by Jon Clinch
He takes to haunting the house on Cardiff Hill, lurking in the woods for the chance to cast his covetous eye upon her. He sleeps on the edge of the abandoned quarry when the weather is fair and in the hogpen behind a farmer’s cottage when it is otherwise. The boy comes and goes and he observes his passage without interest from behind a pine tree as shaggy as his own countenance. It is the woman he wants. He sees her in the yard, he sees her through the window, he sees her making her way to the outhouse and the toolshed. He reckons that the widow must judge her worth her keep, and he bemoans the unfairness of the world.
18
ALONE IN ALL THE WORLD but for his mislaid bastard son with two mothers dead—the apocryphal white in childbirth and now the unfortunate black in bloody ceremonial repudiation of her very nature and his perverse delight in it—Finn rises from his bed and runs his lines and sells the catch as is his custom. Back to his room he returns early, thinking of nothing but the laundress. He lies upon his bed in that milkwhite room half blackened and draws himself out and dreams his insistent dreams there high above the river with the dress and the apron and the underthings of Huck’s mother hanging still upon their outlined nails within his view. He thinks of her flesh, not the laundress but the mother not the mother but the laundress not either one or perhaps both together and indistinguishable, merged, transubstantiate. Visions and impressions alternate in his mind one after the other each one more lurid than the last and each one doomed and empty on its own but capable of edging him that much closer to his satisfaction. In his dream the women love him, each in her turn, regardless of what he has done and how much he may further desire. He completes his act and fetches up black charcoal from the stove downstairs and draws out upon the walls the vision he has just seen in his mind’s eye, himself, the woman, the laundress, his urgent shame and his satisfaction. He cannot get it right and so he tries again and again as he has attempted the act itself again and again before achieving his release, and in his drawing his cave painting his avid repeated execution of the scene formed prior in his imagination he takes the woman and removes from her the raiments of her flesh until she is reduced to mere black bone, an armature of skeletal parts broken and bent to his ministration. By the time he is done he finds himself aroused once more, and he wipes his blackened hands one upon the other and dresses and drinks a glass of whiskey. Then he unties the skiff and poles to the mudflats of darktown.
The laundress he finds tending her cauldron. He makes no pretense of engaging her in custom this time, approaching with neither clothing to wash nor coins for payment. Because he has laved his hands in riverwater then lifted them up to pole she can see the remnants of the black residue of his work shading away into his sleeves, his white skin here and there traced and carved clean by the passage of dripping water which has traveled down his wrists and forearms veinlike.
Her face brightens at his appearance, for none there are who call upon her with half the kindness of this forlorn white. Even from her low vantage she can see that he is of such reduced caste that stooping to her assistance can have caused him no loss of dignity. He has endured some grievous pain in his life and she can see it; he has suffered a loss perhaps even greater than her own and thus sufficiently powerful to bring him lower than the very lowest of his own kind. It is at such desperate points of illimitable degradation that understanding blooms.
“Mr. Finn.”
“Just Finn.”
Withdrawing the peeled branch and passing the back of her hand across her brow. “What brings you here.”
“I was out.”
She cannot help but see upon him a look of strangeness and animal hunger, as if he has emerged from forty days’ wandering in the desert beyond the precincts of civilization. He looks alarmed, astonished by his own presence within earthbound skin, returned here bursting into life by means of some dire pact with the devil.
“Can I get you something?” What she owns shall belong to him, this lone white man who has shown her unbidden kindness.
“A little water.”
There is a cistern by the shack across the way, a cistern shared by these dark poor too downtrodden for declaring individual right even to this the plainest of God’s mercies. She goes and dips water while he stands staring at the bubbling cauldron and the crackling fire. When she returns he takes the hand that holds the dipper forth and bends it steadily in his own that he may down the water with a greedy delicacy, and then he asks for more without so much as taking his eyes away from her.
“Are you hungry?”
“No.”
But she can see his need and so she begins: “I could.”
“You got none to spare.”
“I do. Some.”
“Then I reckon I could make a little room.”
There is hard biscuit and a stew of greens whose scent carries the faintest suspicion of pork and it makes him sad and weary to eat it for it signifies to him the life from which he long ago rescued that other. “Next time I’ll bring you some of them little fiddler cats,” he says.
“You needn’t repay me.”
“I don’t mean to.” Just so she knows he is not beholden. “They’d go good with your greens is all.”
“I reckon they would,” she says, lifting her eyes.
They finish and she takes away his plate, and he sits looking at the place in the corner from which the preacher snatched the child. There lies the abandoned pallet and above it a man’s overalls.
“You look like you lost something,” she says over her shoulder.
“I didn’t,” he says, but in his broken heart and his subverted groin he can tell that he has lost along with his woman and his child the impulse to pursue such possibilities as have brought him abegging to darktown. “How about I cook you them cats next time?” Picturing her in his own lair, that scene of other crimes to which he has become by habit inured.
