Finn (29 page)

Finn watches the way he moves and listens to the way he speaks and realizes all at once. “You think I done that.”

“Done what?”

“Took money from your cashbox.”

“Now Mr. Finn.”

“You said you wouldn’t put nothing past me.” He raises the stick and pushes one end of it into the storekeeper’s chest, stopping him cold.

“I said that, I did. But I didn’t mean nothing by it.” Holding the cashbox to his white-aproned belly as Finn pushes harder on the stick, hard enough to back him up against the wall. His breath comes short and he feels a building pressure against his sternum, as if this avenger intends to lean upon his weapon until it pierces him through.

“There best be a sick baby in your house yonder,” says Finn, leaning on the rod and giving the tip of it a cruel half-turn, “or I’ll gig you like a goddamn bullfrog.”

C
ONNOR’S DAUGHTER IS BATHING
her child in a tub of cool water when the two of them burst in, her father hung at the end of a pole like a dancing marionette and the man behind him ablaze all over with a kind of dark and furious light. “Lorena,” says Connor, “show this man your baby.”

She believes for a moment that in spite of the visitor’s terrifying appearance he must be a doctor, perhaps the only one remaining who will do business in darktown, and she is thus prepared if only for the briefest of instants to throw herself and her child upon his mercy.

The child cries out and her mother cradles her head in her hand and the ferocious white man says to both of them, “That’ll do.”

“Your business here’s done.” Connor, feeling safe in his own house and pulling away from his tormentor and clutching his cashbox to his side.

“But you seen her. I know it.”

“I done told you. I ain’t.”

Finn cares not for his reassurance and sets about to investigate every cranny of his back-alley shack with the lever of his long straight stick. He pries open each door and lifts each threadbare curtain and tries each loose floorboard, and when he is finished he swats at the baby’s basin for good measure.

“If she ever
was
here, she ain’t here no more.” Peering out the back door and letting himself out into a yard stripped bare and packed down hard as rock.

“She weren’t.”

“So you say.”

“I guess you got to try somewheres else.”

“I know it.”

He passes down the alley using the rod as a walking stick and occasionally rapping upon a wall or fencepost with it as his anger rises and falls within his breast like respiration. When he reaches the mudflats he turns upriver and flings the stick into the water as if it is tainted, as if it harbors poor luck, as if it has been handled too many times by that black storekeeper with his recordkeeping and his greed and his falsehearted smile. It whirligigs through the air and lands flat on the surface, refusing to enter the water, and then it gathers momentum and commences to float downstream as do all things dead and useless.

He poles upstream and runs his lines and thinks. Each cat and carp rises to him like a coin drawn up from some secret sunken hoarding, and he reflects as he works that he is surely better off without the woman and the boy to live upon his largesse and take advantage of his hard work and generosity. Without them he could accomplish much more while requiring less. He could eat at Dixon’s more often, move up to a better grade of whiskey, perhaps even put a little something by now that he is out from under her and her carelessly accumulated debt. He poles to the bank and guts the fish and wraps them in wet reeds then poles up to Dixon’s. The packed dirt and twisted roots and fallen limbs that rise from the river like a stairway are slick with dew and will be slow to dry in the autumn damp, but he climbs upward upon them and tries the door to find it locked. The back door leading straight into Dixon’s living quarters is open a crack and from within comes the sound of argument, more precisely the sound of Dixon taking his customary abuse at the hands of his harridan wife. From his own newly elevated position as a freed man Finn takes pity upon him, but not enough to let him suffer his wife’s revilement in privacy. He knocks, listens, and knocks again until Dixon comes sheepish to the door.

“Hey, Dix.”

“Ain’t seen you around.”

“Ain’t been. But that might change.”

“It’s early for drink.”

“Not that.” Finn raises his bundle. “Thought maybe I’d beat out whoever else you been using.”

Dixon’s wife: “You tell him to go around front if he’s got business.”

“I reckon you heard.”

“I did.”

Dixon shrugs. “The counter’s up there and all.”

“Ain’t the kitchen back here?”

“Just go on.”

Go on he does, and he waits at the door while Dixon draws on his trousers and buttons his shirt and makes his way through the place to unlock it and let him in with his bundle of fish wrapped in reeds and dripping wet.

“Got a mess of cats. Fiddlers too.”

“Is that so. To what do I owe the honor.”

“Lucky I reckon.”

“You or me.”

“Either one.” Shouldering his way through the door and back toward the counter that separates the bar from the backroom where Dixon’s wife remains isolate.

“I reckon we can use every last one of these,” says Dixon when he has pushed back the bunched wet reeds and assessed Finn’s offering. “Not just them little ones. Ain’t that right, honey?”

“Suit yourself,” she calls from the back, as if she is ostentatiously deigning to grant him some concession.

Finn raises his eyebrows toward the woman’s voice. “Mine done run off, God bless her.”

From Dixon he gets a look of mingled curiosity and compassion. “Whereabouts?”

“She ain’t gone home, I can tell you that. Not home to Vicksburg.”

“So where.”

“Ain’t sure. Ain’t sure I care.”

“How about the boy.”

“Gone too.”

Dixon gathers up the fish. “He’s a good boy.”

“I know it.”

