Finn (22 page)

A
T THE OVERHANGING
frame house he steps into his own captive skiff from out of the one he has poled all this distance, leaving the borrowed one to find its way back downstream however it might. Thus is one more displaced wanderer set free in this time of transformation.

He climbs the stairs in the dark and admits himself without knocking, whereupon she greets him with the gun as she would greet some common criminal. She very nearly fires to see him there in the doorframe with his shaven two-colored skull, imagining him some odd tattooed fugitive from the carnival recently passed through town and now returned to work mischief, but at the last second he takes the gun from her hands and speaks her name in the softest whisper so as not to awaken the boy.

“Mary,” he says. “I come home.”

She throws herself upon him and he drops the gun in his startlement but the clatter does not begin to rouse the boy, who sleeps out on the porch over the river as upon his own mother’s breast. They take themselves to the bedroom upstairs where every particle of her body returns to his consciousness inch by inch, replacing the dull repetitive textures of Alton with the thrill of her life and her liveliness, and although when they are finished she would rather talk than sleep he is too hungry to do either for long. There are biscuits in the breadbox and she brings him a plate.

“I missed you.”

“I missed you. And them biscuits.”

“I’ll make another batch come morning.”

“Make two or three.”

“I will.”

“While you’re at it.”

“I don’t mind.”

He holds up the last of them into the moonlight and riverlight and studies it as if it is some fetish or source of wonder. “How’d you get by all this time?” Thinking of Will, and of whether his brother may have worked to redeem himself while he was gone.

“I wrote you how kind people have been.”

“I know it.”

“I mean I don’t have family, but.”

“Neither do I.”

“But you’d swear I did.”

“We’ll make it up to them, every one.”

She sits at the end of the bed and smiles upon him as if he is a dear child who has come to her with a notion ten times as big as he is but entirely too lovely for deflating just yet.

When morning comes he stands on the porch studying the steaming water and watching the slow early-morning traffic float past his high place like a procession in a dream, while the boy sleeps at his feet upon a pallet of corn husks. His sleeping place looks more the dwelling of a muskrat than a human child, but the boy curled there upon it smiles a smile so unconscious and beatific as to befit an angel. In repose he is the same Huck.

Finn leaves him there and goes down to see about his lines, which some samaritan has coiled up and hung on nails beneath the house to keep them safe from the weather in his absence. He locates a good deal of rot which he cuts away and mends, and some of the hooks are broken off and rusted through which he can do nothing about just yet, but in the end these raw makings yield two lines for every three original and he trusts that this will be sufficient for now. The shallows are agleam with silvery minnows just as he recalls, and he catches a netful for a place to begin again.

The skiff needs patching. He can see that the boy has been working to keep it bailed, for it is only half sunk when he sets foot in it, and he figures that he ought to find a little pitch later on when he has the chance and show him how it’s done now that he’s big enough. Between the bailing bucket and the lines he is busy out upon the water, so busy that he does not look back up at the house until he has drifted some distance and there upon the porch, with his straw hat askew and his hands upon the railing, stands the boy. He is even taller than his father would have imagined possible, now that he is awake and upright. They meet beneath the house, the child paying no mind to his father’s strange appearance, and since there is nothing to do about the lines now but wait they join hands and return upstairs to Mary as one.

13

F
INN KNOWS THE WOMAN’S SHACK
by its location and by its stove-in door and by the line strung across the alley upon which hangs drying a batch of sheets and pillowcases from the Adams Hotel. Working silent as some bereft spirit in his own empty house above the river he has gathered together his washing—a ratty woolen blanket, two pairs of socks that he won’t have use for until winter, and such else as he can make do without for a time—and he has bundled them all up and brought them here to this place as offering or bait or some other. The laundress, whom he has seen both in town and in her farthest extremity, struggles to swing the door open on hinges that she has thus far lacked the means to repair. Someone has run a bit of rawhide through the broken part of the upper and hammered the lower almost straight, but the door is still not right and looks to remain thus. Between the ragged bundle in his arms and the air of trepidation on his face she takes her visitor for an itinerant, and although she would wish it otherwise she has nothing to offer him and says so.

“No ma’am. I got laundry.” Offering it up.

