by Jon Clinch
“Oh come.”
“Please.”
She has no trouble detecting his embarrassment but blames it upon her forthrightness with respect to his lineage.
“If you don’t mind,” he goes on, aligning the silver upon each side of his plate, “I’m not entirely comfortable.”
“Of course.” Very nearly reaching out to touch his shoulder as she would any other individual this familiar to her and managing at the last instant to stop herself. “Forgive me.”
“I do.”
“These things.”
“Yes.”
Weeks pass before the Judge makes mention of the child to Will and then only in a fiduciary context. They are sitting together in his dim study surrounded by lawbooks and dust, the Judge himself with his black frock coat hung upon a peg but Will still dressed as formally as if he were trying some case before him. The room is close and sultry and dust motes dance in the light that slices in through the drawn shutters. The Judge holds his great noble head such that two stripes of blinding light cut across it from left to right, one upon his broad wrinkled forehead and one across his upper lip, where it illuminates a neat mustache long gone gray. They have finished reviewing his bank accounts and his investments in various stock exchanges and his positions vis-à-vis certain farmers and miners whose fortunes have lately suffered. He closes the ledger and squares it upon the desk before him and gives his son no word of thanks.
“Have you given any thought,” he says, “to addressing our complication?”
Will grasps the subject immediately, and for just an instant he mistakes the question for a sign of his father’s awkward and long-delayed entry into some kind of good-heartedness. He wonders if perhaps the Judge actually intends to make provision for his brother’s bastard child, if only to keep him at arm’s length. So much time has passed since Will has heard his father consider engaging anyone in this way—it has been his entire lifetime really, and then some—that he wonders if perhaps the man has somehow managed to soften without his noticing. He blames himself. Yet he makes only the most cautious and noncommittal answer. “How so?”
“The will. You’ve checked it.”
“No.”
“It’s in your files.”
“I know.”
“We had not prepared for this.”
“For the child.”
The Judge wrinkles his brow in irritation but he does not dignify the creature by granting him a naming even this impersonal, not even within his own mind. “Yes.”
“He’ll get nothing.”
“Who.”
“My brother. And through him the boy.” Still testing the waters.
“You’re certain.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve checked.”
“I know it.”
The Judge ruminates. “Then alter the papers. He shall receive one dollar. One dollar exactly.”
“Which?”
“Your brother.” His eyes flare behind his reading glasses. “I’d not name that other creature in any writing of mine.”
“Of course not.”
The Judge goes on. “See to it that your brother receives one dollar, so that he’ll have no cause for complaint. I’ll not have him claiming that I forgot him altogether. I’ll not have him accusing me of an oversight. I’ll not have him dragging down my good name in the interest of whiskey and his nigger whore and that infernal offspring of theirs.”
“Thy will be done,” says Will, for this is a formula that never fails to provide the Judge a certain measure of delight—even though he is forever at pains to conceal it.
12
THE BOY GROWS STURDY and takes after his father from the start. Anyone can see it. And although Finn never intends to enjoy such moments as they spend together he catches himself taking pleasure in them nonetheless, for even in the cradle his son is so full of mischief that looking at him is like looking into a mirror capable of reflecting the past. When the child is yet in diapers he wants to take him aboard the skiff to have his company while he runs the lines. Mary tries to dissuade him, not because she mistrusts his ability to keep the child safe from harm but because she knows too well his lackadaisical habits of sanitation. Nonetheless he prevails and does as he wishes, making a show of striding down the back stairs with one arm full of linens and the other full of boy, although once he has gone out of her sight beneath the house where the skiff is tied up to a piling he follows his own inclination and leaves the linens on a rock and climbs aboard with the boy flung over his shoulder like a floursack. And when inevitably he shits he rinses him off in the river, a proceeding that brings unstoppered joy to father and son alike.
Such is the child’s baptism, and by such means does his father claim him for his own. He places no demand upon the boy as he grows save that he pull his own weight, and so the river and the tavern and the trading post become his classrooms. From his mother the boy learns different lessons entirely: songs inherited from her father and her father’s father before him all the way back to Africa, poetry memorized under the pathetically hopeful tutelage of Mrs. Fisk, mysterious folk wisdom passed down from the circle of women who have woven from their tangled skeins of belief and superstition her particular history.
From her, Huck learns how to divine the future from the hairballs of cats and oxen and how to circumvent curses by means of stump water and moonlight. He listens wide-eyed and his father listens too, although he feigns some other occupation all the while, either repairing lines or drinking whiskey, thinking as he listens that from this mingled trove of the primitive and the poetic he might likewise acquire some knowledge worth possessing.
The child, perhaps five or six years old now, sits with him in Dixon’s place drinking a glass of milk and watching the other men play cards, and although he longs to ask if he may join in he does not. In this way, in a world populated by none such as himself, he learns his place.
“That your boy,” a cardplayer known to Finn either asks or states.
“It is.”
