Finn (25 page)

“I mean lying about it.”

“I ain’t lying.”

“You are. But since you’re so intent on it I just might reconsider.” For there is something about Finn’s conviction that he admires.

“Either way,” concludes Finn. “It don’t matter to me.”

“How about a little taste of my corn?” Lowering the pistol. “Just to speed you on your way.”

The old man’s stuff is as clear as kerosene and nearly as poisonous, the kind that gives certain strains of bootleg whiskey the reputation for taking a strong man down at a distance of forty rods. Finn learns in a hurry that Bliss enjoys the taste and potency of it as much as anyone, perhaps more, and the riverman is wily enough to use such weakness to his advantage.

“So how’d you find me here?” the old man asks after he has mellowed some under the influence of his own drink.

“I got lost,” Finn confesses again.

“Tell the truth.”

“I got lost. But it weren’t for lack of trying.”

Bliss wheezes in a good-natured way. “Who told you?” He names three quarters of the barmen and trading post operators in the region, at places as low as Dixon’s and Smith’s and as elevated as the Liberty and Adams hotels. He names them in miraculous alphabetical order, a fact that Finn would not notice even if he could.

“Nobody told.”

“You can level with me,” says Bliss. “Whoever it was, I swear I’ll do no more than cut his balls off.
Next time I see him.
” As if to indicate the potency of this promise he tilts his head downward and his one dead filmy eye travels straight from Finn’s visage to his vulnerable crotch.

“There’s lots of rumors,” says Finn. “I ignored every one of them and ended up here.”

“But you do like your whiskey.”

“I do.” Helping himself to the jug and refilling Bliss’s portion too.

After a while they bank the fire and leave the clearing and walk together to micturate in the deep woods. Then they adjourn to a pair of rockers on the old man’s porch, all of which gives Finn the opportunity to make a study of the premises. The sun is well down toward the horizon before he brings up his name and his predicament and his inability to pay more than a few pennies for the whiskey he’s drunk.

“Judge Finn’s boy. So you’re the bad seed.”

“I reckon.”

Bliss puffs himself up and intones the father’s full name as if reading it from an engraved card for introduction before royalty. “James Manchester Finn.”

“You do know the sonofabitch.”

“Ever since I was born, or thereabouts.”

Finn gives a sly smile whose contribution to the tonality of his answer goes not unnoticed. “He never mentioned you.”

“The world ain’t a fair place.”

“So they say.”

“But I knew him. Since I was a boy.”

Finn sips whiskey. “The Judge weren’t never a boy.”

“Neither was I.”

“Maybe not.”

The two sit listening to the night come on. At the margin of the woods a flurry of brown bats drops one by one from their hidden haunts to pursue one another riverward, and thus Finn recalls the way home or at least the direction.

“So you’re the one took up with that nigger woman.”

“I reckon I am.” He asks no question but Bliss can hear his curiosity in the silence as clearly as if he had given it voice.

“People talk, is all.”

“What people.”

“I ain’t saying.”

“What do they say.”

“You know.”

“I reckon I do.”

Bliss stops rocking and squares his odd gaze at Finn. “Me, I say what business is it of theirs.”

“Amen.”

Bliss lowers a fingertip into his jar to assess the level of whiskey in it, finds it satisfactory, and resumes rocking. “A person’s color don’t matter to me. I never gave a tinker’s damn for it one way or the other.”

“It matters.”

“You’re the one to talk, ain’t you.”

“You wouldn’t think.”

“You wouldn’t. But I reckon you’d know after all.”

Finn sits and rocks and speaks not.

“Now don’t take me wrong,” says Bliss, trusting in the defensive powers of his hospitality and his supply of forty-rod and even perhaps his long-dead connection to the Judge, come to that, “but I ain’t never had no nigger gal on me.”

“Your loss,” says Finn.

“Is that a fact.”

Finn nods in the dark.

“I had a feeling.”

“You was right.”

“Then it’s like they say.” Not wanting to go any farther along this path. Finn will be back to buy whiskey and keep him company, he can be certain of that. And there will be time then to discover each other’s secrets.

“I reckon it’s like they say,” says Finn. “It must be, for all the trouble.”

When they are both sufficiently drunk the bootlegger provides his visitor with instructions for finding his way home, instructions that can be followed reliably only in utter darkness or by a blind man fully undistracted. Finn does well enough with them because such dim light as he can make out from the sky overhead is more than offset by his inebriation, and thus he can proceed methodically and slowly with his attention undiluted by sight. When he reaches the river at last he seeks out his skiff, which he has missed by less distance than he had feared. The things he bought for the woman at Smith’s are gone, either stolen by men or eaten by scavenging animals, but this he does not notice until he ties up beneath the house and by then he does not care.

“Y
OU FORGOT THE FLOUR.”

This is how he wakes up, this and a head that feels as if Bliss had fired that pistol of his straight through it and then dragged him here to this bed and left him bleeding in it to die. She is calling to him up the stairs, calling to him as if he can do anything about her lack of flour from where he lies in his bed of pain.

“You forgot the flour.”

Silence.

“There’ll be no biscuits today.”

This suits him fine as long as she goes quiet for a while in the bargain, which she does.

Later he troops down the stairs and plants himself at the table and stares across the water with a headful of poison. The coffee tastes vile but he drinks it boiling until he begins to sweat and then he drinks some more and when the pot is empty he goes outside to relieve himself. All the while the woman and the boy eye him as they would watch a snake, and maintain a safe distance.

“You go on run them lines,” he says to the boy when he returns. “I didn’t get to them last night.”

“All by myself?” The boy is as thrilled as he is uncertain.

