Finn (8 page)

“There was a woman,” says Stone with a certain disinterest.

“Well,” snorts Finn. “I sure ain’t no woman. And I reckon I ain’t dead.”

“Where on earth did you ever hear such talk?”

But the boy apprehends neither his mother’s question nor Finn’s grim reassurance regarding the obvious. His ears pound with urgent blood and he grips his chairseat with both hands to keep himself from toppling off or running.

Finn decides to pursue a course of nonchalance, so he pensively addresses himself again to his pie and watches from underneath his shaggy brows to see what sort of punishment is about to unfold before him. His own boy he has horsewhipped for daring to enter a school spelling bee, and he is certain that in this house of judgment the child’s stoic refusal to answer his mother’s direct question will unloose consequences most immediate and dire. But Stone reaches not for his belt, and after a moment the woman answers her own question on behalf of the tongue-tied boy, saying to her husband something that by the sound of it she has repeated a thousand times prior: “Those children at school are a poor influence on him.”

“Amen,” says Judge Stone, which remark leaves the boy reprieved and the dinner guest both dissatisfied and stunned, as if he has been expecting a mouthful of honey and received a bee sting instead.

After supper the adults arrange themselves around the fire in the parlor, where Judge Stone speaks of temperance and charity and the overwhelming redemptive power of Christ Jesus. He folds his hands in his lap and squeezes them together until his knuckles go white as bones and Finn cannot decide whether his impulse is to pray or to prevent himself from snatching up his guest by the collar and baptizing him in the washtub. The room grows warm and Finn grows comfortably drowsy, until after a while it seems to him that Stone with his inverse-named Christ Jesus has turned the world upside down and back to front, making it over from the hard place he has understood since childhood into a place altogether different, a place where forgiveness is not merely possible but indeed the expected order of the day. Warm and full of supper and his head aswim with sleep he sees his own hands in his lap as unclean things yet things not fully beyond redemption, and he elevates them in the firelight as if they desire on their own to perform an act of invocation or some other arcane magic.

“Those hands once belonged to a beast,” says Judge Stone.

“I know it.”

“But they can be washed clean.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Rest assured.”

“Then so be it.”

The judge rises and takes Finn’s right hand and shakes it without reservation. “Will you do us the honor of staying the night? It’s a good long way back to your cabin.”

“I will.” All that he desires is sleep.

Around midnight he awakens faceup on the sofa with the fire banked and his new boots on the floor and his new coat draped neck to knee like a blanket. His mouth is dry and his stomach is sour and one arm lurches out from beneath the coat to arrest his dead weight as he falls and falls and falls in the last remnant of a dream until his knuckles crack against the hardwood floor and the shock draws him full awake. He lies still for a time listening to his own ragged breathing and his own panicky heartbeat and the stealthy slow rearrangement of coals in the fire, trusting that he will sleep again soon, but sleep will not come no matter how hard he tries. The coat collar tucked beneath his chin smells powerfully of lanolin and he envisions sheep which he attempts to count but to no avail, for his numeric skills are as limited as his wakefulness is vast. Finally, temperance and redemption notwithstanding, he decides that in order to get a proper night’s sleep he is going to require a drink.

He laces up his boots and dons his coat and hat and lets himself out through the front door and onto the porch, where a light dusting of snow has covered everything over. His tracks, tracks that by dint of his newly unmarked heel the devil himself might follow, go straight down the hill to the nearest tavern in the village, one about to close up for the night until Finn presents himself at the bar.

“Throw another log on, Willis,” says the barman to a huge figure bent low over a table by the near-dead fire. “Look who’s come in.”

“Whiskey,” says Finn.

“Turn out your pocket.”

Finn fishes therein with an apologetic look, as if he has somehow neglected to transfer his wealth. “New drawers.”

“Should have saved your money for the finer things.” With a nod toward the back bar.

“I know it.”

“You’ve run out your credit.”

“But my boy.”

“Bring him in and bring his six thousand too and then we’ll talk.”

“How about the coat?” He shucks it.

“Got no use for a coat.”

“It don’t resemble your usual,” says the giant Willis from his place near the fire.

“It ain’t. Brand new.” Showing it off adangle from one finger, like some odd and desperate haberdasher.

Willis rises like a breaching whale. The coat will no more fit him than it will fit his horse. “Give you a dollar for it.”

“Paid three and a half just today.”

“Not likely.”

“Shows what you know.”

Still the coat is clearly worth something. “I’ll give you two. Take it or leave it.”

Finn calculates not the true value of the coat but the duration of the walk back to Judge Stone’s as measured against such a quantity of whiskey as he can acquire as fortification, and upon reflection he decides that two dollars is not only a fair price but the highest bid that he is likely to get anywhere at this time of night. He folds the coat as meticulously as it stands to be folded ever again and lays it over the back of the chair opposite Willis and holds out his hand.

“Put the two on his tab,” says the giant to the barman, simplifying the transaction for all concerned.

“I ain’t open all night,” says the barman.

“I know it,” says Finn.

“Whiskey, I reckon.”

“Just bring the bottle and leave it.”

“I can’t leave it for long.”

“I should have gone somewheres else.”

“Willis ain’t somewheres else, and then you’d be out of luck.”

“I know it,” says Finn, and he commences to drink.

When he has used up two dollars’ worth and the barman has restored the cork and Willis has thrust his arms into the arms of his new coat like paired sausages and gone happily home, Finn trudges back up the hill to Judge Stone’s. The powdering of snow has become an inch and he moves as rapidly as drink and footing will allow, stumbling to his knees once or twice and recovering with a curse. The cold amplifies his purpose and assists his concentration but at journey’s end the slick fresh-painted boards of Judge Stone’s porch conspire with the fresh snow to trip him up and so down he goes, ass over teakettle, arms aflail and hat taking wing, to land hard on the flagstone walk. He is there still when Stone comes upon him in the morning, dead asleep or else merely dead, covered over with snow, his left arm oddly bent and buckled beneath his fallen weight.

