Finn (28 page)

N
O ONE HAS SLEPT
in the back bedroom for years, and although it is clean beyond question there is about it an airless quality of preserved antiquity that the boy finds immediately disconcerting. “You reckon somebody died in here?” is how he puts it, and surely enough he is correct in his guess. The widow has thrown open the one window and he leans out of it headfirst with his feet airborne, halfway eager enough to crawl onto the shed roof and down the drainpipe to the ground. The white curtains billow around his ankles as if he has already taken flight in the manner of some great fledged bird or angel, and his mother pulls them aside and takes his feet and draws him back to safety. Upon the dresser by the window is a tiny group portrait, tilted away from the sun for preservation. It shows a serious-faced young woman, presumably the widow Douglas in the period before her widowhood, an earnest young gentleman with a slouch hat and a ten-mile glower, presumably Douglas himself, and a sour-looking baby child of indeterminate gender clothed in a long dressing gown that tumbles like falling water and pools in the young woman’s lap.

“I told you,” says the boy when he gets a look at the portrait. “That baby’s the one died in here. Right in that bed, I’ll bet you anything.”

Night when it descends brings with it an unearthly quiet. The river traffic to which the boy and his mother have long become accustomed, with its variegated texture of curses and shouts and creaks and whistles, is lost far below, muted and attenuated by distance to nearly nothing. A light wind whispers through the branches of the evergreens behind the house, and occasionally a bough will brush against the shingles or the slates with a weary sigh, but aside from this and the widow Douglas’s antiquarian snore the house is silent. The boy and his mother lie awake wondering what they have done and what they shall do. Around midnight the widow arises and lights a candle and creeps to the outhouse. Upon her return she pauses at their door and opens it just the slightest as if to persuade herself despite the impervious darkness that the two of them are here with her still, and when she is for no ostensible reason satisfied she closes the latch with a tender furtive caution and puts herself back to bed.

T
HE RIVERSIDE HOUSE IS EMPTY
when Finn returns, and when he draws near he can feel its vacancy as he would feel an intruder in his bed. There is no outer indication, no lamp lit or unlit, no signifier present or missing that would suggest as he ties up the skiff and hoists his jug of forty-rod and makes his cautious way to the foot of the open stairs that he has been left abandoned by that faithless nigger woman and her white-skinned mulatto child.

He climbs the stairs and opens the door and does not even bother inquiring upstairs as to her presence for he knows that she is gone. The whiskey jug he puts in the kitchen and the slim contents of his pocket he spills out upon the table, some string, a fishhook, a button, two or three coins. Enough to finish paying off her debt to Connor, if he chooses. Out on the porch he steps around the horsehair couch to make certain about the one thing that he has decided might matter, and surely enough the boy is gone too. His pallet lies empty and oddly yearning in the moonlight.

He returns to the dim kitchen and pours himself a tall dose of whiskey in a jar and brings it back to the porch to drink by reflected riverlight. As usual at this time of night his nerves are wildly ajangle and his body is wound tight as a watchspring and he is ready for something to happen. His breath comes rapidly and his breathing is harsh as he sits taking in the few soft lights moving on the current below. One such light, at some place upstream or down, could represent the vessel in which the two of them made their escape. There is no doubt in his mind that they left by way of the river, for what other artery is there for making serious time and distance. Unless they went to darktown, which would after all be just like that woman.

He tilts his head back and tips the jar fully upward to empty what remains therein down his throat in one impatient sluicing, careless of how much may go into his mustache and his beard and run from there on downward along the sinews of his neck to soak into his shirt collar. The empty jar he places on the railing like a sacred totem, and he sits before it like a dead man with his hands hanging between his spread knees as if it might soon begin working magic. There is in fact some conjury in the way it reflects and absorbs and refracts such bits of light as come to it. Moonlight, starshine, lamps on silent boats below, the jar captures them one and all and mingles them together with diffuse reflected riverlight and trades them one for another as if they are all equal and all equally distant. From such materials as these it creates a localized and mysterious moving galaxy within which this watcher might easily find himself lost, and upon which his own deep alcoholic alchemy overlays its own twinings and taints and endless entanglements. Spots that might be spiders, and twists that might be snakes, and other dark amorphous things lurking indiscernible and beyond differentiation. One of them he fixes his attention upon, a tar-black thing that has either lowered itself down upon a filament or emerged whole from some concealed portal. He tilts his head from one side to another and back again to make it out more clearly but cannot no matter how he tries, for it seems willfully to resist him, concealing itself in the passageways of light and dark within the jar’s surface like some world-destroying entity out adrift among the stars. Once he nearly catches it, and he freezes, preparing to pounce, but it slips away again as a lamplit boat drifts by below disturbing the arrangement of light and dark. Furious and frustrated he decides to leap all the same, ill timed and ill aimed, and with the back of his hand he strikes the jar, which plunges noiselessly into the water. He is too weary to go to the kitchen and seek another jar or a glass or whatever other container he may find, perhaps even just the comforting jug itself, and so he kneels down upon the boy’s empty pallet and falls upon his side there with his back to the wall and drops into a fitful sleep.