“I said
you go.
”

The boy does, gladly and with some pride in the newfound role into which he can feel himself maturing. The woman says nothing as he leaves. She has no fear for his safety nor doubt that he will produce a fine catch, but like any mother she desires all the same to advise caution and invoke good luck. Yet the chill that the man has brought into the room suggests that they will all be better served if she permits the boy to go about his father’s business without remark, and so she sits in silence. He is barely down the stairs when his father begins.

“There weren’t money for flour once I begun paying your debts.”

“My debts.”

“Weren’t money for flour nor nothing else. And we’re still in the hole.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know what I mean and you know where I been.”

She picks up a dish and rises and moves toward the kitchen.

“Sit.”

She sits, and she says what she knows. “You been to Mr. Connor’s store.”

Finn lifts an eyebrow. “That his name? Even a sly old worthless nigger like that one got to have a name, I reckon.”

“He does.”

“And you’d be the one to know it, you running up your tab there and all.”

“I had no choice.”

“You living on credit like the goddamn Queen of England while I ain’t here.”

“It’s not what I wanted.”

“A person don’t do what he don’t want.”

She looks him in his bloodshot eye. “And I suppose you wanted nothing more than to spend our grocery money on corn whiskey.”

He raises a finger, indicative of his entire ready hand. “Don’t question me.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“You got yourself in deeper’n you know.”

“Did I.”

“And white men’s laundry ain’t the way out. Not no more it ain’t.”

“He told you.”

“I figured.”

“I wanted to keep it quiet,” she says. “I knew you’d be.”

“You knew right.”

He rises and strides out to the porch, where he can stand looking across the river with one hand visoring his brow. For a moment he watches the boy running the lines. All along the valley the sky is stacked high with clouds and from time to time one passes between the boy and the sun drowning him in a temporary space of moving shadow. The father draws water from the rainbarrel and stands drinking it while shadows of his own making pass across his face. “You ain’t to go down there no more.” Showing her only his broad back.

“Down to Connor’s.”

“Down to darktown I mean. You got to be broke of that, now I’m home.” He lowers the dipper into the water and raises it up and drinks some more. “I aim to break you of it right quick.”

“Where was I to go.”

“That’s no business of mine.”

“You were in the penitentiary.”

“I know it.”

“I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but white or colored, people aren’t generally solicitous of a woman in my position.”

He turns like machinery and neither puts down the dipper nor hesitates as he steps back inside the door to where she sits at the table with her hurt feelings and her effrontery. The dipper is an old one he found somewhere long ago, its bowl half eaten with rust and its handle twisted like a branch, and he grips it tight enough to slice a less callused hand across the palm. The momentum of his passage brings him to her straightaway and gives the backhanded swing of his right arm untold power, and accelerates the arc of that rusty implement into a stroke as fierce as a lash. Had she not flinched she might have lost an eye but as it is the jagged metal edge cuts her temple down to white bone, white bone instantly drowned in red blood and black flecks of rusty iron and a spattering of residual water that trickles down her face like the tears that she will not permit herself to shed either now or later.

“I’ll teach you to tell me my business,” says Finn, craving solitude and silence and perhaps a little whiskey.

15

A
LL ALONE IN THE WORLD
he passes the shacks and the sheds and the shuttered storefronts of darktown. Along past Connor’s he goes, a place where he is known for having years ago paid off his woman’s debts and then kept his own promise never to trouble those premises again unless burdened by a parcel of carp or some other worthless fish that no other trader in the valley would lower himself to buy. Today he has no catch and only the memory of any closed obligation, and so he directs his tread toward the door of that regal woman whose life he not only helped ruin but has since set about rebuilding according to his own lights.

He finds her tending her cauldron on the riverbank behind the house, and he admits himself into her presence uninvited. He had meant to bring an item or two of laundry but forgot in his eagerness and haste, and so he produces from the pocket of his coat an undershirt that he stripped off while still afloat on the skiff. His shirt is haphazardly tucked in and he fears for a moment that she will surely guess his deception, but if she does she gives no sign of it or at least none that he can detect.

“I figured your husband’d be home.”

“He ain’t these days.”

“Ain’t
home.
” Making a grim little unobtrusive joke to himself but not to her for she cannot know that he knows.

“Ain’t been for a while,” she says.

“He’ll be coming back, though.”

“I don’t reckon.” Stirring with a peeled branch she edges around the pot in Finn’s direction, which has the result of putting her slender back toward him. He is uncertain what to make of this shift for he cannot see the tear gathering in her eye, and he would still be uncertain what to make of it even if he could.

“He run off?”

“He got himself killed.” Her voice rises barely above the inaudible, and a single crack from the fire would be sufficient to drown her out and wipe clean her slight speech from the consciousness of this world forever.

“I’m sorry,” says Finn.

“Two men done it by night.”

“No.”

“Stole my boy and killed my husband.”

“You had a boy.” As if he has forgotten or never known.

“The two of them broke down that door and come in together.”

“You was home?”

“We was all of us asleep. Until then.”

Finn cogitates for a minute, watching the steam rise and inhaling the dizzying smell of her homebrewed lye soap. “At least they didn’t touch you.”

Turning to show him her face. “I’d die right this minute if I knew how.” Turning it away again.

Finn considers asking whether it was white men or black who committed the crime, and then wonders for a moment whether he should ask if the murderers or kidnappers or whoever they are have yet been found, but by the set of her shoulders even he can see that the time for such curiosity or whatever else it might be is well past.

He turns to go. “I’m glad I could make that door right.” Almost as if it doesn’t matter.

“You didn’t have no idea.”

“A person notices.”

“I’m obliged.”

“Don’t worry none. You got troubles enough.”