by Jon Clinch
“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?”
She has given off with the biscuit-making for now and stands alongside Finn with her haunch against his and her arm cradled in his strong fingers. Delicately she advances her forearm just the slightest to point toward a padlocked pantry door, drawing his hand along rather than pulling loose of it.
“I seen bigger locks.”
“It’s no use.”
“A man should get what’s coming to him.”
“I ain’t authorized.”
Taking her arm more tightly and leaning in: “You always do as you’re told?” His breath is excoriating but not without precedent.
After a moment: “I’ll get whipped.”
“Damn right you will.” Which sounds like a promise.
She leans into the counter, easing off the pressure between the pair of them, and she finds the cutter again with her other hand. “You go see Mr. James behind the bar. See can he help you.”
“Barkeep’s got no use for fish.” Throwing her arm down into the flour like a gutted channel cat.
“I could maybe slip you a biscuit later.”
“I’ve got as much use for a biscuit as a barkeep does for a catfish.”
“Suit yourself.” Stamping out rounds as if the cutter were a dagger and the dough were flesh.
“I ain’t looking for charity.”
“You looking for something,” she says.
In the end Finn poles upriver to Smith’s old trading post, whose current crippled proprietor is more amenable to persuasion. He stows salt pork and some beans and flour and sugar aboard the skiff along with the whiskey and continues north to Lasseter where he ties up to one of his own rotted pilings. The river has seen some ice lately especially in the shallows and he imagines a great glacial wall of it pressing downstream from the north to scour away every unclean thing in its path, his precarious house included.
He leaves everything in the skiff and toils up the street to his brother’s office. The door is locked but he finds the spare key right where an individual of Will’s trusting nature would have secreted it, and he lets himself in and helps himself to an apple from the bowl and sits by the fire as contented as he believes he has ever been. By and by he falls asleep with his chin on his chest. Neither the needless rattling of the key in the lock nor the cold blast of air from the open door awakens him when Will enters, and rather than arouse his sleeping brother the lawyer takes up his seat at his desk and goes about his largely silent business. The room grows close as he consults his lawbooks and scratches meticulous notes across wide sheets of foolscap, and slowly his brother’s proximity to the stove yields up the dense and furtive funk of the barroom, the river, and the slaughterhouse. Will puts down his pen and opens the window behind him a crack. He sits with his chin in his hand and his elbow on his desk and contemplates the figure collapsed upon the bench as if studying some primitive artifact that he has never seen before and will never see again, as if comparing this strange sad monster to a kinsman he was once quite certain he knew.
In time this gaze brings Finn warily awake. The apple core falls from his grip and tumbles beneath the bench, where it will stay until his brother bends down later to retrieve it. Finn starts, drawing breath as if it pains him, and pulls himself erect. “Will.”
“To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“The last favor I’ll ever ask.”
The brother laughs out loud. “You’re full of surprises. I’ll grant you that.”
“Honest.” He removes his hat and holds it in his two hands, circling the brim around and around between dirty fingers as if he desires to wear the shine off of it or to take up praying some kind of newfound rosary. “Honest,” he repeats, “the very last favor.”
“How much do you need?” As if he intends to consider it.
“Can’t say.”
Will very nearly barks out another laugh but something in his brother’s expression stops him. “What do you plan to do with it?”
“Get back what’s mine.”
“Good luck.” Thinking of the Judge and such obstacles as have come to lie between Finn and his discarded birthright.
“I’ll need luck. I’ll need luck and patience too, if I’m to get back my son and my fortune.”
“I’ll tell you right now, you can leave the boy out of it.”
“I can’t.”
“The Judge has no time for that boy and you know it.” Will closes his lawbook and runs his finger along its spine. “Whatever you’ve got in mind you ought to leave the boy where he is, if you want my advice on the matter. Don’t so much as mention his name.”
“I got nothing without the boy.”
“It’s not like you to be sentimental.”
“I ain’t.”
“Suit yourself.”
“It’s the boy’s money.”
Which removes the blinders of time and custom and habituated preoccupation from Will’s eyes and brings him hurtling not merely into the present but beyond it and forward into the future as his elder brother imagines the future might be, a place informed by that newspaper article from the week prior or maybe the week before that about how Huck and that other boy had come upon twelve thousand dollars in gold. Leave it to the illiterate Finn to obtain such information through mysterious sources of his own when everyone in the world would have been better off had he not.
