by Jon Clinch
“How about a whiskey on account.”
“I ain’t open.”
“Your door is.”
“That’s no matter.”
“It is to me.”
“I can’t help you.” Swabbing intently at a place he’s already done.
“I’ll take my custom elsewhere.”
“Be my guest.”
“I will.” Looking away out the door he came in. He abandons the pursuit of whiskey not because the proprietor has successfully dissuaded him but because he sees across the street, just about to turn down the alley that leads alongside the Adams Hotel, a certain tall and lovely black woman with a bundle of laundry balanced upon her head. Bedsheets or towels, he reckons, done at home and brought back. He can imagine the misery and duress of her life well enough, for he knows without looking twice that she is managing somehow to get on without the boy whom the preacher drowned in the river after buggering and without the husband whom he himself shot clean in the throat mainly by a stroke of good fortune. He can see in his mind’s eye the line upon which those towels or bedsheets have dried, for it is the selfsame line upon which the preacher spied the boy’s overalls silhouetted. He desires to speak to her but denies himself the pleasure, not because he fears that she would recognize him without the mask—for her attention at that fateful moment in darktown was no doubt occupied by the preacher’s assault on her boy’s pallet and by the harsh report of the pistol that slew her husband—but because of the conversation that he has just had with his mother and the promise that he has made both to her and to himself regarding his reformation. Yet something inexorable within him stirs. And after she has vanished down the alley he returns home as if drawn by some power, and he climbs the stairs to the bedroom, and there upon the wall in anguished word and picture he describes the story of his urge and of his longing and of his despair over the fate of his poor doomed immortal soul.
HIS HAND IS BLACKENED and his face is blackened from the damp dirty recurring touch of it. The long ropes of his hair are drawn back and bound in a scrap torn from her dress, a scrap fingered likewise dark and thoroughly soaked as well for he has been hard at work in the airless bedroom documenting his dissolution. On the porch he drinks a dipper of water and then another after it without pausing. Sated and wet of hand he goes to the kitchen and fills a glass with whiskey and drops it and it shatters upon the planking, and before the whiskey can soak in he has flung himself prone and lapped up such of it as his desperate tongue can locate. He pays no mind to the slivers of wood and the rusty ill-driven nails that get in his way, although now and then a shard of glass does serve to impede his progress. He reckons that the more he presses forward the less he will have reason to mind, and in this he is after a fashion correct.
When he has recovered all that he can he rises upon knees now bloody inside his pantlegs and searches for the other glass in the jumbled depths of the cabinet. Slick with blood and whiskey his hand falls upon it at last, and he hoists it tenderly out into the last dying rays of the riverward sunset only to be disappointed, for he has unearthed not the glass at all but a baby bottle, a baby bottle gone cloudy with dust and cobwebs and perhaps a lingering sentimental scum of milk. Packed into its open end is a rag stopper half gone to dust. He considers for a moment whether or not such a bottle will do for whiskey, but in the end he decides that he would prefer something more capacious. Still he keeps it in the pocket of his overalls even after he has found the other glass and begun making use of it.
The air on the porch is cooler and the traffic on the darkening river provides distraction or at least a pleasant counterpoint to the whiskey. He leans against the rail and hollers once or twice across the water to passing rafts, with no intent beyond livening up the evening. Upon the ears of whatever raftsmen or wanderers or runaways are aboard these silent craft his voice from the elevated porch must fall like that of a lunatic or an idiot or an idle god, speaking from on high in a language unknown to ordinary men. His tongue bleeds in his mouth and from time to time he nurses it by causing it to lie still in an anesthetic puddle of whiskey until he can wait no longer and must swallow, and from this act so elegantly combining self-medication with restraint he derives a certain unmistakable satisfaction.
Black with coal dust and blood he lies upon the horsehair couch and drinks straight from the jug, for his glass is on the railing and he is too encumbered by drink to reach it. The baby bottle is still in his pocket and it pokes into his hip by way of reminding him of itself until he reckons that he knows exactly the place where it belongs and resolves to climb the stairs and place it with such care as he can manage into the broken-backed chest along with the gun belonging to that preacher. Up there in that hallowed place must go these things for which he dares hazard no further use, these things that ought by rights to go straight over the porch rail and into the slow hungry mouth of the river if only he were strong enough in spirit but he is not. And so he gathers himself and climbs the steps one by one to his limbo and his purgatory, where contrary to his best intentions he falls asleep on the hard frame bed and the bottle slips out of his pocket and drops to the floor without making sufficient sound even to awaken him.
11
IN TIME MARY CONCEIVES and they are to have a child. During the months prior he imagines the burgeoning creature aswim in her belly, needful and blind and oddly imperious, as enigmatic as some new constellation hung in the darkness over the face of the Mississippi. He knows within certain limits what manner of fish his lines will bring up each day and how many, but the nature of this new thing is inscrutable and troublous.
