by Jon Clinch
“Roll him over for God’s sake,” says Bliss, whose nose and ears have detected Whittier’s condition.
“That shoulder.”
“The hell with his shoulder. Roll that sonofabitch or he’s a dead man.”
Finn does as he has been told and gets Whittier’s face over the step, where he can work on freeing the passageway of his mouth with bloody fingers. His clasp-knife has disappeared in the scuffle and once Whittier has resumed breathing in that desperate and pitiful way he has acquired he slaps him on the back and goes off to find it by torchlight. He downs a little of the bootlegger’s whiskey while he’s at it, just to take the edge off.
“DID YOU GET IT?” Whittier, buckled over on the step, hard by a pool of his own crusting vomit, his ruined coat thrown about him like a cape.
“Get what?”
“The ball.” Not even lifting his head to explain.
“I reckon it’s in there deeper than I thought.”
“Thank you, Dr. Finn.” Without a weak smile or an ironic smile or any kind of smile at all.
“We got you bandaged up fine though. It’ll hold.”
“I can’t feel a thing.”
“That’s good.”
The two sit for a time, Bliss asleep in the chair behind them. The night air has gone cold and Finn half wishes he had Whittier’s coat.
“We’d better get on,” he says by and by.
“Where.”
“Get you home.”
“I’m happy here.”
“The Judge ain’t. I don’t get you back he’ll have my hide.”
Whittier works at the torn straps of his wooden leg with fingers equally wooden until at last he resigns himself to failure and lets his head collapse down into the cradle of his cupped right hand as if this small frustration were the worst indignity he has yet been caused to suffer and the worst he ever will. Careful to avoid the Philadelphian’s mess Finn kneels before him and ties the leg in place with a rag soaked in either whiskey or blood and wipes his hands on his pantlegs and rises. He is certain there must be a shortcut uphill through the woods that will save some time and keep them off the river, and so he prizes the dead torch from its hole and throws it into the yard and then he wakes Bliss to ask.
Bliss confirms it, so the two of them let him drift back to sleep and set off into the woods. Every step pains Whittier, who clutches his coat around his neck like a shroud and winces each time he runs afoul of some stump or treelimb or thorned underbrush. “How about you go back and get that torch.”
“Won’t do no good,” says Finn. “Funny thing about this place. You can find it better in the dark.”
“How about finding your way out.”
“Don’t get smart.” Pushing the jug toward him.
“I don’t have a free hand.” For his right hand is busy with his collar and his left arm is pinned tight by bandages below which the remainder of it hangs down limp as an animal gutted and bled dry.
Finn pauses long enough to raise the jug to Whittier’s lips and tilt it back. “Easy now.”
Whittier can hardly draw breath for the tightness of the bandages wound around his chest and shoulder, but he acknowledges the whiskey and follows Finn along the trail that is not a trail into deeper and deeper woods. They press on for time indeterminate, the riverman flailing at branches and brush and the diminished lawyer calculating one step after another and stopping now and then to lean against the welcome trunk of some tree.
“We ain’t stopping here.”
“I know it.”
“Stir yourself.”
“I’ll die if we don’t stop.”
“You won’t.”
“A drink then.”
“None for you till we’re back.”
“Please.”
“I’ll end up carrying you, you great drunken baby.” Which he does in the end regardless, the leg coming loose for all his trouble and slipping inch by inch out of its pantleg and battering him about the ankles until he frees it entire and carries that too. By moonlight he emerges laden from the treeline into a farmer’s field he does not recognize and tramps onward with his back-borne burden despite fences and walls and horse-shit until the outline of a farmhouse emerges from the dark and he knows it and can tell the way home.
To his father’s porch he comes like a peddler bearing death by the sodden sackful. There is a swing at the far end and into it he lets Whittier drop, and then he slumps down against the wall and listens while its poor unused rusty chains creak a little and then go quiet.
“Are we there?”
“Yes.” His heart pounding in his ears.
“Nothing hurts.”
“Good for you.”
Finn sits for a while studying the late-night sky and the dim starlight through the vertical balusters of the porch. Whittier’s left arm droops black across the marching line of them at a haphazard angle as oblique and final as a tally mark, its line other than Finn himself the only thing off square upon the spotless white porch of the magnificent white mansion on the most elevated street in town.
COME MORNING a rivulet of blood has dribbled down that selfsame arm and pooled upon the painted floorboards and dried to a black crust, and Finn arises to find himself jailed behind the sunlit balusters with a dead man. He rifles Whittier’s coat for whatever riches may yet remain in his purse, and then he lies back down again and sleeps some more, for he will need all of his wits to handle the Judge and there is no sense in running. The wooden leg he resolves to keep as a memento.
The hired man’s wife discovers them. “There’s two men dead on the porch,” she says to the Judge’s wife, who steadfastly refuses to go out and see for herself. She edges down the staircase from her parlor and thence along the hallway that leads to the chamber where the Judge sits inviolate, and she raps upon the door and delivers to him the news.
