by Jon Clinch
The boy stops for a moment to offer a suggestion: “I’m right handy with a fishpole.”
“I know you are.”
“I sure do hate wasting my time in this here cabin.”
“It’s for your own good. The law is man’s work.”
“That don’t mean I can’t take the air now and then.”
Finn reaches for the jug and uncorks it. “I’ll be the judge of when you can take the air and when you can’t.”
“I wish you’d let me pull my own weight.”
“You done pulled it already with that six thousand if you hadn’t give it away. Let me do my duty and get it back, and then we’ll see who takes the air.”
He believes that as long as he has the boy he has the advantage over the others. “Possession is nine tenths of the law,” he remembers hearing someone say from his youth although surely not his father for the Judge would never have stooped to so reductive a formula, but he takes a kind of comfort in the familiar saying still, as if he could wring the boy out and get six thousand dollars in gold if only he knew exactly how.
There is a sweetness to the spring days that the two of them spend together, mending lines upon the cabin porch in dappled sunlight; waiting on the banks for salable junk to come floating down the river; gutting rabbits over a basin behind the cabin, the man showing the boy precisely how to make their loose flayed skin come away from their long muscular bodies like wrapping. The father doesn’t mind if the boy smokes a corncob pipe or two even though he has never acquired the habit himself, and from time to time he brings home a little tobacco as a gift, a pleasant reminder that he has not been too busy to think of him while in town pursuing their legal options.
While Finn is busy strategizing and cursing his evil luck and seeking out markets for their catch, Huck passes the days of his confinement with the rusted scrap end of a woodsaw that he’s found discarded in the rafters. There is an old horseblanket nailed to the wall opposite the cabin door by way of insulation and windbreak and he addresses himself methodically to the lowest and largest of the logs behind it, aiming one day to remove a segment large enough to enable his escape to freedoms far greater than this. The sawdust he disposes of in the fire.
THE BOY IS ASLEEP in the cabin one night when his father arrives and labors for much longer than usual at the business of opening the lock. His efforts are so futile and frantic that the boy, roused only halfway from his sleep, takes him for a raccoon until the cursing begins.
“Pap!” from a spot directly behind the door. Considering his father’s condition he knows that he would be better advised to play possum as he has done so many times previous, but he has been alone for the better part of three days now and this sudden commotion at the door has about it some of the qualities of the resurrection.
“Boy.”
“You got a light out there?”
“Come on give your old pap a hand.”
“I can’t. You got a light?”
“Bestir yourself.” Hammering on the door, the lock jumping in counterpoint to his blows.
“You locked me in.”
“Don’t blame me.”
“A light would help.”
The father gives the door one last frustrated pathetic blow and leans his head against it.
“There’s some matchsticks,” says the boy, and he is referring not to their generalized presence in the cabin but to the four in particular that he has pushed through the gap beneath the door. “Right there on the floor,” he says. “By your foot.”
Finn drops to his knees as if seeking mercy from some force infinitely greater than he, and with blunt urgent fingers he locates the matches. The first of them he loses unlit down a gap between the floorboards. The next he strikes while still on his knees only to watch it burn out before he can recover his footing. The third he conserves until he is erect. Its flame lasts long enough for him to extract the key from the pocket where he has absently put it, but it sizzles out between his thumb and forefinger before he can bring the key to the lock. By the light of the very last of them, upon which he concentrates a rapt and almost holy attention as if this were the last matchstick on earth and mankind’s final illumination, he springs the lock and admits himself to the squatter’s shack.
“There’s groceries in the skiff.” For even in his present condition he knows that the boy will want them.
Want them he does, so much so that in his hunger he forgets himself and instead of merely vanishing into the woods while his father is conveniently half blind and incoherent he transfers sacks and boxes from the skiff to the cabin one after another and then commences to eat everything in sight.
“Go easy.”
“I will.”
“That’s got to last.”
“I know it.”
While the boy eats, Finn returns to the skiff to fetch the gun he has forgotten there. Then he comes back and locks the door behind him and helps himself to a dipper of water and a square of cornbread and a piece of jerked beef over which he ruminates alternately each of them in turn until by and by he seems refreshed and ready for more whiskey. He grows stern and loquacious as he drinks, earnest as a judge and yet oddly confidential too, as if he has had a premonition that his opportunities to settle accounts with the boy are limited and has decided therefore that he must during this one night pass on everything he has learned in close to fifty years. The whiskey helps.
“You beware,” he says, curling his hand around a glass fiercely enough to break it and pointing with his index finger at a spot between the boy’s eyes. The whiskey in the glass quivers until it very nearly jumps out. “You beware where this world is headed.”
“I will.”
“Good. You do that and you’ll be all right.” He drains the glass and claps it down upon the table with an apparent measure of relief.
“I hope so.”
“You will.” There is nonetheless a light in his eyes that suggests he might remain unconvinced.
“I’ll do my best. Don’t you worry none.”