FIREWORKS THROUGH THE MILK of his whitewashed windows. A ruddy glow to suffuse walls hieroglyphed with one man’s history. Finn rolls over in his lonesome bed and rises up like the dead at a great noise from without, an explosion as big as what remains of the world, and he runs down the stairs to stand upon the long front porch and watch while a crippled northbound steamboat, the Wallace P. Greene, erupts into flame. He has not been in bed for long, and with a befogged brain he stands to observe and marvel. The Wallace P. Greene’s boiler has exploded, the fault of an engineer who fell asleep at his works on account of a sleepless night prior spent arguing with a cantankerous wife who had been busy all week nursing a sick child, the resultant high-pressure blast killing a sweat-greased black tender by driving the blade of a coal shovel through his throat and severing his head clean. The shock wave from the burst boiler has rocked the furnace upon its moorings and blown off its door and opened a seam from which a torrent of fire spills lavalike onto the decking. The engineer is the second to die, trapped amid wreckage and fire, but he will not be the last.
From Finn’s vantage on his riverward porch the Wallace P. Greene is soon become a variegated fountain of flame, not just from its tall twin stacks but from the open lower deck with its cargo of cotton and livestock and coal, and soon enough from the windows of the upper deck as well. The sternwheel seizes and shudders and begins to turn backward as the mighty vessel gives in to the river, and when at last she yields up her aim and begins to turn upon the current small figures appear one by one and two by two at the railings attired wraithlike in nightshirts and nightgowns. They hold hands and assume various theatrical postures of uncertainty and desperation and woe, strung along the rail like gemstones lit by fire. Some turn to look over their shoulders as if seeking a loved one, some dash momentarily back toward the flames only to emerge once again coalescing against the fierce redness that has repelled them. Ultimately they jump alone or in small groups into the black water and thrash against it to free themselves from the gathering power of the steamboat bound ultimately like themselves downstream.
Finn watches all of this, along with t
he arrival of an army of men in a fleet of smaller boats to rescue those gone overboard and corral the willful ball of flame that was once the Wallace P. Greene, with a kingly sort of detachment. Only when the steamboat shifts—its stern running up against a sandbar and hanging there to let the bow swing broadside to the channel and with the force of the current accelerate its turning until it breaks free and takes aim downriver as if the entire Wallace P. Greene were itself a great cannon with its flaming maw aimed squarely at Finn’s violate and piratical presence—only then does he register that there may be some part for him to play in this maritime spectacle. Straight for his overhanging porch comes the steamboat, its twin stacks crumpling over in paired showerings of sparks and its every plank afire and its cargo of livestock bellowing like demons. As intimately as he knows the current and the channel he knows that the Wallace P. Greene will not veer away in time, and as much as he would prefer to escape by jumping barenaked into the river and swimming for it he calculates from the boat’s speed and course that he will do better running out the back door and down the stairs and concealing himself and his nakedness in the woods behind the house. This he does, his darting passage a flicker in the night, and beyond the outhouse he crouches shivering like a wild thing with his red eyes afire and his scraggly goatlike balls adangle to watch while the boat surges slow as death on the unfurling current toward his exposed overhanging house.
Upriver and down the air vibrates with a high and many-voiced keening which he does not register. The boat itself makes only the variegated noises of its burning. He watches it drift downriver like some inexorable ghost ship acrackle with the sounds of timbers popping and containers bursting and plate glass shattering from the outward force of great contained heat; he watches it drift downriver consuming itself as it comes like some cancerous thing alive, fueled and reduced at once by its own selfsame diminishing weight. The pilothouse breaks loose of the texas and tumbles forward and then down two full stories to crash upon the main deck amid bales of cotton already blooming with high ragged flame, and by the resultant burst and subsiding glow the Wallace P. Greene seems even more intent upon sighting its riverside target. Her high jutting prow extends out of the water far enough to spear Finn’s house before she runs aground.
He can see in his mind’s eye the damage sure to be done, the prow blasting at an angle upward through the pilings and into the main house in one blow, hanging there momentarily as if at rest, and then when the irresistible power of the current and the weight of the massive flaming boat take over tearing laterally southward slicing the house in two, like a sharp knife gutting a sunfish.
“Least I’ll see her go,” says Finn.
But he does not.
For the men in their boats have managed to get lines around one strut of the sternwheel, the only part of the steamboat not yet fully engulfed, and the sudden yank of their ropes going taut is sufficient not to arrest the Wallace P. Greene but to alter its course the slightest. The prow turns as the boat shifts on its axis and rather than plunge swordlike into Finn’s riverside house it only clips the southernmost of its pilings and heaves on past oblivious. The piling collapses into the water like another timber of the wrecked steamboat, like the useless pilothouse itself, leaving Finn’s dwelling to sag riverward as if impatient for the hour of its own destruction.
19
SPRING.
