by Jon Clinch
“But Pap always said.”
“Never you mind what Pap always said. Pap always said a lot of things.”
Thus does his luxurious idyll, atop the green sward of Cardiff Hill, freed of running lines and gutting fish, in the gentle company of two women who perhaps without even knowing it have been competing these weeks pie after pie and song after song and story after story for his love in spite of his straitened circumstances and his uncertain future, thus does his idyll come to an end: with a whine and a shrug and a vision of Finn as his absent savior.
In the classroom he proves a fast learner but inconstant. The other children are of mixed ages and although the boys his own size have much to teach him about the local geography they have nothing whatsoever to show him as regards to capitalizing upon it. They point out the church, and Huck climbs to the belfry to sermonize by moonlight in the company of bats. They talk of caves high up on the riverbank, and Huck explores them with a stolen ball of yarn unwound to mark his return. They gossip of a slave reputed to own a prophesying hairball, and Huck befriends the individual and divines his own future by means of the relic’s mysterious power. He becomes in short the children’s secret untouchable prince, their authority on all things mysterious and forbidden, the raiser of their antes and the taker of their dares.
Parents and pastors and teachers alike urge the children to keep a cautious distance once his ill fame has risen up to the level of their awareness. Some know of Finn and some know of his extended dalliance with a black woman and some know or have at least heard tell of how that selfsame personage has lately enslaved herself and the child as well to that poor bereft widow Douglas in her child-empty house on Cardiff Hill. Some on the other hand have heard the official story of the boy’s unknowable origins, and some even believe it. This footloose and misbegotten child, with his fortunate pale skin and his experimental corncob pipe, with his intimacy with slave lore and his confounded gift for looking ragged even in clothing freshly pressed by none other than a white woman or so they say, this child can surely be no positive influence on their young, no positive influence at all. By denying him they make him irresistible, and like a sturdy weed he thrives upon their neglect.
The autumn gives way to winter and the Mississippi begins to glaze over in places. From the boy’s window on certain bright mornings it glints along its margins like a woodland path strewn with gemstones, and he tells his mother that he would go down and retrieve them one and all if only he could and then make for her a necklace. She laughs and tells him that she deserves neither the necklace nor him, which he denies but takes to heart nonetheless without seeing for even a moment the depths of his ready faithlessness. By the time he heads for school the frozen patches are gone and the river has recovered its quality of ambiguous bank-to-bank sameness, which the boy knows from his father’s teachings is only a façade to mislead the ignorant and starve the inexperienced.
For his part the father is upon the river every afternoon, pursuing a catch that grows more scarce as the winter deepens. He mends old lines and acquires new ones and steals still others, and with them he widens his range by appropriating the fishing grounds of lesser men unwilling to contest his claim until the Illinois side of the river is his from above Lasseter to below it, traversed by a latticework that he transits each day to fuel his meager needs and then some. He thinks rarely of the boy and less rarely of the woman, mainly when there are chores to be done or a fire to be built in the old iron stove. Mornings he endures by staying in bed and evenings when he returns home longing for a little warmth he satisfies himself with whiskey. That warm-blooded African girl with her memories of Vicksburg would have kept the stove red-hot night and day, and as he swallows and shivers and swallows again he takes pleasure in realizing that at least he is not outdoors chopping wood so that she might waste it.
A storm blows down the river late one day and catches him unsuspecting past the southernmost perimeter of his workings, below Smith’s trading post by half a mile, nearly as far downriver as St. Petersburg. Icicles are adangle from his slouch hat and his beard is rimed with ice and even his eyebrows beneath that sagging hatbrim are crusted over by the time he has poled to within sight of Smith’s, which looms white against the white storm and looks, as usual, abandoned. On the verge of such a night as this the vituperative Smith will be in no mood to buy fish or offer credit, so Finn settles on tying up downwind against the little pier and sleeping the night there in the protection of its lee side rather than risk the fat man’s reflexive and pitiless ire. The catch will keep until morning under its bed of snow.