“You’ll miss that one.”

“I reckon I will. Sooner or later.”

T
HERE IS A BRUSH
on the dresser and after a few moments of hesitation and any number of false starts Mary takes it up and begins working her hair into a smooth and glossy braid. While she sits occupied in this slow meditative manner she watches the boy asleep angelic upon the widow’s soft spare featherbed, and she thinks for once that she desires for him nothing less than exactly this, forever and ever. The house is quiet, silent in itself and isolated from the rising sounds of the waking village and alive only to the music of birds and the buzzing of insects. The widow must be a late riser, which Mary thinks odd for one her age, since Mrs. Fisk hardly slept a wink and complained about her weariness with every breath she drew.

She is playing possum, the old woman, waiting to see just how her visitors will comport themselves in the absence of her guiding presence. Still as a mummy, desperate to make use of the chamber pot but committed to seeing this experiment through to its end, she lies and waits and listens like some predator. Her heart beats and she draws breath and the inner flesh of her eyelids scrapes again and again across the sticky glass of her glaucous dried-up old woman’s eyeballs, but beyond these small movements she may as well be dead.

A wall away Mary bends into the sunlight of the window and removes from the hairbrush all signs of her use as meticulously as she would sweep clean a gravestone, and then she moves across the room to return the thing silently and with infinite care to its place upon the dresser. The boy is still asleep. She permits herself one last moment of rest in the ladderback chair by the door, letting her vision fall upon the vista of the river below. The positions of the window and the chair angle her view southward, far downstream, away from Finn and his riverside habitation but toward the world of her youth to which she dares not return nor cares to. She feels herself a princess locked in a turret, the sort of figure Mrs. Fisk would read to her about in the old slave days in Vicksburg, back when being royalty confined in a high castle chamber seemed the most desirable fate in the world. As often as not those stories included a banquet that materialized mysteriously upon an intruder’s entry into some ruined palace, and Mary realizes that if she waits for magic or hospitality or some other power to lay such a feast before her and the boy she will have done her years under Mrs. Fisk no honor.

She goes down and makes breakfast, at which development the widow is sufficiently satisfied to don her dressing gown and shuffle downstairs herself, acting when she sets foot in the kitchen astonished and delighted but no more astonished and delighted than she truly is and then excusing herself for an urgent and long-overdue visit to the outhouse. Soon the clatter of pans and the smell of food and the voices of the two women in the kitchen conspire to wake the boy, who flings himself from the bed and darts along the hallway and slides all the way down the railing as if he has decided all at once that he owns the place.

“What on earth?” The widow, alarmed by the crash of his two-footed landing in the front hall.

“Huck!”

“Mama!” Charging down the hall and bursting into the bright fragrant kitchen with a look of such joy upon his face that neither one of the women can bear to criticize him, at least not this morning, at least not this once.

Mary has responded to the abundance of the widow’s pantry by cooking everything in sight, and the widow has not seen fit to restrain her. Eggs and bacon, flapjacks and country ham, biscuits and red-eye gravy—and not a single stinking catfish in sight. This must surely be paradise. The boy is ravenous and so is she and among the three of them they clean their plates and leave not a crumb. Huck has pocketed a biscuit or two but no one notices nor minds.

“I must say you do just fine in the kitchen,” says the widow.

“You haven’t seen supper.”

“I could use the help. Lord knows.”

“You could.” On her feet, looking for an oversize pot to boil water for washing up.

“Bottom shelf.” As if she has been reading her mind. “The cistern’s out back.”

“I’ve found it.”

“There’s no well. We’re up too high.”

“I hadn’t thought.” Out the back door she goes to fill the pot.

Through the open door: “And you do seem to have initiative.”

“You noticed.” Returning and daring to give the widow a playful glance, enough to indicate that she has recognized this morning’s activities for the test that they have been, should the widow care to confess or even merely acknowledge.

“You’re sure you’re not a runaway.”

“Not from slavery.” With a look toward the boy.

“Whyn’t you get some fresh air,” says the widow to him, but before he goes he lets erupt into that bright welcoming kitchen the dark question that has plagued him ever since last night: “Did that baby of yours die in our room?”

“Now Huck,” says his mother.

“Shoo, you impertinent thing,” says the widow. She waggles her fingers at him like twigs, but something in her manner indicates that she does not mind his having raised so delicate a question.

“Forgive him.”

“He’s a child.”

“I know it.”

“We all were, at one time or another. Rich or poor, Negro or white. We all started out the same.”

“You’re very kind.”

“I’m very old,” says the widow. “God help me if I haven’t learned something along the way.”

“He’ll learn too.”

“I know,” says the widow. “He will.” She sips at her tea, not minding that it has gone a little cold. “Perhaps we can even help him along some. Find a way to get him a little schooling.”

Mary’s eyes brighten, but the light that rises within them dies out as rapidly as it has come. “Not Huck. Not a mulatto boy.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“I know it.”

“Have faith.”

“I don’t know.”

“As for me, what I’ve learned is that I can use some help in this world.”

“So you’ll take me on.”

“I need to make some inquiries first. Inquiries with the marshal. With the banker.”

“I see.”

“Just so we know where we stand with respect to each other.”

Mary stands waiting for the water to boil.