by Jon Clinch
“You Finn.”
“What is it.” He swivels his head with the urgency and precision of a crow, following the voice. Water runs down his chest.
“Reckon it’s laundry day.” The marshal, up from St. Petersburg on the Missouri side.
“I reckon.”
“Mind you don’t get your pecker sunburnt.”
“That happens, you’re the first I’ll show.”
“Don’t do me no favors.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“I expect that woman of yours ain’t to home, you running around like that.”
“No she ain’t.”
“Unless I caught you in the middle of something.”
“Not likely.” Finn dips more water. Half of his work is done, a breeze has arisen from across the river, and he is feeling expansive. He has always been a big man, broad of shoulder and well muscled as befits one who draws his living from the river. “So what brings you to the big town,” he says to the marshal, “other’n that steamboat?”
Lasseter, Illinois, is the county seat and a more prosperous place than St. Petersburg, from whence this Missouri lawman has come. His journey upriver has taken him well out of his proper jurisdiction, but not beyond the limits of his curiosity.
“Official business,” says the marshal. “A little legwork.”
Finn sips his water wishing it were something else.
“You see anything unusual float by last night, yesterday?”
“Calf come by last week. Monday, Tuesday maybe.”
The marshal, gone bald before his time and thick around the middle, sags a little and puckers his lips as he turns away and scans the water. “That all?”
“Yes sir.”
“How do you suppose your daddy’s holding up?”
“Same’s always.”
“That a fact.”
“I reckon.”
The marshal chews his lip. “Same as always.” He spits into the brown water, hikes up his trousers, and bids Finn goodbye with the back of his hand.
“Like I said,” says Finn to the water in his rusty dipper. He scratches his crotch, studying the places along the river where his trotlines are fastened into the muddy bank with long iron stakes and rusty chains fit for a dungeon. Every hook must have found its catch by now. Two days have passed since he last ran the lines, one day given over to the work and one more given over to Bliss’s forty-rod, of which he brought home a full jug. He ought to get out there on the river if he means to have any money for food or liquor, take up once again the old reliable routine about which he has hung the tattered rags of his life ever since he fell out of favor with the Judge, but instead he rehangs the dipper on a nail by its twisted handle and returns to the upstairs bedroom as if pursued. Certain stains have bled through the whitewash during his conversation with the marshal, tinting portions of the wall a pink as ruddy as flesh and necessitating there a second and more careful coat.
By nightfall he has finished the job and the room gleams ghostly by the light of his candle. He returns the bed and the chairs and the broken-backed chest to their rightful places, and he hangs the woman’s clothes on their usual peg alongside the window where they may serve him as a reminder. Downstairs he finds a little whiskey left in the jug and a little bit more left in the bottom of another cracked one on the porch. The battered old jug’s contents are mostly crumbled clay and rotten cork but he passes the slurry through a square of cloth and chokes it down all the same, followed by the dregs of Bliss’s more recent handiwork. In the end, even after he’s taken the cloth into his mouth and suckled it like a woman’s breast, it is only enough to fuel his need for more.
He dons his overalls and frees the skiff and poles upstream past his trotlines to a place where other skiffs on the order of his and worse are tied up like a stringer full of fish gone belly up, and he attaches his own to the last of these then walks ashore across the unsteady lot of them. The steps to the riverside tavern grow out of the hillside where nature and convenience have placed them: flat rocks, dead limbs, curved roots cradling dried mud. Finn plods upward and makes one last futile search of his pockets before stepping inside, into a room where the day’s heat lingers undiminished and the dark of night is not dispelled by so much as a single candle. Men play cards on the jutting porch beyond but he greets them not.
“You Finn,” says Dixon, the proprietor.
“Hey Dix. How happy are you to see me?”
“No happier’n usual.” Wiping down the wooden countertop with a filthy rag.
“I take that for a good sign.”
“I take that to mean you’ve got empty pockets in them overalls.”
Judged strictly by the regularity of his appearances and the quantity of his consumption, Finn is Dixon’s best customer. The circumstance is not without its drawbacks. Their transactions are mainly in the way of barter, and Dixon’s wife has lately decided that she would rather not serve her customers catfish with Finn’s scent upon them, nor any other kind of fish that he’s touched for that matter.
“If you won’t stand me to a few then I reckon I’ll find somebody who will,” says Finn. His eyes have adjusted to the darkness and he scans the room from under brows knitted tight with urgency and desire. Only one figure resolves from the smoke and the gloom, a black man nearly as large as he and surely half again as strong. For all the world like a carved monument or a heathen totem, his burnished face glows and fades in the pulsing light cast by his corncob pipe. Finn looks through him or past him and throws up his hands in frustration. “Come on now, Dix. I’m good for it.”
The black man, a gray-headed veteran whom everyone knows as George, rises from the table with his empty glass in hand. He moves with the grace and purpose of a storm cloud from his table to the bar behind which stands Dixon rubbing at an invisible spot with his filthy rag and contemplating Finn’s sad destiny. “I’ll have another’n,” he says. “And this feller here’ll have the same, long as you’re pouring.” Coins spill across the bar.
