by Jon Clinch
“No sir.”
“All right.” The pole sticks and he strains to haul it loose and loses ground in the freeing of it. “Be grateful for what you’ve got.”
“I am.”
“My pap said I had it good on account of we didn’t have to live among no niggers.”
“Who helped out?”
“We had a man.”
“A white man?”
“A white man, Petersen. His wife too.”
“Slaves?” The boy has never heard of such a thing.
“They was hired.” They draw near the shore and the man jumps out into water hip-deep. “More’n once when I misbehaved Pap said he’d just as soon let the neighbor’s nigger have a go at me.” Straining with skiff and raft against the current. “Just so I knew how good I had it.”
The boy jumps out now himself and ties the skiff fast to a tree.
“Said I’d get more than a whipping. Said I could count on being buggered up the ass if it come to that. Buggered up the ass by a filthy good-for-nothing nigger.”
The boy has a pained look.
“You know what I mean by that, boy?”
“Yes sir. I know it.”
“My pap told me that damn one-eyed nigger would bugger me up the ass if I didn’t watch out.” Tramping up into the mud, wringing out his trousers. “You think he was just talking?”
“No sir.”
“Damn right.” He makes to enter the cabin for an early glass of whiskey, since the ten clean logs of this raft are sure to make for a handsome windfall. “Damn right,” he says again, leveling his eyes at the boy. “That’s how good I had it.”
RATHER THAN WAIT for fish or game or some other added bounty that he might bring upstream and sell in St. Petersburg he unfastens the broken raft from the skiff and poles off on it alone, making certain to lock the boy in before he goes. He reflects on how this valuable cache of lumber has passed this very way unnoticed once before, and when he reaches the St. Petersburg landing and strikes a bargain to shed himself of it he congratulates himself that merely by the exercise of his sharp riverman’s eye and his main strength he has captured it and brought it back and sold it for enough money to purchase a gallon of forty-rod with change left over if he’s careful. Thus does the wise and wary man turn all things to his advantage, as the river turns all things to her will. He rises up from the riverside and moves toward the village proper like some slow revenant, his feet dragging but his heart light with the idea of pleasures to come. Up an alley he goes past the rear of the Liberty Hotel wishing he had a catfish or two that he could trade with Cooper who’s generous with his whiskey as long as it’s not Monday which he does not believe it is.
“You that James?” To the man behind the bar.
“I am.”
He spills coin onto the hardwood and brings the jug down beside it. “Whiskey.”
“This is a decent place.”
“I don’t mind.”
“We sell by the drink or we don’t sell at all.”
“Cooper gives me a fair trade for provisions.”
“What Cooper does is Cooper’s business.” Turning away to adjust a bottle in a grand array behind the bar. From beneath his eyebrows he keeps an eye on Finn’s reflection in the mirror.
“He’s always been fair with me.”
“Then go see him.” His hands are busy with the bottles for no reason.
“You saying my money’s no good?”
“It’s plenty good by the drink.” He turns to assess the jug and then raises his eyes to the man’s face. “But you don’t look to me like a by-the-drink kind of individual.”
“Not here I ain’t,” says Finn, taking the jug in the crook of his arm and scooping up the coins. “There’s friendlier places in this town.”
“Suit yourself.”
Finn can tell when he’s been bested and he knows when to leave off beating a dead horse and he has no time or patience to spare for any individual who would thwart his desires, so he puts the lobby of the Liberty Hotel behind him, walking through the double doors and out onto the broad sunny front porch all set about with white-painted rocking chairs. In one of these, her back to him and her expectant face to the street, sits the widow Douglas waiting on some lunchtime companion for this is the third Sunday of the month and such is her usual routine. She ceases rocking at the scent of him and turns. “What have you done with that boy?” Without any preliminary, as if he neither requires such nor deserves it.
“Took him where he belongs.” He tongues a tooth and gives her only a portion of the attention that she surely believes is her due, for he is busy scanning the street and deciding where he might most profitably continue upon his errand.
