Finn (31 page)

The barman whistles low. “Nothing much that I’ve got.”

“How about if I said that feller’s my own pap.”

“I’d say you were drunk, if I didn’t know better.”

“I ain’t lying.”

The barman rubs a fresh glass with a towel and does not even look up at the man standing eager before him. “If that’s your pap, then your money’s no good here.” Which remark Finn takes for an insult until he realizes that it is either a wager or a guarantee, between the two of which possibilities he has no cause to make any great distinction.

“You mean it.”

“I do.”

“Then pick me out a fair to middling bottle—none of your fancy stuff—and leave it on the bar.”

A
SPECTER SWOOPING DOWN
at him from the high chandelier could surprise the Judge no more than the sudden shambling appearance of his own son within the depths of this previously secure redoubt.

“Pap.” Hiking up his trousers as he comes.

His answer comes not from his father but from his mother, who speaks aloud his Christian name.

“Didn’t think I’d run into you,” says Finn.

The Judge stands dumbstruck beyond a theoretical margin sprung up around his own flesh-and-blood descendant, like a man tending a brushfire that has grown suddenly hotter and less amenable than he would like.

“Who’s your friend, Pap?”

The Judge looks away as if distracted, and then to the tall man in the beaver hat. “Mr. Whittier, may I present William’s brother.”

“Pleased to meet you,” says Whittier, with a smile and an outthrust hand. He teeters just the slightest, oddly like a drunken sailor in spite of his elegance, for his right leg is missing below the knee and he has never quite accustomed himself to its wooden substitute.

“Careful,” says the Judge, his smile an ironic mask.

“Why? Does this one bite too?”

Finn takes his hand and churns it. “I see you
do
know that brother of mine.”

Perhaps Whittier is humoring the Judge or perhaps he is blinded by the old man’s legendary stature or perhaps he is himself just more a man of the people than his elegant appearance suggests, but he gives the impression of being genuinely delighted to have made the acquaintance of this ragged and wild-eyed figure. “Will you be joining us for supper?”

“He will not.”

“I reckon I already had a little something.” Rolling his eyes toward the bar and the barman and the standing bottle.

“Then perhaps we ought to have a little something more.” Whittier indicates the bar with his upturned palm and addresses his suggestion more to the Judge and his wife than to Finn, who he can see is always ready for anything in the way of a drink.

“I’m in.”

His mother demurs and starts off toward the dining room, which leaves the Judge to choose between accompanying her and looking after the best interests of his unsuspecting guest. As much as it distresses him he follows the two of them to the bar, where they have already taken up positions on either side of the bottle.

“How long you known Pap?”

“Not long.”

“I reckoned so.” Confidentially: “
He ain’t got much patience for drink.
”

“Now, now,” says Whittier as the Judge settles onto a stool and shakes his head at the ready barman. “All things in moderation. Isn’t that correct, Judge Finn?” Lifting his glass.

The Judge ignores his impudence. “Mr. Whittier is out from Philadelphia, your mother’s birthplace.”

“I know where she’s from.”

“He’s an attorney, representing us in certain matters having to do with her parents’ estate.”

Finn gawks, incredulous. “When’d they pass on?”

“They’ve been in the ground for years.” The Judge tips his great knowing head toward Whittier for sympathy, but Whittier offers him none for he believes that his son’s ignorance is a great and bracing joke.

“You’ve got your own way of looking at the world,” he says, a step away from clapping the younger man on the back. “Do you know that?”

“I know it. I reckon I’m what you call the black sheep.”

“Me too,” says Whittier. “My people are day laborers, one and all. It broke their hearts when I took up the law.”

“Ain’t no good never come of it.”

“And very little good has come of hard labor, either. Not so far as I’m concerned.” He raps with his knuckles upon his wooden shin loud enough to make Finn jump. “Taken off by an overturned hay wagon. I was just a child. It reformed me then and there, and set my course in life.”

The two of them put their heads together to work on the bottle of whiskey for a few minutes and the Judge watches them as he would study a nest of insects, curious about their ways but wary of their intent.

The barman whispers to him. “The feller told me who he was, sir, but I thought he was all wet.”

“Thank you,” as if he has received a high compliment long overdue. “Oddly enough, he seems to possess a power for entertaining my houseguest that is well beyond my own capacity.”

“Folks are different.”

“I know they are.”

“That’s one thing I’ve learned.”

The Judge sniffs.

Finn lifts his voice. “I’ve been telling Mr. Whitfield here how I’m at loose ends.”

The Judge to his visitor: “My son’s income has always been, how shall I say it, uncertain.”

“I ain’t talking about them kind of loose ends. I mean the woman.”

“Please.” With a freezing look that would bind and gag him if it possibly could, and manacle him to the bar for good measure.

Whittier raises his glass in a toast. “Your son tells me that he and his wife have gone their separate ways.”

“Not exactly. Not exactly my wife, I mean.” With an animal grin.

“That’s correct, Mr. Whittier.” The Judge agrees with his son for once.
“Not exactly his wife.”

“Now, I’m not bothered in the least if you folks want to do things a little differently out here.”

“We do not do things differently. We live by the same precepts here as in any other civilized place.”

