Finn (3 page)

“I ain’t never in my life been beholding to no nigger,” says Finn, “and I ain’t about to start now.”

Dixon grows thoughtful behind the bar, and moves his hand in ever smaller circles.

“You going to stand me to that drink?”

George stacks his change into two separate piles, one for each drink he has in mind, and he gives them the faintest suggestion of a push across the bar. “Just being neighborly,” he says in a voice like gravel and velvet. “Ain’t a loan, ain’t charity, ain’t nothing but a drink.”

“Tell him to drink it himself,” says Finn, contrary to his own most imperative instincts but in keeping with his higher principles. “Tell him he ought to learn how to keep his money in his pocket.”

Finn leaves the bar by the other way and stalks out onto the porch among the cardplayers. For the most part they look up, one at a time or in small groups like nesting owls, reflexively but without any excess of interest. Insects swarm their candles and collect in their glasses and get swallowed up one by one in the manner of Jonah but perhaps a bit more content for the anesthetic specifics of their dying. One of the men raises a glass to Finn, a trifle ironically and at some personal risk, but Finn pays him no mind and stamps off down the path toward the river from which he has come.

The evening has gone cool, and a sharpness in the air suggests to him that by and by his waterbarrel will resume crusting itself over with the thinnest frangible film of overnight ice. Everything changes, he thinks. The woman is gone and the world turns. Free niggers try to buy a man a drink for no reason. He troops down the steps with his head aching for whiskey and his boot-heel, the one into which he’s driven a cross of nails to keep away the devil, leaving its own highly particularized trail in the dirt. He frees the skiff and it finds its own way into the current, reliable and wise as a bloodhound. Many’s the time it’s taken him well past home on a night like this. Perhaps the skiff knew best after all, perhaps he should have lingered down where it willed him, permitted himself to drift deeper and deeper into the slave states. Everything might have gone differently.

This evening though he’s wide awake and fully alert, perhaps more so than is entirely healthy for a man of his habits and inclinations. He sniffs the air, listens to the lapping of water and the creaking of oars from downstream and the clinking together of glasses from up on Dixon’s porch and other sounds too from various other locations along the river—sounds of argument and talk and singing and work, always work, for it seems to him that someone is forever chopping wood or wielding a saw or dragging some heavy object somewhere along the amplifying reach of the water, even at the deepest hour of the night. He comes abreast of his most upstream trotline and pictures its swarming struggling catch; tomorrow he’ll run them all and gut the slick fish clean and cache them one after another in a bed of wet reeds like Moses in the bulrushes, and then he’ll bring them up into the village to sell. Thus tomorrow night will not be like this night in the least, for he will be flush and able to do as he pleases. A flicker of light in the woods catches his eye and he considers pulling ashore for a while, following a certain path well known to him and hitting up old Bliss for a drink or two on account, an idea that sparks up in his mind and distracts his attention just long enough that as he’s considering the tortuous walk into the deep woods to where the old man keeps his works his drifting boat bumps against another, this one not moving with the current but rather holding steady against it.

“Hey. Watch where you’re going.” The voice of a boy, no older than Finn’s own son, which gives him an instant’s pause.

“You boys.” A powerful scent of fish above the omnipresent smells of the river and the night helps Finn realize just where he is and why the boys’ doubtlessly purloined skiff is hanging steady in the water here of all places and exactly what the young miscreants are up to under this blanket of darkness. “Them’s my trotlines,” he says in a level voice.

“Shitfire,” says one of the boys, and he goes plunging overboard rather than confront Finn’s well-known wrath.

Everything is wet: fish arching in the bottom of the stolen skiff, the air erupting as two more boys dive to evade capture, Finn himself as he catches hold of a watersoaked and half-rotted paintless gunwale and makes fast. Only one boy remains, the youngest of the four and the most innocent and the least equipped to be out on the river in this kind of a fix, a black child barely visible in the stern until the moon breaks through overhead cloud and reveals him there. He has a tear in his glistening eye and a hook in his palm that he’s been trying to nurse out with no success.

“You boy.”

“It warn’t my idea, suh.” Fussing with the hook as if it possesses mystical qualities.

“Is that a fact?”

“Yes suh.”

“Whyn’t you go over with them others?”

“It warn’t my idea.”

Anyone could see that this one has been a good boy all his short life, and that the act of throwing himself on the mercy of adult authority comes as naturally to him as breathing. Upon this one occasion, however, the truth serves him exactly as well as it has served ten thousand men who have come before Finn’s father in his time, which is to say poorly. He offers up that palm with the hook in it, a bead of blood gleaming there by moonlight, as if this explains everything, as if he has already endured all of the punishment that he deserves.