“I must warn you, Mr. Finn.”
“Is that so?” He fixes her with his gaze and speaks the words by way of returning threat unto threat, for now she has his attention in full.
“I must warn you,” she goes on oblivious, for as a dignified and refined lady of the old school she is unaccustomed to the need for fear or even for cautious restraint in her dealings, “I must warn you that Judge Thatcher and I are taking steps to recover him.”
“Is that so?” he says, more slowly this time but the same, for what else is there.
“Legal steps.”
He commences to tap tap tapping the empty jug against his haunch with a slow tolling rhythm as insistent and long-suffering as any heartbeat. “Now what am I supposed to think about that.”
“Think whatever you like.” For rectitude and certainty and recent proximity to the judge have contrived to make her bold.
“The boy belongs to me.”
“He deserves better.”
“Don’t we all.”
He turns his back upon her and steps down off the porch into the street where his boots raise dust and leave a cross-marked trail.
“I’ll have him,” calls the widow from the safety of her chair on the porch of the Liberty Hotel.
“We’ll see,” says Finn as he goes, mainly to himself.
Later, penniless again as usual and armed with a jug full of whiskey and fortified with as much beyond that as was possible given the quantity of his coin, he goes down to the riverside and stands on the bank eyeing the tied-up skiffs and wondering where his has gone. In the gathering dark he paces from one to another rejecting each in turn while a spark catches somewhere in his brain fueled and nursed by the whiskey without intervention or even awareness on his part. He begins to suspect that his skiff is missing not by accident or as a matter of some other individual’s convenience—for he has helped himself to many a handy boat when exigencies have demanded it, not excluding perhaps the very skiff that he has been using these days, although of this he cannot be entirely certain—but missing as part of a plot to separate him from the boy and thus from his rightful treasure. What, he wonders almost aloud, what will happen if he cannot return to the boy with all possible dispatch? Have the widow and the judge already sent some emissaries into the woods to track him down and steal him away? Was that cunning old widow counting upon the empty whiskey jug of his—for surely she took note of it—was she counting upon it to occupy his time and cloud his judgment and provide the ideal cover under which she and the judge could accomplish their plan? For a moment he nearly strikes out for her house or the judge’s to wait and see but he cannot decide between the two, so in the end he cuts loose a likely boat and poles home to the cabin where he discovers his old skiff tied up safe and sound. He sets his recent one adrift rather than tie it up for he likes it less than the original and has no use for a second, and then he enters the cabin and finds the boy asleep and sleeps himself.
THE FATHER STANDS looking at the river for a minute and then turns his broad back to it. “How about some breakfast?” Indicating by the direction of his look that the boy should have undertaken its preparation long ago.
“You sell that raft?” Huck, from over the eggs.
“You bet.”
“How much?”
/> “Enough. Some of them logs was rotten.” As if he needs to make an excuse for how little he got or how much of it he spent on drink.
“Looked good enough to me.”
“You don’t know.”
After a while the boy scrapes eggs and bacon onto the two tin plates and serves them up with hot coffee boiled black as tar. They sit eating side by side on the edge of the cabin porch with their legs adangle. “You’re back early.”
“I did my business.”
“You happen to fetch any tobacco?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“You left in a hurry.”
“I know it.”
The man finishes his breakfast and drains his coffee cup and licks his plate clean and then the boy does likewise in turn.
“I don’t like that town much.”
“St. Pete?”
“I don’t like it.”
“I reckon it’s all right.”
“You’ll get over it.”
He lets that notion or threat or promise or whatever it is hang in the air while the boy considers.
“I’ve been giving thought to pulling up stakes. There’s a different cabin I know where nobody’d never find us.”
The boy understands his meaning perfectly.
“Downriver a few miles.”
“Why?”
“Change of scenery.”
“I like it here.”
“I know it. But sometimes a body gets too comfortable.”
