Finn (2 page)

I
N THE END
it falls to the undertaker to load the corpse upon a wagon and remove it from the indignity of public display. Except perhaps for O’Toole, the giant who owns the slaughterhouse in the next county, there is none other who might possess the stomach for it. So here he is, rolling the sticky fly-blown thing into a square of old canvas and wrangling it up onto the bed of his wagon as if it were the featureless corpse of a slug and he an ant, strong beyond his size. His name is Swope, he is rail-thin and dressed in rusty black, and he has been a fixture in the village of St. Petersburg for longer than anyone can remember. From long association he has acquired both the air of death and some of its permanence, and his pale hair bursts from under the brim of his slouch hat like a pile of sunbleached straw.

The corpse for its part is well mannered, patient, and perfectly amenable. Leached clean of all fluids, it barely stains the canvas tarpaulin.

Swope mutters to himself as he works, complaining about the hour and the uncharacteristic heat and the unfairness of the world. He has long made a habit of talking to himself, since no one else will do it. The children believe that he speaks to Death, which hovers invisibly over one of his shoulders or the other, although their parents believe instead that he addresses his harmless old horse, Alma.

“As if I weren’t busy enough without goddamn half-pay charity cases come floating downstream. Won’t barely cover my expenses, may God damn the goodness of my goddamn bleeding heart, but who in hell else is going to do it? And at this time of the morning, as if the old gal couldn’t have kept till noon. A feller gets himself the idea to go skin somebody like a goddamn rabbit at least he ought to have the decency to set something by for the proper obsequies, mail it anonymous to the paper or the marshal or some such. A goddamn crime is what it is. The feller what done it deserves to be tried as much for one as for the other. Pitiful goddamn half-pay charity case.”

The corpse has a high rotten smell that sifts through the canvas and rises into the morning air like supplication. Swope rumbles down the main street of the village cursing his luck and bemoaning his fate while in his dim little office the marshal scratches his head and his chin and his belly and lays plans to consult with the authorities upstream, from whom he is certain to learn nothing.

H
E SLOPS PAINT
onto the wall as if he has it to spare, which he does not. The money that he discovered in the woman’s apron pocket, a dollar and change which he reassures himself he must have given to her at some time or another for he is no murdering thief—he may be many things but he is at the very least no murdering thief—the money that he found in her apron pocket bought the better part of a three-gallon pail of whitewash, although at the rate he’s going it will be barely enough to cover the four walls and he’ll still have the floor to do after that, along with the ceiling if it holds out. The furniture, what there is of it, is huddled midroom. Two sagging wicker chairs, a chest, a wooden frame bed of simple country carpentry. Perhaps he’ll paint these as well, provided he has the opportunity and the materials. Laid out upon the chair are the woman’s clothes, just where she took them off.

Two gabled windows front the river, looking west toward the Missouri side. The rising sun lights the tops of fir trees with pale gold and the river steams like slow soup in the cool morning air but Finn pays it no mind. The world is a distraction. With his thick brush he paints over the windows when he comes to them, glass and mullions and frames and all, as if to establish a seamless barrier between himself and the world outside. The whitewash, thin as the water that sulks by directly below this overhung house of his, seeps into every crack and cranny, cementing the windows shut and promising a long airless season ahead.

He is not entirely certain that he will sleep up here anymore. There’s a horsehair couch downstairs, on the long west porch with the river running underneath, and he thinks that perhaps he will take up sleeping there from this day forward as a visible sign of the invisible change that he has wrought within himself. This bedroom he will leave naked and plain as a mausoleum, with the bed and the chairs and the off-angled broken-hinged chest positioned talismanic and the walls stripped bare and every single surface painted white.

As the morning advances he realizes that he ought to pace himself lest he grow weary before the job is done, even though the urge that drives him is more spiritual than otherwise and not to be denied from mere physical weakness. Sweat drips off the tip of his nose. Dirt and grease have caked his long black hair into ropes that hang thick before his face and he ties the filthy mess of them back with a strip of fabric torn from the hem of her dress, bedecking himself half like a pirate of the Spanish Main and half like something odder and less knowable. Aside from the knotted strip of fabric he is naked, splashed with paint, white on white. His overalls, washed in the river this very morning before the sun was up, hang dripping from a cane pole slung out over the river from the porch downstairs like an empty gibbet, the faintest faded ghost of a warning to all traffic upstream or down.

He slackens his pace and still has three walls finished by noon with half the paint left at least. Upon hard bare feet he goes downstairs out of the eyewatering smell of solvent to help himself to a dipper of water from an old sugar hogshead he keeps as a rainbarrel in one corner of the porch where the collapsed roof lets the runoff sluice down into it. Naked he stands behind the boards that rim the porch in the way of ramparts, watching the river traffic.

“You Finn.”

“What is it.” He swivels his head with the urgency and precision of a crow, following the voice. Water runs down his chest.

“Reckon it’s laundry day.” The marshal, up from St. Petersburg on the Missouri side.

“I reckon.”

“Mind you don’t get your pecker sunburnt.”

“That happens, you’re the first I’ll show.”

“Don’t do me no favors.”

“I don’t mean to.”

“I expect that woman of yours ain’t to home, you running around like that.”

“No she ain’t.”

