Finn (15 page)

“This is a nice town,” says the girl, for it is and she is not merely making conversation and moreover she needs something else to think about.

“Don’t go getting used to it.”

“Where’s the house?”

“Mine?”

The girl does not answer, not because she is recalcitrant or ignorant but because she is too busy taking in the river traffic and the movement of laden carts along the dockways and the jumble of people and horses thinning off uphill toward the higher reaches of the town.

“Mine ain’t here. It’s in Lasseter, a day south.”

He chooses a skiff from out of many unattended and they load it with her bags and untie.

“Don’t you have something that needs doing?” she asks as he looses the last rope.

“I need to get us home.”

“In this town I mean. In Fort Granger. Didn’t you.”

“No. I never meant to come up this far.”

The girl considers his appearance and his lack of baggage and his cavalier ways with a boat that apparently does not belong to him, and she decides to inquire no further.

In a compartment he locates a fine net on a wire frame which he drops over the side according to certain signs and indicators that are invisible to the girl. “Quick,” he says when a moment has passed and he has become occupied with the pole. “Pull it up.” And she pulls it up, and the spread net emerges all ashimmer with silvery minnows so small that their gasping is beneath notice and so brilliantly alike that they dance upon the net and upon one another less like imperiled creatures than like slick stones come magically to life. He fills a bucket with riverwater and saves half of the minnows and lets the rest go. Then he baits lines with the first unlucky few and drops them over the stern and waits.

“We were going to live in Iowa,” says the girl.

“I know it.”

“Mrs. Fisk has people in Rock Island but we were going to go and live in Iowa, my father and me and some others we happened on.”

“It was your father’s idea.”

“Mrs. Fisk wasn’t going to take him at first.”

“To Illinois.”

“Not to begin with. But I persuaded her.”

Finn tests a line.

“It wasn’t until sundown yesterday he gave me the gun and set me on the captain.”

“Where’d he get it.”

“Somebody back home.”

They sit for a moment.

“I reckon you’re brave enough.”

“I didn’t know any other way.” She has fixed her eyes downstream as if thinking that she could ride all the way to Vicksburg and return thereby to a past that has been ruined long since by circumstance and desire and bold inexpugnable action.

Finn pulls in a little channel cat and puts it on a stringer and drops it back into the water to continue swimming as if it were yet as free as it is alive. He intends when he has caught enough of them to seek out a trading post on the river somewhere and clean the fish all at once and sell them as a lot, for he has with him no means of making fire and thus cannot prepare a meal for the girl and himself. Failing that he can always hail a passing boat and part with his catch for money or something else in trade, salt beef or biscuits or beans or what have you. Thus is he ever the link between the way of the river and the way of man, believing without reservation that he does daily service to each.

“Mrs. Fisk schooled me herself.”

“Did she now.”

“She was always kind to me.”

“Not kind enough to let you go, I reckon.”

“No.”

He can tell that she desires to argue her point, to explain Mrs. Fisk’s decency by means of a dialectical process that in itself would demonstrate the tolerance and generosity of spirit that the old woman always showed her, but in the end she lets it pass as they both know she must. There will be time for this later if there is time for anything.

“I never had no patience for schooling.”

“Is that so?”

“If I had a child, I don’t believe I’d let him go. My pap made me, but often as not I went somewheres else instead.”

“My father couldn’t decide what to think.”

Finn looks out across the water for a moment. “I reckon he didn’t figure it’d do you no good. Less’n you made Iowa.”

“I suppose.”

“Which weren’t likely.”

“I know.”

“Anybody could have told him that.”

“People do desperate things.”

“I reckon.”

The girl pulls up a line with another catfish and treats it as she has seen him do, and then she baits the hook with another minnow from the bucket and drops the line back into the water. “Will they hang him?”

“They’d hang a white man for what he done.”

“He did it on my account.”

“That don’t matter. Be glad you’re shut of it.”

“I had the gun.”