She considers the bundle and the figure carrying it and although she is poor beyond knowing and could make use of whatever he might desire to pay she wants nothing to do with either one. “I don’t do much,” she says. “Just the hotel, mainly.”

“I sure could use the help.”

“I know it, but.”

“I’m all alone in this world.”

“I understand.” For she of all people does.

The look that he gives her is so laden with beseeching that her heart nearly breaks and she realizes that she cannot bear to turn such a one from her door. She takes to herself the bundle and names a price, which he calculates in forty-rod whiskey and agrees to. He asks when.

“I’ll need two days at least. Maybe three.”

“Don’t hurry on my account.”

“I won’t.”

“You around most times?”

“Same time as this in three days, if that suits you.”

“It does.”

“Fine then.”

“I’ll be obliged.” He hates saying it to a person of her color, but he reckons it can do no harm this once.

F
INN RETURNS
to the mansion at the top of the hill and lets himself in this time without the assistance of the hired man’s wife. He is in the kitchen scavenging through the cupboards like some sneak thief or stray starveling beast when she comes upon him, and although she has seen him infrequently enough until that recent prior visit one daunting glare from beneath those shaggy brows and she identifies him as the Judge’s son all right and none other. She leaves him alone to do as he pleases.

Fortified with coffee and a slice of pie consumed over the sink he mops his face and beard with a sleeve and proceeds down the back hallway to the Judge’s study. The door is closed as it has always been. Even with no living creature in the house other than his own cowed wife and the timid ghost of the hired man’s woman, the Judge requires for himself isolation or at least confinement.

Finn knocks at the door and there is no answer.

Within, the Judge assesses the tonality of the knock and evaluates the silence that went before it and chooses to hold his ground.

“Pap.” Finn, with his lips to the door.

Nothing.

“I seen your carriage in the barn.”

Nothing. Nothing beyond perhaps the merest whistling breath of an old man, which the son detects as he would detect the twitch of a cornered rabbit’s eyelid or the slow rhythmic underwater pulsing of a carp’s fin.

“Pap.”

“Don’t think I’m hiding from the likes of you.” Lifting his voice to be heard through the door.

“I don’t.”

“You’re not welcome here.”

“I know I ain’t.”

“Neither in my house nor in my study.”

“I know it.”

“Nor anywhere upon these premises.”

“I broke it off with that woman.” Daring to unlatch the door, which for all its constant closure is nonetheless unlocked.

“You’ll find another.” As if he knows.

“I won’t.” He stands back and lets light spill in from the hallway to his father’s dark precincts, where it gleams muted against picture frames and polished hardwood and gold-stamped leather bindings all thick with dust.

“You probably already have.” There behind his massive oaken desk the Judge is as broad as he ever was, smaller perhaps by a shade than his son remembers but no less fierce for the bow of his back and the slope of his shoulders. The light of a single oil lamp illuminates his collapsed visage from below and casts shadows that creep upward along the creases and protuberances of his face and then merge together into one great blackness above the line of his heavy brow, giving him in this small space the ghastly judgmental aspect that he possessed in even the brightest of daylight for those hundreds of poor damned miscreants who passed before his bench during his prime. “No doubt you’ve
already
found yourself another nigger bitch,” he continues, proud of himself and of his wisdom, “if I know you.”

“I ain’t done it.” Then a pause. “Maybe you don’t know me like you think.”

“I know you better than you know yourself.” He uncurls two fingers from around the corner of the lawbook he’s been studying and uses them to wave his son off as he would shoo a fly.

“Maybe not.”

“Go,” says the Judge. “You and your ridiculous claims are dismissed. Your presence here is neither required nor tolerated.”

“I know it. But if I’ve changed.”

“Even if you have, I shall be ten lifetimes forgiving you.”

“But.”

The Judge tilts his head back and his eyes vanish into the shadowy reaches above the lamplight. “In the meantime,” he says, “you are at liberty to wait for that day in some more hospitable location.”

“A man can only do so much.”

“Do as you wish, but you’ll get nothing for your troubles from me.”

“I ain’t asking for money.” Thinking of his boy’s six thousand.

“Good. For you’ll get from me neither funds nor forgiveness nor any other sort of gratification.”

“I know it,” says Finn. “I know it now.”

