Finn (38 page)

24

T
HE
J
UDGE CANNOT HELP
but note the pair of them bound upstream on the skiff, his errant son and the woman, no doubt the very same woman his son has been miscegenating with all these years, the selfsame woman he surely lied about having slain and thrown into the river, but he acknowledges nothing for he has work to accomplish with the new eastern lawyer. He is frankly unsurprised, for he has seen enough of this world to know that treachery is commonplace and the worst possible outcome is forever to be expected. From the corner of his eye he watches his son pole upstream to his destination, then he brings the attorney to the great white mansion on the highest street in Lasseter and admits him to his chamber where they spend the afternoon in counsel.

For his part Finn ties up beneath his leaning riverside house and bends to help the laundress to her feet, the first time they have touched skin to electric skin.

“What happened?” Taking in the broken piling, the sagging porch, the bent roofline.

“Steamboat.”

She hesitates on her way up the stairs for the place seems unsafe, oddly cocked, a cunning trap in danger of lurching shut at the thoughtless placement of a single errant ounce, but he offers her encouragement and finally sets chivalry aside and goes ahead himself.

“See?” Giving a little jump at the landing. The stair proves stable enough.

“I’m coming.”

He stands aside to admit her first, this woman so like the other and doomed to the same fate. Her familiar silhouette against the light from the porch makes him vertiginous, and he can hardly draw breath.

“You all right?” She reaches out a hand, aware that he is older than she and thinking that he has perhaps fallen away from the man that he once was.

“Fine.” Taking the hand offered, indicating the porch with a dip of his head.

“In darktown,” she says as they sit, “all I get is pity.”

“You won’t get none from me,” says Finn.

“Promise.”

He makes his promise and brings out whiskey in a bottle though he hates to waste any on her. They share a glass, she merely to be polite and perhaps to reduce her trepidation.

“I never known a woman liked whiskey.”

“You still don’t.”

“I know it.” Tossing off the remainder. “I don’t reckon I could support one who did.”

“You sleep out here?” She toes the corn husk pallet used by Huck in those long lost years, the pallet now torn asunder in places and soaked stinking by water spilled over the lip of the slanting rainbarrel and ravaged by birds for use in building other better resting places.

“Had a boy.” He leaves it at that and pours more whiskey, letting her think what she chooses about such kinds of misery as they may already share in common. After a while he says, “I sleep upstairs.”

“Show me.”

“It ain’t much to look at.”

Past the kitchen they go with the fiddler cats wrapped in reeds and the gutting knife lying beside them ready for his purpose. He reckons that he will accomplish this one as he did the last with his bare hands alone, and use the knife only for the secondary work once again although this time he will need to save some part over to show the Judge. But this fate is not all that he means the laundress to share with her prior incarnation, and so he permits himself to touch the small of her back as he guides her to the bedroom stairway.

“Goddamn kids,” he says when she takes note of the thorny crown of bent and halfpulled nails surrounding the door. “Made themselves a mess upstairs too.”

She wonders if perhaps they deemed the place abandoned, but she chooses not to ask.

“It’s home,” he says. “Home all the same.”

“I know.”

“Just close your eyes if you don’t like what they done.”

And close her eyes she does, for there is too much of it and it is too uncouth for enduring. The drawings and the words and the half-breed constructs that are neither drawings nor words but partake perhaps of both cover even the whitewashed windows through which slanting sunlight comes now as through spiderwebs or the rigging of an abandoned ship. The bed is inviting nonetheless, and the woman’s dress hanging upon its nail reminds her of the overalls of her own dead husband, which she has not yet had the strength to move, not since the night he died, and so between the boy’s forlorn mattress and the woman’s empty clothes she believes that she understands just how Finn has come to be this way.

He calls her Mary when he takes her and she corrects him not, for she pities him and would grant him this one kindness at least.

The whiskey he has drunk makes him sleep despite his intent, but the woman soon stirs and opens her eyes in the last dying light. There upon the wall she spies that speckled straw hat once belonging to her son, and for a moment she believes that she is either dreaming or dead or else fallen into someone else’s dream of death, and she stifles a gasp by exercise of will. Out from beneath Finn’s fallen bulk she slides without disturbing his slumber of weariness and whiskey, to pad naked over to the protruding nail and take down the charcoal-outlined hat with her own two shaking hands. There can be no mistaking it. And now that she has eyes to see there can be no mistaking certain of the mad scrawlings upon the walls either, least of all those depicting her wronged child and her throat-shot husband and her own beauteous profile untainted, certainly not those recalling the vulgar bare-rumped preacher having his hideous way and the familiar masked figure standing to one side with a pistol in his hand.

Like a cat she prowls the room in silence for some tool or weapon or other device appropriate to her aim. She recalls a gutting knife in the kitchen below but cannot muster the courage to leave this murderous monster alone here for long enough to retrieve it lest she meet him on the stairs returning or worse and more shameful still risk losing her nerve and running from the house entirely with him still asleep and at large and her still owing the two of her most beloved more in the way of faithfulness than that. In the room’s lowest downstream corner, in the spot slumped most precipitously riverward by the house’s meeting with the
Wallace P. Greene,
stands the sprung chest with its broken hinges. By and by she dares approach it and thus discovers in its depths not only a baby’s broken bottle with its dry rag stopper but a pistol, gift to her from some vengeful god in whom she has had no prior right to believe.

W
HEN HE HAS SHED
himself of the easterner and driven his matched pair down to the river, the Judge hardly dares to climb the crooked steps of that treacherous overhanging house. But climb them he does, for he is old and has nothing to lose save such tatters of civility and self-respect as his son has seen fit to leave him. The house is dark and he creeps upward without a light without a sound without remorse over the sentence that he shall soon impose upon the son and the woman and to hell for the moment with the boy for there will be time and opportunity to find him later all the time and opportunity in the world but first things first. He has discovered the two of them in bed before, and this time he will not merely cast them out of this earthly Eden or any other. He bears in his right hand a pearl-handled pistol for enforcing his judgment.

