Finn (10 page)

T
HE SPRINGTIME IS COMING ON
now and the river is running faster, and they set out trotlines and run them and shoot squirrels and rabbits with the gun, or at least the father does. He keeps the weapon either locked up in a trunk or close by his side, and he keeps the shells buried somewhere around in the woods for safekeeping. The lock on the trunk is not the only one he possesses, for there is another on the cabin door and no window fit to crawl out through. He vanishes for days at a time, leaving the boy sealed in. He says that he is prosecuting a case to have the money released and he reassures him that once they get their hands on it they will prove to the world that the two of them know how to make better use of it than any judge ever yet born, just wait. Yet the more he ruminates over the injustice of it all and his secret inability to restore his own rights the angrier he gets, not with himself but with Judge Thatcher and with The Other Judge and with his own cowardly brother and with the boy who brought on this sorry situation in the first place. He finds himself netted in by enemies and incompetents, and the only thing for it is to travel to St. Petersburg or Lasseter or Smith’s or some other village or town or trading post and swap such dead things he has been able to draw forth from the river and the woods for the various simple staffs of his particular life: ammunition, flour, salt pork, cornmeal, whiskey. He keeps a low profile in St. Petersburg, sticking mainly to back alleys and the narrow passageways between buildings and never venturing far from the most riverbound of the village’s precincts. When he returns the boy is generally famished and ready to eat whatever poor makings his father has brought back without expressing much in the way of gratitude or even appreciation.

“I suppose you’ve gotten used to finer things than your old pap can provide,” says Finn one evening when he’s had enough.

“No sir. This suits me just fine.” Not looking up. “The widow never cooked no better.”

“All right.”

“I do get hungry, though.”

“Fatback bacon don’t grow on trees.”

“I know it.” Busy with his spoon.

“It’s hard enough feeding just the one.”

The boy stops for a moment to offer a suggestion: “I’m right handy with a fishpole.”

“I know you are.”

“I sure do hate wasting my time in this here cabin.”

“It’s for your own good. The law is man’s work.”

“That don’t mean I can’t take the air now and then.”

Finn reaches for the jug and uncorks it. “I’ll be the judge of when you can take the air and when you can’t.”

“I wish you’d let me pull my own weight.”

“You done pulled it already with that six thousand if you hadn’t give it away. Let me do my duty and get it back, and then we’ll see who takes the air.”

He believes that as long as he has the boy he has the advantage over the others. “Possession is nine tenths of the law,” he remembers hearing someone say from his youth although surely not his father for the Judge would never have stooped to so reductive a formula, but he takes a kind of comfort in the familiar saying still, as if he could wring the boy out and get six thousand dollars in gold if only he knew exactly how.

There is a sweetness to the spring days that the two of them spend together, mending lines upon the cabin porch in dappled sunlight; waiting on the banks for salable junk to come floating down the river; gutting rabbits over a basin behind the cabin, the man showing the boy precisely how to make their loose flayed skin come away from their long muscular bodies like wrapping. The father doesn’t mind if the boy smokes a corncob pipe or two even though he has never acquired the habit himself, and from time to time he brings home a little tobacco as a gift, a pleasant reminder that he has not been too busy to think of him while in town pursuing their legal options.

While Finn is busy strategizing and cursing his evil luck and seeking out markets for their catch, Huck passes the days of his confinement with the rusted scrap end of a woodsaw that he’s found discarded in the rafters. There is an old horseblanket nailed to the wall opposite the cabin door by way of insulation and windbreak and he addresses himself methodically to the lowest and largest of the logs behind it, aiming one day to remove a segment large enough to enable his escape to freedoms far greater than this. The sawdust he disposes of in the fire.

T
HE BOY IS ASLEEP
in the cabin one night when his father arrives and labors for much longer than usual at the business of opening the lock. His efforts are so futile and frantic that the boy, roused only halfway from his sleep, takes him for a raccoon until the cursing begins.

“Pap!” from a spot directly behind the door. Considering his father’s condition he knows that he would be better advised to play possum as he has done so many times previous, but he has been alone for the better part of three days now and this sudden commotion at the door has about it some of the qualities of the resurrection.

“Boy.”

“You got a light out there?”

“Come on give your old pap a hand.”

“I can’t. You got a light?”

“Bestir yourself.” Hammering on the door, the lock jumping in counterpoint to his blows.

“You locked me in.”

“Don’t blame me.”

“A light would help.”

The father gives the door one last frustrated pathetic blow and leans his head against it.

“There’s some matchsticks,” says the boy, and he is referring not to their generalized presence in the cabin but to the four in particular that he has pushed through the gap beneath the door. “Right there on the floor,” he says. “By your foot.”

Finn drops to his knees as if seeking mercy from some force infinitely greater than he, and with blunt urgent fingers he locates the matches. The first of them he loses unlit down a gap between the floorboards. The next he strikes while still on his knees only to watch it burn out before he can recover his footing. The third he conserves until he is erect. Its flame lasts long enough for him to extract the key from the pocket where he has absently put it, but it sizzles out between his thumb and forefinger before he can bring the key to the lock. By the light of the very last of them, upon which he concentrates a rapt and almost holy attention as if this were the last matchstick on earth and mankind’s final illumination, he springs the lock and admits himself to the squatter’s shack.

“There’s groceries in the skiff.” For even in his present condition he knows that the boy will want them.

Want them he does, so much so that in his hunger he forgets himself and instead of merely vanishing into the woods while his father is conveniently half blind and incoherent he transfers sacks and boxes from the skiff to the cabin one after another and then commences to eat everything in sight.

“Go easy.”

“I will.”

“That’s got to last.”

