Finn (21 page)

“Father,” says Will.

“Your brother has always been recalcitrant. He has always been willful. He has always, dare I say it, been perverse in the extreme.”

“Cruelty is no.”

“Hush. I’ll cite you for contempt.”

Will retreats.

“He has gone his own way without regard for decency or history or God’s will, or even for the merest wishes of those who gave him birth. He is by nature cross-grained and rebellious, and the longer he has lived upon this earth the more devoted to these traits he has grown. The time has come at last for him to be reformed whether he likes it or not, for I shall tolerate his ways no more.” He pauses to draw breath. “If that qualifies as cruelty, then so help me God I stand abidingly unrepentant and guilty as charged.”

“As you see fit,” says Will.

If he is to be sent to prison Finn desires to be done with it, and he desires in any event for his father not to think that he cares. “Do I leave right off?”

“In the morning.”

“That suits me fine.”

“Good. And may you return a changed man.”

“I can’t say about that.”

“God knows I have asked little enough of you.”

“I know it,” says Finn.

B
ECAUSE THE
J
UDGE
has sequestered himself in his study, Will dares collect Mary and the boy to say their goodbyes. If he should fail his brother again in even this insignificant duty he is certain that he could not live with himself, so he borrows the wagon and the matched Arabians from the Judge’s barn and fetches mother and child back up the hill to the jailhouse. The boy takes no end of pleasure in the ride, which cheers Will some, but the woman collapses on the box wordless and woeful.

“Neighborly of you,” says Finn from his cage. His tone when he speaks has a kind of resigned gratitude, as if he has recently made a vow to savor such decency as he can witness while he yet tarries in this world.

Will opens the cell door to admit them and locks it again behind, and then absents himself to the marshal’s office, where he waits.

“How much he tell you?” Rather than tell it again himself.

“That you’re going to the penitentiary,” she says. “For a year.”

“I reckon that’d cover it.”

“A year.”

Finn nods.

“Seems like forever.”

“It’s supposed to.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

“You don’t have to. I’d not blame you if.”

“But I will.”

“I know it.”

“And we’ll come visit you.”

“I don’t know they allow it.”

“We’ll come anyhow.”

“It’s a ways.”

“Not that far.”

“You’ll be busy. With the boy and all.”

“I know it.”

In the end she does not come at all and he does not blame her because he understands the reasons. Her heart breaks over not doing it more than his does over her failure.

T
HE PENITENTIARY AT
A
LTON
is the state’s original and Finn is among its earliest inmates. A low stone fortress asquat by the Mississippi, it houses but twenty-four prisoners and admits into their presence nearly no air and less sunlight. He has inhabited worse places than this and he surely will again. At Alton the prisoners wear uniforms with alternating stripes of black and white, and each man’s head is shaven on one side lest he escape and attempt to enter society by stealth. The prison hires them out to work in the fields, and on these long summer days out of doors Finn can smell the river, which makes him long for home more than usual.

The other inmates are murderers mainly, which gives him neither comfort nor inspiration. He aspires only to return home and reunite with Mary and the boy, and to this end he keeps his nose clean and indicates the passing of the days by scratching marks into the wall alongside his bed although their array soon grows beyond his counting. The warden has imposed a vow of silence upon the inhabitants of his fiefdom, which does not bother Finn in the least. From time to time he gets a letter from Mary, which he struggles to decipher, and deep in the silence of the prison he believes that if only he could read its sentences more perfectly he would hear her very voice speaking them aloud within his mind as if by magic or miracle.

Whenever he can get out into the daylight he relishes it despite such labor as he has been assigned, and in the winter when the prisoners’ work schedule is sporadic and the pale sun leaks down into their frigid stone bunker through high windows as narrow as gunslits he remembers the river and the woman and the child and he dreams of them all alike. Snow falls sometimes from that great windowed height onto the black-and-white shoulders and the half-shaven heads of the prisoners, and once during the winter Will comes by to visit but his brother denies him entry for denial is the only power he yet retains.