“It’s mine, ain’t it?” he says to her as they lie side by side in the frame bed one morning, light coming in through the gabled windows. The lean flat surface of her belly has begun to distend and he is fascinated by it.
“Who else’s would it be?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think too much.”
“I know it.”
She is unwell these mornings and she visits the outhouse in a desperate hurry and then returns to the upstairs room not entirely better but at least some relieved.
He takes up his thread again, for he has been considering something in her absence. “Boy or girl, you suppose?”
“I don’t care.” Lying back down with her face to the ceiling and her hands folded upon her stomach.
“I hope a boy.”
“I’m sick enough for it.”
“What’s that mean?” For he knows nothing of such matters.
“They say you’re sicker with a boy is all.”
“Do they?”
“They do.”
He lies contemplating. A steamboat passes on the river and in its wake he asks, “White or nigger?”
“They both say it the same. Everybody knows it.”
“I mean the child.”
She turns her head to look at him.
“White or nigger?”
She understands now. “The child could look either way, I suppose.”
His gaze flicks down to her belly and back.
“You suppose.”
“There’s no telling.”
“It could be someplace in between.”
“Bound to be someplace in between. Just where in between is the question.”
“I know it.” He lies thinking. “I just thought maybe.”
“Just maybe on account of how much experience I have with this kind of thing?”
“Just maybe you had a feeling.”
“This doesn’t come with any kind of a feeling.”
“I don’t reckon so.”
“If I had any kind of a feeling I’d surely tell you.”
“I know it.” For he trusts that she would and he understands that there are some mysteries in the world that must wait until the lines are run.
Later he ties up at Dixon’s place and climbs the rutted steps for whiskey. He has been ruminating about his prospects and considering the shape of his future in light of both his sha
meful devotion to the woman and his own wondrous and overweening potency, and as he sits he concludes that someone other than the two of them ought to know about the child and that it may as well be Dixon as any.
“I reckon I ought to make a better father than the Judge,” is how he introduces the subject, hardly above a whisper.
“You mean that?” says Dixon. There are others in the place, six or eight boisterous men gathered around a table playing cards and a handful more on the porch, but Finn prefers to sit by himself and nurse whiskey from a jug without distraction.
“I do. I mean it.”
“With that one?”
“There ain’t been none other.”
Dixon cogitates for a moment. Whether he is pleased for Finn or embarrassed is beyond saying, but either way it is none of his business. “You old dog.”
“I reckon.”
“This calls for a little something.” Reaching for a bottle.
“Long as it’s on you.” He has not had a taste of the bottled merchandise since the Judge threw him out and ruined his financial prospects.
“It is,” says Dixon. “It’s on me for sure.”
“Just a small one then.” Knowing that a small one is all he will get as long as Dixon’s eagle-eyed wife is in the kitchen. “You having some?”
“Not while I’m working.”
“Then let me have yours too.”
“I can’t.”
“I know it.” But it was worth a try.
Dixon sets down the bottle and goes to the kitchen. One of the cardplayers, McGill by name, passes by on his way to the jakes and observes Finn with a bottle at his elbow instead of the customary jug. “What’s the occasion?” His clothing has a scoured-clean look to it and his hair is greased back with a pomade that Finn can smell from where he sits.
“Ain’t no occasion.” He does not know whether to ignore the bottle or to help himself as if nothing has changed, so he does neither.
“You certain.” The dandy cocks his head.
“I am.”
“I was thinking maybe you come into some money.”
“I wish I did.”
Indicating the card game. “We could use another.”
“I’d spend it on whiskey before I’d throw it away.”
“Just being neighborly,” says McGill, looking a little crestfallen over how the indicator of this riverman’s improved finances has misled him.
Dixon returns to the bar to find the two conversing like old conspirators and he asks if McGill has heard the news.
“Way I hear it there ain’t none.”
“You heard wrong.” Without thinking and surely without seeing the look by which Finn means to silence him. “Finn here’s going to be a pappy.”
“Well now,” says McGill, who knows the same truths as everyone. “Under those circumstances I believe I’d get drunk too.”
Finn removes one foot from the barstool and braces it upon the floor. “You be careful.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know what you’re saying.”
“Just saying what I’d do.”
“You mean the woman.”
“I prefer the free and easy life.”
“You mean the woman.”
“She’s no concern of mine.”
“I know she ain’t.” Considering that McGill seems to have withdrawn his objection or perhaps not even to have stated it specifically in the first place, Finn returns to his less coiled position on the barstool and helps himself to an additional dose of the bottled whiskey with no threat of interference from Dixon.
“There’s alternatives,” says the dandy as he turns to continue on his way to the jakes. “There’s always alternatives.”
“I reckon you’d know.” Finn rises and reaches out to take McGill by the collar. The man is two thirds his size and he arrests him without effort. “You and your free and easy ways.”
Dixon restores the whiskey bottle to its place behind the bar and advises the pair of them to head outside if they have differences in need of settling. “Go on now, you two.”
