by Jon Clinch
Finn has no time for him. “You let just anybody drink these days?” he says to Dixon.
“Anybody who pays,” says Dixon, devoting an abundance of attention to the motion of his rag upon the bar.
“I’ll have money tomorrow,” says Finn, which may or may not be the case and Dixon knows it.
“Note,” the baldheaded man goes on, “note that I said ‘unsatisfied desire.’”
“Don’t he look poorly for a preacher?” To Dixon.
“Be civil.”
Finn could not say which part of the question Dixon thinks his strange pale new customer might find offensive, the idea that he looks poorly or the suggestion that he might be a preacher, and so he minds his tongue.
“I might’ve done a little preaching,” says the man.
“Try it somewheres else.”
“Now Finn.”
“Aww,” answers the stranger, “I don’t mind him none.” And then directly to Finn, with a paternal look almost kindly: “I like you, boy. I do.”
Finn drinks.
“You’ve got backbone.”
“Enough of it.” He drinks again and sets the empty glass on the bar.
“Let me stand you to one of those.”
“I’ll need more than one.”
The fat man takes his purse from his pocket and spills out money across the bar.
“I reckon you must be some preacher,” says Finn.
“So people say,” says the fat man. “Although I also fill in with some phrenology if need be. And a little mesmerism and a bit of the old laying on of hands.” At this last he raises both of his eyebrows together, wrinkling back his pale forehead. “Not to mention Shakespeare, if you like that sort of thing.”
“I do not.”
“Some do.”
“I reckon.” Which is the last he says until the preacher has poured half of his savings onto the bar and down Finn’s throat transubstantiated into whiskey and thence again transubstantiated into Finn himself.
“What’s a fellow do around here for a good time?”
“This,” says Finn.
The preacher rises up kingly and surveys the room. “Any women in these parts?”
“Not here,” says Dixon from a stool at the back end of the bar, near the door to the kitchen past which his wife snores on her pallet. “Not that sort. I run a clean place.”
“I can see that,” says the preacher, “however much the observation pains me.” He has a bag at his feet, a thing of greasy carpet with a hinged top, bulging and lumpen and disreputable as himself. “A traveling man has certain needs,” he says, giving the bag a halfhearted kick by way of indicating his trade or at least the apparent trappings of it. “Remember what I said about the power of a man’s unsatisfied desire.”
“You’ll have to satisfy it somewheres else,” says Dixon.
“I am but a stranger here and friendless.”
“You’ve made the one.” Indicating Finn, nearly facedown.
“I should hate to impose upon his gratitude.”
“Don’t you fret. He’ll be a long time showing it.”
“Sir,” to Finn, placing upon the riverman’s shoulder a paw as meaty as a cured ham. “Might you assist me?”
Finn gathers himself up.
“I require companionship.”
Which Finn takes the wrong way.
“A woman.”
Finn has never before assumed the role of procurer but why not. The preacher hoists his bag and the two of them exit down the steps worn into the hillside to the black river silently moving.
“We’ll take yours,” says the preacher when they reach the landing where a dwindling handful of boats are tied up. And so they climb aboard Finn’s skiff and head downstream. Finn poles absently and the preacher plants himself amidships upon his carpetbag like royalty.
“I believe I’d like to sample something of a darker shade.”
“I can’t help you.”
“There must be places.”
“They don’t mingle.”
“Places that specialize.” This last word comes off his tongue with a long lazy hiss.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Surely you know where they live.”
“Niggers.”
“Amen.”
“I know where they are well enough.”
“Then lead on.”
Finn urges the skiff downstream past the skeletal pilings of his teetering house and past the brush and the mudflats and the weeping willows that intervene and past the quiet piers of Lasseter proper toward the less-lit depths of darktown, where he ties up to a post at the end of a dock with more boards missing than intact. “Mind your step.” Although considering his condition he ought better to be minding his.
The preacher bestirs himself sufficiently to bend double over his bag and withdraw from it certain articles that Finn cannot make out in the dark. He conceals them in a long denim coat that he throws over his shoulder in a theatrical manner and then, panting like a locomotive, he rights himself and follows his guide toward the packed dirt landing.
“What you got.”
“What we’ll need.”
“I won’t be needing anything.”
“We shall see,” says the preacher.
They move in the secretive manner of grim spirits from the waterside to the single narrow street that runs through darktown like a vein. “Here she is,” says Finn. “You’re on your own, I guess.”
“Come.” The preacher takes his elbow in the crook of his arm and by dint of his greater bulk commences a gay promenade down the center of the street. He has Finn’s interest now and leads him without difficulty, for there is something about the certainty with which he commences upon this adventure that draws Finn to it.
“How do you know where you’re headed?”
“Experience,” says the preacher. “Experience, and a practiced eye.”
Every shack here looks the same to Finn, and at this hour of the night they are silent and dark as ranked tombs. “Don’t look like a busy night for nigger whores.”
“Ahh. You have to know what to look for.”
