by Jon Clinch
“Some.” For he is not dishonest.
“Iowa, I see, is in for quite a celebration.”
“Yes it is.”
“And your mistress is in for quite a surprise.”
“She never should have taken this boat. I told her it wasn’t safe.”
“How on earth will she ever get by without you?” Parkinson clucks and asks the question as mildly as if he were merely musing to himself here alone on the deck, and to judge by his lack of answer the black man with the bowie knife seems to consider the question beneath notice.
Finn, who has no interest in riding this steamboat as far as Iowa, yawns and stretches and rises wearily to his feet. To the rail he steps with an exaggerated little stumble and from there he leans out over the water putting a finger to each nostril in turn and blowing out like a steam engine. He is wiping his hand on the leg of his trousers when he takes obvious note of the three standing nearby or at least of the captain.
“Parkinson!” he says with a kind of mingled astonishment and delight. “You’re up late.”
“Mr. Finn.”
“These two giving you trouble?” With a wink at the girl which includes her father also and in the process subdues them both.
“Trouble? I should say not.”
“That’s one beautiful child you got there.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ve been told.” He has hidden away the knife behind his back and he permits his gaze to swivel toward Parkinson as he wonders what secrets other than this the captain has been sharing abroad.
“Mr. Finn is a guest of the Santo Domingo,” says Parkinson. “In our northward haste, we ran afoul of his boat and had to bring him aboard.”
The father looks at Finn as if there could be no creature in all the world more to be pitied than the victim of a shipwreck.
“That’s right,” says Finn, his attention shifting back to the captain. “When you reckon we’ll hit Fort Granger, us running behind and all.”
“That would be hard to say.”
“Can’t be long now.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“You wouldn’t think so.” He hawks and spits into the dark water. “Tell me who’s running this boat.” With a smile indicating that he knows the captain would be wise not to give an accurate answer.
“It’s a complicated world, Mr. Finn.”
“I know it.”
“Some things are beyond our control. Rivers like this one, for example. They’re full of surprises.”
“Wake me up at Fort Granger then,” Finn concedes, and with two arms he shoves off from the rail. “Much obliged.” He puts out a hand as if to shake but instead of taking Parkinson’s hand he slides past the startled captain and reaches into the deep single front pocket of the girl’s apron where her hands have been conspicuously hiding since he first set eyes upon her. There he finds the pistol and by the combined powers of brute force and startlement he makes it his own. He does not remove it from its hiding place but turns it instead and holds its barrel square against her belly. In his fury he nearly lifts her up against the rail. She gasps and casts a helpless eye upon her helpless father.
Finn’s voice is tight with rage and effort. “Drop that pigsticker of yours, boy.”
The black man lets his knife clatter to the deck.
“Now ain’t you just the cleverest son of a bitch. Kick it over before I blow this pretty little girl a brand-new hole.” Prodding at her belly with the urgent barrel.
The man does as he has been told, and the knife slices into the water without a sound.
“Now bend over.”
He keeps the man on his knees until Parkinson can return with some rope.
“There are others,” says the captain.
“There won’t be,” says Finn.
They strip the man of the white suit that is not his and they tie him naked to a stanchion where his crime and his disgrace will be public come daylight.
“How can we repay you?” says the captain.
“I might have an idea,” says Finn.
“YOU SHALL GET a whipping when we return to Vicksburg,” says an elegant old white-haired woman no bigger than a child but as ferocious as some avenging angel, approaching the bound black man with baleful speed.
“Don’t count on it,” Finn puts in from a nearby deck chair, where he reclines with the pistol jammed ostentatiously into his pants. The girl is on a stool alongside him.
“You child,” cries the woman, wringing her hands and hurrying toward her on tiny tapping feet, ignoring Finn as if any individual of his wretched appearance must surely be beneath her notice.
“That boy ain’t seeing Vicksburg again, whipping or no.”
The woman assesses him quickly and dismisses him for an ignoramus and a bloodthirsty one at that and turns again to the girl.
“I reckon you might bring him home in a box if you’ve got a mind to, but myself I never took much pleasure in whipping a dead nigger.”
Captain Parkinson arrives and declares himself at the old woman’s service and explains to her that Mr. Finn here is correct, that her man can look forward to enduring some extremely sharp punishment for his barely averted attempt to commandeer this rivergoing vessel and kidnap its many innocent passengers. A whipping would be insufficient punishment for such a crime were the perpetrator white or black, slave or free, and most likely the man will be hanged by the neck until dead after a rapid and businesslike trial in the federal courts at which the captain himself will be honored to testify. If she has any words to say on the man’s behalf she might consider them directly and plan to make an appearance in court, although the captain does not imagine that anything she might possibly have to say will do this criminal the least good or prolong his life by any more time than it will take for her to make her futile statement.