The boy has expanded his orbit through the long cold months of winter, wordlessly making clear to his mother the untruth with which his father has rendered him both cursed and cured. He has gone pale and sad during these pale and sad days. The widow has made attempts to warm him by the fireside and to help him with his studies but he rejects both her comfort and her aid for he desires them no more than he desires the attentions of the woman who once was his mother and then was his secret and now is merely a signifier of all that he has lost without knowing it. He possesses at least the sensitivity not to confront her with his burden of truth and thereby break her heart; this much he has unwittingly inherited from this figure who now, against her will, retreats into a dark corner of that which was once his life.
“Soon we shall need to make a decision,” says the widow on a fine spring morning when no person could desire a single thing more in life than to remain forever upon this high and airy hill so far above the world. The boy has gone down ostensibly to school but actually to recapitulate the best and freest and most true aspects of his father’s life, out on the mudflats with a cane pole and a blackened corncob pipe. He will release what he catches and eat the lunch Mary has prepared for him and stretch out full upon a sunny rock until the time has come to return to the widow’s house bearing tales of the other boys’ mischief-making with tacks and chairs and inkwells and braids. Neither woman will attend in the least to these stories of his, and not merely because they have heard each word of them one hundred times before. Instead they will find themselves preoccupied by the implications of a decision that even now, even while the boy loafs under a pine tree at the margin of the river dangling his line, they are about to reach.
“Where will you go if you don’t stay on?” asks the widow. She sits in the porch swing and Mary sits on the step beneath her.
“I don’t know.”
“The boy is certainly happy here.” She makes this observation as if it settles everything, which it practically does. “If you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I know it.”
“I’ve treated you two properly, haven’t I?”
“Yes ma’am.” Thinking of winter nights at the fire, the three of them more a family than any she has known since fate swept her away from the care of Mrs. Fisk and the high hopes of her father and left her shipwrecked and friendless in the wretched cabin behind the Judge’s house with Finn for her keeper. She knows that this widow woman could be Huck’s own Mrs. Fisk, faithful and kind and expecting the best despite all odds. Yet. “I can’t be a slave again.”
“Child,” says the widow, “what on earth can you know of slavery?”
“No more than what I hear.” Recalling that once upon a time she lied to the widow about having been stolen away from it at an age too early to remember.
“All folks do things differently. There are circumstances and there are circumstances.”
“I know it.”
“Nothing will change.”
Mary purses her lips and looks out at high clouds adrift like steamboats.
“I’ll keep up your pay.”
“Thank you kindly,” says the woman, but she shakes her head.
“What will you do? Go back to that Finn?” Thus speaking aloud the changeless and unapproachable fear that Mary herself for these past months has dared not contemplate. Yet downstream lies sure slavery, and upstream lies bleak uncertainty, and across the broad Mississippi lies some lonesome solitary life deprived not only of the boy but of all who have ever known him. Finn, the devil she knows, is barely distinguishable among the sorry alternatives.
The clouds collide and separate and drift on, changed in their aspect but immutable in their nature. “If you go to him,” says the widow, “you surely can’t think of taking the boy. He’ll hurt that poor thing too. Sooner or later. You know it sure as I do.” The widow raises to Mary a finger as frail and stern as any that she has seen since she left the hopeful care of Mrs. Fisk. “Do as you like with yourself, but think of the child.”
His mother sits for a moment in the spring air and the open light, drawing inward upon herself and closing some door in her mind and opening another. Then she stands and levels her gaze at the widow: “Wherever I go, you need to understand something.” Drawing one slow breath. “He’s truly not mine.”
The widow cocks her old head.
“I love him, but I’m not his mother.”
“Is that a fact,” says the widow. She would have promised not to claim him anyway, even without Mary’s resorting to this dreadful lie by way of repudiating his parentage and clearing his name and title. She was prepared to promise
anything, any kindness within her power, if only she could keep the boy and raise him as a simulacrum of her own lost child, and so her heart wells up with love for this woman’s final act of denial. “You know who he belongs to?”
“Finn. Old Finn in Lasseter, who doesn’t care in the least for him.”
“And his mother?”
“Dead,” says Mary.
FINN PLIES THE RIVER with his wooden skiff and strung lines, small on a boundless expanse, as if plundering immensity itself. He sells his catch and buys back a little of it fried up by Dixon’s wife and sits drinking whiskey on Dixon’s high porch as the sun sets far beyond the river in wilder territory than this.
“That’s it,” he says after a while to nobody except perhaps the absent Dixon, and he raps his scabby knuckles on the table and shoves off. Since no one seems to be looking, he takes the jug.
He permits the skiff to meander southward on its own, standing amidships in the dark with the jug in one hand and his unloosed self in the other, blessing the downbound Mississippi with his own slight augmenting stream. As long as he has it out he considers doing a little something further with it, but the whiskey has gotten the better of him and in the end he decides that he ought to save himself anyhow, for who knows what opportunities tomorrow may bring.