“I ain’t that thirsty.” Glowering at Dixon.
“Come on, Finn.”
“That’s all right.”
Dixon pours one. “I ain’t never seen you turn down a drink.”
“There’s a heap of things you ain’t never seen.”
“I know it.”
“You ain’t never seen the day I’ll take his charity, for one.” To Dixon, for Finn will not so much as cast his eyes upon the man who would be his benefactor.
George permits his teeth to gleam briefly in the dark.
“I didn’t hear the man mention no charity,” says Dixon. “You mention anything about charity, Mr. George?”
“No suh.”
“Hear that, Finn?”
“I ain’t never in my life been beholding to no nigger,” says Finn, “and I ain’t about to start now.”
Dixon grows thoughtful behind the bar, and moves his hand in ever smaller circles.
“You going to stand me to that drink?”
George stacks his change into two separate piles, one for each drink he has in mind, and he gives them the faintest suggestion of a push across the bar. “Just being neighborly,” he says in a voice like gravel and velvet. “Ain’t a loan, ain’t charity, ain’t nothing but a drink.”
“Tell him to drink it himself,” says Finn, contrary to his own most imperative instincts but in keeping with his higher principles. “Tell him he ought to learn how to keep his money in his pocket.”
Finn leaves the bar by the other way and stalks out onto the porch among the cardplayers. For the most part they look up, one at a time or in small groups like nesting owls, reflexively but without any excess of interest. Insects swarm their candles and collect in their glasses and get swallowed up one by one in the manner of Jonah but perhaps a bit more content for the anesthetic specifics of their dying. One of the men raises a glass to Finn, a trifle ironically and at some personal risk, but Finn pays him no mind and stamps off down the path toward the river fro
m which he has come.
The evening has gone cool, and a sharpness in the air suggests to him that by and by his waterbarrel will resume crusting itself over with the thinnest frangible film of overnight ice. Everything changes, he thinks. The woman is gone and the world turns. Free niggers try to buy a man a drink for no reason. He troops down the steps with his head aching for whiskey and his boot-heel, the one into which he’s driven a cross of nails to keep away the devil, leaving its own highly particularized trail in the dirt. He frees the skiff and it finds its own way into the current, reliable and wise as a bloodhound. Many’s the time it’s taken him well past home on a night like this. Perhaps the skiff knew best after all, perhaps he should have lingered down where it willed him, permitted himself to drift deeper and deeper into the slave states. Everything might have gone differently.
This evening though he’s wide awake and fully alert, perhaps more so than is entirely healthy for a man of his habits and inclinations. He sniffs the air, listens to the lapping of water and the creaking of oars from downstream and the clinking together of glasses from up on Dixon’s porch and other sounds too from various other locations along the river—sounds of argument and talk and singing and work, always work, for it seems to him that someone is forever chopping wood or wielding a saw or dragging some heavy object somewhere along the amplifying reach of the water, even at the deepest hour of the night. He comes abreast of his most upstream trotline and pictures its swarming struggling catch; tomorrow he’ll run them all and gut the slick fish clean and cache them one after another in a bed of wet reeds like Moses in the bulrushes, and then he’ll bring them up into the village to sell. Thus tomorrow night will not be like this night in the least, for he will be flush and able to do as he pleases. A flicker of light in the woods catches his eye and he considers pulling ashore for a while, following a certain path well known to him and hitting up old Bliss for a drink or two on account, an idea that sparks up in his mind and distracts his attention just long enough that as he’s considering the tortuous walk into the deep woods to where the old man keeps his works his drifting boat bumps against another, this one not moving with the current but rather holding steady against it.
“Hey. Watch where you’re going.” The voice of a boy, no older than Finn’s own son, which gives him an instant’s pause.
“You boys.” A powerful scent of fish above the omnipresent smells of the river and the night helps Finn realize just where he is and why the boys’ doubtlessly purloined skiff is hanging steady in the water here of all places and exactly what the young miscreants are up to under this blanket of darkness. “Them’s my trotlines,” he says in a level voice.
“Shitfire,” says one of the boys, and he goes plunging overboard rather than confront Finn’s well-known wrath.
Everything is wet: fish arching in the bottom of the stolen skiff, the air erupting as two more boys dive to evade capture, Finn himself as he catches hold of a watersoaked and half-rotted paintless gunwale and makes fast. Only one boy remains, the youngest of the four and the most innocent and the least equipped to be out on the river in this kind of a fix, a black child barely visible in the stern until the moon breaks through overhead cloud and reveals him there. He has a tear in his glistening eye and a hook in his palm that he’s been trying to nurse out with no success.
“You boy.”
“It warn’t my idea, suh.” Fussing with the hook as if it possesses mystical qualities.
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes suh.”
“Whyn’t you go over with them others?”
“It warn’t my idea.”