“That don’t matter. You’re shut of it.”

“I suppose I ought to be grateful to you.”

Finn considers this for a moment as a purely intellectual proposition, and then bends in earnest to his poling.

B
EHIND THE JUDGE’S HOUSE
is the barn. Behind the barn and concealed by it is the cabin where Finn retreated when he came of age and took on the work done for pay in his youth by the hired man Petersen and his wife both dead these many years. Such is his inheritance and such is now the patrimony to which he introduces the girl on a night as dark as she and moonless.

“You ain’t allowed in the main house.”

“Who cooks?”

“The old woman. Her and a girl from town comes in to help. We’ll eat back here just us.”

Bringing her bags up from the river through the dark and empty streets of the village makes him desire a wagon or at least a horse which in some other place and under some other circumstance he would have borrowed but not here and not now and not with the girl.

“This place could use some tidying up.” By the light of a single candle she can tell.

“You’ll do it in the morning.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be obliged.” Which is as tender an expression as he permits himself.

Come morning he fetches eggs from the barn and provisions from the kitchen at the back of the house before anyone is up. His mother and the Judge when he is not on the circuit have grown accustomed to his irregular habits and they expect little from him in the way of conversation or even presence. In his entry into the life of this new community he has forged in the hired man’s cabin they will see only further withdrawal, if they take note of it at all.

8

W
ITH THE BOY DISAPPEARED
or stolen or otherwise run up against some temporary fate, Finn returns home from the squatter’s shack below St. Petersburg as from a long voyage. The world to which he recovers himself is unchanged by his absence, for the particulars of his surroundings—the rotted beams that keep the house from falling into the river, the filthy horsehair couch upon the porch, the trotlines mended so often that they have been made new a thousand times over and look none the better for it—the particulars of his surroundings have about them a quality of long disuse and advancing decay. He nets minnows and sets out his lines and assesses his need for supplies, all the while wondering if perhaps he would be better served by behaving as if that nailed-shut door to the bedroom stairs did not exist at all. He avoids it thus for three days. Then with his own clawhammer and a rusty pry bar borrowed under cover of darkness from the shed behind another man’s cabin he addresses himself to it in a slow reversal of a burial itself reversed. When he is done he feels not a burden removed from his shoulders and not an easing of his load but a strange sagging sense of disappointment, as if by unsealing this chamber he has deflated something whose power might have raised him up.

He sets down his tools and climbs the stairs from full darkness into darkness diminished. Before him in the air hangs a dim light, the pale and dissipated glow of the moon through milky painted windows, and he feels himself drawn in its direction equally fearful and expectant. The bedroom when he sets foot upon its white planking has about it a purity that nearly repels him. In order to move forward he reminds himself that he is in a place of his own creation, this room transmuted by blood and cleansed by whitewash and kept safe from the eyes of men by the found lumber and nails with which the river—the river that in its infinite wisdom and patience carries all things—by these elements with which the river has blessed and absolved him.

He enters into the upper room and stands in its center by the white bed and the white trunk and the white chairs all luminously set about. There is no sound save his breathing. In the damp dim light certain artifacts and instances stand out in relief upon the walls, white-painted each identical to its surroundings but each made distinct by dint of its individual edging of shadow. A windowsill. A hinge. A picture frame painted over. Her sun-bonnet. The nail upon which his own clothing once hung. He proceeds to this last and reaches out with one finger to touch its head and to touch its square shank and then inquisitively at first but by and by with more urgency to merge the relative darkness of his pale skin with its cast shadow. Tracing that dark line upon the wall with his unclean finger he discovers that he is able to manipulate its extent and add to it by means of the dirt that he has introduced to this place upon his hand. One finger after another he rubs against the white wall as if he has become some artist of reversion. He decides without thinking to trace as best he can the shadow outlines of each visible thing, an act that fixes them into permanent and grotesque signifiers of this moment. His fingers are soon clean enough to be of no further use to him and he goes downstairs and brings back up a fistful of burned charcoal and continues with redoubled fury to create upon the walls these markings which signify his return and his reclaiming.