“Two men?” From deep within. “Two?”
“So she says.”
“Then you haven’t seen for yourself?”
“No.”
With a creak the Judge’s chair gives up his weight. “I do not require a crystal ball to foretell that only one of those two men is dead,” he says when he emerges from behind the door. “If you’re curious, it would be the one not descended from your bloodline.”
“My bloodline.”
But the Judge has already put his broad black back to her and gone striding down the hall toward the porch where he might take in the damage with his own two eyes. He discovers the tableau exactly as he had expected it, and with a grunt he kicks his son in the ribs to rouse him.
“Ow.” Turning painfully over onto his back. There is more blood on him than there is on the dead man, as if Whittier for his last gift had bequeathed every drop of it to the individual who saw fit to carry him as far as the Judge’s porch. Blood has stained his shirt and his trousers and his boots and by his walking he has left upon the porch a pattern of crosses in blood, as of a man who has waded in paint. Blood is caked in his hair and in his beard and blood is dried masklike upon his face and blood is crackling from his hands like his own dead skin.
“You’ve made a by-God mess.”
“It weren’t my fault.”
“It never is.”
“I brung him home. That’s all.” He knows that offering up too much too soon will drive the Judge’s suspicion and intuition to an even higher pitch than they have surely reached already.
Fingering the bullet hole in Whittier’s coat: “You didn’t do this?”
“No.”
“Who did.”
“I don’t know.”
“So it was you.”
Finn sits and leans his bloody back against the white wall. “It weren’t. It was two men down to Dixon’s. Stole my skiff and shot Whitman here in the bargain.”
“Why him.”
“He weren’t smart enough to let them have the boat.”
“And you were.”
“Oddly enough.”
The Judge surveys Whittie
r’s long and crumpled form, pale as wax beneath his coat and covered over with a thousand stray spatters and streaks of blood. “I don’t believe it.”
“Suit yourself.” Blinking hard to clear his head.
“I will,” says the Judge.
“You always do. A man can count on that.”
The Judge calls forth the hired man’s wife and instructs her to go fetch the marshal, and then he bends himself nearly double to fill his son’s vision with his great vengeful head and forges for the pair of them a pact. “I shall not dispute your story. Moreover I shall not by the exercise of such power as I possess have you hanged by the neck until dead, however much you deserve it. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“In return you shall mark this occasion and remember my kindness all the days of your life, for as of this moment you are irrevocably and immeasurably in my debt.”
“I won’t forget.”
“No.” Unbending himself. “You won’t.”
“How can I.”
“Repay me? How can you repay me? Why, it may not be possible. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“But.”
“However.” He shows Finn a stern finger, smudged with a little blood from Whittier’s coat. “If we cannot agree upon a way, or if you should dare deny your promise, honor shall require me to inform the marshal of exactly how you lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie. I didn’t kill Whittington. I tried to save him.”
“Perhaps you did,” says the Judge. He rises and wipes that one tainted finger clean upon Whittier’s pantleg. “But I can no longer bring myself to care.”
HE LEAVES his father’s house and goes down to the river to bathe. At the steamboat landing he lowers himself fully clothed into the water as a sinner plunged into fire or a penitent baptized. He does not so much as remove his hat, and when he draws a gasping breath and pushes himself under the riverwater that misshapen black thing remains floating at the place of his disappearance, signaling his vanishment just as a loaf of bread doctored with quicksilver will seek out a bottombound corpse. He scrubs himself against himself, running his fingers through his beard and his hair and scraping with a fingernail at his temples and at his cheeks and at his ears to remove such bits of Whittier’s blood as he can identify by their stubborn crust. The muddy current carries it all away and he rescues his hat and hauls himself out weighted down and wet. Then he walks back to shore ignoring the bystanders who stare at him as at a sideshow act, and he trudges up the mudbank toward home, where he hangs everything save himself on the porch railing and sits in the sun while the heat of the day comes up and order by means of evaporation restores itself moment by moment.
17
“WE ALL MAKE SACRIFICES.” Thus Mary begins, digging the last of the onions in the widow’s garden.
“I know it,” says the boy.
“You do.” Not a question but a challenge.
“Yes ma’am.”
She brushes hair and sweat from her forehead with the clean back of her hand, leaving behind a trail of dull velvet black against the remainder. “Reach down and get those, will you?” She stands weary with her sole on the fork, letting the boy scrabble in the place where she has dug.
“I don’t mind,” says the boy from the dirt.
“You don’t mind what.”
“Working. Whatever I got to do.” He is vigorous and bursting with life and proud of each contribution he has ever made to this multifarious family of his. The boy was born content to pull his own weight and draw his own oar, and so he has remained whether the work has required running trotlines on the river or digging onions in the widow’s yard. “You know.”
“I do.”