“I don’t.”
The preacher raises one stubby finger as if to point out something to Finn or else to silence him, and together they stumble to a halt. On one side is an alleyway leading back down to the water. The air smells of gutted fish and spilled shit and the river, but the preacher breathes it in as if it were a zephyr wafted from Arabia just for him. Down the alley, silhouetted against the sky, is a clothesline bearing a pair of drawers, a woman’s underthings, and a boy child’s overalls.
“This’ll do,” says the preacher. From his pocket he withdraws a pistol which he hands to his companion.
“What’s this.”
“You know what it is.”
Finn jams the barrel into his belt reckoning that either the man is needlessly cautious or else he has a history of encountering tight spots in places like this.
“Put this on.” The preacher has drawn from his pocket a pair of black cloth masks of the sort that common bandits might wear. He ties one tight around the great humped mass of his white head, making his ghastly and misshapen visage into something more loathsome yet.
“You look like a stoat with a sore tooth.”
“Put yours on.”
Finn obliges.
“And you keep that gun handy.”
“I don’t see why.” Drawing it nonetheless.
Thus reassured and without further explanation the preacher holds his breath and hurls himself against the shack’s half-rotted door and plunges within as a leviathan plunges into water.
The shack consists of one room, and moving like a thunderbolt he makes for the child’s bed in the far corner just as if he can see it in the near-perfect darkness or as if it is here in this particular place that his prey is always doomed to lie. A man and a woman are asleep on a pallet of corn husks in the near corner and they rise up hollering and upon the preacher’s command Finn li
fts the pistol and fires one lucky shot square into the man’s throat. By the flare he sees the man’s eyes grow wide in anticipation and shock and takes note that his woman is the very woman he has seen in the street with this very child. She catches his eye once again as before. He cannot help it or help himself and he moves to put the gun away or at least drop it to his side as the preacher snatches up the boy and his blanket and his speckled straw hat and fairly knocks his stunned accomplice on his ass in making his exit.
THEY ARE ON THE SKIFF the three of them, and Finn is poling upstream.
“You’ll stay put if you know what’s good for you.” But where would the child go. The preacher takes the gun from Finn and removes his mask and drops it unceremoniously to the planking, where it lies peltlike. Finn does the same. In the darkness he can make out the great bulk of the preacher as he bends over the child only if he squints and studies upon it, and he would prefer not to. He prefers instead to reflect upon the boy child’s mother with however much intensity alcohol and excitement permit his befogged brain, and so he attends as best he can to her memory and to his poling as the stars wink from behind the bankbound willows and his head gradually clears. The preacher addresses the child in tones alternately guttural and tender and there is a furtive scrambling in the center of the boat as of a small beast attempting to free itself from a trap. After a while the child cries out and gasps and lies still, and the skiff rocks unevenly upon the face of the black water until the preacher unleashes from his throat a great roaring animal bellow.
“What do you mean to do with him now.”
“Throw him back,” says the preacher. “I believe he’s too damn small to keep.” He lies against his carpetbag like a potentate reclining or some beached seagoing monster. When he recovers himself he takes up the twitching child and lifts him over the gunwale and holds him down beneath the waters with both arms extended until he stops struggling. Then he lets go of him and rises to his feet to dress. “How about we get us another drink.”
“Dixon’s closed up.”
“You got any at home?”
“I don’t,” says Finn, for he will require all of it himself.
“I know you better than that.”
“No you don’t.”
“I know everything.” The preacher elevates his voice to a kind of insinuating whine.
“This is where you get out.” They have come abreast of Dixon’s.
The preacher is uninterested and merely grunts.
“I thank you kindly for the drink. Now git.”
The preacher bends to lift his carpetbag and rises up again with the pistol in his hand. He lets it hang at his side, glinting in starlight. “You still owe me.”
“Not after that.” Indicating with a snap of his chin the place where the child went into the water or at least the fact thereof.
“I surely could make use of a boat like this one.”
“Steal your own.”
“Very well.” Raising the gun.
Finn lifts the pole to push again but waits. “Goddamn nigger-loving sodomite.”
“I despise flattery.” Although to judge from the glint of his teeth he is charmed without limit.
For lack of any other weapon and with no opportunity to make fuller use of the one he has, Finn angles the pole out of the water and in a single smooth motion he thrusts the dry end of it ramlike into the center of the preacher’s chest. The man is too massive to be caught off balance and too broad to fall easily, but he does drop the gun to the deck where it clatters away. Whether thinking or merely acting he takes hold of the pole with both of his massive hands and props it hard against his belly and strains as if to raise his attacker up into the air fishlike, and he very nearly succeeds until Finn lets go his end and the fat man staggers backward into the bow where his feet grow tangled in a mess of lines. Finn charges him and takes him over the side into the water with his hands stretched around his neck and his thumbs probing for an Adam’s apple buried somewhere unreachable beneath pale flesh, and between the water and Finn’s furious grip the preacher can breathe neither in nor out and he flails and lashes out at his attacker with a fierce but steadily diminishing fury until Finn lets up and makes for the skiff, leaving the preacher to drift downstream and succumb or not.