“I like it fine right here,” says Finn.
“I’ll not have it.”
“You brung it on.”
Which Dixon does not dispute.
“I didn’t mean nothing,” says McGill.
“So you say.”
“Honest.”
“Next time you don’t mean nothing, maybe you oughtn’t say nothing.”
“I won’t.”
Before he lets him go Finn gives him a shake hard enough to rattle his teeth, like a lioness toying one last time with some ravaged carcass. McGill goes off leaving his cards and his money on the table and he will not come back for them this night.
“I’m proud of you, Finn.” Dixon, mopping the bar.
“I figure I ought to get in the habit.” Which is easy enough to say while the child is still mere potential.
“You ought.”
Finn nurses his jug whiskey and looks over at the card game, which shows no sign of breaking up. He puts down his glass and goes in three steps to McGill’s empty seat and pockets the coins left stacked before it upon the table. Then with a drunkard’s rough disdain he pushes the man’s abandoned cards back toward the dealer. “Go on shuffle these back in if you’ve a mind to. I believe he’s finished.”
THE BOY EMERGES squalling from his mother’s womb as do all children regardless of parentage: dark with contorted rage and the bare willful containment of his own pulsing lively fluids, adrip with blood like some wrathful demon plucked from hell. His mother gives him his name, perhaps in anticipation of a dusky quality of skin that to his good fortune never quite returns after the first fading bluish-purple blush of his entry into this world.
Huckleberry.
It is a poor name for a boy but then she is poor in judgment, hardly past childhood herself, and the father is more interested in celebrating the boy’s pale skin than in helping her choose. It is a name doomed to suggest not only the boy’s curse but the raw pure accident of his creation and the unstraightened path down which he must tread. It is a name that bespeaks the simplest and most natural of freedoms, given at birth to a boy whose accursed birthright may prove to admit none.
His father pays the midwife with a bundle of fish and they resume their life as if nothing has changed. In a few days Will sends a note that his brother cannot read but Mary can. Its contents are not entirely congratulatory but more in the line of acknowledgment and advice.
“I reckon word gets around.”
“Be glad he thought.”
“People got no right to talk.”
“Now Finn.”
“They don’t.”
“You can’t stop them.”
“I’d like to.”
“You can’t stop them all.” Taking the child to her breast.
“I know it.”
In the back of his mind is the individual to whom no one speaks other than the variously accused and the constitution of the State of Illinois and under certain circumstances Almighty God Himself. No doubt the Judge will have heard of the child nonetheless. Possibly he has foreseen his coming for months. Finn looks at the boy and his mother nestled together content upon the horsehair couch and he half wishes that the Judge could see his circumstances now if only to condemn his behavior even more stridently than has previously been his habit. The woman and the child are a strange and cumbrous burden but they are a burden his alone, and he believes them thus deserving of acknowledgment.
WILL REMAINS CHILDLESS and unwed, and so Finn is the only one of the pair to have engaged in the continuation of any sort of family life however attenuated or odd. It is as if Will has decided that the Judge’s lineage shall descend this far and no farther, or as if by agreeing to handle his father’s financial affairs he has given himself over to the preservation of a dynasty long dead and thus finds himself with no spirit remaining for the pursuit of any living future.
“And how are you today, Mr. Fin
n?” asks the waitress at the Adams Hotel, a tall slender woman of middle age whose name Will has never made a point of catching.
“Quite well, thank you.” He waits for her to finish filling his water glass and then waits another moment or two before reaching out for it and lifting it to his lips so as not to seem overeager. He dines alone as usual. Others in his line of work have never dared associate with him, some because they fear seeming to cultivate his friendship so as to influence the Judge, and others—those who know the Judge better—because they know that they would gain no benefit from bothering and might even come to suffer for it. And so he has become a highly esteemed pariah.
The waitress observes no such boundaries. On the contrary, over the years his solitariness has persuaded her that he must be more in need of human contact than her other patrons. Although it pains Will to accept her unbidden daily attentions he nonetheless persists in lunching here, for the Adams is directly across the street from his office and the food is both familiar and plentiful.
“That brother of yours,” she says with a rueful shake of her head. He is seated at his usual table in the corner near the dead fireplace and far from the other customers, and she adopts for the occasion of their interchange a hushed kind of exasperated cluck.
Will looks helplessly at her over the menu.
“I suppose it’s not my place.”
“No.” Yet he maintains a thoroughly professional smile that she mistakes for something else.
“But you’d think.”
“You would.” He orders the fried chicken, which he settles upon every day after a thoughtful examination of the entire menu.
“I suppose it happens in even the best of families.” She tips her head just a hair’s breadth toward the busman, a sepulchral octoroon known only as Lovett, whose grandfather was rumored to have been not only a wealthy Virginia planter but a hero of the Revolution.
“Even the best.” Unfolding his napkin. “Which I am not suggesting mine has ever been.”
