Finn (7 page)

6

F
INN LINGERS
at his fencepost and permits the heat of the sun to draw him back from his reverie of that upstream house sloping riverward under its burden of remembrance. Two men stroll past his resting place, one black and one white, each of them paler and more bookish than the other. Head to grizzled gray head they converse like a pair of old philosophers. The black man is by a slight degree the more fastidious, dressed like a diplomat in a gleaming white shirt and a woolen suit the color of a chestnut, balancing upon his head an elegant brown bowler and bearing in his right hand a silver-headed cane that he uses only sparingly, as if he is loath to soil its chalk-white tip upon the ground of St. Petersburg. He walks with his shoulders thrown back and his narrow chest cutting the Missouri air like the prow of a ship, his slender hands are gloved in a pale off-white only shades lighter than his yellow skin, and from time to time he opens his mouth wide and laughs a deep round laugh from between bright white teeth as if everyone within earshot were appreciative of his refined sense of humor. Finn squints at him as he would squint at a bright light or the arrival of apocalypse.

The two men pause a little distance away to greet another gentleman, this one known to the white but not to the black. Once their introductions are complete and their gloves have been removed as needed to permit the shaking of hands and then donned all over again, the third gentleman tips his hat and proceeds on his way with an appreciative nodding of his head—while the other two continue toward Finn.

“New in town?” says Finn from his seat by the fencepost. “Your friend I mean.” Looking straight at the white man and the white man only, with an intensity that makes a show of excluding the other.

The white man has been so long so far beyond contact with an individual like Finn that he accepts his question without reservation and stops as eagerly as if he has been invited to dance. “Why, yes,” he says, and again: “Why, yes indeed.”

“Thought so.”

The white man folds his hands at his sternum and begins to declaim. “Professor Morris is visiting from Ohio, where he teaches at Kenyon College. He’ll be speaking tonight at the Reform Church.”

“You fixing to sell him?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Not that he’s likely to fetch much.” Here he permits his gaze to wander over the black man’s regally slim figure. “Not by the look of him.”

“Sir.”

“Ain’t nothing worth any less than a puny nigger. Other’n a puny nigger in a ten-dollar suit, putting on airs.”

“Come along, Professor,” says the white man to the black. “We’re late for your introductions at the church.” He takes his associate by the elbow but finds him immovable, for the professor has been turned to stone by Finn’s effrontery. He spreads wide his legs and cocks his head to one side and leans forward upon his cane, transfixed by their interlocutor as he would be by a Siberian tiger in a circus parade.

“You mind your master,” says Finn with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Git along now, boy.”

“No man is my master,” intones the black man, with the theatrical air of an individual winding up to deliver a lecture or a sermon.

“Is that so?” Addressing the white man, parting his knees to scratch at his crotch.

“If you please, sir,” interrupts the black man with a schoolroom kind of sarcasm, “you may direct your questions to me. Dr. Bale here is my colleague, not my translator. And above all he is most assuredly not my keeper.”

“I told you,” the white man puts in, “he’s a college professor. From Ohio.”

“I got ears.”

“He’s a scholar.”

“I heard.”

“He comes from an extremely progressive state—a state where a man like Professor Morris is not only free, but free to vote.”

“Bullshit,” says Finn.

“Not at all.”

Finn grunts.

“You have a lot to learn,” says the professor.

“I might.”

“Change is afoot.”

Finn cogitates for a minute. “If a nigger can vote,” he says, “then I don’t reckon I’ll ever vote again.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I don’t care what state.”

“Time and events will overtake you.”

“Maybe they will.”

“Perhaps they already have.”

As the gentlemen go on their way Finn has an idea. He returns to the jail where he finds the marshal on his knees in the one cell, bent over a bucket and bearing a rag, cleaning up after Finn’s own mess of the night prior.

“You tell me something?”

“What is it?”

“What’s the rule for claiming a loose nigger in this state?”

“Depends.”

“What on?”

“Where he’s from. Certain conditions.”

“From Ohio, let’s say.”

“You be talking about a free man?”

“So far.”

The marshal drops the rag into the water and sits back upon his heels. “Anybody particular in mind?”

“I won’t lie to you. That professor.”

“The one over to the church tonight.”

“That’s the one.”

“Finn, you’re either the smartest man in this town or the stupidest.”

“I need money. You heard that judge same as me.”

“I did.”

“Lawsuits cost.”

“I wonder how much you’d need before you couldn’t spend every bit of it on whiskey.”

“I aim to find out.”

“You never will.”

“We’ll see. So what’s the rule on that professor?”

“You won’t like it.” He goes back to daubing the floor with his rag. “Six months to claim.”

“He ain’t here six months.”

“I know it.”

“I claim him, I’d even sell him back to that Ohio college they like him so much. He don’t look like a worker to me.”

“You can’t do it, Finn.”

“You sure about the six months?”

“I am.”

“That long?”

“That long.”

“A man could starve.”

“Or work.”

“I’ve run up against the law before.”

“I know it.”

“I don’t mean this.” Indicating with a flick of his eyes the cell, the crust of vomit still visible upon the bedframe, the recent past. “I mean the Judge.”

“I know.”

“Him and my own rightful inheritance, which it looks like I’ll never get as long as I live.”

