Finn (16 page)

T
HEY ARE ON THE SKIFF
the three of them, and Finn is poling upstream.

“You’ll stay put if you know what’s good for you.” But where would the child go. The preacher takes the gun from Finn and removes his mask and drops it unceremoniously to the planking, where it lies peltlike. Finn does the same. In the darkness he can make out the great bulk of the preacher as he bends over the child only if he squints and studies upon it, and he would prefer not to. He prefers instead to reflect upon the boy child’s mother with however much intensity alcohol and excitement permit his befogged brain, and so he attends as best he can to her memory and to his poling as the stars wink from behind the bankbound willows and his head gradually clears. The preacher addresses the child in tones alternately guttural and tender and there is a furtive scrambling in the center of the boat as of a small beast attempting to free itself from a trap. After a while the child cries out and gasps and lies still, and the skiff rocks unevenly upon the face of the black water until the preacher unleashes from his throat a great roaring animal bellow.

“What do you mean to do with him now.”

“Throw him back,” says the preacher. “I believe he’s too damn small to keep.” He lies against his carpetbag like a potentate reclining or some beached seagoing monster. When he recovers himself he takes up the twitching child and lifts him over the gunwale and holds him down beneath the waters with both arms extended until he stops struggling. Then he lets go of him and rises to his feet to dress. “How about we get us another drink.”

“Dixon’s closed up.”

“You got any at home?”

“I don’t,” says Finn, for he will require all of it himself.

“I know you better than that.”

“No you don’t.”

“I know everything.” The preacher elevates his voice to a kind of insinuating whine.

“This is where you get out.” They have come abreast of Dixon’s.

The preacher is uninterested and merely grunts.

“I thank you kindly for the drink. Now git.”

The preacher bends to lift his carpetbag and rises up again with the pistol in his hand. He lets it hang at his side, glinting in starlight. “You still owe me.”

“Not after that.” Indicating with a snap of his chin the place where the child went into the water or at least the fact thereof.

“I surely could make use of a boat like this one.”

“Steal your own.”

“Very well.” Raising the gun.

Finn lifts the pole to push again but waits. “Goddamn nigger-loving sodomite.”

“I despise flattery.” Although to judge from the glint of his teeth he is charmed without limit.

For lack of any other weapon and with no opportunity to make fuller use of the one he has, Finn angles the pole out of the water and in a single smooth motion he thrusts the dry end of it ramlike into the center of the preacher’s chest. The man is too massive to be caught off balance and too broad to fall easily, but he does drop the gun to the deck where it clatters away. Whether thinking or merely acting he takes hold of the pole with both of his massive hands and props it hard against his belly and strains as if to raise his attacker up into the air fishlike, and he very nearly succeeds until Finn lets go his end and the fat man staggers backward into the bow where his feet grow tangled in a mess of lines. Finn charges him and takes him over the side into the water with his hands stretched around his neck and his thumbs probing for an Adam’s apple buried somewhere unreachable beneath pale flesh, and between the water and Finn’s furious grip the preacher can breathe neither in nor out and he flails and lashes out at his attacker with a fierce but steadily diminishing fury until Finn lets up and makes for the skiff, leaving the preacher to drift downstream and succumb or not.

He brings to the white room the gun which he drops into the chest and the masks which he kicks beneath the bed and the speckled straw hat which he hangs upon a nail. Then he goes downstairs and falls asleep unclothed upon the porch, his overalls slung over the rail to dry.

Come morning he awakens from a sweet dream of the boy child and his mother and he fetches himself a bit of charcoal from the stove. Up in the bedroom he chooses a wall and he moves the chest over to it so that he can reach the top, all the way up near the ceiling where a single spider has begun making herself at home, and there he commences to mark down the story of what he has and has not done. His penmanship is poor and his spelling is worse and his grammar is the worst of all but these things matter not, because not long after he begins he gives off writing almost entirely and commences to draw in a manner befitting some primitive cave painter working by torchlight to document and dispel demons both real and imagined. Here is the black man sitting up in bed, a hole torn in his throat. There opposite is his wife, unharmed and beauteous as the artist’s shaking hand will allow. And in the center is the boy himself, nearly obscured by the grotesque bent oversize form of the preacher. Each mouth is open save the woman’s, and from each open mouth streams a river of wordless incomprehensible language in Finn’s furious scrawl. The inscrutable outpourings bend and intermix, each one a tributary unto the others, until the whole expands ineluctably into a spiraling morass that drowns the mouths from which it has come and subsumes the space almost entirely in black. Only the woman remains silent, the woman and the riverman drawn remote from her and slightly askew in a far corner with a gun in his hand and his face concealed behind a mask.

