Finn (33 page)

C
OME MORNING
a rivulet of blood has dribbled down that selfsame arm and pooled upon the painted floorboards and dried to a black crust, and Finn arises to find himself jailed behind the sunlit balusters with a dead man. He rifles Whittier’s coat for whatever riches may yet remain in his purse, and then he lies back down again and sleeps some more, for he will need all of his wits to handle the Judge and there is no sense in running. The wooden leg he resolves to keep as a memento.

The hired man’s wife discovers them. “There’s two men dead on the porch,” she says to the Judge’s wife, who steadfastly refuses to go out and see for herself. She edges down the staircase from her parlor and thence along the hallway that leads to the chamber where the Judge sits inviolate, and she raps upon the door and delivers to him the news.

“Two men?” From deep within. “Two?”

“So she says.”

“Then you haven’t seen for yourself?”

“No.”

With a creak the Judge’s chair gives up his weight. “I do not require a crystal ball to foretell that only one of those two men is dead,” he says when he emerges from behind the door. “If you’re curious, it would be the one
not
descended from your bloodline.”

“My bloodline.”

But the Judge has already put his broad black back to her and gone striding down the hall toward the porch where he might take in the damage with his own two eyes. He discovers the tableau exactly as he had expected it, and with a grunt he kicks his son in the ribs to rouse him.

“Ow.” Turning painfully over onto his back. There is more blood on him than there is on the dead man, as if Whittier for his last gift had bequeathed every drop of it to the individual who saw fit to carry him as far as the Judge’s porch. Blood has stained his shirt and his trousers and his boots and by his walking he has left upon the porch a pattern of crosses in blood, as of a man who has waded in paint. Blood is caked in his hair and in his beard and blood is dried masklike upon his face and blood is crackling from his hands like his own dead skin.

“You’ve made a by-God mess.”

“It weren’t my fault.”

“It never is.”

“I brung him home. That’s all.” He knows that offering up too much too soon will drive the Judge’s suspicion and intuition to an even higher pitch than they have surely reached already.

Fingering the bullet hole in Whittier’s coat: “You didn’t do this?”

“No.”

“Who did.”

“I don’t know.”

“So it
was
you.”

Finn sits and leans his bloody back against the white wall. “It weren’t. It was two men down to Dixon’s. Stole my skiff and shot Whitman here in the bargain.”

“Why him.”

“He weren’t smart enough to let them have the boat.”

“And you were.”

“Oddly enough.”

The Judge surveys Whittier’s long and crumpled form, pale as wax beneath his coat and covered over with a thousand stray spatters and streaks of blood. “I don’t believe it.”

“Suit yourself.” Blinking hard to clear his head.

“I will,” says the Judge.

“You always do. A man can count on that.”

The Judge calls forth the hired man’s wife and instructs her to go fetch the marshal, and then he bends himself nearly double to fill his son’s vision with his great vengeful head and forges for the pair of them a pact. “I shall not dispute your story. Moreover I shall not by the exercise of such power as I possess have you hanged by the neck until dead, however much you deserve it. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“In return you shall mark this occasion and remember my kindness all the days of your life, for as of this moment you are irrevocably and immeasurably in my debt.”

“I won’t forget.”

“No.” Unbending himself. “You won’t.”

“How can I.”

“Repay me? How can you repay me? Why, it may not be possible. We’ll have to wait and see.”

“But.”

“However.” He shows Finn a stern finger, smudged with a little blood from Whittier’s coat. “If we cannot agree upon a way, or if you should dare deny your promise, honor shall require me to inform the marshal of exactly how you lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie. I didn’t kill Whittington. I tried to save him.”

“Perhaps you did,” says the Judge. He rises and wipes that one tainted finger clean upon Whittier’s pantleg. “But I can no longer bring myself to care.”

H
E LEAVES
his father’s house and goes down to the river to bathe. At the steamboat landing he lowers himself fully clothed into the water as a sinner plunged into fire or a penitent baptized. He does not so much as remove his hat, and when he draws a gasping breath and pushes himself under the riverwater that misshapen black thing remains floating at the place of his disappearance, signaling his vanishment just as a loaf of bread doctored with quicksilver will seek out a bottombound corpse. He scrubs himself against himself, running his fingers through his beard and his hair and scraping with a fingernail at his temples and at his cheeks and at his ears to remove such bits of Whittier’s blood as he can identify by their stubborn crust. The muddy current carries it all away and he rescues his hat and hauls himself out weighted down and wet. Then he walks back to shore ignoring the bystanders who stare at him as at a sideshow act, and he trudges up the mudbank toward home, where he hangs everything save himself on the porch railing and sits in the sun while the heat of the day comes up and order by means of evaporation restores itself moment by moment.

17

“W
E ALL MAKE SACRIFICES.”
Thus Mary begins, digging the last of the onions in the widow’s garden.