Anyone could see that this one has been a good boy all his short life, and that the act of throwing himself on the mercy of adult authority comes as naturally to him as breathing. Upon this one occasion, however, the truth serves him exactly as well as it has served ten thousand men who have come before Finn’s father in his time, which is to say poorly. He offers up that palm with the hook in it, a bead of blood gleaming there by moonlight, as if this explains everything, as if he has already endured all of the punishment that he deserves.
“Aww,” says Finn, and without a second look he grabs the line that leads from it to draw the child within striking range. He has acquired a natural caution about such things from his years on the river, an instinctual feel for the tension of the line and the power of the hook and the secret breaking point of the tender pad of flesh within which the barbed iron has buried itself. The boy rises like a perch, fighting his natural inclination to resist capture, judging furiously the relative risks and advantages of the two paths open to him. And before he can make up his mind to come along or jump Finn is upon him with the back of his brutal right hand. A spattering of the boy’s teeth precedes him into the river and the hook flies free, nearly but not quite catching Finn in the cheek. There’s a spot of blood on the gunwale where the boy’s head hit after the blow and whether or not there’s any thrashing to be heard from the river is no concern of Finn’s, certainly not as regards a thieving nigger boy and a sissy at that, blubbering away about a hook in his goddamn hand. He kneels and bends to take up the gasping fish, tenderly as a shepherd.
2
THE WINTER COMES ON and Finn wears every article of clothing he owns and works the trotlines every day but they are less productive. When he does catch something it’s usually carp, which nobody has much interest in buying except perhaps a certain oil-black trader in darktown with whom he’d rather not do business. He fuels his stove with fallen branches and on one occasion finds a wooden door floating down the river from the north, frame and all, which he considers burning but in the end decides to use for its intended purpose. He mounts it at the foot of the bedroom stairs where it serves as insulation against intrusions and loss both thermal and psychic. The downstairs room is warmer now and he’s brought the horsehair couch in from the long porch and often as not he spends the better part of the day napping on it with his back to the world. The house creaks in the wind and shudders when something in the water strikes one of the pilings on which it stands and at such moments Finn awakens with a start, picturing an insistent floating corpse long gone downstream.
The sky is pressing low over the river when he decides to walk into the village. He dons his broken slouch hat and wraps a blanket around himself, more for effect than for warmth. Lasseter is empty, abandoned to the wind, and he passes before its shuttered windows like a wraith. In the diffuse gray light he casts upon its walls not so much as a shadow.
WM. FINN, ESQ. says the shingle that sways creaking in the manner of a ghost ship over the boardwalk along which he treads. The paint upon the shingle is fresh, white and black as judgment, and at the sight of it Finn stops to consider. Then he mounts the porch and admits himself at the door.
“Look what the wind blew in,” says his brother, Will. His cheeks are apples and his hair, as black as Finn’s own, is thick and neatly parted in the middle.
“Will.”
“Pull up a bench by the stove.” Rising he is his brother’s purified image, although where Finn’s bulk has long been the product of exercise and whiskey Will has derived his from sedentary habits and a fondness for good food in plentiful quantities. They are nonetheless clearly two branches of the same tree, each bent by circumstance in his own way.
“This ain’t no social call,” says Finn, drifting mothlike toward the fire all the same.
Will encourages his brother with a soft hand set upon his shoulder. “Warm yourself anyhow.”
“No harm in it.”
The two sit for a moment, wordless, listening to the fire. The wind tries the latch and passes on.
Finn nods toward the door and the trail of footprints that followed him in, bits of white snow and black mud mingled. “Forgive my manners.”
“These old planks have seen worse.” If they have, it does not show. Even in the pale meager wash of light that sifts through the curtains on this grim day they gleam as if lit from within, as if all of the
sunlight that has ever fallen upon the trees that gave them birth has somehow taken residence within their depths. The residue of Finn’s passage melts over their waxed surfaces like butter on a hot griddle. It cannot penetrate, and thus it will not long endure to mark his presence here. Will looks his brother in the eye. “Hard winter.”
“Hard,” says Finn.
“How’s the fishing been?”
“Poor.”
“So I’d imagine. And Mary?”
“I give that one up a while back.” All nonchalance.
“Is that so?”
“Broke it off.”
“I know you.”
“This time I mean it,” says Finn. “No going back.”
“You want me to tell the Judge.”
“I reckon he’ll find out on his own, this way or that.” Finn crosses his legs, fingers the nails in his boot-heel. “Folks talk.”
“That they do.”
“I ain’t the one brought it up just now.”
“I know.”
“You make a note of that.”
“I will. You’re correct.” Will is the younger of the two, and he learned long ago the importance of letting his brother assert his claims.
Finn coughs into his fist.
“So I guess that’s not what you came to see me about.”
“No. Not the woman.”
“No.”
Finn examines the stove, admiring its flue, which glows red as a cherry.
“What then?”
“I need a little money.” Staring at the floor.
“I give you a little money. First of every month, although I’m not supposed to.”
“I need a little more.” Finn raises up his head and his eyes flare with something that may be anger but is more likely plain unembroidered helplessness, helplessness that rages against its own unmistakable self. “I could use a little more, is all.”