Unbidden she comes to him in the night, a warm tender spirit coalesced from out of the cold. Mary. Under the darkness of his eyelids under the whiteness of the accumulating snow he sees her through a fog of sleep lit piercing in the absence of his usual whiskey. Snow-damped silence and the patient slow rocking of the skiff have put him to sleep beneath his tarpaulin, the night has reached some blank unknowable nadir aspin beneath ratcheting stars and cartwheeling snowflakes, and at this point or some other she comes to him unwanted but not undesired. He shivers and yearns and warms himself against her and unwittingly draws himself out to spill his milt upon the icy heap of catfish warmed slick by his sacrificial flesh. Through it all he awakens not.
Come daylight he shakes himself off and knocks on Smith’s door to find the proprietor as unreceptive to his merchandise as he would have been the night before. The storm has mostly spent itself but the riverman is half frozen and dying for warmth, a thing that Smith hoards with the same miserliness that he brings to guarding his other merchandise.
“You’ll frighten away my customers.”
“If they’re brave enough to bargain with you, I reckon they’re plenty brave enough.”
Somewhere deep within his mountain of flesh Smith chuckles in spite of himself, but he neither warms to Finn nor permits him to linger. “Be on your way before you begin stinking like a wet dog.”
Finn obliges and tests the wind and follows it downriver to St. Petersburg, where he can trade his catch to Cooper at the Liberty Hotel. Up the hill into the village he troops with a sackful of frozen cats and bluegills, unsteady on his feet in the snow and leaving behind him a trail of crosses. Cooper gives him whiskey and pork and cornmeal from his stores and a hot breakfast fit for a king right there in the kitchen, where he and the black woman sit and yarn and wait upon orders.
“I reckon won’t be many customers on a morning like this,” says Cooper. “You may as well have your fill.”
“I’m obliged.” His coat and hat steam on a nail by the stove and the snowmelt from his boots soaks into the hardpacked dirt floor and he can hardly believe his good fortune. “I could stay here all day.”
“Don’t get any ideas.”
“I won’t.”
Full and warm and drier at least than he has been, he gathers his sack and leaves down the alley. On the street he spies a group of children off to school, one of them Huck.
“You boy.”
The snow is still pelting and he stands between buildings ghostly and darkly emergent.
“You Huck.”
The boy turns. Deep in scheming conversation with some mischievous towhead, he recognizes his father as if growing cognizant of a dream made real before him; he notes his appearance as if a chasm in this world has opened up and let loose the inhabitants of some other.
“Pap.” Soundless, just the merest dark opening of his boy’s mouth in the bright snowfall. He halts and the boy behind stumbles up against him but the rest go flowing ’round about like a stream past a rock. Some look back over their shoulders and some do not and those who do avert their eyes quickly before going on their way for they have been warned about this individual.
“Where you bound, boy.”
“School.”
Full as he is of flapjacks and bacon and hot coffee, and pleased as he is with his haul of goods and whiskey from that burden of fish frozen solid in the skiff, he can feel the heart in h
is chest collapse at the sound of the word. School. All is surely lost. “No you ain’t.”
“The widow says.”
“What widow.” Brutal he is and single-minded but not lacking in imagination. The word upon his son’s lips suggests that perhaps the woman Mary has declared herself thus liberated in her new life. Again: “What widow.”
“Widow Douglas. She took us in.”
“Not out of charity.”
“No.”
“What then.”
“Mama works for her.”
“Not in Missouri. In Missouri they call that slavery.”
“She ain’t a slave.”
“Wake up, boy.”
“The widow don’t treat her like one. She treats her like help.” Standing in the snow as it lightens around them both.
“What do you know about help.”
“Pays her every week like clockwork.”
“So tell me,” Finn wheedles. “You all free to leave the premises?”
“Where would we go?” With a shrug.