The cardplayer has approached the bar to refresh the ale he’s been drinking and has put down upon the damp wood an oversize portion of his winnings. He is in a generous mood and so he offers to stand Finn to his next round. “Assuming there’ll be one.”
“There will be.”
He nods to Dixon who nods back, refilling his glass. “And how about something for the boy.”
“He’s got his.”
Huck sits with his milkglass clutched in both dirty hands and looks up at the cardplayer as if nothing in all the world, neither wealth nor plaything nor talisman, could make him any happier than he is at this moment.
“Time comes to put away childish things.” Taking up his drink.
“Time ain’t come yet.”
“Let him try.”
“I ain’t ungrateful, but.”
“Not even a black and tan? Dix, help the boy to a black and tan.” The cardplayer hoists his glass and winks at Huck. “May as well get used to it, son.”
Finn coils. “He ain’t your son.”
“I’d not have him. But that don’t mean I can’t be gentlemanly to his kind.”
Finn rises like weather and steps around Huck with one hand grazing his small shoulder in an instant’s offhand tenderness, and with his greater bulk he moves to pin the cardplayer against the bar. The other falls backward and drops his glass which shatters spilling ale upon hardwood and piled coin alike. Amid the wreckage the thick bottom of the glass remains intact with its remnant jagged rim and Finn’s hand falls upon it in a black rage. “I’ll teach you to talk.”
Behind the bar Dixon dares neither arrest Finn nor speak up in defense of the cardplayer or even of basic civility so he comes around and takes the boy and puts his milk on the bar, and removes him to the kitchen while his father attends to the defense of either his boy or himself or some other.
The cardplayers at the table turn as one and for a moment they believe that the activity under way at the bar is m
erely the usual. Which of their number first spies the glint of that bit of glass cannot be said and will become a point of prideful contention in the years to come, but glint it does in the light of the lamps behind the bar and the candles on the tables, and as they watch transfixed Finn raises its sharp jagged circular end to their fellow’s blasphemous mouth. He twists it and blood bubbles up black from around its perimeter and although the man dares not scream or even breathe the other cardplayers fall upon his assailant and drag him to the plank floor. One of them will remember bringing his boot-heel down upon Finn’s wrist and thereby knocking free his makeshift weapon. Another will recall kicking the ugly gleaming bloodstained thing off into the darkness beneath a table, where a third will remember trying to find it for use on Finn himself but to no avail. In the end they subdue him with their fists and the task requires all of them even in his state or perhaps because of it.
Two of them help the cut man down the steps and up the hill to where the doctor lies dreaming of a place where incidents such as this do not happen. Finn sleeps off his injuries and alcohol on the floor and his boy gets a pallet in the corner of the room behind Dixon’s kitchen. Come morning they head home to find Mary frantic with worry, but after one look at Finn she knows better than to complain or demand reason. He will tell her when he is ready, later on in the day once the boy has gone off somewhere, and when he does she will not know whether to respond with satisfaction or with alarm.
HE IS ASLEEP in the skiff when the marshal comes to arrest him. The marshal, a boneyard of a man in loose gabardines whose deputy sits by his side brandishing a pistol, looks no more equipped to wrestle Finn into compliance with the tenets of civilization than to outswim an alligator gar, but the deputy with the weapon provides all the authority he requires. They bump Finn’s boat with the bow of theirs and rouse him up.
“How I hear it,” the marshal says, lazily leaning against his pole, “that feller may not talk again.”
“He’d be smarter not to.”
“Now Finn.”
He has not seen the interior of the jailhouse previously and so he knows not what to expect. The marshal leads him down a gray hallway and locks him behind iron bars and advises him that he may smoke if he likes provided he has makings. His lawyer will be along presently.
Will.
“You look like hell,” he says when he arrives.
“I feel it,” says Finn.
The marshal has given Will the key on a great iron ring and he admits himself to his brother’s cell and takes a seat on the hard bed. “You know what you’ve done.”
“I reckon.”
“He may never talk again.”
“That would suit me.”
“You ought to keep your voice down.”
“If you say so.”
Will clears his throat and tugs at the knees of his trousers to preserve their crease. “I hear he had some words to say about the boy.”
“He did.”
“You didn’t like them.”
“No.”
“This can’t go on.”
“I know it.”
Will sits silent for a moment and draws a deep breath to remind himself of the reason he is here with his brother in this prison cell and not merely consorting with him in some spot less full of portent. “This is going to be terribly serious.”
“How serious?”
“It depends on the prosecutor.”
“They all know the Judge.”
“I would advise you to take no comfort in that.”
He does not, but he has other ideas for his defense. “Look what they did to me.” Indicating his raw face.
“That came later.”
“So they say.”
“The chronology is plain enough.”
“They were drunk, the lot of them.”
“Those men won’t be on trial.”
“So put them.”
“I can’t.”
“Then go after them on the stand.”
“You leave the law to me.”