9

S
HE SAYS
that Mary is her name, although Finn has not asked. His practice for these first days in the hired man’s cabin behind the Judge’s barn has been to call her by no name at all, not even the impersonal
girl
or
woman
or some other oblique reference to their relation.

“Mary,” he says. “So be it.”

As the days go by he watches her in the manner of a naturalist making observations, as if fearing that at any moment she could molt and reveal some alternate self beneath her skin, some raw beast damp and ready for transformation into a different sort of creature altogether. Everything she touches she touches in a manner different from the ways of his mother and the ways of dead Petersen’s dead wife. There is about her a grace and an ineffable sadness that conspire to retard her movements and make them thereby into something almost musical, transforming every act into a kind of prayer or languorous meditation. She seems always to be
preparing—
not merely his supper or a bucket of washwater or some other common thing, but herself, for that part of her life which is yet to come.

She is a fair cook and a poor housekeeper, but Finn does not notice these failings because her abilities in both matters are far superior to his. After a week his clothing is cleaner than it has been in all of his adult life despite the cabin’s lack of a proper laundry room or even a washboard. These chores do not by any measure come naturally to her. She has spent her life luxuriously enslaved by Mrs. Fisk, whose opinions regarding black people are the opposite of those espoused by the Judge. Not only is the old woman happy to enjoy their company, but she believes it her duty to improve each one of them who crosses her path so as to ready their race for the day when they shall be set free.

Mary achieves such success as she does in matters of housework by concentrating her attention and focusing her will. In the absence of any other outlet, whether books or needlework or dreams of such life as might lie beyond the door that Finn padlocks behind him when he heads to the river, she can attend only to the instant in which she finds herself. “This is for your own good,” he says when he takes the lock down and fishes the key from wherever he keeps it secreted about himself. She cannot imagine that he is telling her anything like the truth.

“I need to get some air,” she says one evening when he comes back from the river bearing his catch. The day has been hot and the cabin is an oven.

“There’s air out back.” Tilting his head toward the fenced yard behind the cabin where he keeps the chopping block and a flat board for cleaning fish and various sprung and rusted implements more useful as curiosities than tools. He raises the fish to her as if they are the veriest prize, some reward for which she has labored without ceasing, the golden fleece itself. She takes them with a gracious nod and exits to the yard.

A river breeze stirs the clothes that she hung on the line before he left this morning and she threads her way between them careful with the fish.

From the tiny window comes his voice: “Mind them clothes.” As if she needs telling.

She can feel his eyes upon her as she guts the fish and scales them and as she rinses her hands in the rainbarrel and dries them on a stiff rag long bloodied. By the sound of it he is occupied with starting the fire in the big iron stove but she knows that he is watching nonetheless even though she keeps her back to him to such degree as she can. Then with the fish on a platter and their guts and glistening scales rinsed from the board with a dipper of water she starts back through the thin maze of hung laundry.

“Don’t forget them clothes.”

“One thing at a time,” she says without thinking and without implication.

“You watch your tongue.”

“I didn’t mean.”

“I know it.”

She pauses and visibly considers how she might carry two armfuls of clean laundry in addition to the platter of fish.

“Go back for that,” he says. He neither reaches to take the platter from her nor moves to assist her in any other way but instead turns his back and attends to some trivial thing in the cabin. He has done enough by letting her go.

She brings in the laundry and folds it and begins to prepare the fish. She slides a spoonful of lard into the pan and puts it over the heat and while the lard melts she dredges the fillets in flour and then in milk with a beaten egg and then again in cornmeal, and then she arranges them in the pan and steps away while they sizzle. The heat in the cabin is stifling, but she knows better than to ask directly why they cannot build a fire in the yard and cook out there when it gets this way. The less she is outdoors the better as far as he is concerned, and smoke would only increase the risk.

“Your father,” she hazards as they sit before their plates.

“The Judge.”

“Why does he.” Pausing to compose her thoughts.

“It’s his way.”

“But.”

“Nobody knows.”

“What would he do if he knew about me?”

“Don’t ask.”

This night he tells her to come to his bed rather than sleep on the pallet she has made up in the corner. Why he has waited this long she cannot say although she has begun to think that he might have a good heart. She obeys without hesitation for she lacks alternative. Before bedding down he swung wide the door for ventilation and propped open the shutters, so now a small breeze moves through the cabin bearing upon it the sound of crickets and the smell of the barnyard and bearing away the scent of fried catfish and the ticking of the woodstove as it cools.

When they finish he groans and rolls upon his back and places a proprietorial hand upon her thigh. In the shifting fragrant dark he keeps it there, a burning token constant while the moments pass and the air around them faintly cools and their bodies cool likewise.