“Unless I caught you in the middle of something.”

“Not likely.” Finn dips more water. Half of his work is done, a breeze has arisen from across the river, and he is feeling expansive. He has always been a big man, broad of shoulder and well muscled as befits one who draws his living from the river. “So what brings you to the big town,” he says to the marshal, “other’n that steamboat?”

Lasseter, Illinois, is the county seat and a more prosperous place than St. Petersburg, from whence this Missouri lawman has come. His journey upriver has taken him well out of his proper jurisdiction, but not beyond the limits of his curiosity.

“Official business,” says the marshal. “A little legwork.”

Finn sips his water wishing it were something else.

“You see anything unusual float by last night, yesterday?”

“Calf come by last week. Monday, Tuesday maybe.”

The marshal, gone bald before his time and thick around the middle, sags a little and puckers his lips as he turns away and scans the water. “That all?”

“Yes sir.”

“How do you suppose your daddy’s holding up?”

“Same’s always.”

“That a fact.”

“I reckon.”

The marshal chews his lip. “Same as always.” He spits into the brown water, hikes up his trousers, and bids Finn goodbye with the back of his hand.

“Like I said,” says Finn to the water in his rusty dipper. He scratches his crotch, studying the places along the river where his trotlines are fastened into the muddy bank with long iron stakes and rusty chains fit for a dungeon. Every hook must have found its catch by now. Two days have passed since he last ran the lines, one day given over to the work and one more given over to Bliss’s forty-rod, of which he brought home a full jug. He ought to get out there on the river if he means to have any money for food or liquor, take up once again the old reliable routine about which he has hung the tattered rags of his life ever since he fell out of favor with the Judge, but instead he rehangs the dipper on a nail by its twisted handle and returns to the upstairs bedroom as if pursued. Certain stains have bled through the whitewash during his conversation with the marshal, tinting portions of the wall a pink as ruddy as flesh and necessitating there a second and more careful coat.

By nightfall he has finished the job and the room gleams ghostly by the light of his candle. He returns the bed and the chairs and the broken-backed chest to their rightful places, and he hangs the woman’s clothes on their usual peg alongside the window where they may serve him as a reminder. Downstairs he finds a little whiskey left in the jug and a little bit more left in the bottom of another cracked one on the porch. The battered old jug’s contents are mostly crumbled clay and rotten cork but he passes the slurry through a square of cloth and chokes it down all the same, followed by the dregs of Bliss’s more recent handiwork. In the end, even after he’s taken the cloth into his mouth and suckled it like a woman’s breast, it is only enough to fuel his need for more.

He dons his overalls and frees the skiff and poles upstream past his trotlines to a place where other skiffs on the order of his and worse are tied up like a stringer full of fish gone belly up, and he attaches his own to the last of these then walks ashore across the unsteady lot of them. The steps to the riverside tavern grow out of the hillside where nature and convenience have placed them: flat rocks, dead limbs, curved roots cradling dried mud. Finn plods upward and makes one last futile search of his pockets before stepping inside, into a room where the day’s heat lingers undiminished and the dark of night is not dispelled by so much as a single candle. Men play cards on the jutting porch beyond but he greets them not.

“You Finn,” says Dixon, the proprietor.

“Hey Dix. How happy are you to see me?”

“No happier’n usual.” Wiping down the wooden countertop with a filthy rag.

“I take that for a good sign.”

“I take that to mean you’ve got empty pockets in them overalls.”

Judged strictly by the regularity of his appearances and the quantity of his consumption, Finn is Dixon’s best customer. The circumstance is not without its drawbacks. Their transactions are mainly in the way of barter, and Dixon’s wife has lately decided that she would rather not serve her customers catfish with Finn’s scent upon them, nor any other kind of fish that he’s touched for that matter.

“If you won’t stand me to a few then I reckon I’ll find somebody who will,” says Finn. His eyes have adjusted to the darkness and he scans the room from under brows knitted tight with urgency and desire. Only one figure resolves from the smoke and the gloom, a black man nearly as large as he and surely half again as strong. For all the world like a carved monument or a heathen totem, his burnished face glows and fades in the pulsing light cast by his corncob pipe. Finn looks through him or past him and throws up his hands in frustration. “Come on now, Dix. I’m good for it.”

The black man, a gray-headed veteran whom everyone knows as George, rises from the table with his empty glass in hand. He moves with the grace and purpose of a storm cloud from his table to the bar behind which stands Dixon rubbing at an invisible spot with his filthy rag and contemplating Finn’s sad destiny. “I’ll have another’n,” he says. “And this feller here’ll have the same, long as you’re pouring.” Coins spill across the bar.

“I ain’t that thirsty.” Glowering at Dixon.

“Come on, Finn.”

“That’s all right.”

Dixon pours one. “I ain’t never seen you turn down a drink.”

“There’s a heap of things you ain’t never seen.”

“I know it.”

“You ain’t never seen the day I’ll take his charity, for one.” To Dixon, for Finn will not so much as cast his eyes upon the man who would be his benefactor.

George permits his teeth to gleam briefly in the dark.

“I didn’t hear the man mention no charity,” says Dixon. “You mention anything about charity, Mr. George?”

“No suh.”

“Hear that, Finn?”