by Jon Clinch
Perhaps, Finn thinks, he might offer some alternative penance.
“The woman,” he says. “The nigger woman.”
“What of her.”
“I didn’t break it off.”
Wearily: “You will now. Or you’ll risk siring another mulatto bastard. And you have seen where that leads.”
“No. I didn’t need to break it off.” Finn lowers his voice to the faintest conspiratorial hiss. “I killed her.”
“Really.”
“Honest,” says Finn. “I done it for you.”
“For me.”
“There weren’t no other way to get shut of her. No way that I could tell. I tried losing her but I couldn’t make it stick.”
“With your own two hands.”
“It’s what you wanted.”
“I’ll admit that,” says the Judge. He removes his reading glasses and studies his son as if seeing him anew. There is a certain grudging and tentative respect in his look, mingled with the usual contempt and a newfound measure of something like alarm. The man before him is capable of almost anything and he sees this somehow for the first time. He sees it with all the terrible clarity of a premonition. “Very well,” he says at last, folding his glasses and tucking them into the breast pocket of his coat. “Where’s the body?”
“That’s my business.”
“It was mine from the start.”
“It’s safe enough all right.”
“I’ll need to see it.” For the proof and for the pleasure and for the satisfaction of seeing his son reduced.
“I thrown it in the river.”
“More’s the pity,” says the Judge. “If you could have shown me some evidence, I just might have given you more time to consider the boy.” He dangles the idea like bait. Whether he believes that Finn has lied about the murder or lied about the disposal of the body makes no difference, for the two are signs of one and the same impulse.
“Maybe,” says Finn, his mind racing, “maybe it got hung up on a snag.”
“You let me know if you find it,” says the Judge. “And then we’ll talk about that other.”
21
NOW THAT SHE HAS RETURNED to live with him again she can do nothing right, but in any extremity there is always the potential for betterment. She awakens in the dawn yearning for the boy now lost to her for good, and as she rises in pain from her bed and begins the rounds of her endless day she permits herself to brighten for at least a moment with the last dead despairing hope of any dream-deprived soul, that the two of them mother and child might one day be reunited in heaven.
The morning hours are hers, for as has become his habit Finn rises late and loafs in bed with a bottle he has secreted beneath the bedframe. Only when he is fully restored does he come down the stairs and eat whatever she has laid out before he goes trudging off to run his lines. In the hours before he materializes, she can imagine that the riverside house is hers and hers alone, a place that she can arrange to her liking and where she can do as she pleases. She dreams sometimes that he is dead and has thus freed her to live here by herself and take in the hotel’s laundry and labor over a boiling cauldron stinking of lye like the slave that she is not in order to make ends meet, and no dream pleases her more than this. Save perhaps one in which Huck returns and claims her for his own.
Finn despises himself upon arising, both for that which he has done and for that which he has not done. Try as he might he cannot imagine why the woman would tolerate returning to one such as he, although on the obverse he cannot imagine why he ought to continue tolerating her presumptuous presence. Only the boy, the boy now set loose without chance of recovery, could have reassured him by his mere existence that the doomed lust he harbors for the woman could have in the end generated something other than rage and loathing. So day by day, in the absence of the boy and the absence of his own improvement or understanding, he finds himself pursuing her degradation as if by diminishing her he might diminish his own wrongdoing.
Even Dixon finds that the subject of Mary is forbidden.
“I hear tell that woman of yours is back,” is all he says, and he says it affably enough, but Finn turns on him a reptilian look of smoldering wrath.
“I don’t require your pity.”
“I ain’t offering it.” Topping up the riverman’s drink out of the goodness of his heart.
“And I don’t require your advice.”
“I know you don’t. I was only.”
“The Judge given me sufficient in that area.” He shakes his head and subsides, and turns his full attention to his glass.
Thinking that Finn has changed the subject and that following his lead will be the wisest tactic: “I didn’t know you saw that old man anymore.”
“I don’t.” He cranes his neck to look up at Dixon inviting contradiction, and detects none, and addresses once more his whiskey.
When he gets home he reacquaints himself with the reasons he has admitted this strange dark creature into his house into his heart into his bed and once she has satisfied him he goes down to sit naked and alone on the horsehair couch and watch the river. There are a few lights here and there and from someplace above the long rightward bend to the north he hears the uplifted voice of a man singing unaccompanied. Some drunk. He sits and lets the night chill settle into him and tells himself that any decent man would throw a sinner such as he into the river to drown, that if he were in possession of any sense at all he would throw his own self in if only he did not know how to swim. Thus stymied he drinks more whiskey and when he is finished with it he heaves the jug over the side and down into the river in his own stead. Come morning he will regret its loss, and consider such outlay as its replacement will require, and blame it all upon the woman who has made him this way.