The boy chooses not to press but hopes that he will have just one more opportunity to address his work with the handsaw before his father takes him away downriver to some secluded place from which he may not return alive if at all. Another two or three inches on the one side and he’ll be free to do as he pleases forever and ever, unburdened by this man and his desires and unburdened even by his own infernal accidental fortune of six thousand dollars, which he has already done his best to wash his hands of to no apparent avail.
“It ain’t like me to run,” says the man later in the boat, offhand and out of the blue, fundamentally to himself but in the boy’s presence and as if, having considered some course of action all the day long, he is now about finished persuading himself to pursue it. The boy takes this for a good sign but vows to redouble his efforts with the handsaw the instant he gets an opportunity.
While they watch, the corpse of a mule comes sagging down the river on the current, miraculously holding to the channel where the water is deep and fast and it can travel without hanging up on rocks or snags or mudflats. High upon its haunch presides a funereal black buzzard, silent and evilly intent, its wings half spread and its shoulders hunched and its talons hooked into flesh like some great grim angel of death. “I’m going upriver,” says the man, and the boy does not ask why for he is relieved by the direction and eager to be locked safely inside the cabin just this one last time.
“I TOLD YOU I’d waste no money of mine on your pipedream.” Will, not in the least hesitant about making himself clear to his brother.
“You’ll pay.”
“I won’t. I told you.” Looking out the window.
“Before I’m through you will.”
The brother returns his attention to his immediate problem. “And what on earth might you mean by that?”
“You know what.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“A body could say so.”
Will rises to his feet and slams shut his desk drawer. “I see you’re continuing to get smarter by the day.”
His brother, slumped in the chair opposite as if he has grown there like some man-shaped fungus, moves not at all.
“What do you have to gain by threatening me?”
“I’d say it’s more in the line of a bargain.”
“You’d say that.”
“I would.”
“Then it’s a poor bargain and I’ll have none of it.”
“You ain’t even heard it.”
“Where does that leave you?”
“You ain’t even heard it.”
“I’ve heard enough.”
“No.” Eyeing his brother. There is a good deal of sincerity in his look and no belligerence whatsoever, a combination that may as well be calculated to take Will off guard. “I don’t mean you no harm.”
“How practical of you.”
“I don’t.”
“How foresighted.”
“Honest. I been thinking about telling the Judge where his money’s been going is all.”
“I see,” says Will. “You’ve been thinking.” He sits again, incredulous.
“Where’s the harm in telling? Ain’t honesty the best policy?”
“So they say.”
“I don’t reckon the Judge’ll be as happy with you as you’ve been with yourself.”
“Or as happy as you’ve been with me,” says Will.
“I ain’t ungrateful.”
“No. You’re not ungrateful. You’re just stupid and self-destructive.”
“He’ll cut you off once he knows. I know that.”
“And where do you suppose that will leave you?”
“Same place I always been.”
“Only worse.”
“Maybe so.”
“You’ll have nothing.”
“I can tolerate it. How about you?”
Will does not flinch. “The Judge isn’t my sole support. Far from it.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Absolutely. Most of what I get from him I steal by cunning.”
Finn stirs in his chair.
“And every cent of that I give to you.”
“Pshaw. You could take more anytime you want.”
“There’s only so much leeway.”
“There’s plenty, I bet.”
“I’m only so smart.”
“You’re smart enough.”
“Believe what you like. Do as you see fit. And at the end of the day, any hours I’d have spent managing his affairs I’ll spend on some other paying client. No harm done.”
Finn takes a deep breath and holds it in for a moment, cogitating. “You’ll be disowned.” As if he’s drawn slow aim and fired. “Just like me.”
“Which I’ve risked from the beginning.”
“I reckon you have.”
“On your behalf.”
“I appreciate it.”
“All he needs to do is take a close look at the ledgers.”
“He won’t.”
“He could.”
“He don’t.”