His mother has been drawn downstairs by the murmur of their two voices and she awaits him in the kitchen. She has poured him coffee and drawn him a glass of cool water from the well, not knowing which he will prefer or guessing that in the end he will want neither.

“You told him.” Her mouth drawn up into a little incipient smile in spite of the evidence written large upon her son’s face.

“I see why you wouldn’t bother.”

“It’s not that.”

“You knew he wouldn’t change his mind.”

“I thought maybe if you’d.”

“You said he had faith in me.”

“I had faith in the both of you.” Lifting the coffee, an offering.

“Only one of us deserved it.”

“I didn’t mean any harm.” For who truly means harm in all this world.

R
AIN COMES EARLY
on the second day and settles in, and he crouches in his skiff to run the lines and then lets the little boat find its own way downstream along the mudbanks of darktown, where under better weather he would expect to see his blanket and the rest of it drying upon her line. He thanks God that he can produce an income fair weather or foul, then waits another day before returning on foot for his things, which he can hardly recognize when she presents them.

He shakes his head in wonderment and fishes in his pocket for a coin. “This is a help.”

She stands in the open door holding up the laundry, tall and slim and elegant as some Egyptian statuary. He makes such a show of searching for his money that she suspects for a moment he might be intending not to pay at all, and even as this possibility comes dawning upon her she remains impassive for she has endured worse.

At last he yields it up, presenting it to her as if he has minted it himself.

“Thank you, mister.”

“Finn.”

“Mister Finn.”

“Finn alone’ll do.”

“Thank you.” Perhaps acknowledging his request and perhaps ignoring it.

“Folks around here used to know me.” He tests the waters for some sign of the ill fame that his presence engendered in the period after he’d come back to Mary and Huck from his imprisonment at Alton.

“I don’t.” Shaking her head.

“Now you do,” he says with a display of teeth.

“I reckon.”

“Whyn’t you see can your husband fix that door.”

“He can’t.”

He gives the hinge a look of respectful puzzlement, as if it has somehow bested a better man than he, but he inquires no further as to the reason. “I could give it a try. It won’t be no trouble.”

“No. Thank you. But I’m obliged.”

Nonetheless he returns in a day’s time with a sack of tools purloined from the shed where old Bliss keeps such things, prepared to rectify at least this one wrong and earn thereby her gratitude. At the outset she looks upon him as if he has taken it upon himself to desecrate a holy shrine, but he seems so intent that she can find within herself no strength to resist. He removes the door entire and takes the hinges off and hammers them straight upon a rock. The bit of rawhide he discards upon locating the upper pin where it fell unseen on that awful night, in a crack between the floorboards and covered over with a scrap of rug. He refits the latch and with a plane and a file and a crosscut saw for which he can imagine Bliss having no earthly use he trims the rough splintered edges away from the door before rehanging it.

“That’ll keep out the weather,” he says. Swabbing his brow with the back of his forearm.

“It weren’t the weather broke it.”

“Is that so.” Inviting her to tell more or nothing, howsoever she might desire.

Although every woman, child, and man in darktown knows the story, she can see that he does not. Such is the manner in which information, like water or blood, flows only where it is admitted and fills up only those places wherein it may be confined. Permit two white men to batter in a darktown door and steal a woman’s child and murder her husband by means of a bullet through the neck, and from that night forward those two masked men or their simulacra shall be forever breaking down doorways into the dreams of every last mother and child in that forlorn place—while elsewhere their fame shall go unbespoken. The white children of Lasseter may have monsters of their own, but none of them are exactly these.

The sadness that creeps into her eyes Finn either does not notice or else takes for appreciation of his kind act.

“’Tweren’t nothing.”

“Thank you,” she says, perhaps the slightest bit late. “I’m obliged.” The hand in her apron pocket clutches tight to the coin he gave her yesterday and he can see it hiding there just as he once saw a certain girl’s hands thrust into her own apron pocket for other reasons altogether. Concealed things of this order are to him like fish lurking just beneath the surface of a placid river pool, endlessly fascinating and deeply desirable and capable of being read only by one who knows how to attend to their signs.

“How about we take it out in wash,” he says.

“That’d be fine.”

“Though it ain’t necessary.”

“It is.”

“Fixing that door was my idea.” He is gathering up the tools taken from Bliss and returning them one by one to his sack. “You never said you required it.”