“Sounds a heap like slavery to me.”
The man has a point that rings true to the boy but only so far. “Mama never left the house upriver neither. Except when you was in prison.”
“Them was different times.”
“I reckon they was.”
Finn watches the other boys vanish around the corner. “You ain’t going to no school.”
“Where then?”
“Wherever suits you.”
“You fishing?”
“Not today.” Lifting his sack of groceries. “Just back home.”
“Can I come?” For the boy’s great gift is of accommodation.
“No. I reckon you’re better off here.” Thinking of his own obligations and customs. “Just don’t get in the habit of going to that school.”
“I won’t.”
“Take off when you like. Go fishing maybe. Take a swim come summertime.”
“I will.”
Finn stands thinking. “So where’s this widow’s place, anyhow?”
“Top of the hill.” Pointing with a hand that emerges from the sleeve of a coat of better quality than any Finn has possessed since his own squandered childhood.
“I seen it up there.” He chews his lip and squints up toward the place.
“Reckon I might go on up and say my goodbyes. Ain’t never done it proper, on account of how you two run off.”
“It weren’t my idea.”
“I know it. I don’t blame you. I blame that woman calls herself your mama.” For it has occurred to him in this instant on this show-white street in this no-account Missouri village that if he does not desire to possess the boy then no one shall have him, least of all a nigger woman bound for enslavement.
The normally garrulous and amenable Huck knows not the words to make answer.
“Hear me, boy. Your mama’s long dead.”
“No.”
“Breaks my poor heart to say it.”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me what I know. She died giving you birth.”
Tears come to the boy’s eyes but he fights them back and turns to wipe his nose upon the sleeve of his coat.
“Now that nigger woman, she come along later. She’s a runaway I done took in to be kindly.”
“But the two of you.”
“One thing led to another is all. That’s the way of the world, boy.” He hikes up his trousers and spits down between his boots. “I always had a fondness for her color, even though your own mama was as white as this very snow.”
“She was.”
“She by-God was. Look at your own self.”
Confronted by the evidence of his very flesh the boy casts aside all previous assumptions on the matter and discovers that he believes. “Why did you lie to me.”
“She done it, not me. I never.”
“But sometimes you did. You’d call her my mama. You would.”
“It weren’t my idea.”
“But.”
“That nigger’s a kindly old gal for the most part. I ain’t taking that from her. I reckon she wanted a little boy of her own and I just up and give her one.”
Huck looks away, distracted, off down the street to where the boys have disappeared around the turning. Despite his youth he desires in the manner of all people gone bereft to absent himself entirely from the known world, to break all bonds with it rather than let the pain of any yet unsevered connection bespeak the absence of those others already gone. Today he has lost two mothers, and he desires to be neither with his father nor with Mary nor anywhere at all. “I got to get to school,” he says, hoping neither for confrontation nor for approval, but perhaps to wound his weakened father just the slightest by his willfulness.
“I know it.”
“I don’t go regular, but I got to go now.”
“Then you go on.”
“I will.” Turning and making tracks.
“There a path up to that widow’s house?” asks his father as he goes.
THE PATH CIRCLES AROUND the base of Cardiff Hill and skirts the upper edge of the quarry, where it intersects another path coming straight up from the edge of the Mississippi. Finn looks back and wonders how any son of his coming downhill from that house could ever choose the town path over the river, particularly when he faces no contrary force save a nigger woman and a useless old widow, but in the end he resolves that there are some things in this world that simply will not yield to reason.
He tops the hill and scuffs up the walk where the snow is thinner and windblown with his cross-heeled boot pinning down some of its tatters, and Mary answers his knock.
“You.” Casting eyes upon him.
“I see that old widow’s got you trained up well enough. The boy too, going to school and all.”
“You saw Huck.”
“I did.”
The woman’s eyes darken and she draws one short breath. “You can’t have him.”
“My, my, my.” Finn rocks back on his heels, grinning through his mustache. “Ain’t you gotten uppity?”
