Finn (17 page)

These things Tyrell cannot see and cannot guess and would not treasure if he did. “I reckon the Judge changed his tune,” he says offhand to Finn when they meet on the mudflats by the river.

“I can’t say,” says Finn, for he does not care what the halfwit thinks about anything and if pressed would say that he most likely thinks nothing at all, certainly nothing orderly enough to merit acknowledgment.

“Changed his tune about that girl, I mean. She’s a pretty one all right.” Grinning, showing his teeth. Tyrell has grown feeble with the passage of the years and his head bobs upon his neck like a lascivious sunflower.

“What girl.”

“Yours.”

Finn scans the river and waits.

“Your
nigger
girl.” As if Finn himself is the halfwit.

Finn turns to his interlocutor and blinks once, slowly as a cat, in either assent or disbelief.

Satisfied, Tyrell presses on. “I reckon even your pap can see the worth of a sweet thing like that.” He goes all moony and licks his lips as if the girl were Christmas dinner, and like a slug his tongue leaves behind a glistening trail.

Finn does not think before answering. “The Judge ain’t had no piece of that girl.”

Tyrell looks offended.

“He don’t know nothing about her.” Pointing a finger at Tyrell’s chest.

“I was only.”

“That girl ain’t none but mine.” Pushing at the halfwit with that finger hard enough to make him stagger backward a little upon his thin and bowed-out legs.

“I reckon,” says Tyrell.

“She ain’t no property of the Judge.”

“I know it.”

Had Finn denied the presence of the girl and offered the halfwit a glass of whiskey at Dixon’s or some other place he might have persuaded him that she was instead some vision or mere figment. Later he will blame this lapse upon his urge to defend her reputation against the repellent notion of her having lain with the Judge, although some might suggest that the opposite is more likely the case and he was defending instead the Judge’s inscrutable constancy. Regardless Tyrell shambles down the bank to his skiff, knowing what he knows and disputing within his mind what use he might make of it.

T
HE
J
UDGE TRIES THE CABIN DOOR
and finds it locked from within, which he takes as confirmation. Neither knocking nor making any other signal he slips around to the back and pries loose the ax from the chopping block and returns to the front door, where he applies the weighty implement with a sudden fury. The raw lumber has weathered poorly and the door is instantly burst from its hinges and the Judge enters to find the two of them together in bed not even covered by a proper sheet, roused up naked and wide-eyed like a pair of nesting animals startled awake. He is even more appalled than he has prepared himself to be.

“I can trust that idiot Tyrell,” he says, “but I cannot trust my own blood.”

Finn eyes the ax and holds up both hands like a man accosted by a bandit. “Put that down.”

“You boy.” The Judge can think of nothing else to say and so has gone atavistic, reverting to the discarded locutions of his childhood. He has no further use for the ax but having been told to let go of it he hangs on.

“I’ll drop her.”

The woman listens and believes, and the Judge listens but does not.

“I swear I’ll drop her.” Negotiating either for his life or for his patrimony.

“You will.”

“I will.”

“But you won’t come back here.” He lets the ax hang down alongside his leg. “Neither in this life nor in any other.”

“However you see fit.”

“It isn’t my decision.” The Judge points briefly doorward with the ax and then stands watching in a kind of dull and horrified astonishment while his son and the girl dress and gather themselves up to depart. Adam and Eve would more likely steal apples from the garden than these two would dare take anything more than the clothing they wear and one or two necessities that come easily to hand: a hat, a clasp-knife, matches. Finn resolves to creep back later for the frying pan and the ax and a few things more.

Disheveled and displaced they proceed downward to the river’s edge where he knows of a raft hung up against a snag in the shallows and long unclaimed. Some of the logs are rotten and some others are broken in two but it will make shelter enough as long as the weather holds, so working side by side they haul it from the water and into the woods where they prop it against a tree and give thought to making themselves comfortable.

“You said you’d drop me.”

“Go on leave anytime you want. I can’t stop you.”

“Where would I go?”

“I meant to do you a favor.” Thinking of the
Santo Domingo.

“I know it.”

She gathers up some pine boughs and finds a straight stick and then with line salvaged from the raft he binds them all together into a passable broom. With it she sweeps out a smooth place and she makes up in the center of it a pallet of more boughs while he runs his lines more urgently than usual and wonders where he might acquire some tomatoes or beans to go with the bluegills now that the garden behind the white mansion is surely off limits.

“You hungry.” Arriving with fish wrapped in reeds.

“How am I to cook that?”

He turns his back and walks off through the woods to the river again and poles his skiff up to Dixon’s place where he trades the fish for whiskey, and then he returns to the lean-to and lies down to sleep the afternoon away. In the early evening he runs his lines again and puts the fish into a sling made of rope and hangs them from a limb out of reach of such wildlife as may pass this way. “We’ll need a fry pan,” he says to her and she follows him up the hill into their own retreating shadows while the sun finishes setting.

They gather what they can from the cabin and bundle it up into a blanket, certain that the Judge will never discover their thievery and not caring if he does. When they finish they slip down the pathway between the Judge’s property and Tyrell’s until Finn takes note of the halfwit himself silhouetted in his parlor window smoking a corncob pipe as contented as a sultan.