“I know it,” says the boy.

“You do.” Not a question but a challenge.

“Yes ma’am.”

She brushes hair and sweat from her forehead with the clean back of her hand, leaving behind a trail of dull velvet black against the remainder. “Reach down and get those, will you?” She stands weary with her sole on the fork, letting the boy scrabble in the place where she has dug.

“I don’t mind,” says the boy from the dirt.

“You don’t mind what.”

“Working. Whatever I got to do.” He is vigorous and bursting with life and proud of each contribution he has ever made to this multifarious family of his. The boy was born content to pull his own weight and draw his own oar, and so he has remained whether the work has required running trotlines on the river or digging onions in the widow’s yard. “You know.”

“I do.”

They labor together for a while, each of them taking his turn, and the bushel basket fills little by little.

“This doesn’t have to be your fate.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You can make something of yourself.”

“I’ll try.”

“Trying’s not half of it.” She thrusts the fork into the ground as far as it will go and heaves upon it. “Sometimes a person can get only so far.”

He kneels in the dirt and looks up at her as at some oracle or demigod.

“I won’t have you grow up a slave.”

“
You
ain’t one.”

“Not now.” She cannot bring herself to mention those six months that the law has seen fit to grant unto the likes of them, those six months already commencing their inevitable accelerating vanishment.

“So?”

“Things could change. I can’t much help it for myself, but I don’t want it for you.”

“I don’t see how there’s.”

“I’d give anything.” Stabbing the ground.

He fetches up the onions and puts them into the basket which he bends to lift with all his might, straightening his back and swaying a little, rehearsing for a lifetime.

“I’d give anything,” she says again. “I believe I might even give
you.
” As he drops the basket she reaches up with a knuckle to brush at the corner of her eye.

“Mama.”

Letting go the fork and kneeling alongside him in the dirt. “You hear me. From this day forward, as far as anyone beyond this house knows, you are a poor motherless child.”

“Motherless.” He knows her intent as any would.

“That’s right. We know better, but nobody else needs to.”

He sits stunned.

“You’ll go to school like any white boy.”

“Mama.” At least now his alarm has found a focus.

“Don’t
mama
me.”

“Pap hates.”

“I know it. But you’re going to grow up different from your pap. Different from either one of us, come to that. Better too.”

“How?”

“Don’t you worry. I’ll be here to help.” Thinking of the six months. “Just as long as I can.”

“But.”

She points a finger at him. “You came here to St. Pete with me, but you aren’t mine. That’s all anyone needs to know. And let that be an end to it.”

N
IGHT HAS DESCENDED
upon the widow’s house, and the boy has gone complaining off to bed as boys will. His mother sits on a hard chair opposite the widow’s rocker patching a hole in his trousers while the widow reads from the family Bible. The little parlor is bright with many lamps, bright enough to be visible from the river below, bright enough that these two may pursue their separate aims at their ease despite the woman’s weariness and the widow’s fading vision. Mary’s concentration, whether on her sewing or on her fate, is sufficiently complete that the widow discovers she can lower her book and lift her eyes and study her over her glasses without being noticed. Thus she sits for a time until her lack of movement draws Mary’s attention, for prior to this moment she has been sliding the tip of her finger across the page of her Bible and fluttering her lips around the lineaments of the words she finds there.

“Ma’am?”

Raising the finger that has been tracing the Gospel, and pointing it trembling at the scar upon Mary’s cheek: “Did he give you that?”

“Yes ma’am, he did.”

“A white man.”
She spits out the words as she would expel a cherry pit. “A white man did that to you.”

“The white man I left.”

The widow closes the Bible on her finger. “You’re more intelligent than he is.”

“I hope so, ma’am. And thank you for your kindness.” But now that the widow has unlatched this door for so long sealed Mary feels arising within herself an upwelling of grief and grievance, a burgeoning of truths forever withheld and forever likewise unresolved. She rolls up one sleeve and displays the soft tender pale underside of her forearm, marked. “He did this. And this too.” Her wrist. “And this.” Her ankle. One twisted finger broken and healed that way unset. A gash concealed just under the tattered collar of her dress. Beneath the smooth dark curve of her hair, a red-rimmed and puckered cavity torn from one ear by his strange and brutal teeth. Displayed and duly witnessed here in this quiet and well-lit room with the boy asleep upstairs and the river creeping past far below and the limitless darkening sky yawning overhead, she is a palimpsest of her own degradation.

“You poor child.”

“Now you see why.”

“I do.” The widow has an impulse to set down the book and lean forward in her rocker and bless the poor beaten girl with a touch, but she knows not where to begin. She opens the volume and takes one last look at the place within it where her finger lies as if she might find there some eternal truth with which to comfort Mary, and then she closes it again and rests it in her lap, where it lies impotent against incarnate personal evil such as this. “Did he touch the boy?”