The doctor, an ill-tempered hogshead of a man awakened far too early for his liking, has nothing in the way of sympathy. “This should teach you to handle your own anesthesia,” he says to Finn with a glance toward the judge. Neither one of them is amused.

For a while he squeezes and pokes the broken arm like a joint of meat, and when he’s satisfied he commences twisting it this way and that like a pump handle, and once Finn has finally had enough the doctor instructs him to take a seat in a straight-backed chair and plant his feet squarely upon the floor. He removes his belt and ties it around the patient and the chair both, and he orders Stone to kneel behind the chair with his arms around Finn’s chest. At last he takes Finn’s wrist in both his hands, and with a curse and a grunt he throws all of his considerable and compacted weight in the opposite direction.

Finn deflates like a balloon and his shoulder nearly separates and the pain in his arm screams louder than any whiskey could possibly mitigate, much less whiskey drunk six or eight hours previous, but the arm goes straight or nearly so. The doctor mops his forehead with his sleeve and ties Finn’s arm to a splint, and in the aftermath he presents his bill.

“If this is yours, Judge, I’ll forgive it. If it’s his, I reckon you’ll have to lock him up before I get so much as a nickel.”

“Now, now, that’s not fair to you.” Reaching for the paper.

But just as death outpaces justice the doctor is faster than the judge, and he snatches up the bill and tears it to bits.

Judge Stone: “Do you see that, Mr. Finn? Do you recognize basic human kindness when you see it?”

“I see it,” says Finn, testing his arm. “I’m obliged.”

“Damn right you’re obliged,” says the doctor, “not that I’ll ever see any good from it.”

“Where’s your coat?” The judge.

“Drunk it.”

“So this is where my kindness leads.” Indicating the arm.

“I reckon.”

“Pray that I never see you in my courtroom again.”

“I will.” With a little dip of his shaggy head. Then he turns to the doctor. “Obliged.” And he shambles out, holding his arm across his chest like a baby child.

“You gave him a coat?”

“I did. And a suit of clothes and a pair of boots and a hot supper and more. Never again.”

“He has limitations, that one.”

“I see.”

“The earlier you learn that, the better.”

“I’ve learned it now.”

“The only way you’ll ever improve him,” says the doctor, “is with a pistol.” A locution which the judge finds so very amusing and insightful that he repeats it at every opportunity, until at length it enters the common lectionary of the village and becomes thereby Finn’s calling card and his sentence and his fate.

F
INN WORKS SOME NAILS
out of a piece of lumber that’s come floating down the river and caught on a snag upstream of the cabin and he straightens the nails upon a rock and then with another rock he drives them into the heel of his new left boot to keep away the devil. Thus girded he scrubs out his breakfast dishes in the river and sets them upon the bank to dry and climbs aboard his skiff with a two-gallon jug and a couple of empty sacks and a mess of fish gutted and wrapped in reeds. With his one good arm he poles upstream to St. Petersburg and ties up at someone’s dock just as bold as if he owns it and half of the others strung along the waterfront too. With the jug adangle from his forefinger and the reed-wrapped fish bound up neatly in a sack he makes for the white double front door of the Liberty Hotel but thinks better of it at the last second, his cross-heeled boot barely on the threshold. So down the boardwalk he goes toward the river again and then up a narrow alleyway to a weed-grown yard aswarm with feral cats and mined with fishbones and dotted with the inverted skeletons of ruined rowboats. Beyond the jakes and the overgrown garden he finds the kitchen, and he kicks open the door with the toe of his marked left boot and heaves the sack of fish up onto a counter within. “Where’s Cooper?” He addresses a black woman of middle age, her name unknown to him despite years of nodding acquaintance.

“It’s Monday.”

“I know it.”

“Mr. Cooper ain’t in on Monday.”

“Since when?”

“Since ever’ Monday I can recall.”

“Well these fish won’t wait.”

“I don’t reckon they will.” She dusts the counter with flour that sifts down like snow or scattered seed and she rolls out a great lump of dough upon it and scatters some more flour and then bows to her kneading, oblivious.

“A dozen good-size cats there and a couple of bluegills. What’ll you give?”

“I ain’t authorized.”

“Not money. I ain’t talking about money.”

“I ain’t neither.” Locating the wooden rolling pin in the depths of a drawer and setting to work. In a mere moment, precise as Noah with his cubits, she has fashioned this lump of pure white dough into a flat slab as round as a dinner plate and three eighths of an inch deep and no deeper from edge to edge and back again.

“Come on now.” He takes a single step toward her, turning as he does one shoulder away from the bundled fish as from a child either defended or left to its fate.

“I ain’t authorized. I tole you.”

“Who’d know?”

“I just ain’t.”

“Those fish there are worth three pounds of salt pork anyhow plus a fill-up.” Bringing the jug down on the countertop hard enough to raise a cloud of flour from the entire surface, bare wood and flattened dough dusted alike and alike disturbed.

“I don’t know where he keeps it.”

“You do.”

“No sir.” She picks up the biscuit cutter and touches it to piled flour to dust its edges. The palms of her hands are as pale as frog bellies and the backs as black as oil, covered all over with a thin film of flour that serves only to intensify their soft inky sheen.

“Don’t lie.” Another step and he takes her forearm just below the elbow.

“I won’t.” And then, since he is touching her with more tenderness than she had reason to expect from him though no less urgency, this: “He keeps it locked up.” She is tentative with her confession but not entirely begrudging.

“Whereabouts?”