“I don’t want you thinking I’m shocked is all, just because I’m from the big town back east, if a fellow wants to take up with a little old gal.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I’ve seen a bit of the world.”

“I suppose you have,” says the Judge.

“As I was saying,” Finn resumes, helping himself to the bottle, “I done set myself free of that woman.”

“And as a result you expect me to be proud of you.”

“Speaking for your son, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I assure you that my son knows all there is to know about shame, Mr. Whittier. He could teach both of us volumes.”

Whittier eyes Finn with something approaching a new appreciation.

“I shall be forthright with you, Mr. Whittier. My son has possessed an untoward predilection for nigger women since young manhood. He has lain with one in particular for many years now, and their unnatural union has yielded unto this world a bastard mulatto child.” He rises a bit, as if pronouncing a sentence. “The shame that he has rung down upon his family and his race is beyond any reckoning.” He excuses himself to check on his wife, and when he returns from the dining room his misbegotten son and the Philadelphian Whittier and the half-drained bottle are all three of them gone off into the night, the barman knows not where.

T
HE TWO MEN,
one broad and bullying as a grizzly and the other dangerously slim in his elegant woolen coat and beaver hat, one slightly astagger and the other reeling on his mismatched legs, make their way down the hill sharing a bottle between them. It does not last long, the bottle, and Finn underhands it riverward when they reach the pier and together they stand to watch it go circling end over end upward and upward into the moonlight and then down again knifing into the water with nary a splash.

“That’s that,” says Finn.

“That’s that.”

“You got money.”

“I happen to be filthy with it.”

“God bless you for a gentleman,” says Finn. “Myself, I’m a little poorly just now.”

“Don’t you worry about a thing.” Whittier puts his hands on his hips and surveys the night river. He turns to his guide and presents him with a slow smile of infinite mischief and delight. “Your grandparents’ estate takes good care of its executor.”

“And that would be you.”

“That it would.”

Finn lowers his chin and cackles into his beard with a certain unmitigated glee. “Whitman, you’re a man after my own black heart.”

“And who would have guessed?”

“Not the Judge.”

“No. Surely not the Judge.”

They choose a skiff and Finn poles it up to Dixon’s place and introduces his newfound benefactor all around. Dixon has plenty of whiskey and Whittier has plenty of money and between them they strike an agreement that leaves everyone happy save perhaps Dixon’s wife who hates a drunkard. An angular black man playing a banjo in the corner names a rollicking number after him and the cardplayers let him win a harmless hand or two, and by closing time his misspelled name along with the date or some date close to it have been carved into the wainscoting beneath the bar by a grateful individual gone belly up and fish-like thanks to Whittier’s memorable largesse.

“Where to?” says the Philadelphian when everyone else has gone home and Dixon’s wife has shown these last two the door.

“I know a feller.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

They stumble down the steps and untie and make for the dense patch of woods on the river’s edge where the trail that is not a trail to Bliss’s cabin begins. Even for Finn, who knows it well, the passage seems to camouflage itself anew each time he seeks it, and as he proceeds along it now he could swear that every turning has shed its prior geometry or traded places with some other. The woods are silent save the tree-to-tree movement of these two, whose steps are not half so stealthy as they would desire or believe.

“Bliss can hear a cricket fart at a hundred yards,” says Finn. “So we better start stepping light.”

“Won’t he be asleep?”

“You can’t never tell. Not with Bliss. He don’t do nothing regular.”

“Why don’t we just wake him up and buy the stuff?”

“Now Whit,” says Finn with a look of comic derision visible by moonlight through a high canopy of leaves, “where’s your sense of adventure?”

“I have money. I don’t need a sense of adventure.”

Because Finn cannot deny the wisdom of this sentiment he chooses to ignore it, and so rather than answering he lifts a finger to his lips. Together they plunge ahead into the depths of the woods as quietly as any two staggering drunks, one of them city-bred and afoot in the wilds of Illinois for the first time in his life and hampered by a wooden leg on top of it all, possibly could.

Bliss’s shack is darker than the dark woods themselves and many times as threatening. Despite his frequent visits to the still and the secret cache of whiskey and the broad tree-shaded porch, Finn has never set foot within the cabin itself and so he does not know exactly where inside it Bliss might lie sleeping or beneath which open window his ready ear might lie cocked. The crumbling place stands in its clearing like a ruined mausoleum by moonlight, the air around it still redolent of woodsmoke and alcohol. Finn spies it first from the fringe of the woods, and he reaches back to place a hand on Whittier’s chest, thereby arresting his progress.

“Are we getting close?” Whittier, hissing.

“Have
you
gone blind now too?” The outline of the house is plain enough to him as to be illuminated. He cannot imagine that Whittier is having difficulty resolving its squarish silhouette from the tangle of woods and brush that surrounds it, although by the light of day the very boards and shingles and struts of the decrepit place seem intent upon merging themselves back again into the organic earth.

“Oh,” whispers Whittier, making it out plain as day now that he knows it is before him. “Excuse me.”

Finn believes that Whittier means to make apology for his incompetence as a woodsman, and he is about to forgive him when from the direction of the Pennsylvanian there issues a noise as of strong rain on a flat rock. To avoid his companion’s inadvertent overspray Finn steps into the clearing where his foot lands with a single sharp report upon a twig laid by chance traplike upon another just like it.