He holds the bottle with one hand, and with the other he distractedly combs the damp greasy ropes of his hair, his fingers leaving psoriatic trails of cornmeal and filth where they pass. “I seen a nigger not long back,” he says, “right here in St. Pete, a free nigger from Ohio. A mulatto he was, near as white as a white man. And he was wearing the whitest shirt you ever seen and the shiniest hat too.”
“What’d he do?”
“It ain’t what he did.”
The boy waits while the man pours more whiskey.
“That goddamn free nigger was the awfulest old gray-headed nabob you ever seen. Walked with a silver-headed cane. Said he was a college professor.”
The boy fusses with some crumbs on the table.
“I tried to claim him for a runaway, but it weren’t no use.”
“He put up a fight?” Suddenly interested.
“I wish he had. I’d have broke his back and skinned him alive.”
“I know it.”
“Marshal said it weren’t legal, claiming him that way. So I give it up.”
“It weren’t legal?”
“Said I had to wait six months.”
“I’ve heard.”
The man pours himself another and favors the boy with a conspiratorial leer. “Seemed to me even a nigger college professor would be smart enough not to stay any six months, considering.”
The boy laughs over his father’s wisdom, and awash in the happy shower of approval and companionship thus unleashed Finn downs the whiskey as if it were the foulest medicine but necessary all the same for what ails him. Then he turns on the boy like a snake, his thoughts gone rushing back to the professor.
“Goddamn nigger can vote in Ohio. I reckon any nigger can. Any goddamn nigger. And after he gets done with that he can come down here six months at a time and look at me over them gold-rimmed glasses any way he likes and there ain’t a goddamn thing I can do about it.” He looks daggers at the boy, either imitating the
black or else imagining him.
Bit by bit he descends to the level of drunkenness that he had attained previous to arriving home and then he proceeds beyond it, venturing into territory that the boy has seen before only on occasions when the fish have been especially plentiful and the harvest of whiskey has thus been particularly bounteous. For a man who enjoys his drink he permits it to make him miserable. He rages against the blacks and the government and the law, all of which he insists have conspired to bring him to ruin. Something about his drunkenness gives him the idea that he must stand up in order to orate properly, and every time he attempts to do so he loses his balance and falls, spilling his drink and catching himself with his sore left arm. This only fuels his wrath and his urgent sense that remaining successfully upon his feet is essential to his thwarted purpose and so he rages against the table and against the chair and against the tub of salt pork over which he takes a tumble for they too just like the blacks and the government and the law have been laying for him since the day he was born.
At length he collapses beaten onto the bed and the boy sits alert in the chair waiting for sleep to overtake him. The sawn log behind the horseblanket is not yet freed but the key to the lock is in the man’s shirt pocket and he figures that he will make use of it once his father gives up tossing and turning and commences to snore, but sleep is no more kind to the man than the chair and the table and the law have been. He thrashes and groans without letup, hollering at the walls and at the universe and most furiously at the boy himself telling him that he’ll put out that candle like a decent white boy and quit studying on him like some prowling thieving infernal white-shirted free nigger if he knows what’s good for him.
The boy unwittingly sleeps first but is soon awakened by a scream that signals the appearance in his father’s bed of an invading army of snakes and spiders. They are crawling up his legs, he says, and squirming in his tattered underwear and biting him on the buttocks and the chest and the face and any other place where they can sink a mandible or a fang. He leaps from the bed and throws himself upon the floor as if he has woken up entirely afire, screaming and tearing at his hair and kicking his feet like a mule possessed.
“Take him off!” His snarl is desperate and guttural and whether he is referring to a snake or a spider or the devil himself is beyond the boy’s knowing. At once he is on his feet again racing in circles this time around and around the cabin stirring up a whirlwind of fishing tackle and tin pots and kindling until the boy fears that he will accidentally take down the horseblanket and leave his work with the handsaw exposed come morning and what then. “Take him off!” he cries again and again and the boy does not oblige but in a few moments the man is nonetheless either satisfied or sufficiently exhausted to surrender and so he lies back down to rest. His face presses into the ticking as if he aims to leave his likeness there for posterity. One eye gleams in the darkness like a bloody gemstone and with terrible effort he focuses it upon the boy. Lying there transfixed and panting he strains his ears and listens to something, perhaps the terrifying mysterious surge of his own blood, perhaps the calling of wolves and owls in the encroaching forest. The boy is listening too, frozen in his chair as still as some hunted creature, and while he concentrates his attention upon his father as if to subdue him by pure will or hypnosis or some other childlike strength the man digs in his pocket for his clasp-knife.
“Tramp, tramp, tramp,” he intones with a grim doomlike rhythm. “Tramp, tramp, tramp. Them’s the dead come to claim me. But I won’t go.”
The boy opens his mouth as if to reason with him and then claps it shut again.
“Their hands are cold. Take them off. Make them leave a poor devil alone.” Fiddling blindly with the knife, his fingers numb as sticks.
The boy sits without hope or alternative and waits for sleep to overwhelm the man at last, but it does not for he is altogether too furious to be overtaken. His mind has gone aboil and he cannot rest for its constant seething.