They labor together for a while, each of them taking his turn, and the bushel basket fills little by little.
“This doesn’t have to be your fate.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You can make something of yourself.”
“I’ll try.”
“Trying’s not half of it.” She thrusts the fork into the ground as far as it will go and heaves upon it. “Sometimes a person can get only so far.”
He kneels in the dirt and looks up at her as at some oracle or demigod.
“I won’t have you grow up a slave.”
“You ain’t one.”
“Not now.” She cannot bring herself to mention those six months that the law has seen fit to grant unto the likes of them, those six months already commencing their inevitable accelerating vanishment.
“So?”
“Things could change. I can’t much help it for myself, but I don’t want it for you.”
“I don’t see how there’s.”
“I’d give anything.” Stabbing the ground.
He fetches up the onions and puts them into the basket which he bends to lift with all his might, straightening his back and swaying a little, rehearsing for a lifetime.
“I’d give anything,” she says again. “I believe I might even give you.” As he drops the basket she reaches up with a knuckle to brush at the corner of her eye.
“Mama.”
Letting go the fork and kneeling alongside him in the dirt. “You hear me. From this day forward, as far as anyone beyond this house knows, you are a poor motherless child.”
“Motherless.” He knows her intent as any would.
“That’s right. We know better, but nobody else needs to.”
He sits stunned.
“You’ll go to school like any white boy.”
“Mama.” At least now his alarm has found a focus.
“Don’t mama me.”
“Pap hates.”
“I know it. But you’re going to grow up different from your pap. Different from either one of us, come to that. Better too.”
“How?”
“Don’t you worry. I’ll be here to help.” Thinking of the six months. “Just as long as I can.”
“But.”
She points a finger at him. “You came here to St. Pete with me, but you aren’t mine. That’s all anyone needs to know. And let that be an end to it.”
NIGHT HAS DESCENDED upon the widow’s house, and the boy has gone complaining off to bed as boys will. His mother sits on a hard chair opposite the widow’s rocker patching a hole in his trousers while the widow reads from the family Bible. The little parlor is bright with many lamps, bright enough to be visible from the river below, bright enough that these two may pursue their separate aims at their ease despite the woman’s weariness and the widow’s fading vision. Mary’s concentration, whether on her sewing or on her fate, is sufficiently complete that the widow discovers she can lower her book and lift her eyes and study her over her glasses without being noticed. Thus she sits for a time until her lack of movement draws Mary’s attention, for prior to this moment she has been sliding the tip of her finger across the page of her Bible and fluttering her lips around the lineaments of the words she finds there.
“Ma’am?”
Raising the finger that has been tracing the Gospel, and pointing it trembling at the scar upon Mary’s cheek: “Did he give you that?”
“Yes ma’am, he did.”
“A white man.” She spits out the words as she would expel a cherry pit. “A white man did that to you.”
“The white man I left.”
The widow closes the Bible on her finger. “You’re more intelligent than he is.”
“I hope so, ma’am. And thank you for your kindness.” But now that the widow has unlatched this door for so long sealed Mary feels arising within herself an upwelling of grief and grievance, a burgeoning of truths forever withheld and forever likewise unresolved. She rolls up one sleeve and displays the soft tender pale underside of her forearm, marked. “He did this. And this too.” Her wrist. “And this.” Her ankle. One twisted finger broken and healed that way unset. A gash concealed just under the tattered collar of her dress. Beneath the smooth dark curve of her hair, a red-rimmed and puckered cavity torn from
one ear by his strange and brutal teeth. Displayed and duly witnessed here in this quiet and well-lit room with the boy asleep upstairs and the river creeping past far below and the limitless darkening sky yawning overhead, she is a palimpsest of her own degradation.
“You poor child.”
“Now you see why.”
“I do.” The widow has an impulse to set down the book and lean forward in her rocker and bless the poor beaten girl with a touch, but she knows not where to begin. She opens the volume and takes one last look at the place within it where her finger lies as if she might find there some eternal truth with which to comfort Mary, and then she closes it again and rests it in her lap, where it lies impotent against incarnate personal evil such as this. “Did he touch the boy?”
“Not like this.”
“Does the boy know what he’s done?”
“Some. Enough to have come away with me.”
“Yes,” says the widow, and “yes” again. “Of course he does.” The Bible in her lap has become a dead weight and a heavy burden and she absently fiddles with the purple satin bookmark that runs its spine as the river runs the valley. After a time a question occurs to her and she recognizes that there will be no better occasion to ask it and so ask it she does: “Do you suppose he’ll come looking for you?”
“Yes ma’am. I believe he will.”
“Mary.” Fixing her with a look that will admit no denial.
Mary puts down her work.
“The man’s name is Finn, isn’t it. Finn.”
“Yes.”
“I thought so.”
“You did.”
“I made inquiries.”
“I know it.”
THE BOY GOES OFF to school for the first time.