As the dining room fills for breakfast a wary assortment of blacks both free and slave files past the stanchion, each one indicating by the angle of his head and the set of his jaw precisely where he stands in the delicate shading of responses to the roped man’s predicament. Finn is correct that whatever uprising may have been under way has been quelled, and he celebrates by ordering one of the porters to bring him a rasher of bacon and a stack of pancakes and a bottle of good whiskey to wash it all down. The girl volunteers to go on his behalf but he does not permit her.
“You stay put now.”
“Yes sir.” Eyeing the pistol.
“Your father made a mistake.”
“I know.”
“I could have shot the both of you and nobody would have given a good goddamn.”
“It’s our lot.”
“You have me to thank.”
The girl will not cast her eye upon Finn and she cannot cast her eye upon her father and so she looks instead at the river and the steadily unreeling promised land of northern Illinois which in the end is not Iowa but still.
“I hope you appreciate my generosity.”
“I do.”
Which Finn knows is untrue or at best premature, and yet because he is of a hopeful nature in such matters he raises his whiskey glass to her with a wink and takes her compliant duplicity for a good sign.
In the end the captain writes a check on the steamboat line for the price of the girl because Finn is going to take her one way or another and the elegant old woman deserves fair value. The mismatched pair of them disembark at Fort Granger with the girl’s baggage, which is grand enough and sufficiently well stocked to have been the entire equipage of the old woman herself.
“This is a nice town,” says the girl, for it is and she is not merely making conversation and moreover she needs something else to think about.
“Don’t go getting used to it.”
“Where’s the house?”
“Mine?”
The girl does not answer, not because she is recalcitrant or ignorant but because she is too busy taking in the river traffic and the movement of laden carts along the dockways and the jumble of people and
horses thinning off uphill toward the higher reaches of the town.
“Mine ain’t here. It’s in Lasseter, a day south.”
He chooses a skiff from out of many unattended and they load it with her bags and untie.
“Don’t you have something that needs doing?” she asks as he looses the last rope.
“I need to get us home.”
“In this town I mean. In Fort Granger. Didn’t you.”
“No. I never meant to come up this far.”
The girl considers his appearance and his lack of baggage and his cavalier ways with a boat that apparently does not belong to him, and she decides to inquire no further.
In a compartment he locates a fine net on a wire frame which he drops over the side according to certain signs and indicators that are invisible to the girl. “Quick,” he says when a moment has passed and he has become occupied with the pole. “Pull it up.” And she pulls it up, and the spread net emerges all ashimmer with silvery minnows so small that their gasping is beneath notice and so brilliantly alike that they dance upon the net and upon one another less like imperiled creatures than like slick stones come magically to life. He fills a bucket with riverwater and saves half of the minnows and lets the rest go. Then he baits lines with the first unlucky few and drops them over the stern and waits.
“We were going to live in Iowa,” says the girl.
“I know it.”
“Mrs. Fisk has people in Rock Island but we were going to go and live in Iowa, my father and me and some others we happened on.”
“It was your father’s idea.”
“Mrs. Fisk wasn’t going to take him at first.”
“To Illinois.”
“Not to begin with. But I persuaded her.”
Finn tests a line.
“It wasn’t until sundown yesterday he gave me the gun and set me on the captain.”
“Where’d he get it.”
“Somebody back home.”
They sit for a moment.
“I reckon you’re brave enough.”
“I didn’t know any other way.” She has fixed her eyes downstream as if thinking that she could ride all the way to Vicksburg and return thereby to a past that has been ruined long since by circumstance and desire and bold inexpugnable action.
Finn pulls in a little channel cat and puts it on a stringer and drops it back into the water to continue swimming as if it were yet as free as it is alive. He intends when he has caught enough of them to seek out a trading post on the river somewhere and clean the fish all at once and sell them as a lot, for he has with him no means of making fire and thus cannot prepare a meal for the girl and himself. Failing that he can always hail a passing boat and part with his catch for money or something else in trade, salt beef or biscuits or beans or what have you. Thus is he ever the link between the way of the river and the way of man, believing without reservation that he does daily service to each.
“Mrs. Fisk schooled me herself.”
“Did she now.”
“She was always kind to me.”
“Not kind enough to let you go, I reckon.”
“No.”
He can tell that she desires to argue her point, to explain Mrs. Fisk’s decency by means of a dialectical process that in itself would demonstrate the tolerance and generosity of spirit that the old woman always showed her, but in the end she lets it pass as they both know she must. There will be time for this later if there is time for anything.
“I never had no patience for schooling.”
“Is that so?”
“If I had a child, I don’t believe I’d let him go. My pap made me, but often as not I went somewheres else instead.”
“My father couldn’t decide what to think.”
Finn looks out across the water for a moment. “I reckon he didn’t figure it’d do you no good. Less’n you made Iowa.”
“I suppose.”
“Which weren’t likely.”
“I know.”
“Anybody could have told him that.”
“People do desperate things.”
“I reckon.”
The girl pulls up a line with another catfish and treats it as she has seen him do, and then she baits the hook with another minnow from the bucket and drops the line back into the water. “Will they hang him?”