“A
MONG ALL OF THE POWERS
and principalities, there is none on earth so mighty as a man’s unsatisfied desire.”

The orator gives the appearance of possessing little firsthand experience with the subject at hand, for he is enormously fat and dissipated-looking at the same time. His stomach rolls abundantly out over his trousers despite a half-pair of home-knit galluses, and his threadbare crotch strains as he sits. He is bald as a lizard and his skin is the color of a fish belly, so white as to be nearly blue and spotted all over with moles and tiny scabbed lesions. He has done his beard the disservice of attempting to shave it with a found blade or some other scrap of metal within the past week, riverwater his only lubricant and no mirror in sight, and the result is that his flaccid cheeks resemble bottomland poorly tended and gone to brush.

Finn has no time for him. “You let just anybody drink these days?” he says to Dixon.

“Anybody who pays,” says Dixon, devoting an abundance of attention to the motion of his rag upon the bar.

“I’ll have money tomorrow,” says Finn, which may or may not be the case and Dixon knows it.

“Note,” the baldheaded man goes on, “note that I said ‘
unsatisfied
desire.’”

“Don’t he look poorly for a preacher?” To Dixon.

“Be civil.”

Finn could not say which part of the question Dixon thinks his strange pale new customer might find offensive, the idea that he looks poorly or the suggestion that he might be a preacher, and so he minds his tongue.

“I might’ve done a little preaching,” says the man.

“Try it somewheres else.”

“Now Finn.”

“Aww,” answers the stranger, “I don’t mind him none.” And then directly to Finn, with a paternal look almost kindly: “I like you, boy. I do.”

Finn drinks.

“You’ve got backbone.”

“Enough of it.” He drinks again and sets the empty glass on the bar.

“Let me stand you to one of those.”

“I’ll need more than one.”

The fat man takes his purse from his pocket and spills out money across the bar.

“I reckon you must be some preacher,” says Finn.

“So people say,” says the fat man. “Although I also fill in with some phrenology if need be. And a little mesmerism and a bit of the old
laying on of hands.
” At this last he raises both of his eyebrows together, wrinkling back his pale forehead. “Not to mention Shakespeare, if you like that sort of thing.”

“I do not.”

“Some do.”

“I reckon.” Which is the last he says until the preacher has poured half of his savings onto the bar and down Finn’s throat transubstantiated into whiskey and thence again transubstantiated into Finn himself.

“What’s a fellow do around here for a good time?”

“This,” says Finn.

The preacher rises up kingly and surveys the room. “Any
women
in these parts?”

“Not here,” says Dixon from a stool at the back end of the bar, near the door to the kitchen past which his wife snores on her pallet. “Not that sort. I run a clean place.”

“I can see that,” says the preacher, “however much the observation pains me.” He has a bag at his feet, a thing of greasy carpet with a hinged top, bulging and lumpen and disreputable as himself. “A traveling man has certain
needs,
” he says, giving the bag a halfhearted kick by way of indicating his trade or at least the apparent trappings of it. “Remember what I said about the power of a man’s unsatisfied desire.”

“You’ll have to satisfy it somewheres else,” says Dixon.

“I am but a stranger here and friendless.”

“You’ve made the one.” Indicating Finn, nearly facedown.

“I should hate to impose upon his gratitude.”

“Don’t you fret. He’ll be a long time showing it.”

“Sir,” to Finn, placing upon the riverman’s shoulder a paw as meaty as a cured ham. “Might you assist me?”

Finn gathers himself up.

“I require companionship.”

Which Finn takes the wrong way.

“A woman.”

Finn has never before assumed the role of procurer but why not. The preacher hoists his bag and the two of them exit down the steps worn into the hillside to the black river silently moving.