“Stealing a nigger ain’t the way to fix your problem.”

“I reckon.”

But Finn is not without alternatives. When evening comes he takes up a position in the doorway of the Reform Church, where Professor Morris will be speaking, and assumes the pose of a mendicant, hat in hand and cheeks hollow and eyes brimming with woe. To the forward-looking faithful he is the veriest picture of need, unbesmirched by such associations as his figure may possess for those acquainted with the taverns and the marshal’s office and the courts, and they do unto him as they would have others do unto themselves.

He is gone before the professor climbs the steps to the pulpit, and on his tramp back to the cabin he stops at the riverside redoubt of a bootlegger for a gallon of whiskey that will hold him until he has an opportunity to use the rest of his newfound riches to lay in proper supplies.

J
UDGE
T
HATCHER PERMITS
the boy three dollars and before he can make use of it Finn has claimed it for his own. He awakens in the marshal’s office to discover that Thatcher is riding the circuit and he’ll be seeing a new man instead.

“This one a kindly sort?”

“Don’t know. Mostly he’s on the circuit.”

Finn looks as if he’s just been cheated at poker. “Time served’s always enough for Thatcher.”

“I know.”

“A person gets in the habit.”

“I know it.”

“Ain’t there a law on that subject?”

“Not that I know.”

“How one of them has to do like the other’n already done?”

“You mean following precedent.”

“Think I’d be smart to mention that?”

“I wouldn’t. No.”

Stone is the new judge’s name and he has a house in the village where he lives with his wife and his son and his daughter, a fine Christian gentleman presiding over a fine Christian family, and for Finn he has nothing in his heart but forgiveness. “I believe that a fellow such as yourself can be improved,” he says, careful not to say “saved” although “saved” is what he means.

“I do too. I believe it.”

Stone looks childlike to Finn, cherubic as a soprano in a boys’ choir. Tall and thin and pale, his high forehead crowned by a frill of swept-back hair the color of rust, he eyes Finn with the look a gardener would use upon a hedgerow that he means to prune.

“I have made a promise to myself, Mr. Finn. A promise that I shall never permit myself to give up on so much as a single soul. And I have kept that promise, regardless of how much evil and criminality I have witnessed.”

“You ain’t been a judge long.”

“No.”

“You giving me time served or some other?”

“Time served,” says Judge Stone, “with the admonition that rather than visiting a tavern tonight you spend the evening dining with my family and myself.”

In order to make Finn presentable to his wife and children the judge takes him to a dry-goods store and has him fitted with a new suit of clothes and a sturdy overcoat and a felt hat and a pair of boots, all at his own expense. Finn observes out loud that he will need to bedeck the left boot-heel with a cross of nails in order to keep away the devil, an idea that Stone receives as if it were the quaintest superstition from out of some impenetrable African jungle. “Don’t you worry about the devil,” he says. “He’s not permitted across the threshold of my house.”

Finn knows better but he will not say.

The food at Judge Stone’s table is not elegant but it is rich and varied and there is plenty of it. Mrs. Stone has even baked a pie, not because they have a guest for supper but because she bakes a pie most every day of the week. For Finn, whose diet changes month by month as the year unwinds, the preserved huckleberries speak of a season long gone and hitherto irrecoverable. As he chews, methodical as some old ruminant, these baked-black berries beneath the latticework of their pale and tender crust speak also of innocence undisturbed, of childhoods spent around tables like this and around others less elevated and bountiful, of secrets buried beneath time and earth and flowing water; and even in the forced absence of whiskey a vision passes before his eyes unbidden not of snakes or of spiders but of the turgid Mississippi beneath his window on the Illinois side crossed and recrossed with a cumulative ghostly weavework of fishing boats’ accidental paths and steamboats’ cautious trajectories achurn with white foam beneath which and supporting all lies dark water and darker history.

Only the children fear him. The boy is perhaps seven or eight, his sister older than that by a year, and they are formally dressed in a way that distinguishes them from the ordinary run of children, a condition that has made them disdained on one hand and elevated on the other but has nonetheless left neither unbaptized by the river of rumor that laves all of St. Petersburg’s children, a river heavy with detail about the hideous habits of Pap Finn. All the same their father is present, and their visitor is well enough dressed and better behaved, and they are safe by their own homefire, so by the time Finn has loaded up his plate with his third piece of pie and drunk his second cup of coffee the boy works up sufficient nerve to ask him a question.

“That dead body that came down the river awhile back: Did you know some folks thought it was you?”

Finn holds his fork in his fist like a club, and he freezes with it poised over a dessert plate clotted with syrup. For some seconds he does not move, not so much as an eyelash, and his presence at the table takes on by its very stoniness a kind of fearsome potency, like a mountain lion coiled to leap or a hunter waiting behind some leafy blind for the inevitable moment when his prey will step into full and vulnerable view. He is pure potential, dead silent and for all human purposes outside time, and as he hangs there during those few interminable seconds the boy realizes that he has made a dreadful mistake—until with a visible effort the dinner guest slides his lips back over blue teeth as tipsy as tombstones and gives the boy a ferocious smile and moves his head toward him just perhaps a quarter of an inch or even less, a cobra lining up his strike, and returns question with question: “What body?”