O
N THE SUMMER DAY
that he leaves Alton for good the barber shaves his head entire. Thus restored he steps forth from the prison door in his own clothes, ill-fitting now for Alton’s food has been even poorer than that to which he has previously accustomed himself, and follows his instincts straight to the riverside. Children spy him marching hatless along and can tell that he is recently released by the two colors of his scalp, burnished brown on the one side and pale as a fish belly on the other. Beyond this visible bifurcation and a redoubled urge to take up his former life he is apparently unchanged.

At the river’s edge he seeks transportation upstream to Lasseter, but opportunities are few and he finds no willing souls. The few rivermen he meets take him for a murderer most likely unreformed and they desire nothing to do with him or any other such risky cargo. Upstream he walks along the mudflats past green islands and snags and shallows, past children playing hooky and rivermen running their lines, until he comes to a spot where a few battered skiffs are tied up to a post and to one another and there above the river he spies a place not much different from Dixon’s. With a dollar that Will left for his release burning a hole in his pocket he climbs the stairs.

“So what’d you do?” says the man behind the bar.

Finn has had plenty of time to reflect upon this question, but on account of the vow of silence prevailing at Alton he has had during the entire year’s passage no opportunity to answer it aloud.

“I run afoul of the authorities,” is what he says.

“Next time,” says the barman, “don’t get caught.”

“Easier said than done.” His voice has gone a little creaky from disuse but the barman takes pity upon him and starts him off with a decent whiskey on the house. Finn has missed the drink more than he reckoned and he fishes out his dollar and places it upon the bar.

“Got folks waiting at home?”

“I reckon so.”

“And nobody come to get you. Ain’t that the way it goes.”

“I got a brother would have tried.”

“What put him off.”

“I did. He ain’t no use to me.”

“Any man who’ll provide passage home is of use.”

“I can provide my own.” Pushing the glass forward for more whiskey.

When the dollar is gone he descends the stairs and helps himself to a skiff and poles upstream. Someone shouts down from the bar but too late and they know neither his name nor his destination. He keeps his head low lest there be gunfire and stays to the shallows, thrusting with the pole and feeling strong and a good bit drunk and happy to be out upon the river again.

W
HEN THE NIGHT GROWS
too dark for navigation he ties up and sleeps beneath the cover of an overarching willow. In the morning he plunges his face into the water and wishes he had not parted with his dollar so rashly, and then he leaves the skiff tied where it is and sets out upon a path leading inland to a cabin. He detects the smell of breakfast from the place long before he sees it, biscuits and fatback bacon and coffee too. A woman of his age or perhaps a little less is alone in the kitchen.

“Take what you want,” she says to him when he comes to stand in supplication at the door, for she can see the hunger in his spare frame and the strangeness written upon his face.

“I’d be obliged.”

“If they ask, I ain’t seen you.”

“They won’t.”

“They’ve asked before.”

“Not about me they won’t.” He takes from his pocket his release papers and flattens them upon the table. Between the two of them they have sufficient reading to confirm his freedom, and she gets another plate from the cupboard and invites him to sit if he will.

“I believe I could set here just about forever,” he says in a moment of candid relief and gratitude, for he realizes that under certain circumstances he just might. She does not ask him his crime nor inquire as to his destination and he admires the curve of her throat as he helps himself to her provisions.

After breakfast they adjourn to a pair of chairs upon the porch and she tells him of her husband gone these many years. The woman’s voice soothes him after his months in the harsh silence of Alton and makes him wonder how far it is back upstream to where he belongs, and she tells him exactly how far it is then asks what’s his hurry. For he has told her nothing about himself.

“Folks waiting.”

“They know you got out?”

“I don’t reckon.”

“Someone would’ve come for you.”

“It ain’t that easy.” He sits and studies the woods and thinks of the river, imagining its southward flowing and picturing overlaid upon it his own unfinished journey north. “Besides, they know I can look out for myself.”

“They can count on you.”

“I reckon.”

He splits a pile of wood in exchange for her kindness and then drinks a dipper of cool water from her well, and as he prepares to go he catches her looking at him despite his shaven head and his particolored skin in a manner suggestive of certain possibilities that he has already rejected. If he were in possession of his old slouch hat he would tip it as he leaves but he goes on his way in the absence of such niceties, back to the river and the skiff and his long day’s journey upstream, penniless and indelibly marked but heading for home.