He brings to the white room the gun which he drops into the chest and the masks which he kicks beneath the bed and the speckled straw hat which he hangs upon a nail. Then he goes downstairs and falls asleep unclothed upon the porch, his overalls slung over the rail to dry.
Come morning he awakens from a sweet dream of the boy child and his mother and he fetches himself a bit of charcoal from the stove. Up in the bedroom he chooses a wall and he moves the chest over to it so that he can reach the top, all the way up near the ceiling where a single spider has begun making herself at home, and there he commences to mark down the story of what he has and has not done. His penmanship is poor and his spelling is worse and his grammar is the worst of all but these things matter not, because not long after he begins he gives off writing almost entirely and commences to draw in a manner befitting some primitive cave painter working by torchlight to document and dispel demons both real and imagined. Here is the black man sitting up in bed, a hole torn in his throat. There opposite is his wife, unharmed and beauteous as the artist’s shaking hand will allow. And in the center is the boy himself, nearly obscured by the grotesque bent oversize form of the preacher. Each mouth is open save the woman’s, and from each open mouth streams a river of wordless incomprehensible language in Finn’s furious scrawl. The inscrutable outpourings bend and intermix, each one a tributary unto the others, until the whole expands ineluctably into a spiraling morass that drowns the mouths from which it has come and subsumes the space almost entirely in black. Only the woman remains silent, the woman and the riverman drawn remote from her and slightly askew in a far corner with a gun in his hand and his face concealed behind a mask.
9
SHE SAYS that Mary is her name, although Finn has not asked. His practice for these first days in the hired man’s cabin behind the Judge’s barn has been to call her by no name at all, not even the impersonal girl or woman or some other oblique reference to their relation.
“Mary,” he says. “So be it.”
As the days go by he watches her in the manner of a naturalist making observations, as if fearing that at any moment she could molt and reveal some alternate self beneath her skin, some raw beast damp and ready for transformation into a different sort of creature altogether. Everything she touches she touches in a manner different from the ways of his mother and the ways of dead Petersen’s dead wife. There is about her a grace and an ineffable sadness that conspire to retard her movements and make them thereby into something almost musical, transforming every act into a kind of prayer or languorous meditation. She seems always to be preparing—not merely his supper or a bucket of washwater or some other common thing, but herself, for that part of her life which is yet to come.
She is a fair cook and a poor housekeeper, but Finn does not notice these failings because her abilities in both matters are far superior to his. After a week his clothing is cleaner than it has been in all of his adult life despite the cabin’s lack of a proper laundry room or even a washboard. These chores do not by any measure come naturally to her. She has spent her life luxuriously enslaved by Mrs. Fisk, whose opinions regarding black people are the opposite of those espoused by the Judge. Not only is the old woman happy to enjoy their company, but she believes it her duty to improve each one of them who crosses her path so as to ready their race for the day when they shall be set free.
Mary achieves such success as she does in matters of housework by concentrating her attention and focusing her will. In the absence of any other outlet, whether books or needlework or dreams of such life as might lie beyond the door that Finn padlocks behind him when he heads to the river, she can attend only to the instant in which she finds herself. “This is for your own good,” he says when he t
akes the lock down and fishes the key from wherever he keeps it secreted about himself. She cannot imagine that he is telling her anything like the truth.
“I need to get some air,” she says one evening when he comes back from the river bearing his catch. The day has been hot and the cabin is an oven.
“There’s air out back.” Tilting his head toward the fenced yard behind the cabin where he keeps the chopping block and a flat board for cleaning fish and various sprung and rusted implements more useful as curiosities than tools. He raises the fish to her as if they are the veriest prize, some reward for which she has labored without ceasing, the golden fleece itself. She takes them with a gracious nod and exits to the yard.
A river breeze stirs the clothes that she hung on the line before he left this morning and she threads her way between them careful with the fish.
From the tiny window comes his voice: “Mind them clothes.” As if she needs telling.
She can feel his eyes upon her as she guts the fish and scales them and as she rinses her hands in the rainbarrel and dries them on a stiff rag long bloodied. By the sound of it he is occupied with starting the fire in the big iron stove but she knows that he is watching nonetheless even though she keeps her back to him to such degree as she can. Then with the fish on a platter and their guts and glistening scales rinsed from the board with a dipper of water she starts back through the thin maze of hung laundry.
“Don’t forget them clothes.”
“One thing at a time,” she says without thinking and without implication.
“You watch your tongue.”
“I didn’t mean.”
“I know it.”
She pauses and visibly considers how she might carry two armfuls of clean laundry in addition to the platter of fish.
“Go back for that,” he says. He neither reaches to take the platter from her nor moves to assist her in any other way but instead turns his back and attends to some trivial thing in the cabin. He has done enough by letting her go.