“I know it.”

While the boy eats, Finn returns to the skiff to fetch the gun he has forgotten there. Then he comes back and locks the door behind him and helps himself to a dipper of water and a square of cornbread and a piece of jerked beef over which he ruminates alternately each of them in turn until by and by he seems refreshed and ready for more whiskey. He grows stern and loquacious as he drinks, earnest as a judge and yet oddly confidential too, as if he has had a premonition that his opportunities to settle accounts with the boy are limited and has decided therefore that he must during this one night pass on everything he has learned in close to fifty years. The whiskey helps.

“You beware,” he says, curling his hand around a glass fiercely enough to break it and pointing with his index finger at a spot between the boy’s eyes. The whiskey in the glass quivers until it very nearly jumps out. “You beware where this world is headed.”

“I will.”

“Good. You do that and you’ll be all right.” He drains the glass and claps it down upon the table with an apparent measure of relief.

“I hope so.”

“You will.” There is nonetheless a light in his eyes that suggests he might remain unconvinced.

“I’ll do my best. Don’t you worry none.”

He holds the bottle with one hand, and with the other he distractedly combs the damp greasy ropes of his hair, his fingers leaving psoriatic trails of cornmeal and filth where they pass. “I seen a nigger not long back,” he says, “right here in St. Pete, a free nigger from Ohio. A mulatto he was, near as white as a white man. And he was wearing the whitest shirt you ever seen and the shiniest hat too.”

“What’d he do?”

“It ain’t what he did.”

The boy waits while the man pours more whiskey.

“That goddamn free nigger was the awfulest old gray-headed nabob you ever seen. Walked with a silver-headed cane. Said he was a college professor.”

The boy fusses with some crumbs on the table.

“I tried to claim him for a runaway, but it weren’t no use.”

“He put up a fight?” Suddenly interested.

“I wish he had. I’d have broke his back and skinned him alive.”

“I know it.”

“Marshal said it weren’t legal, claiming him that way. So I give it up.”

“It weren’t legal?”

“Said I had to wait six months.”

“I’ve heard.”

The man pours himself another and favors the boy with a conspiratorial leer. “Seemed to me even a nigger college professor would be smart enough not to stay any six months, considering.”

The boy laughs over his father’s wisdom, and awash in the happy shower of approval and companionship thus unleashed Finn downs the whiskey as if it were the foulest medicine but necessary all the same for what ails him. Then he turns on the boy like a snake, his thoughts gone rushing back to the professor.

“Goddamn nigger can
vote
in Ohio. I reckon any nigger can. Any goddamn nigger. And after he gets done with that he can come down here six months at a time and look at me over them gold-rimmed glasses any way he likes and there ain’t a goddamn thing I can do about it.” He looks daggers at the boy, either imitating the black or else imagining him.

Bit by bit he descends to the level of drunkenness that he had attained previous to arriving home and then he proceeds beyond it, venturing into territory that the boy has seen before only on occasions when the fish have been especially plentiful and the harvest of whiskey has thus been particularly bounteous. For a man who enjoys his drink he permits it to make him miserable. He rages against the blacks and the government and the law, all of which he insists have conspired to bring him to ruin. Something about his drunkenness gives him the idea that he must stand up in order to orate properly, and every time he attempts to do so he loses his balance and falls, spilling his drink and catching himself with his sore left arm. This only fuels his wrath and his urgent sense that remaining successfully upon his feet is essential to his thwarted purpose and so he rages against the table and against the chair and against the tub of salt pork over which he takes a tumble for they too just like the blacks and the government and the law have been laying for him since the day he was born.

At length he collapses beaten onto the bed and the boy sits alert in the chair waiting for sleep to overtake him. The sawn log behind the horseblanket is not yet freed but the key to the lock is in the man’s shirt pocket and he figures that he will make use of it once his father gives up tossing and turning and commences to snore, but sleep is no more kind to the man than the chair and the table and the law have been. He thrashes and groans without letup, hollering at the walls and at the universe and most furiously at the boy himself telling him that he’ll put out that candle like a decent white boy and quit studying on him like some prowling thieving infernal white-shirted free nigger if he knows what’s good for him.

The boy unwittingly sleeps first but is soon awakened by a scream that signals the appearance in his father’s bed of an invading army of snakes and spiders. They are crawling up his legs, he says, and squirming in his tattered underwear and biting him on the buttocks and the chest and the face and any other place where they can sink a mandible or a fang. He leaps from the bed and throws himself upon the floor as if he has woken up entirely afire, screaming and tearing at his hair and kicking his feet like a mule possessed.

“Take him off!” His snarl is desperate and guttural and whether he is referring to a snake or a spider or the devil himself is beyond the boy’s knowing. At once he is on his feet again racing in circles this time around and around the cabin stirring up a whirlwind of fishing tackle and tin pots and kindling until the boy fears that he will accidentally take down the horseblanket and leave his work with the handsaw exposed come morning and what then. “Take him off!” he cries again and again and the boy does not oblige but in a few moments the man is nonetheless either satisfied or sufficiently exhausted to surrender and so he lies back down to rest. His face presses into the ticking as if he aims to leave his likeness there for posterity. One eye gleams in the darkness like a bloody gemstone and with terrible effort he focuses it upon the boy. Lying there transfixed and panting he strains his ears and listens to something, perhaps the terrifying mysterious surge of his own blood, perhaps the calling of wolves and owls in the encroaching forest. The boy is listening too, frozen in his chair as still as some hunted creature, and while he concentrates his attention upon his father as if to subdue him by pure will or hypnosis or some other childlike strength the man digs in his pocket for his clasp-knife.