“They’d hang a white man for what he done.”
“He did it on my account.”
“That don’t matter. Be glad you’re shut of it.”
“I had the gun.”
“That don’t matter. You’re shut of it.”
“I suppose I ought to be grateful to you.”
Finn considers this for a moment as a purely intellectual proposition, and then bends in earnest to his poling.
BEHIND THE JUDGE’S HOUSE is the barn. Behind the barn and concealed by it is the cabin where Finn retreated when he came of age and took on the work done for pay in his youth by the hired man Petersen and his wife both dead these many years. Such is his inheritance and such is now the patrimony to which he introduces the girl on a night as dark as she and moonless.
“You ain’t allowed in the main house.”
“Who cooks?”
“The old woman. Her and a girl from town comes in to help. We’ll eat back here just us.”
Bringing her bags up from the river through the dark and empty streets of the village makes him desire a wagon or at least a horse which in some other place and under some other circumstance he would have borrowed but not here and not now and not with the girl.
“This place could use some tidying up.” By the light of a single candle she can tell.
“You’ll do it in the morning.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be obliged.” Which is as tender an expression as he permits himself.
Come morning he fetches eggs from the barn and provisions from the kitchen at the back of the house before anyone is up. His mother and the Judge when he is not on the circuit have grown accustomed to his irregular habits and they expect little from him in the way of conversation or even presence. In his entry into the life of this new community he has forged in the hired man’s cabin they will see only further withdrawal, if they take note of it at all.
8
WITH THE BOY DISAPPEARED or stolen or otherwise run up against some temporary fate, Finn returns home from the squatter’s shack below St. Petersburg as from a long voyage. The world to which he recovers himself is unchanged by his absence, for the particulars of his surroundings—the rotted beams that keep the house from falling into the river, the filthy horsehair couch upon the porch, the trotlines mended so often that they have been made new a thousand times over and look none the better for it—the particulars of his surroundings have about them a quality of long disuse and advancing decay. He nets minnows and sets out his lines and assesses his need for supplies, all the while wondering if perhaps he would be better served by behaving as if that nailed-shut door to the bedroom stairs did not exist at all. He avoids it thus for three days. Then with his own clawhammer and a rusty pry bar borrowed under cover of darkness from the shed behind another man’s cabin he addresses himself to it in a slow reversal of a burial itself reversed. When he is done he feels not a burden removed from his shoulders and not an easing of his load but a strange sagging sense of disappointment, as if by unsealing this chamber he has deflated something whose power might have raised him up.
He sets down his tools and climbs the stairs from full darkness into darkness diminished. Before him in the air hangs a dim light, the pale and dissipated glow of the moon through milky painted windows, and he feels himself drawn in its direction equally fearful and expectant. The bedroom when he sets foot upon its white planking has about it a purity that nearly repels him. In order to move forward he reminds himself that he is in a place of his own creation, this room transmuted by blood and cleansed by whitewash and kept safe from the eyes of men by the found lumber and nails with which the river—the river that in
its infinite wisdom and patience carries all things—by these elements with which the river has blessed and absolved him.
He enters into the upper room and stands in its center by the white bed and the white trunk and the white chairs all luminously set about. There is no sound save his breathing. In the damp dim light certain artifacts and instances stand out in relief upon the walls, white-painted each identical to its surroundings but each made distinct by dint of its individual edging of shadow. A windowsill. A hinge. A picture frame painted over. Her sun-bonnet. The nail upon which his own clothing once hung. He proceeds to this last and reaches out with one finger to touch its head and to touch its square shank and then inquisitively at first but by and by with more urgency to merge the relative darkness of his pale skin with its cast shadow. Tracing that dark line upon the wall with his unclean finger he discovers that he is able to manipulate its extent and add to it by means of the dirt that he has introduced to this place upon his hand. One finger after another he rubs against the white wall as if he has become some artist of reversion. He decides without thinking to trace as best he can the shadow outlines of each visible thing, an act that fixes them into permanent and grotesque signifiers of this moment. His fingers are soon clean enough to be of no further use to him and he goes downstairs and brings back up a fistful of burned charcoal and continues with redoubled fury to create upon the walls these markings which signify his return and his reclaiming.
“AMONG ALL OF THE POWERS and principalities, there is none on earth so mighty as a man’s unsatisfied desire.”
The orator gives the appearance of possessing little firsthand experience with the subject at hand, for he is enormously fat and dissipated-looking at the same time. His stomach rolls abundantly out over his trousers despite a half-pair of home-knit galluses, and his threadbare crotch strains as he sits. He is bald as a lizard and his skin is the color of a fish belly, so white as to be nearly blue and spotted all over with moles and tiny scabbed lesions. He has done his beard the disservice of attempting to shave it with a found blade or some other scrap of metal within the past week, riverwater his only lubricant and no mirror in sight, and the result is that his flaccid cheeks resemble bottomland poorly tended and gone to brush.