“You.” Narrowing his one panicky red eye.
The boy waits.
“You.” Again. Softly and a bit more coolly this time, as if he is leveling not a word but a shotgun.
The boy tenses.
“You’re the Angel of Death, ain’t you,” says the man, and with that assessment he pries open the clasp-knife and springs from the bed, hurling himself at the boy like a cannonball. “You can’t have me. Not yet.” Flailing madly with the knife.
The boy steps neatly to one side and the man hurtles past him but miraculously recovers.
“I reckon you can’t take me if I take you first.” Righting himself on his two bandy legs. “I’ll show you.”
He leaps upon the boy with all of his considerable unbalanced weight, nearly crushing the air out of him as he falls, and then rising up again upon his elbows to exhale a sour and choking miasma composed of cheap corn whiskey and persistent indigestion and rotten teeth.
“Pap.” With such breath as is left to him.
But the man is blinded by drink and darkness and either he scoffs at this doomed demon’s futile attempt at self-defense or he does not hear it to begin with. He has cut his own forefinger on the knife and the running blood makes him lose his grip for a moment but only for a moment. He fumbles with the slick handle, regains his grip by means of some automatic animal instinct, and presses the filthy point of the rusty blade against the tender underside of the boy’s pale chin. The boy quivers and squirms and cranes his neck up gasping and the man presses the knife upward taking pleasure in the fierce delicacy of it in assessing the soft precise pressure at the tip of this blade that at his touch has slit throats and bellies uncountable times previous as reliable as an old friend and perhaps his only. The boy scrabbles for purchase against the hard dirt floor feeling the pinpoint of the blade against his throat like a needy thing desirous of entry and possession and then risking whatever unforeseen results any such sudden movement might bring he holds his breath and drives one bony knee into the man’s crotch. Now it is the man gasping as the boy regains his feet. The man rises slow and ineluctable, but this time the boy takes the initiative and throws himself toward him before he can attack again, which initiates a brief scramble during which the man grabs for his shirt and the boy slips out of the tattered thing as if performing magic. The man slashes what remains of the garment in twain and believes that he has accomplished his goal of executing the Angel of Death and keeps right on believing it until he falls on his face and the knife clatters off under the bed and he sleeps at last. The boy gives up all hope of extracting the key from his father’s pocket and takes up the gun from the corner instead, trading the promise of escape for a small measure of security. He trains it upon the man’s still and shaggy head from over the back of a chair until he too nods off and abandons the remainder of the nighttime hours to the lonesome needy calls of owl and wolf.
“BOY.”
No answer.
“Get up, boy.”
No answer.
“What were you doing with that gun?”
At which the boy comes yawning awake at last in the warm soft glow of daylight from the cabin door. The river is just beyond and he can see its dancing reflections aswarm upon the walls and hear its urgent movement within its banks and detect the buoyant morning rise of birdsong. “Somebody was trying to get in here last night,” he says. “I was laying for him.”
“Next time, you roust me out.” The man looks sick and sore. “You roust me out and I’ll see to him, you hear?”
“I will.”
The boy cooks a breakfast of flapjacks and bacon while the man sits blinking on the porch nursing a dipper of water and studying the river and attempting to recover his lost equilibrium. He remains pensive all the day long, suspicious of some connection that he senses but cannot quite puzzle out among the prowler and the misery in his head and the boy that he is bent on keeping safe from harm. The current is strong and the river is thickly laden with debris and it takes all of his strength to navigate t
he skiff along the trotlines when the time comes. He blames it on his age and he wonders what sad fate the future will hold for him if he cannot obtain the boy’s six thousand dollars as a bulwark against sure decline.
“Your grandpap is as rich as a king, I ever tell you that?”
“I know. How’d he get that way?”
“By never giving me a nickel,” which as far as he is concerned might as well be true.
“Is that so?”
“That man was so by-God stingy he wouldn’t give me a whipping.”
Huck laughs as only a boy can, illuminating the river valley with an arc of sound that bends across the water like a handful of thrown coins.
“I mean it. He wouldn’t so much as lay a hand on me. What kind of father is that?”
The boy must confess that he does not know.
“When I done wrong he’d cook up some other sort of punishment he reckoned would suit the crime.”
“Like?”
“Like extra chores maybe. I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember?”
“Not no more. Not too good.” Scratching his aching head and marveling at how much of his experience has vanished into nothing.
“Too bad.”
“I suppose.”
They take note of a broken-up raft just drifting into sight in the shallows around the upstream bend and light out after it in the skiff.
“Might be eight or ten good logs to that one by the look of it.”
“I reckon.”
“Be worth catching.”
They pole to it and make fast while it’s still well upstream and then they proceed cautiously back using the current to their advantage as best they can but nonetheless struggling against the stubborn willful weight of the thing.
“My pap used to tell me I had it good.”
“Did you?”
“It don’t seem so.”
“You weren’t hungry,” says the boy.
The man flashes him a boiling look and heaves on his pole as if he is driving the boy himself into the soft muddy bottom. “Are you hungry, boy?”