“The twelve thousand. You’re talking about the twelve thousand dollars.”
“Six is all.”
“Six or twelve, it’s his.”
“So you’d think.” And with that much infuriating introduction he commences his tale of how Judge Thatcher has stolen away the boy’s fortune and permitted the innocent child to be raised up by a widow woman of uncertain intent. “He’s a slave in that house he is. A slave to that widow and her Bible and what all else I can’t
say.”
“So you’re going to sue.”
“I am.”
“You’ll go bust in the process.”
“Justice will be done.”
“Where on earth did you get an idea like that?” Wondering how the two of them could have come of age in the same household.
Finn is nonetheless implacable. “You’re the lawyer. How much you reckon it’ll cost?”
“Everything and then some.”
“Answer me.”
“You’ll die before it’s over.”
“I won’t be scared off.”
“There isn’t a lawyer in Missouri who’ll take the case.”
“You don’t know every one.”
“I know Thatcher.”
“I know him too.”
“It’s a fool’s errand, and you’ll not waste my money on it.”
“You never meant to give me none.” Standing up and screwing his brand-new hat down over his ears.
HE IS IN THE BOY’S ROOM again that night, having climbed up to the shed roof with his one good arm and nearly lost his footing on the scattering of pebbles thrown against the window by one mischievous child or another and made his silent way inside nonetheless without waking the widow only to find the boy gone as usual. Soon Huck enters that same way, his shadow on the pane a black repetition of his father’s, and he is unsurprised to discover that he has company.
“I’m broke, Pap.”
“Is that all you think of?”
“I know you.”
“You don’t.” Eyeing the boy and his new school clothes from his hiding place back in the deepest shadows, wondering what bad habits the widow and her refined ways have sown in his mind.
“Suit yourself.” The man doesn’t seem to have been drinking, and the boy doesn’t seem to know if he should be emboldened or alarmed thereby.
“Find your own clothes and put them on.”
“These are my own.”
“I ain’t leaving here with no dandy.”
“Leaving?”
“You can come along the way they brung you or you can come along stark naked. It’s no affair of mine.”
“Where we going?”
“To a proper home.” He casts his eyes around the dark room as if the place is a museum or a prison cell. There is a lace doily under the candlestick and he eyes it suspiciously. “This ain’t no suitable place for a boy.”
“I won’t have to go to school, will I?”
“Try it and I’ll whip you good.”
This cheers the boy, for he is the kind who always finds his shoes too tight and his obligations too confining. “Not to church neither?”
The man brightens for a moment, remembering that Huck is a child after his own heart. “Not to church neither. Now strip and find them clothes.”
“But these.”
Abrupt as a rattlesnake from its rockbound fastness he strikes, fluid despite the darkness and the nighttime need for stealth and his crippled left arm, and he brings the boy down without so much as drawing breath. He lies upon the child’s pinned body on the bedroom planking and there is in his overwhelming presence something oddly maternal or at the very least possessive, something suggestive of a force that would swallow up the child rather than let him go.
“In the bottom drawer,” says the boy. And even these poor rough-used things, ragged overalls three sizes too large and a shirt of butternut homespun worn through in more places than not, even these the widow has scrubbed into submission and mended like precious relics and pressed so stiff and square that the boy looks by moonlight as if he has just emerged from a packing crate.
“They’ll have to do,” says Finn.
“Truth is, there’s more comfort in them.”
“You ain’t just saying that for my benefit.”
“No sir.” The boy fills his familiar pockets with odds and ends transferred from his newer pants and makes a beeline for the window but his father arrests him midstep and tilts his head toward the bedroom door.
“We’ll leave like decent folk.”
Something passes across the boy’s eyes indicating either that he fears to wake the widow or that he regrets the loss of this one final opportunity for passage down her iron drainpipe, but in either case he resigns himself to his father’s fierce intransigent will.
Finn lifts the latch and presses the door open and steps out into the hall upon boots that squeak with newness and grind with their one modified heel a staccato trail of signifiers into the plank floor. The boy follows on silent feet.
“Huckleberry?” The widow, her voice muffled by bedclothes and the intervening door, surprised because to the best of her knowledge the boy is never up roaming. Like others of her age she has largely given up on sleep, and she retires to her bed each night mainly from habit and propriety and futile hope. “Are you well, Huckleberry?”