“Aww,” says Finn, and without a second look he grabs the line that leads from it to draw the child within striking range. He has acquired a natural caution about such things from his years on the river, an instinctual feel for the tension of the line and the power of the hook and the secret breaking point of the tender pad of flesh within which the barbed iron has buried itself. The boy rises like a perch, fighting his natural inclination to resist capture, judging furiously the relative risks and advantages of the two paths open to him. And before he can make up his mind to come along or jump Finn is upon him with the back of his brutal right hand. A spattering of the boy’s teeth precedes him into the river and the hook flies free, nearly but not quite catching Finn in the cheek. There’s a spot of blood on the gunwale where the boy’s head hit after the blow and whether or not there’s any thrashing to be heard from the river is no concern of Finn’s, certainly not as regards a thieving nigger boy and a sissy at that, blubbering away about a hook in his goddamn hand. He kneels and bends to take up the gasping fish, tenderly as a shepherd.

2

T
HE WINTER COMES ON
and Finn wears every article of clothing he owns and works the trotlines every day but they are less productive. When he does catch something it’s usually carp, which nobody has much interest in buying except perhaps a certain oil-black trader in darktown with whom he’d rather not do business. He fuels his stove with fallen branches and on one occasion finds a wooden door floating down the river from the north, frame and all, which he considers burning but in the end decides to use for its intended purpose. He mounts it at the foot of the bedroom stairs where it serves as insulation against intrusions and loss both thermal and psychic. The downstairs room is warmer now and he’s brought the horsehair couch in from the long porch and often as not he spends the better part of the day napping on it with his back to the world. The house creaks in the wind and shudders when something in the water strikes one of the pilings on which it stands and at such moments Finn awakens with a start, picturing an insistent floating corpse long gone downstream.

The sky is pressing low over the river when he decides to walk into the village. He dons his broken slouch hat and wraps a blanket around himself, more for effect than for warmth. Lasseter is empty, abandoned to the wind, and he passes before its shuttered windows like a wraith. In the diffuse gray light he casts upon its walls not so much as a shadow.

WM. FINN, ESQ.
says the shingle that sways creaking in the manner of a ghost ship over the boardwalk along which he treads. The paint upon the shingle is fresh, white and black as judgment, and at the sight of it Finn stops to consider. Then he mounts the porch and admits himself at the door.

“Look what the wind blew in,” says his brother, Will. His cheeks are apples and his hair, as black as Finn’s own, is thick and neatly parted in the middle.

“Will.”

“Pull up a bench by the stove.” Rising he is his brother’s purified image, although where Finn’s bulk has long been the product of exercise and whiskey Will has derived his from sedentary habits and a fondness for good food in plentiful quantities. They are nonetheless clearly two branches of the same tree, each bent by circumstance in his own way.

“This ain’t no social call,” says Finn, drifting mothlike toward the fire all the same.

Will encourages his brother with a soft hand set upon his shoulder. “Warm yourself anyhow.”

“No harm in it.”

The two sit for a moment, wordless, listening to the fire. The wind tries the latch and passes on.

Finn nods toward the door and the trail of footprints that followed him in, bits of white snow and black mud mingled. “Forgive my manners.”

“These old planks have seen worse.” If they have, it does not show. Even in the pale meager wash of light that sifts through the curtains on this grim day they gleam as if lit from within, as if all of the sunlight that has ever fallen upon the trees that gave them birth has somehow taken residence within their depths. The residue of Finn’s passage melts over their waxed surfaces like butter on a hot griddle. It cannot penetrate, and thus it will not long endure to mark his presence here. Will looks his brother in the eye. “Hard winter.”

“Hard,” says Finn.

“How’s the fishing been?”

“Poor.”

“So I’d imagine. And Mary?”

“I give that one up a while back.” All nonchalance.

“Is that so?”

“Broke it off.”

“I know you.”

“This time I mean it,” says Finn. “No going back.”

“You want me to tell the Judge.”

“I reckon he’ll find out on his own, this way or that.” Finn crosses his legs, fingers the nails in his boot-heel. “Folks talk.”

“That they do.”

“I ain’t the one brought it up just now.”

“I know.”

“You make a note of that.”

“I will. You’re correct.” Will is the younger of the two, and he learned long ago the importance of letting his brother assert his claims.

Finn coughs into his fist.

“So I guess that’s not what you came to see me about.”

“No. Not the woman.”

“No.”

Finn examines the stove, admiring its flue, which glows red as a cherry.

“What then?”

“I need a little money.” Staring at the floor.

“I give you a little money. First of every month, although I’m not supposed to.”

“I need a little more.” Finn raises up his head and his eyes flare with something that may be anger but is more likely plain unembroidered helplessness, helplessness that rages against its own unmistakable self. “I could use a little more, is all.”

“I don’t know how I could manage it.”