“We’ll take yours,” says the preacher when they reach the landing where a dwindling handful of boats are tied up. And so they climb aboard Finn’s skiff and head downstream. Finn poles absently and the preacher plants himself amidships upon his carpetbag like royalty.

“I believe I’d like to sample something of a darker shade.”

“I can’t help you.”

“There must be places.”

“They don’t mingle.”

“Places that
specialize.
” This last word comes off his tongue with a long lazy hiss.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Surely you know where they
live.
”

“Niggers.”

“Amen.”

“I know where they are well enough.”

“Then lead on.”

Finn urges the skiff downstream past the skeletal pilings of his teetering house and past the brush and the mudflats and the weeping willows that intervene and past the quiet piers of Lasseter proper toward the less-lit depths of darktown, where he ties up to a post at the end of a dock with more boards missing than intact. “Mind your step.” Although considering his condition he ought better to be minding his.

The preacher bestirs himself sufficiently to bend double over his bag and withdraw from it certain articles that Finn cannot make out in the dark. He conceals them in a long denim coat that he throws over his shoulder in a theatrical manner and then, panting like a locomotive, he rights himself and follows his guide toward the packed dirt landing.

“What you got.”

“What we’ll need.”

“I won’t be needing anything.”

“We shall see,” says the preacher.

They move in the secretive manner of grim spirits from the waterside to the single narrow street that runs through darktown like a vein. “Here she is,” says Finn. “You’re on your own, I guess.”

“Come.” The preacher takes his elbow in the crook of his arm and by dint of his greater bulk commences a gay promenade down the center of the street. He has Finn’s interest now and leads him without difficulty, for there is something about the certainty with which he commences upon this adventure that draws Finn to it.

“How do you know where you’re headed?”

“Experience,” says the preacher. “Experience, and a practiced eye.”

Every shack here looks the same to Finn, and at this hour of the night they are silent and dark as ranked tombs. “Don’t look like a busy night for nigger whores.”

“Ahh. You have to know what to look for.”

“I don’t.”

The preacher raises one stubby finger as if to point out something to Finn or else to silence him, and together they stumble to a halt. On one side is an alleyway leading back down to the water. The air smells of gutted fish and spilled shit and the river, but the preacher breathes it in as if it were a zephyr wafted from Arabia just for him. Down the alley, silhouetted against the sky, is a clothesline bearing a pair of drawers, a woman’s underthings, and a boy child’s overalls.

“This’ll do,” says the preacher. From his pocket he withdraws a pistol which he hands to his companion.

“What’s this.”

“You know what it is.”

Finn jams the barrel into his belt reckoning that either the man is needlessly cautious or else he has a history of encountering tight spots in places like this.

“Put this on.” The preacher has drawn from his pocket a pair of black cloth masks of the sort that common bandits might wear. He ties one tight around the great humped mass of his white head, making his ghastly and misshapen visage into something more loathsome yet.

“You look like a stoat with a sore tooth.”

“Put yours on.”

Finn obliges.

“And you keep that gun handy.”

“I don’t see why.” Drawing it nonetheless.

Thus reassured and without further explanation the preacher holds his breath and hurls himself against the shack’s half-rotted door and plunges within as a leviathan plunges into water.

The shack consists of one room, and moving like a thunderbolt he makes for the child’s bed in the far corner just as if he can see it in the near-perfect darkness or as if it is here in this particular place that his prey is always doomed to lie. A man and a woman are asleep on a pallet of corn husks in the near corner and they rise up hollering and upon the preacher’s command Finn lifts the pistol and fires one lucky shot square into the man’s throat. By the flare he sees the man’s eyes grow wide in anticipation and shock and takes note that his woman is the very woman he has seen in the street with this very child. She catches his eye once again as before. He cannot help it or help himself and he moves to put the gun away or at least drop it to his side as the preacher snatches up the boy and his blanket and his speckled straw hat and fairly knocks his stunned accomplice on his ass in making his exit.