“He’s better off here.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Scanning the room behind her.
“Now Finn.”
“A feller could be right comfortable in such a place.”
“Don’t you get any ideas.”
“Yes sir, right comfortable. Provided he weren’t growing up a goddamn nigger slave.”
From the kitchen: “Mary?”
“I reckon your mistress is calling.”
The woman cuts him with a look both furious and terrified if not for herself then for her son. She has grown comfortable here these last months enjoying the widow’s wherewithal and accommodating the widow’s habits and doing the widow’s bidding, and now she despises this gleeful harbinger of fate for reminding her that all of it must come inevitably and one way or another to an end. She shall be either exiled or enslaved, and the decision between the two shall be entirely her own.
“I said your mistress.”
“Mary?” Stretching out that second syllable as if calling a hog, the widow bustles toward them down the hall and then pulls up short to appraise this mendicant come begging around her door with his dusting of snow and his hat down over his eyes and his greasy old sack. Rarely do his kind seek comfort this high above the more ready pickings of the village, and she is unpracticed in the ways of rejection. “May I help you, sir?” Not recognizing him.
“No ma’am, your girl is doing just fine.” A delicate stab that goes unnoticed at least by the widow, or else noticed and by lack of response acknowledged as mere truth.
“Have him go around to the kitchen door, Mary. He can have what breakfast Huck didn’t eat. Then send him on his way.”
“Mighty obliged, ma’am,” touching his hat, “but I done had all the breakfast I can hold.” By the time he delivers his surprising answer she is gone, circulating back into the depths of the house like some secretive fish and leaving Mary alone to dispose of h
im as she has been instructed.
“I done Huck a favor,” he says, leaning toward her and offering a carnivorous smile.
So certain is she of the impossibility of it that she bothers not to ask what he has done. She scents the sharp tang of him and the sour rot of his breath and draws back a step.
“I told him he weren’t yours.”
“You.” She stops, for she dares not so much as repeat the betrayal he has described lest by stating it again she should conjure it into truth.
“I done it so he don’t suffer your same fate.”
“You did it because you want him for yourself.”
“I don’t care to rear no child.”
She scoffs with the last shred of dignity permitted her. “What chance would he have with you anyhow.”
“He wouldn’t be no slave.”
“I’ll tell him the truth.”
“You do that. He’ll believe his own flesh and blood.”
Mary turns and considers herself in the hall mirror. “Then how am I to keep him?”
“You ain’t.”
From the back of the house: “Mary, shut the door.”
He tells her what he has told the boy of his mother’s death in childbirth and his kindness in taking in this desperate runaway for a substitute. “I never said you didn’t care for him none.”
“Mary!”
HE CAN STILL SEE HER standing in the doorway of the widow’s place, surrounded by that looming hilltop house like Lazarus gone stiff at the entrance of his tomb, like Lot’s wife turned to statuary by the power of her own unbelief. Like her he too dares look back over his own history, and for his punishment he is tormented to distraction by a kind of desperate unholy vigor, by the inescapable conviction that he has abandoned something that he must now restore unto himself regardless of the cost. He runs his lines and drinks his whiskey and sleeps all by himself in the hard frame bed, and he dreams of Mary of Mary only of Mary after all this time and he cannot help himself.
This would be a fine time to talk with Will or even to go straight to the Judge himself and make a clean breast of it regarding his now-terminated miscegenation. He has after all found his way through these many months without her, and if it were not for his damnable weakness he could make it through as many more again and then who knows. Perhaps his kinfolk would uphold him in his efforts. He would readily pledge to reform and swear upon a goddamn Bible if they required it. And yet to be truthful with himself he recognizes these ideas for the pipedreams that they are, since regardless of such other faults as he may have he is not entirely lacking in self-awareness. In this matter as in any other he has only himself to depend upon, and regardless of his intent he grows increasingly weak of spirit.