22
OUT ON THE RIVER his mind is achurn with thoughts of the woman now dead and himself left as usual with nothing to show for it. He sells his catch but for a mess of sweet little fiddler cats, which he keeps wrapped in the bundle of damp reeds and brings back home. His natural inclination is to leave them in the skiff right where they lie for he has come not to care whether he shares some of his bounty with any such scavenger as may find it, be his beneficiary fox or wolf or dog or some other, but on this day in particular he has different ideas so he bends to lift the bundle in his arms like a swaddled child and he carries it up to the kitchen where he leaves it alongside his gutting knife and goes out.
He looses his skiff and lets it glide southward on the current to bear him past the landing where a small crowd has gathered for the arrival of a steamboat. Whether the boat is coming upriver or down a person could not say without knowing the day of the week and the riverboat schedule, and Finn knows neither of these for such information matters not in the least to him. Out upon his skiff in midriver he slides past the gathered assemblage of men and women and wagons and horses like a leaf adrift on a breeze, like a comet dying in the night sky, like any inconsequential thing in its ordinary unremarkable passage. He drifts past the mudflats and along the riverward margins of darktown keeping to the edge of the channel until he comes abreast of the laundress’s shack, and then he digs in with his pole and comes around. Rather than seek a place to tie up he runs the skiff aground on the mud and steps off dryshod.
“I got them little fiddler cats,” he says when she replies to his knock upon her door. Just that and no more, by way of greeting and invitation.
“I’m obliged.” Looking at him and wondering just whereabouts on his person he has secreted the fish. “They out on that boat of yours?”
“Back home,” he says with a toss of his head.
Whereupon she remembers the promise that she never reckoned he would keep. “You still plan on doing the honors?”
“If you don’t mind.” All gallantry.
“You’re quite the gentleman.”
“I know it.”
She has chores to do and the afternoon is at its peak. Alongside the half-open door she rests the dark serio
us oval of her face. “You’ll come back for me.”
“Whyn’t you come on up now.”
“Suppertime’s a long way off.”
“We’ll pass the time.”
She tilts her head against the door, either playful or sly or suspicious.
“I reckon we’ll think of something to do,” says Finn.
A STEAMBOAT HAS ARRIVED from the north, a sidewheeler bearing upon its broad decks both cargo and passengers to be dispersed along the river from Rock Island to New Orleans. Lasseter is but one landing among dozens and not a major one at that, so the activity at the landing is confined to the unloading of a few ropebound crates and the transfer of some sacks of grain and the disembarkation of but a handful of passengers. Poling northward Finn swings wide of the steamboat in his skiff, the woman at his side dangling one hand luxuriantly in the water and gazing up at the boat’s towering double stacks as if she has never before seen such marvels. Anyone can see that the nature of things has shifted for her, that the world has gone upside down entirely and she finds herself compelled now to hang on lest she grow disoriented and plummet to some alternate unpredictable earth.
One of the passengers makes for a wagon driven by an individual well known in these parts and throughout the whole of western Illinois, a fierce and imperious figure more likely to drive the affairs of men than to drive this wagon pulled by a matched pair of Arabians stamping on the shore awaiting this steamboat this passenger this attorney from Philadelphia sent to complete the work begun by the late Whittier.
The Judge raises his hat by way of identifying himself to his visitor, and that small movement—the glint of his cufflinks, the gleam of his revealed pate in the bright afternoon sun, the flicker of his black bowler hat—that small movement calls out to Finn as his skiff clears the sidewheeler’s upstream limit. For a moment or two he freezes and stares as if he has stumbled across some ferocious thing in the wild, and then he regains his senses and looks away.
23
HE SITS BY THE RIVER mending his lines. He has made do without her before and when the times comes he will make do again. The months since she has been returned from the widow’s have taught him this much.
If anyone dares ask about her he will merely report that he has broken it off once more. This time for good. The Judge he will tell the same partial truth, but only if pressed. He will make no public show of his reformation, and he most surely will not confess to any soul the entire truth.
Let her vanish into the collective memory like bait thrown into moving water.
He finishes mending his lines and hangs them looped from nails the way that nigger bastard did during the time of his imprisonment and then he retreats to his skiff bobbing tied up beneath the house. He smells his cooking supper and nearly has second thoughts, so he unties and pushes off and when he has cleared the porch he hollers up to get the woman’s attention. “Whatever it is you’re making,” he says when she has come to the porch, “I’ll not be having any of it.” And she knows better than to ask.
He takes himself and his pocket full of riches to the haunt of old blind Bliss, where he might drink his supper rather than eat it. He finds Bliss tending his fire, crooked double over banked coals like a shaman bent upon summoning up some spirit.
“Bring me something besides your money next time,” says the bootlegger as he rises. “Maybe a little bacon to go with my beans.”
“I just might,” says Finn, who is in a mood to take everything in the world for a signifier.
“Do a helpless old blind man a favor.”
“I will.”
“I don’t get out much.” He limps as he heads toward the cabin.
“I know it.” For who other than his customers knows that Bliss even draws breath upon this earth. Finn thinks for a moment about what sort of life this individual must have lived for all these years here in his forest hideaway, secretive and self-contained, to some men but a myth or a grail and to others such as himself who know the truth nothing more than the merest insignificant enabling fixture.