The downstairs is empty save a bundle of fish stinking on the table, and the overhanging porch is likewise empty but for a jug and one empty glass. He turns back around and in the darkness sees the nail-toothed hole to the stairway gaping and he crosses to it and enters into its mystery as cautious as a man on ice. Black underfoot are the stairs themselves and black are the walls alongside him but a dim halo of pale riverlight hangs above his head and toward this he strives pistol in hand. Finding his son facedown in his own bed, one bullet square through his back and the sheets running red and the blood filtering down through the straw tick to pool upon the floor, is to him an anticlimax—and he desires to fire again, to slay him all over, but resolves instead to conserve the ammunition. The walls are mingled white and black with something that he reads as cobwebs and no more.

The house with its broken spine and its ruined pilings proves no match for a single strong rope and his impatient paired Arabians. Into the river it crashes in a slow shattering avalanche, sunk in water up to its roofline and bobbing faintly beneath the moon, ultimately unrecognizable to any who might happen upon it downstream with its gaping roof and its broken gable windows and its secret burden of betrayal. When the boy Huck discovers it afloat and ties up seeking adventure of his own he will know it not, nor will he desire to see or understand or much less judge the heart-shot corpse upon its slanted floor. He will take what he requires and light out.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T
HIS IS
F
INN’S BOOK.

And although I have approached its source material with the reverence that is its due, Finn himself has always insisted upon having the last word. Which is another way of saying that in order to learn the facts about Huckleberry Finn, you’ll need to seek out an older and better novel than mine.

It’s not that I have discounted or denied the details of Huck’s story as Mark Twain set them down. Quite the contrary. In matters of location and timing and continuity, the events retold in this novel are fitted meticulously into and around Pap Finn’s appearances, both alive and dead, in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The elements of his character—his drunkenness, his cruelty, his virulent and overwhelming hatred of blacks—are all drawn whole from Twain’s novel and followed here to their likely ends.

A hundred other details link Twain’s novel and mine, including the contents and condition of the room where, in Chapter 9 of
Huckleberry Finn,
Jim discovers Pap Finn’s dead body. My own interpretation of these particulars—the words and pictures on the walls, the men’s and women’s clothing, the whiskey bottles and the black cloth masks—served as a road map for charting many aspects of this book. I’ve made use of some of Twain’s minor characters, too (Judge Thatcher, the widow Douglas), and permitted at least one other (the King, a shapeshifter if there ever was one) to appear reimagined. A few of Twain’s scenes, filtered through a different sensibility, appear more or less whole in this novel. And in that “
more or less
” lies the spot where, in the company of passing time and changing critical sensibilities, and in the service of a narrative that requires its own shape and its own energy and must by its own working acquire its own meaning, this story parts company with Twain’s book—and travels down its own treacherous channel.

I have assumed, for example, that the Huck of
Huckleberry Finn
may not be an entirely reliable narrator. What boy is? What boy, aiming to describe his relationship with a father as appalling as Finn, possibly could be? Thus certain encounters with his father take on different nuances here than they possessed in Twain’s novel.

Throughout, I have followed such narrative threads as the elder Finn and his particular brands of selfishness and bigotry have suggested to me, dealing with the facts of
Huckleberry Finn
at least as fairly as Twain himself treated his own sources. For after all, as Ron Powers noted in
Mark Twain: A Life,
the author “took a democrat’s view of fact and fiction; he privileged neither above the other and let them mingle in his work without prejudice.”

T
HE NOTION OF
H
UCK
as a mulatto is certainly the most daring aspect of this novel, and the one sure to cause the most consternation among some readers. It most definitely takes Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s monograph
Was Huck Black?—
which traced Huck’s voice to distinct black sources from Twain’s youth—to another level altogether. But is a mulatto Huck really that unlikely an extrapolation of Twain’s intent? Perhaps not.

Fishkin links Twain’s satirical impulse to his experiences with the black tradition of “signifying” speech, that complex rhetorical doubling documented by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in
The Signifying Monkey.
Fishkin traces Twain’s appreciation for the rich signifying tradition to the young Sam Clemens’s contact with particular black speakers—among them a youth known to history only as Jerry, whom the author memorializes in “Corn-Pone Opinions”: “I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man—a slave—who daily preached sermons from the top of his master’s woodpile, with me for the sole audience.”

If a key part of that description—“a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it”—does not have a familiar ring, then you haven’t read
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
recently enough. Here is Twain in that book, introducing Huck to his audience for the very first time: “Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town…all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him.” Although I make no claim that Twain meant to suggest anything but a Caucasian Huck, he most certainly and consciously built his boy hero out of materials whose blackness goes far deeper than mere dialect.

In later years Twain would give us Tom Driscoll, the secret mulatto at the heart of
Pudd’nhead Wilson.
Driscoll reflected Twain’s lifelong fascination with double identities, and demonstrated his growing sense of the complexity of race relations. To the reader who would suggest that my mulatto Huck subverts a cherished motif of
Huckleberry Finn—
the relationship between a free white boy and an adult black slave—I point out the similar (though reversed) revelation that comes near the close of this novel: When the elder Finn strips Huck of all traces of his true black mother, substituting in her place a dead white woman, he sets his son free to pursue whatever fate Mark Twain has in store for him. Huck’s identity is thus doubled without his even knowing it, a device of which I believe his creator might have approved.

—J
ON
C
LINCH
Plymouth, Vermont
February
2007