“I’d like to.”
Three days pass before he sees the courtroom. Mary and the boy visit him twice, and upon each occasion he is so pained by the thought of their witnessing him in his caged state that he insists they leave. On the third day they come not at all, or at least not in time.
“Which judge you suppose?” Finn inquires of the marshal as he leads him out, for he knows them all at least by name and reputation.
“Can’t say.”
“You don’t know or you can’t say.”
“I can’t say, on account of I don’t know.”
The marshal plants him in a chair within a small chamber containing a high bench and several rows of empty seats and then stands behind him waiting. Neither of them speaks for the longest time until at last the door behind the bench opens and out steps the Judge.
He speaks first to the marshal. “You may go.”
“I believe it’s my duty.”
“Not today.”
“But.”
“I can handle this.”
“Yes sir.” Leaving Finn hard up against his own father for the first time since that day when the Judge broke down the cabin door and turned him out.
“Properly speaking, I ought to have recused myself.”
“I know it,” says Finn, and know it he does, for he did not come of age in that white mansion belonging to his father for no reason.
“It’s a matter of conscience, though. As I see it, so long as I am of the belief that I am capable of executing my duties in a fair and impartial manner, I shall proceed.”
“Are you sure.”
“You don’t need to ask.” Studying a paper before him. “You have no right to ask, come to that.”
“Where’s Will?”
“He’ll be along.”
“Where’s the prosecutor?”
“He’ll not be needed.”
At which idea Finn’s spirits rise unaccountably.
“I’ve already spoken with him at some length, and although we are not precisely of the same mind on all points he has seen fit to yield to my greater wisdom.” He speaks to his son as to a child, flashes a brief and reflexive smile, and bows his head to his paper again.
“I understand.”
“You do.”
“Yes sir.”
“Then you understand why you’ll be spending the next twelve months in the state penitentiary at Alton.” Without so much as looking up.
“Where’s Will.”
“He’ll be along.”
“I’ll appeal.”
“You’ll get nowhere.”
“This ain’t right.”
“I shouldn’t think that you would be a trustworthy judge of right and wrong.” He deigns at last to lift his eyes unto his son.
“You know it ain’t right.”
“I know you need to be taught a lesson.”
“Where’s Will.”
“He’ll be along.”
“When.”
“Be patient.”
Finn sits plaintless for a moment as if compliance will do him the slightest good. His bruised face pains him still and the beaten muscles of his arms and shoulders and chest are sore but he touches them not lest he be judged even more severely than he has.
“That’s better,” says his father, just as sweet as pie. “You’re learning already.” He adjusts his reading glasses and tilts his massive head back and draws out a pen with which he signs some lengthy document to which his prisoner is not privy. While he blots up the ink Will enters and stands between the two of them wearing upon his face a look of resignation.
“This ain’t been much of a trial.” Finn to his attorney.
“I suppose not.”
“You have no idea,” says the Judge. He motions to Will, who approaches the bench and takes the pen from him and signs.
“While I’m gone,” Finn hazards to his brother’s back, “what’s to become of.”
“I’d counsel you to tr
avel no further down that line of reasoning in my presence,” says the Judge.
“They’re my concern.”
“They’re none of mine. Should those creatures go feral and starve, then perhaps their deaths will teach you the full wages of your sin. It might be the best thing for you.”
“Father,” says Will.
“Your brother has always been recalcitrant. He has always been willful. He has always, dare I say it, been perverse in the extreme.”
“Cruelty is no.”
“Hush. I’ll cite you for contempt.”
Will retreats.
“He has gone his own way without regard for decency or history or God’s will, or even for the merest wishes of those who gave him birth. He is by nature cross-grained and rebellious, and the longer he has lived upon this earth the more devoted to these traits he has grown. The time has come at last for him to be reformed whether he likes it or not, for I shall tolerate his ways no more.” He pauses to draw breath. “If that qualifies as cruelty, then so help me God I stand abidingly unrepentant and guilty as charged.”
“As you see fit,” says Will.
If he is to be sent to prison Finn desires to be done with it, and he desires in any event for his father not to think that he cares. “Do I leave right off?”
“In the morning.”
“That suits me fine.”
“Good. And may you return a changed man.”
“I can’t say about that.”
“God knows I have asked little enough of you.”
“I know it,” says Finn.
BECAUSE THE JUDGE has sequestered himself in his study, Will dares collect Mary and the boy to say their goodbyes. If he should fail his brother again in even this insignificant duty he is certain that he could not live with himself, so he borrows the wagon and the matched Arabians from the Judge’s barn and fetches mother and child back up the hill to the jailhouse. The boy takes no end of pleasure in the ride, which cheers Will some, but the woman collapses on the box wordless and woeful.
“Neighborly of you,” says Finn from his cage. His tone when he speaks has a kind of resigned gratitude, as if he has recently made a vow to savor such decency as he can witness while he yet tarries in this world.