The father spins on his heel, his face drawn down into a threatening mask, and clamps a hand over the boy’s uncertain mouth.
“Huckleberry?” With a rustling of bedclothes. The slats of the bed creak as she stirs herself. “You boy?”
The father whispers in the boy’s ear and eases his hand from around his mouth.
“Just on my way to the privy, ma’am.”
“Did that pie disagree with you?”
“No, ma’am.”
Her feet strike the floor and something else does, too, making a third harsh clacking step in counterpoint to the two soft ones, for the widow has lately acquired a cane. Finn vanishes into the disused bedroom across the hallway and conceals himself in the darkness, steady and watchful as a cat. Before his eyes the light of a candle blooms from the crack under the widow’s door. He hisses at the boy to gain his attention and there in the darkness upon a little oval scrap rug he commences dancing a kind of nervous jig, looking for all the world like a pagan priest stamping out his heathen dance by firelight to invoke some savage god, and with his eyes he indicates that the boy should do likewise.
Just in time Huck catches his father’s meaning, and he takes over the dance just as the widow’s bedroom door opens. “Beg your pardon, ma’am.” The boy is all urgency from head to toe, big-eyed and nervous as a tadpole.
“Oh, my, my, my,” clucks the widow, leaning on her cane and craning her neck to one side so that she can examine him by the light of the candle on its stand by the door. The flame must glint in two places from off the wet orbs of Finn’s eyes, but she has left her glasses on the nightstand and requires them if she is to see that far. Besides, her concentration is all upon Huck. “Are you certain you’re well, boy?”
“Yes ma’am. Quite certain.” With an abject and beseeching look.
Finn considers the candlelight and narrows his eyes to cunning slits, an adjustment that causes him to vanish as completely as if he has turned into pure malevolent spirit. He is careful to narrow them no further, else the scene before him vanish likewise.
“May I go, ma’am?”
“By all means.” Shooing him with her free hand.
He turns and slips down the stairs.
“If you’re not feeling better in the morning, we’ll go see the doctor.”
The boy calls some hasty bit of reassurance up the stairwell and then he dashes in the dark through the parlor and out the back door, leaving it open behind him to ease his father’s passage.
Come morning the widow will recollect that the boy was dressed, and not even in his ordinary clothes but in his old retired things, and she will find his bed empty and the floor clawed and the pantry ransacked and she will alert the marshal and complain to Judge Thatcher but it will do no one, neither her nor the boy, the slightest bit of good.
THE SPRINGTIME IS COMING ON now and the river is running faster, and they set out trotlines and run them and shoot squirrels and rabbits with the gun, or at least the father does. He keeps the weapon either locked up in a trunk or close by his side, and he keeps the shells buried somewhere around in the woods for safekeeping. The lock on the tru
nk is not the only one he possesses, for there is another on the cabin door and no window fit to crawl out through. He vanishes for days at a time, leaving the boy sealed in. He says that he is prosecuting a case to have the money released and he reassures him that once they get their hands on it they will prove to the world that the two of them know how to make better use of it than any judge ever yet born, just wait. Yet the more he ruminates over the injustice of it all and his secret inability to restore his own rights the angrier he gets, not with himself but with Judge Thatcher and with The Other Judge and with his own cowardly brother and with the boy who brought on this sorry situation in the first place. He finds himself netted in by enemies and incompetents, and the only thing for it is to travel to St. Petersburg or Lasseter or Smith’s or some other village or town or trading post and swap such dead things he has been able to draw forth from the river and the woods for the various simple staffs of his particular life: ammunition, flour, salt pork, cornmeal, whiskey. He keeps a low profile in St. Petersburg, sticking mainly to back alleys and the narrow passageways between buildings and never venturing far from the most riverbound of the village’s precincts. When he returns the boy is generally famished and ready to eat whatever poor makings his father has brought back without expressing much in the way of gratitude or even appreciation.
“I suppose you’ve gotten used to finer things than your old pap can provide,” says Finn one evening when he’s had enough.
“No sir. This suits me just fine.” Not looking up. “The widow never cooked no better.”
“All right.”
“I do get hungry, though.”
“Fatback bacon don’t grow on trees.”
“I know it.” Busy with his spoon.
“It’s hard enough feeding just the one.”