The muscles in Finn’s jaw bunch.

“He knows where everything goes. Every nickel.”

“Not every.”

Will angles his head a few degrees from level and looks steadily at his brother. “So just because I lie about one thing, I’m supposed to lie about another.”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“That house of yours. That house of yours is different. The paperwork says it’s in Pike County, for one thing, on a riverbank that flooded back in ’32. Strictly uninhabitable. A total loss.”

“I know it.”

“And do you know what it cost me to set that up?”

“How much?” As if dreaming that he could recapture it and spend it on food and drink.

“It cost me more pride than you’ll ever possess.” He steams where he sits. “At a risk far greater than any you’ll ever know.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain as all that,” says Finn, with the air of a man who possesses a secret idea of his own superiority.

“Have an apple before you go,” says Will with a gesture that includes both a bowl on the desk and the door itself.

“Don’t mind if I do,” says Finn. “I see you’ve got plenty to spare.”

A
LITTLE BLACK BOY WHISTLES
through missing teeth as Finn approaches down the far side of the snowy street and his mother draws him to her hip instinctively, muffling his music with her long strong fingers. Nothing about the boy commands Finn’s attention, including the possibility that he may be the child whom he struck for purloining his fish so many months back. Not even this living potential for absolution draws his attention to the boy, for he has lost not so much as a moment’s sleep worrying about the child and his fate. But the boy’s mother seems to know everything, even things she cannot possibly know, and she pulls him close to her flank as Finn approaches on the other side of the street, harmless or at least too distant for trouble.

Finn has eyes only for her. She is tall, elegant of movement, haughty of aspect. The only parts of her skin that he can see are her face and her ankles and that one strong hand with which she has restrained the boy, but even that much is sufficient to set his imagination afire. He pauses on the boardwalk and squares himself perpendicular to the frozen-over street, reaching the apple to his mouth. In spite of his rags and his blanket and his broken slouch hat he studies her slow passage with the proud indifference of a proprietor, giving his apple one great cracking bite that unleashes juice to trickle down his chin and nearly freeze there. She pauses not nor looks up. Only the boy, whether or not he recognizes the man who might or might not have been his assailant those months ago if assailed he was at all, turns his head beneath his speckled straw hat in acknowledgment of Finn’s presence.

D
ESPITE THE BITTER COLD
in the house Finn drops his overalls and sits on the horsehair couch with its view of the river and thinks of the woman, not his Mary but the woman in the street with the boy he’d barely noticed, and even though he can conjure up all of the usual details in a mind sufficiently fevered to warm the premises with a kind of sickly heat he can find no pleasure in them. He sighs and throws his head back and tries again, baring himself to the cold with his mind aboil, beneath his bony ass his ragged blanket spread and by his haunch a stack of castoff newspapers that he collects for sanitation and kindling although for the most part their words are to him the most impenetrable of mysteries. After a while he succeeds and cleans himself with newspaper and sleeps.

Guilt and cold and darkness awaken him. He shakes the grate and starts the stove with the newspaper he has lately used, which flares damply and dies but catches the kindling nonetheless. Drawn back from the ash his hand bears a stain that catches his interest likewise. Down his bare chest beneath the blanket he draws one finger, marking a line from sternum to navel, halving himself thus, and thus cloven he proceeds to mark his leftward portion with signs and signifiers in charcoal drawn from out of the ash. Crosses to keep away the devil and charms to ward temptation. Strange native markings geometric and spiral. They overlap and merge and bleed into one another with a dark pro-creative fury until only he might know where one ends and the next begins and he is halfway all over dusty dusky black. By firelight he makes a raging discovery and returns again to the couch for another go with that blackened right hand, watching as he does certain lights make their slow passage along the river at his feet until he finishes and grows restless and desires whiskey. The great jug is nearly full, two gallons from old Bliss, corn transubstantiated by heat and cold. Finn dresses and puts flame to his one lamp there upon the table and sits by it with a glass, the jug within reach. He vows to drink just so much and no more, but when the warmth of the whiskey finds its way down his throat and into his belly and out into his arms and legs, some of those extremities still residual white and the others blackened beneath his clothes—when the warmth penetrates his body as first it penetrated Bliss’s cool complex works in the alchemy of transmuting raw corn into raw whiskey—he yields as he always does. Motes swim in his vision as the night progresses, black spots the inverse analogues of the lamps that drift by upon the river below. They persist for a moment, dart from one corner of his vision to another, and vanish in the furtive manner of spiders. From time to time he slaps at one of them, suddenly certain that the phantom thing is an arachnid indeed for the house is after all inhabited by hundreds of their worldbound brethren. His movements grow wilder the longer the night goes on, and before he corks the jug and thumbs out the lamp and crawls to the horsehair couch he has begun seeing snakes.