by Jon Clinch
Downriver he goes past the steamboat landing, past the huddled shacks of darktown, past the trading post belonging to Smith. He poles where he can pole but mainly he drifts in deep water, making good time on the fast high springtime current that hurtles south as if eager to bear him to his destination. Just north of St. Petersburg he angles around the far side of an island and makes for the Missouri shore, permitting the skiff to slide past the ramshackle docks and the deserted levee and drawing up instead onto a muddy bank below the quarry. He ties up in a brushy spot overarched with willows and sleeps while the rest of the world does likewise.
In the morning he rises and strips naked and throws himself into the river, and then lizardlike upon a rock he dries his flesh in the sun and drinks what remains of the whiskey, growing warm both inside and out. He dresses after a while and ties back his hair with a bit of line and throws the jug into the river as if to turn over some new leaf, and then without further thought or consideration he stalks up Cardiff Hill.
The woman is already out among the washlines, and she comes upon him behind a flapping sheet as upon a spider beneath some rock.
“Mary.”
He holds up a hand in a kind of innocent greeting, and she takes a half-step backward. He keeps the hand raised and with its fingertips he holds back the sheet, making of it a proscenium beneath which she might witness one version of her life’s remainder enacted.
“You Finn.” Looking over her shoulder for the widow, who will not come.
“Is that any way.”
“I don’t know.”
He smoothes back his damp hair with the flat of one palm. “I been keeping an eye on you.”
“Have you now.”
“I have.”
“From whereabouts?”
“From around,” he says.
“The boy too?”
Huck is to him a mere impediment, but the look in her eye prevents him from saying so. He remarks instead upon the length of her absence, and how it has seemed to him an eternity.
“Is that a fact.”
“It is.” He lets go the sheet and steps past it, and with the other hand he takes her wrist in a grip whose pressure is calibrated as precisely as any line he has ever tugged, any blade he has ever pressed, any trigger he has ever squeezed. His touch communicates a thousand shades of yearning and insistence and possibility. “Come home,” he says.
THEY ARE TOGETHER upon the frame bed in the high bedroom in absolute dark, the dense clouds above and the sluggish river below each likewise invisible. By his potency and the rapt hypnotic attention that he focuses upon her she judges that he has given up whiskey in her absence, and this she takes for the greatest of miracles.
“At the beginning I feared you’d come for us.”
“I known where you was all along.” A lie for its own imperious sake.
“But you didn’t.” Trailing off.
“I reckoned a person wants to make her own bed ought to sleep in it a while.” Upon her belly he traces with his finger a line from navel to breastbone. “It weren’t so bad being all by my lonesome. I got by.”
“Did you tell the Judge?”
“Thought about it. Reckoned it weren’t no business of his.”
“You could have told him you put me out.”
“I know it.”
“Years ago you said you would. When he found us in the cabin you said you’d drop me, just like that, on his account.” Never again since that day has she called him on this denial, and yet it has remained all this time upon her heart like another scar.
“I know.”
“Did you mean it?” she says. “That you’d drop me?”
“I didn’t.” He draws breath, lifts his finger from her skin, and lies back like a man on a slab. “And I reckon he knew I didn’t.”
She lies breathing there beside him, her mind and heart angled at cross purposes. “The thing you told Huck,” she begins after a while.
Finn grunts and scratches himself.
“I believe you did him a kindness.”
“I know it,” says Finn.
He was ravenous for her when he found her there among the hanging sheets and now that they are finished getting reacquainted and have rested a while he is ravenous again and hating himself for it, and thinking as he penetrates her once more of nothing other than the Judge and those pleasures in life that the Judge has forbidden him. She would rather sleep but she interprets his urgent roughness for something higher and so she acquiesces. Yet when he is finished this second time, truly and unsatisfactorily finished, and when she has stood to open the window and let in some fresh air, he rises too, unsteady on his feet and damp with her, and he dons his overalls and takes his hat from its nail and heads for Dixon’s. Returning he will battle serpents on the stairs and spiders in the doorway and fall unconscious upon the horsehair couch as if she has not returned to him at all, but as the months pass he will grow accustomed to her presence once more and her good fortune will come to its natural end.
20
TWICE WILL RAPS upon the door of the tumbledown riverside wreckage that may as well be his own for all the value in Finn’s squatter’s right, and when twice there is no answer he springs the latch and admits himself. The floor slants alarmingly downward to his left where the Wallace P. Greene swept one of the pilings away, and already certain flotsam has begun to accumulate in that far corner by the entry to the porch. Bottles mainly but also clothing and trash and scraps of paper and something alive that rustles invisibly there even as he looks and listens. To his right is the door to the bedroom stairs, hanging open in a frame abristle with pulled nails that sprout like so many teeth. The naked board steps before him are spattered with white paint and bare footprints marked in the blackest coal dust, with bits of charcoal littered from edge to edge and ground into each crevice and corner. He thinks the place is worse than he had imagined it, worse even than it must have been when old Anderson died intestate here and left it ripe for the salvaging, and he is half afraid to touch anything within its confines. At the turning of the stairs he begins to see if not what his brother has done then at least the markings indicative of it. They swoop and careen across the walls in great angry torrents. They intersect and overlap and contradict one another like a band of murderers making testimony. They consist where he can make them out of dead men and spraddle-legged women and lost children, of blood and bottles and long sharp knives, of words never spoken save in derision and lust and despair. Will turns his rapt gaze entirely around as he takes the last few steps, wondering what he has done by turning this riverside place into his brother’s habitation and penitentiary and sanatorium. He has not long to consider the question, for even now his brother, despite the lateness of this fine bright morning when he ought by rights to be out running his lines, even now his brother has commenced to stir upon his whitewashed bed of coals.