“He might. And I guess if I could take that chance all these years on your behalf, I can take one more on my own. Whatever you care to offer up.”
Finn cannot tell if his brother is working on his loyalty or his self-interest, but he sees that the time has come to alter the terms of his argument. “They’ll steal him. The boy.” Sad-eyed and abject as a mourner.
“Unless you intervene.”
“First chance they get.”
“Tell me,” raising one hand and speaking to him not like his brother but like his attorney, for this is the relation between them most likely to produce an agreeable outcome. “So they take him. Exactly where is the harm in that?”
“He belongs to me.”
“You’ve been something less than assiduous about exercising your parental rights.”
“That don’t matter.”
“It will in a court of law.”
“All the same.” With dirty fingers he picks at something on the knee of his trousers. “He’s mine.”
“Here’s an idea. If Thatcher and the widow feel so strongly, why not be generous and let them enjoy the use of him for a while?”
“He’s all I’ve got.”
“Maybe so. But if you force their hand they’ll pursue that lawsuit just as vigorously as they can and take him away for good. No doubt about it. And then you’ll have nothing.”
“Nothing but you.”
“Free legal advice and a roof over your h
ead. You could do worse.”
“I have done worse.”
“I know it.”
“You know and you don’t know.”
Will cocks an eyebrow.
“It don’t matter either way. I’m back on the straight and narrow.”
“I can see that.”
“That’s why I want the boy. Bring him up right.”
“You’ll get your chance.”
“I know it.”
“It’ll happen.”
“By and by.”
“Give it time.”
“I will.”
WHEN FINN RETURNS to the squatter’s shack he finds the place transformed by violence. The door is ruined, battered in and splintered all over with ax strokes, hanging listless as laundry from one bent hinge. Before entering he turns by reflex and scans the area close by, the treeline and the riverbank and the patch of grass outspread before the cabin door. Though he finds sign there of neither boat nor intruder, the part of his brain capable of detecting a single fish aslumber in dark water discerns a strangeness in the lay of the dooryard grass and he bends upon one knee to judge for certain. Sure enough there is a trail flattened between the door and the riverbank, as of some heavy thing dragged. He leaves it unexplored for now, this shining path of green within darker green, and pokes his head into the cabin to find the dirt floor soaked with blood.
“You Huck.”
No answer comes from within or without, and the single room lies empty not just of his son but of his own every earthly possession. Food and fishlines and matches, skillet and coffeepot and jug. All of them gone. Only the ax remains, bloodied all over and with a bit of hair stuck to the back of it as if from a blow to the boy’s head, and from this significantly ostentatious detail he deduces not Huck’s actual plan for counterfeiting his own murder and stealing away under cover of it, but a different and more cunning plan altogether—this one contrived by Judge Thatcher and the widow Douglas.
“They think they can steal him that easy,” he says to himself as he rubs the axhead clean with the heel of his hand. “They think I’ll give him up for dead like a goddamn beast.” He plucks away the tuft of hair and brushes it off on his pantleg.
He walks the path to the riverbank and discerns there in waist-deep water all he needs for confirmation: a sack, a perfectly good and useful sack, filled with rocks by that wasteful Thatcher or some other in his employ and drawn across the grass to the water as if Huck’s body itself had been there dragged. He vows to deny Judge Thatcher the satisfaction of misusing his property, and wades in to recover it less its burden of rocks. Sitting to wring it out upon the bank he catches sight of further sign, footprints in the dirt and a drop or two of blood, and he scouts down along the waterside until he comes upon marks where someone looks to have nearly lost his balance throwing some other thing into the water, some other thing that proves to be a half-grown pig with its throat cut, nearly bled-out and still foggily abloom and staining the Mississippi a vague dark red. The source of that floorstaining blood. He wallows it out and skins it and cleans it with his clasp-knife, and he pledges that none shall have a bite of it save himself. Surely not that son of his, who probably went off without a fight and is now living high on some other hog at either the judge’s table or the widow’s.