“Not like this.”

“Does the boy know what he’s done?”

“Some. Enough to have come away with me.”

“Yes,” says the widow, and “yes” again. “Of course he does.” The Bible in her lap has become a dead weight and a heavy burden and she absently fiddles with the purple satin bookmark that runs its spine as the river runs the valley. After a time a question occurs to her and she recognizes that there will be no better occasion to ask it and so ask it she does: “Do you suppose he’ll come looking for you?”

“Yes ma’am. I believe he will.”

“Mary.” Fixing her with a look that will admit no denial.

Mary puts down her work.

“The man’s name is Finn, isn’t it. Finn.”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.”

“You did.”

“I made inquiries.”

“I know it.”

T
HE BOY GOES OFF
to school for the first time.

“But Pap always said.”

“Never you mind what Pap always said. Pap always said a lot of things.”

Thus does his luxurious idyll, atop the green sward of Cardiff Hill, freed of running lines and gutting fish, in the gentle company of two women who perhaps without even knowing it have been competing these weeks pie after pie and song after song and story after story for his love in spite of his straitened circumstances and his uncertain future, thus does his idyll come to an end: with a whine and a shrug and a vision of Finn as his absent savior.

In the classroom he proves a fast learner but inconstant. The other children are of mixed ages and although the boys his own size have much to teach him about the local geography they have nothing whatsoever to show him as regards to capitalizing upon it. They point out the church, and Huck climbs to the belfry to sermonize by moonlight in the company of bats. They talk of caves high up on the riverbank, and Huck explores them with a stolen ball of yarn unwound to mark his return. They gossip of a slave reputed to own a prophesying hairball, and Huck befriends the individual and divines his own future by means of the relic’s mysterious power. He becomes in short the children’s secret untouchable prince, their authority on all things mysterious and forbidden, the raiser of their antes and the taker of their dares.

Parents and pastors and teachers alike urge the children to keep a cautious distance once his ill fame has risen up to the level of their awareness. Some know of Finn and some know of his extended dalliance with a black woman and some know or have at least heard tell of how that selfsame personage has lately enslaved herself and the child as well to that poor bereft widow Douglas in her child-empty house on Cardiff Hill. Some on the other hand have heard the official story of the boy’s unknowable origins, and some even believe it. This footloose and misbegotten child, with his fortunate pale skin and his experimental corncob pipe, with his intimacy with slave lore and his confounded gift for looking ragged even in clothing freshly pressed by none other than a white woman or so they say, this child can surely be no positive influence on their young, no positive influence at all. By denying him they make him irresistible, and like a sturdy weed he thrives upon their neglect.

The autumn gives way to winter and the Mississippi begins to glaze over in places. From the boy’s window on certain bright mornings it glints along its margins like a woodland path strewn with gemstones, and he tells his mother that he would go down and retrieve them one and all if only he could and then make for her a necklace. She laughs and tells him that she deserves neither the necklace nor him, which he denies but takes to heart nonetheless without seeing for even a moment the depths of his ready faithlessness. By the time he heads for school the frozen patches are gone and the river has recovered its quality of ambiguous bank-to-bank sameness, which the boy knows from his father’s teachings is only a façade to mislead the ignorant and starve the inexperienced.

For his part the father is upon the river every afternoon, pursuing a catch that grows more scarce as the winter deepens. He mends old lines and acquires new ones and steals still others, and with them he widens his range by appropriating the fishing grounds of lesser men unwilling to contest his claim until the Illinois side of the river is his from above Lasseter to below it, traversed by a latticework that he transits each day to fuel his meager needs and then some. He thinks rarely of the boy and less rarely of the woman, mainly when there are chores to be done or a fire to be built in the old iron stove. Mornings he endures by staying in bed and evenings when he returns home longing for a little warmth he satisfies himself with whiskey. That warm-blooded African girl with her memories of Vicksburg would have kept the stove red-hot night and day, and as he swallows and shivers and swallows again he takes pleasure in realizing that at least he is not outdoors chopping wood so that she might waste it.

A storm blows down the river late one day and catches him unsuspecting past the southernmost perimeter of his workings, below Smith’s trading post by half a mile, nearly as far downriver as St. Petersburg. Icicles are adangle from his slouch hat and his beard is rimed with ice and even his eyebrows beneath that sagging hatbrim are crusted over by the time he has poled to within sight of Smith’s, which looms white against the white storm and looks, as usual, abandoned. On the verge of such a night as this the vituperative Smith will be in no mood to buy fish or offer credit, so Finn settles on tying up downwind against the little pier and sleeping the night there in the protection of its lee side rather than risk the fat man’s reflexive and pitiless ire. The catch will keep until morning under its bed of snow.