She considers, lying there beneath that brand, what use she might make of the door that he has left open. A hundred schemes run through her mind, each one possible and each one faulty and each one rejected in the end. She requires her things, which would mean gathering them up from where they have gone scattered in this short time and restoring them in utter silence to her bag. He might rouse up during this operation, an eventuality that she might overcome by means of the chamber pot, but still. Obviously she must leave with only the barest of essentials. But where would she go? All she knows of Illinois is Rock Island and of Rock Island she knows only that Mrs. Fisk has people there whose names she either did not hear or does not recall. She has no means of transport beyond her own two legs. She does not even know which way the river lies, for she came to this place in darkness and has been kept in darkness ever since.

Ultimately he removes his hand and turns his shoulder away, leaving her to concentrate upon remaining alert until he should fall asleep. The night goes fully still and the breeze dies away, and she settles her own breathing to its most shallow. Some small creature, mouse or rat or other, scuttles past the doorway and as she hears its furtive steps muffled by grass and dust and then considers such noises as Finn himself might detect even from the depths of his sleep, such small courage as she has managed to collect in her heart diminishes and dims and dies. She nonetheless takes in air and reaches with her toe for the floor as gingerly as she can just to see, and it takes no more than that to bestir the man, who rises up cursing himself for a fool and stalks over to close the door and secures it with the lock.

F
INN TOOK TO DRINK
early in spite of his father’s counsel. “You can rely upon whiskey to destroy a man,” the Judge would say to no one in particular, waiting at the head of the table for Petersen’s wife to serve him his supper. The Judge’s own father before him had possessed a boundless appetite for drink, and as a result the Judge was by inclination more sympathetic to the lowest sneak thief than to any drunkard who happened before his bench. “Make no mistake,” he would say then and he still does, “I am always unstintingly fair to the tippler. I can be counted upon to be perfectly just in hearing his plea and gauging his punishment. But I must confess that such judiciousness brings me no pleasure.”

Thus Finn now takes a certain habituated thrill in sitting upon the porch of the cabin that he secretly shares with the girl and enjoying there in public his jar or two of whiskey. It comes from a bottle and is therefore of known quality and fair repute. His parsimonious father pays him little enough to maintain the place but between his simple needs and his patience with a trotline he gets by and routinely has more than enough extra to spend on such an extravagance as this. “That’s the Judge’s dollar right there,” he will say to Dixon as he completes his transaction, and surely enough it is, for he is fastidious in his accounting and careful to use his father’s funds for such purchases as this, which would break any such heart as the elder Finn may yet possess.

“Whyn’t you plant a kitchen garden back there come spring?” he asks of the woman who sits in darkness behind the door as if the cabin is her confessional. No remark could be calculated to produce in her heart more hope, or more dread for that matter, for in it she detects both a promise of some small eventual relief and a far more dire promise of a lifetime spent imprisoned nonetheless. At least until the Judge passes on and she can emerge from her cocoon.

She asks: “Would it be safe?”

“We’ll see.”

“It would surely ease your burden.” For she knows his habits and has read his mind.

“Put it over toward the barn, close to the fence as we can.”

“Where I’d be out of sight.”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly.”

This night she dreams herself trapped within the fenced yard by a terrifying personage who can be none other than the Judge himself or else plain Justice personified. He appears to her alternately as an enormous white man pale as death and as some ordinary inconsequential thing become animate, laundry or line or ax, and in whatever form he chooses to be made flesh he seeks to corner her and overwhelm her in some manner that her dream does not dare make specific. She awakens in the dark, pounding her fists upon Finn’s chest and clinging to him at the same time, and crying out into the empty stillness of the cabin and the farm and all of Adams County surrounding that place where once there was none such as her and now there is but one and it is she and she alone.

W
EEKS PASS
and they fall into habits these two like an old husband and wife. During the days she misses him, and not only because his mere presence in the cabin means a door swung wide if not to provide freedom then at least to suggest it. He arrives at day’s end like a liberating army, reed-wrapped fish in his arms and a bottle of whiskey in the crook of his elbow and the key between his teeth, and as he stands in the dusty dooryard she looks out through the tiny square of window and wishes that she were free to come outside and help him as he stands there juggling. When he finally springs the lock and gets the door open she greets him like a genie let loose from a bottle.

It must be during one of these moments that their peculiar joy is witnessed by the halfwit Tyrell. Other such moments there are, but with none to be their witness. In the dim candlelit evening, when she reads to him from a book of poetry he has found in the dry depths of a floating steamer trunk, she seems to him in her fluency a creature from some other place and time or an instrument shaped by the Almighty so that a long-dead cavalier poet might whisper his incomprehensible arcana into the mind of a benighted illiterate riverman. At night on the hard bed, as he explores her brown body with his fingers and with his tongue and with that other, she seems an astonishment and a mystery and a strange miracle, forbidden to him by his father the Judge but infinitely more precious for that.