and it extends all the way down to the river, although thanks to the deep summer greenery of the trees and the comfortable clustering together of neat clapboarded houses one against the next he cannot make out his own place.
“He did,” she says, as if to make herself believe it.
“You think so.”
“I do.”
“Then you tell him.” Squinting at a boat upon the river and past that at a plume of smoke rising into the air from somewhere over on the Missouri side.
“No.”
“Tell him I was here and tell him what I done.”
“I will not.”
He stands chewing his lip for a moment and then turns to face her. There upon her settee she has drawn herself up to her largest and most imposing aspect and although she doubtless intends to demonstrate her resolve thereby she looks to Finn like a foolish and willful child.
“I’ll not run your errands,” she says.
“You never would.”
“Come back.”
“I will.”
Finn leaves his mother in the parlor and proceeds back down the long hill toward that house upon the river which now stands empty of all life save his own. His lines need running and he will get to them by and by, but no sooner has he passed his brother’s office than he finds himself waylaid by the open door of a tavern. The proprietor is mopping up from the night previous and he shows him his back along with as much uninterest as he dares.