“What become of that easterner, anyhow.”
“The one you killed?”
“Don’t say it.” Spitting good whiskey.
“It’s the truth.”
“I didn’t.”
“I reckon your bullet landed in his shoulder all by its lonesome.”
“I reckon it did.”
Finn drinks and stares into the lowering dark and Bliss does the same, his one cocked eye wandering over the tops of the graying trees and the other, the one sealed up behind a glaucous film, fixed as fate upon some indeterminate point.
“I ain’t heard nothing about it.”
“I done you a favor.”
“Don’t tell me no more.” Bliss takes a slow sip and puckers his lips around it. “I can still picture that old boy out here. Gasping like a fish.”
Finn looks downward in the falling light and sees there upon the floor the traces of Whittier’s passing, writ in blood nearly scuffed clean by Bliss’s transit. “I took the blame and done you a favor. Leave it at that.”
“I will.”
“You’ll do me one sometime.”
“I reckon.”
“ONE THING I REMEMBER about that Whitfield,” says Finn, arising from his chair on Bliss’s porch preparing to take his leave.
“Not him again,” says Bliss. “I thought.”
“Hear me out. You know the last thing he said?”
“I don’t.”
“Last thing he said was nothing hurts.”
“Is that a fact.”
“It is.”
“I’ll be.”
“Take a little comfort in that if it suits you.”
“I will.” Bliss makes an attempt to rise but collapses back into his chair where he will spend the remainder of the night. “Help yourself to a jugful on your way,” he says.
“It’s the least you can do.”
“It is.”
“I hate to take advantage.”
“Don’t make it a habit.”
Finn steals a jug to replace that other lost in the river and fills it, then traces the path back to his skiff and unties and poles downstream as if pursued by demons. The jug is alongside him but he touches it not, because the work that remains before him shall require all of his will. He thinks as he goes of the woman asleep in his bed wrapped up in her warm traitorous skin. He thinks of that which drew him to her in the beginning, her innocent brown-eyed youth, the mysterious dusk of her flesh, the hand bravely hidden in her apron pocket to conceal and ready a white man’s pistol that her father had stolen from God knows where and passed on implacably to her just as he had passed on his stain and his fate. Blame it on that overweening nigger slave then, and blame it on the Judge for his part in it. And take comfort, if any comfort is to be had, in the bled-out easterner’s dying words. Nothing hurts. Nothing hurts save duty realized too late.
The sky above the Mississippi is clear and bright and hung all about with stars, and the moon has given up its shining, when Finn ties up in his customary spot below the house and leaves the jug and goes stealthily within upon his errand.
24
THE JUDGE CANNOT HELP but note the pair of them bound upstream on the skiff, his errant son and the woman, no doubt the very same woman his son has been miscegenating with all these years, the selfsame woman he surely lied about having slain and thrown into the river, but he acknowledges nothing for he has work to accomplish with the new eastern lawyer. He is frankly unsurprised, for he has seen enough of this world to know that treachery is commonplace and the worst possible outcome is forever to be expected. From the corner of his eye he watches his son pole upstream to his destination, then he brings the attorney to the great white mansion on the highest street in Lasseter and admits him to his chamber where they spend the afternoon in counsel.
For his part Finn ties up beneath his leaning riverside house and bends to help the laundress to her feet, the first time they have touched skin to e
lectric skin.
“What happened?” Taking in the broken piling, the sagging porch, the bent roofline.
“Steamboat.”
She hesitates on her way up the stairs for the place seems unsafe, oddly cocked, a cunning trap in danger of lurching shut at the thoughtless placement of a single errant ounce, but he offers her encouragement and finally sets chivalry aside and goes ahead himself.
“See?” Giving a little jump at the landing. The stair proves stable enough.
“I’m coming.”
He stands aside to admit her first, this woman so like the other and doomed to the same fate. Her familiar silhouette against the light from the porch makes him vertiginous, and he can hardly draw breath.
“You all right?” She reaches out a hand, aware that he is older than she and thinking that he has perhaps fallen away from the man that he once was.
“Fine.” Taking the hand offered, indicating the porch with a dip of his head.
“In darktown,” she says as they sit, “all I get is pity.”
“You won’t get none from me,” says Finn.
“Promise.”
He makes his promise and brings out whiskey in a bottle though he hates to waste any on her. They share a glass, she merely to be polite and perhaps to reduce her trepidation.
“I never known a woman liked whiskey.”
“You still don’t.”
“I know it.” Tossing off the remainder. “I don’t reckon I could support one who did.”
“You sleep out here?” She toes the corn husk pallet used by Huck in those long lost years, the pallet now torn asunder in places and soaked stinking by water spilled over the lip of the slanting rainbarrel and ravaged by birds for use in building other better resting places.
“Had a boy.” He leaves it at that and pours more whiskey, letting her think what she chooses about such kinds of misery as they may already share in common. After a while he says, “I sleep upstairs.”