I
N THE MORNING
it is either search the river or search darktown, and even with a throbbing head he is wise enough to know which of the two will prove simpler. He makes haste downstream and ties up just below the village on the invisible margin where darktown begins. Down the single street he prowls, alert for any sign that she and the boy might have passed this way. Each glance that falls upon him and caroms off in its habituated manner looks suspicious this morning, and the posture of each individual he sees—whether a naked child at play in a hardpacked dooryard or an ancient gray-headed grandmother smoking her corncob under a willow tree—speaks to him of a secret just barely kept. He stops at Connor’s, turning with an appraising look to survey the low shack with its broken backbone and its long porch jammed with useless junk both for sale and otherwise. Then he goes to the door, careful as any regular to skip the one treacherous sprung step on the way, and admits himself.

The place is as empty of life as a depot after the last stage has come through, and the unaccustomed silence both satisfies Finn and sets his nerves on edge. “You Connor,” he says at half-volume, the first words he has spoken all day, and the phrase as it passes from his lungs turns into a great throat-clearing cough that he stifles on his sleeve.

No answer.

“I’d reckon a nigger bastard could show himself long enough to take a white man’s money,” he says to the darkness, hoping that the woman is hiding somewhere nearby so as to witness both his disdain and his faithfulness. For in both of these qualities he is demonstrably and by his God-given disposition the natural superior to any of her race.

No answer.

He proceeds toward the rear of the shack, past where Connor keeps work implements hung and certain dry foodstuffs in barrels and various second- or thirdhand treasures making their sad rounds again in a display case built from the frame of a rowboat. He proceeds toward the counter, behind which that grinning squat old orangutan Connor holds court day after day. His cashbox is present, right below the counter on the little shelf where he is known to keep it, and this fact puzzles Finn as well. He bends over the counter to touch the cashbox with one finger as he would toe some dead thing he’d found lying in the road, just to assess its condition and see if there might be any danger in approaching more closely. There is plenty of weight to it, he discovers. There also may as well be a string attached, for no sooner has he pushed at it than Connor comes careening in through the front door as if the world is on fire and Finn has sounded the alarm.

Finn turns as if he himself is the proprietor of this place. “Don’t hurry on my account.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Finn. I was just.”

“No harm done.”

“Something doing back to the house.” For in recent years Connor’s merchandise has so filled his little shack that it has finally crowded him out altogether and into a place down the alley.

“I’ll bet.”

Connor ties a white apron around his barrel of a midsection, an affectation he has lately acquired from shopkeepers in the village proper, and with an eye on the cashbox with which Finn has recently been toying he moves behind the counter. “What can I do for you?”

“The usual.” Finn reaches into his pocket and draws forth from it his coins, and then one by one he lays them out upon the counter. “I reckon that about puts us square.”

“You are a gentleman and a scholar, Mr. Finn.” He can see from the ridge of dust on the shelf that the cashbox has been lately disturbed, and he decides that the coins upon the counter are about to go back where they came from. No harm done. He will be glad to be shut of this Finn, make no mistake about that, and if he needs to pay a few cents for the privilege then so be it. He puts away the coins and opens the ledger and makes some marks therein, ending with a broad flourish. “No catfish today?”

“No catfish no more, I reckon.”

“Now, now. Just because we’re square don’t mean you need to be a stranger.” He lays his hands on the counter and puts on the old smile, but it doesn’t seem to fit.

Finn has the impression that the savvy old man desires their interview to be over even more urgently than usual. “So what’s the matter back at the house?” As if he has ever extended a conversation of theirs so much as one word past its necessary length, and as if he could possibly care about the private life of this individual or any like him.

“Nothing. Sick child.”

“Honest to goodness.”

“Honest to goodness.”

“Ain’t that a damn shame.”

“It is that.” His smile faltering a little. Finn has never attended entirely to the humanity of this being, preferring to watch him at some remove as he would observe a caged animal or some potential prey, but on this occasion he detects in his eyes and in his stance and in his weak smile a furtive quality that he does not like in the least.

“You seen her, ain’t you.”

“The child. Yes. My grandbaby.”

“Not her. The other.”

“She woke up with a mighty high fever.” Not thinking that Finn cares to know this but sensing that he wants to know something.

“
The other,
I said.”

“The other.” A question and a reassurance and an admission of bafflement all at once.

“That woman of mine. You’ve seen her.”

“No.” Yanked back into this moment by the scruff of his neck. “She run off?”

“Don’t lie to me, boy.”

“I won’t.”

“I won’t tolerate it.”

“I ain’t seen her.”

“Don’t you lie to me.” He picks up a varnished stick that Connor uses to fish bolts of fabric down from high places and takes a single step backward and sights down its length toward him. “It won’t do neither one of you no good.”

“Come over see my grandbaby, you don’t believe me.”

“You think I won’t.”

“No. I wouldn’t put nothing beyond you.”

“You’re one smart nigger. You know that?”

“I don’t mean to be.”

“Let’s go.” Waving one end of the stick doorward.

Connor bends to take up the cashbox rather than leave it unguarded here once more, and along the way he gives Finn a little sycophantish smile of explanation: “A person might wander in, take advantage of this useless old nigra.”