“Wait,” he says. Lowering the bound-up blanket to the grass in a single smooth movement and slipping away catlike.

The house is ramshackle and swaybacked and he enters through the back door as if he owns the premises and is free to dispose of it in any way he sees fit.

“You Tyrell.”

The halfwit takes the pipestem from his mouth and surveys his visitor with the offhand grace of bemused royalty. “Now what brings you here?” As if Finn’s appearance upon these premises is a common thing but one that never ceases to bring him delight.

“You know.”

“Need somewheres to bed down?”

“I don’t.”

Tyrell luxuriates with his pipe for a moment.

The visitor asks his question. “Why’d you tell him?”

“Why not?” For there is no other reason or at least none better.

Finn strides to the old man and takes the vegetal stalk of his neck in one hand and presses upon it. With the other he knocks the pipe to the floor and covers the old man’s mouth lest he cry out. Through the window he sees Mary waiting and he presses harder taking no pleasure in it but hanging on to the old man as he would to a rattlesnake got likewise by the throat or some other dangerous beast desirous of doing him harm. When he is finished and Tyrell lies limp he locates a jug of coal oil and empties it upon the halfwit and his threadbare couch and scatters red embers from the corncob pipe thereon rather than waste matches.

Under full dark they crouch in the woods along the margin of the property and together they watch as Tyrell’s house burns to the ground. They have barely gotten themselves settled when the halfwit’s wife hobbles shrieking from the front door in her nightgown bereft of home and husband and flings herself full upon some sympathetic neighbor. Finn has forgotten about her entirely and he is taken aback to witness her standing there big as life and solid as denunciation, describing no doubt the atrocity she discovered upon the parlor couch when she came down to call the old man to bed.

Mary cherishes the inch or two of space between their crouched bodies and she brushes away a tear with the back of her hand. But for their shining eyes the lurking two of them are invisible in the dark woods, she in particular, despite the light cast roundabout by flames.

At the height of the blaze Finn bumps against her and takes her forearm in his hand and speaks without turning away from this bright thing he has created. His voice comes to her amid the crackle of fire and the crash of falling beams and the roar of wind through flame as if from the throat of some reassuring demon. “I done this for you.”

She sits wordless but does not dare pull away.

“You remember that.”

T
HEY PASS THE REMAINS
of the summer without difficulty and the autumn too, but soon enough winter comes on. He has kept himself alert for such floating timber as he may salvage from the river and added it piece by piece to the raft until their poor habitation has grown from a mere lean-to into a certain kind of disreputable-looking shed. The one original side supports some brushy overgrowth and has begun to tolerate the dense-furred encroachment of moss, with the result that the place has begun to look not so much lived-in as like an abandoned relic of some ancient civilization lost and long forgotten by the sons of man. Only the firepit provides a clue as to its inhabitance.

One deep snowfall after another pushes conditions toward the untenable. The woolen blanket that she hung upon found nails for a door no longer suffices to keep out the wind and needs reinforcement by pine boughs and a deadfall better used for firewood. They huddle outdoors around the firepit when they can and long for its warmth and light when they cannot. He experiments with building a fire inside for cooking, but as they lack proper material to construct a chimney of any sort or even tools to cut a venthole in the roof the trial ends without success. The shallows freeze over and Finn chops his skiff away from its moorings with the ax each day to run his impoverished lines.

When his brother finds them they are not so near death as he has feared but sorely afflicted nonetheless.

“Will.” In an astonished voice from beneath a pile of clothing and stolen blankets and pine boughs.

The brother’s instinct is to stamp off his feet before coming indoors but the margin between inside and out is so thin as to be past notice. He has come through the woods with an oil lantern for light and he places it on the frozen mud of the floor, where it sits at an angle and radiates a welcome incidental heat. “I can’t bear this,” he says.

“You can’t?”

“No. I can’t.”

“You ain’t inviting me home.”

“No.”

“What then.”

“The Judge’d never have you.”

“Nor I him.”

“I’m taking a place of my own, and I thought you might do the same.”

“I already done it.” Indicating the frigid room and its fire-blackened walls by means of a hand thrust out into the cold.

“This. Honestly. I can help.”

“I don’t require it.”

“He’d let you die.”

“I won’t die.”

“I know it. Still.”

“I’m obliged for your concern.”

Will jams a hand into his breast pocket and draws forth an envelope folded over many times and wrinkled into illegibility. He shows it to his brother as if in itself it has meaning. “I’ve arranged a place for you.”

“What.”

“That’s right.

“With you.”

“No.”

“Where then.”

“A house. On the river. Maybe a half-mile from here.” Will is beginning to shiver in the cold shack.

“Have a blanket,” says his brother, and he throws him one, diminishing the pile strewn upon himself and the girl. She has been witnessing all this in silence, wearing a look of studied uninterest.

Useless though it is, Will throws his brother’s ragged castoff over his shoulders. He returns the deed to his pocket and prepares to go on.

“What house?” asks Finn.

“The Anderson place.”

“That old fool.”

“He’s dead.”

“When’d it happen?”

“Maybe a month ago.”