“Will.”
“What have you done.”
“I can’t say.” For he knows not whether Will is asking about the drawings or about the things they represent or about some other perhaps less grievous crime that he may have committed as recently as last night while under the perpetual influence.
“These walls.”
“I painted them up a while back, but they was too plain.”
“Is that it.” He asks although he does not truly desire to know.
“I reckon.”
Will puts his hand on the banister and draws it back grimed over with black. “Father wants you.”
“I ain’t going.” He staggers out of bed and slips upon a strewn deck of greasy cards, falling hard on his bony unforgiving ass. He has lost some weight since Will saw him last, lost some weight yet gone flabby in places too. He is oddly both diminished and increased, at once an echo and a refutation of his former self.
“You ain’t going. Isn’t that just like you.”
“I ain’t his to command.”
“He seems to think you are.” Drawing from his pocket a summons and
clearing his throat and reading it aloud, with particular emphasis upon a certain passage regarding a promise that Finn has apparently made to his father in return for some kindness granted. He folds the note with one hand clean and one otherwise, and restores it thus contaminated to his pocket.
Finn regains his feet. “So what’s he got on his mind, you reckon.” Considering such alternatives as there may be to ignoring his father’s summons, including a noose around his neck at best and a lifetime in Alton at worst. Having already rid himself for good of the woman and her taint, he cannot imagine what his father might desire or what he himself might offer the Judge by way of alternative penance or even perhaps proof that he has acceded already to his highest wish.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I reckon I ought to count my blessings he ain’t called on me before.”
“I remember times when all you wanted was to talk to him.”
“Not lately.”
“Perhaps not.”
“Them times are gone.”
“Maybe so.”
Finn sits upon the bed and reaches under it to draw out a bottle. He uncorks it with his teeth and takes a long satisfying pull.
“Is this all you do anymore?” Looking from his brother to the walls and back again.
“It ain’t so bad.” He pounds the cork back in with the heel of his hand. “I fish a little bit. Either way, it’s all I got left in the world.”
“You’ve got the Judge.”
“I know it.” Pulling on his drawers and his shoes. “There’s always the Judge. I believe he’ll outlive me, the sonofabitch.”
“The Judge,” says Will, “is sure to outlive us all.”
The day is hot and sunny and Finn exits into it with the fierce sudden pain of the newly awakened dead. The light burns his eyes and his head throbs and he can hardly keep pace up the hill with his own perpetually deskbound brother.
“You’ll go it alone from here,” says Will as they reach his office door. The white sign with its black letters gleams in tumultuous leafshot daylight, and the nest of spiders has cast forth its young to scatter themselves abroad like so many rumors of catastrophe. Finn tips his broken slouch hat to his brother and walks on wordless.
Spring seems to him more advanced the higher into the village he goes, perhaps because its bright signifiers are more readily available to and cultivated by residents of higher strata. Flowers bloom in gardens and window boxes and hanging planters, and as intimate as he is with the elements of the natural world he cannot tell one of these domesticated blossoms from the next. The Judge’s mansion alone remains unbedecked. Finn keeps his pace steady as he travels the walk and strides across the porch with his cross-marked boots. Then hat in hand he knocks.
“The Judge wants me.” To the hired man’s wife or at least a vertical sliver of her, bright in narrow sunshine through the cracked door.
“I’ll tell him.” She goes off neither closing the door nor opening it farther and he remains behind. When she returns he follows her down the hall to the Judge’s sealed room and knocks, and lets himself in without waiting to be admitted.
“Pap.”
“You look a fright.”
“I know it.”
“Sit.” The Judge closes a ledger book and files it and spends a moment or two stacking up papers that he has positioned around about his desk like dealt cards. He makes a study of each one as he raises it into the light of his oil lamp, and midway through he stops, reconsiders, and sorts them all over again into a different arrangement.
Finn clears his throat.
The Judge attends to his work.
“You sent for me,” says Finn.
“I am aware of that. Sit.” Without looking up at his son or glancing away at anything other than whatever artifice of paper he is devoted now to constructing. His reading glasses have slipped down his nose and he keeps his great hairless head tipped rearward as if he has detected upon the air some troubling scent brought by his prodigal son into this place. Finally he ties the pages off in a slim leather portfolio with a tourniquet of dark red ribbon, and aligns the packet in the dead center of his desk. He folds his hands upon it, waiting.
“Pap.” Beginning again.
“For some time I have been reflecting on our agreement.”
“I know it.”
“Do you recall its terms?”
“I do.” For he has labored beneath them since the night when through no fault of his own the poor luckless Philadelphian went to meet his maker.
“You’ll be glad to make an end to it, then. I can see that.”
“I will be.”
“Good.”
The Judge slides his elbows forward and raises his hands to place the palms and fingertips together. Then he tips his hands over slowly until they point toward his son, and he angles his head and sights along them over his reading glasses as he would sight down the barrel of a gun.
“That child of yours. That mulatto creature.”
“Huck.”
“How old would he be now?”
“Ten years, I reckon. Maybe eleven. Maybe more.” With a shrug. “He run off.”
“He did.”
“Some while back.”
“How long.”
“A year or two.”
“Your chronology is a little vague.” Flattening his hands back down upon the desk.
“I don’t keep no calendar.”
“So I see.”
“I don’t have much need.” This audience is proceeding better than Finn had expected, and he permits himself to sag a little in his chair. He slides one booted foot out to the side, making himself just the slightest bit at home.
The Judge for his part stiffens. “Do you know where he’s gone?”
“More or less.” He goes cagey.
“But you can find him. You’re a man of the woods, a man of the river, the sort of highly capable individual who could track down a fugitive creature like that with his eyes closed. Isn’t that correct?”
“I reckon it is.” Although his father’s tone is abrupt and more than a trace sarcastic, the Judge has never before spoken such respectful words to his son, and so Finn receives them now with a little self-conscious smile.
“Very well then. I shall give you the opportunity to make good—not only upon your vaunted abilities as a woodsman, but upon the promise you made to me over the body of that godforsaken Whittier.”
“And then we’ll be square.”
“Then we’ll be square.”
“It’s been a long time coming,” says Finn. “God knows I’ve tried.”
But the Judge makes no acknowledgment. He merely swivels his head to look toward the shuttered window as if imagining a world beyond it different from this one, and then turns back to his grown son. “I want you to clear my bloodline.”
Finn gives him back a look of mixed bafflement and horror.
“The creature. The child. The boy.”
“I already took care of that.” For he has an idea.
The Judge narrows his eyes. “You said he ran off.”
“He did. I tracked him down and set him straight about that nigger woman.”
“As much as it pains me to admit it, I’m having difficulty following your thread.”
“I told him she weren’t his mama.”
The Judge shifts in his chair. “Go on.”
“I told him his mama was a white gal that died giving him birth. Told him the nigger gal was just a charity case I took in. A runaway.”
“My God.” With an incredulous shake of his head. “You are indeed gifted at bringing things to ruin.”
“Oh, he believed me all right.”
“He won’t keep it up for long. A mulatto child like that.”
“Huck’s as white as you or me. I swear it.”
The Judge leans back in his chair and tugs at his lip. “So that’s the way you left things with him. That his mother is a dead woman.”
“A dead white woman,” Finn
clarifies. “And he’ll never know no better.”
“I suppose he won’t.”
“He won’t go noising nothing around, that for sure. Once he got wind of that nigger woman’s lie, he broke it off with her for good. Just like his old man done.”
“That’s all to my advantage, I must admit it.”
“My pleasure to oblige.”
“But still,” says the Judge, leaning forward into the light of the oil lamp, recovering his old intent, “I cannot tolerate my blood passing through mulatto veins.”
“I know it.” Airy and agreeable, as if the storm has passed.
“So regardless of what the boy knows or does not know, I must insist upon purging my bloodline of all trace of your willful and wicked miscegenation. By which, lest there be any misunderstanding on your part, I mean to say that I am relying upon you to end the life of that bastard creature. And bring me evidence.”
“But if he don’t know, and nobody else knows.”
“I still know.” The Judge paces his words like drumbeats. “And my knowing is sufficient cause. Let that be a lesson.” He leans back and withdraws his head from the light as if he has become some mythic oracle of few words and implacable intent.
“I can’t do it.”
“Consider the alternative.”
“I considered it.”
“You don’t have to make up your mind now. Take a few days. You’ve disarmed the creature, after all, which I appreciate. Such action is grounds for a brief stay of execution, if nothing else.” The idea seems to give him pleasure.
Finn sits thinking. He pushes a fingertip into one ear and draws it back and rubs the waxy residue into a ball between forefinger and thumb. He wonders how much wastage of hair and fingernails and sloughed skin, how large an accumulation of snot and phlegm and crusted sleep he has cast aside on his passage through this vale of tears, and he figures that if he had it all collected up in one place he could make of it a boy, a thing like a tar baby or some other lifeless husk yearning for his animating breath, instead of having only the boy Huck to show for his troubles, only the boy Huck not even sufficiently aware to understand the woes of his origin or to grasp the slow sure sealing of his doom.
