by Jon Clinch
Will opens the cell door to admit them and locks it again behind, and then absents himself to the marshal’s office, where he waits.
“How much he tell you?” Rather than tell it again himself.
“That you’re going to the penitentiary,” she says. “For a year.”
“I reckon that’d cover it.”
“A year.”
Finn nods.
“Seems like forever.”
“It’s supposed to.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“You don’t have to. I’d not blame you if.”
“But I will.”
“I know it.”
“And we’ll come visit you.”
“I don’t know they allow it.”
“We’ll come anyhow.”
“It’s a ways.”
“Not that far.”
“You’ll be busy. With the boy and all.”
“I know it.”
In the end she does not come at all and he does not blame her because he understands the reasons. Her heart breaks over not doing it more than his does over her failure.
THE PENITENTIARY AT ALTON is the state’s original and Finn is among its earliest inmates. A low stone fortress asquat by the Mississippi, it houses but twenty-four prisoners and admits into their presence nearly no air and less sunlight. He has inhabited worse places than this and he surely will again. At Alton the prisoners wear uniforms with alternating stripes of black and white, and each man’s head is shaven on one side lest he escape and attempt to enter society by stealth. The prison hires them out to work in the fields, and on these long summer days out of doors Finn can smell the river, which makes him long for home more than usual.
The other inmates are murderers mainly, which gives him neither comfort nor inspiration. He aspires only to return home and reunite with Mary and the boy, and to this end he keeps his nose clean and indicates the passing of the days by scratching marks into the wall alongside his bed although their array soon grows beyond his counting. The warden has imposed a vow of silence upon the inhabitants of his fiefdom, which does not bother Finn in the least. From time to time he gets a letter from Mary, which he struggles to decipher, and deep in the silence of the prison he believes that if only he could read its sentences more perfectly he would hear her very voice speaking them aloud within his mind as if by magic or miracle.
Whenever he can get out into the daylight he relishes it despite such labor as he has been assigned, and in the winter when the prisoners’ work schedule is sporadic and the pale sun leaks down into their frigid stone bunker through high windows as narrow as gunslits he remembers the river and the woman and the child and he dreams of them all alike. Snow falls sometimes from that great windowed height onto the black-and-white shoulders and the half-shaven heads of the prisoners, and once during the winter Will comes by to visit but his brother denies him entry for denial is the only power he yet retains.
ON THE SUMMER DAY that he leaves Alton for good the barber shaves his head entire. Thus restored he steps forth from the prison door in his own clothes, ill-fitting now for Alton’s food has been even poorer than that to which he has previously accustomed himself, and follows his instincts straight to the riverside. Children spy him marching hatless along and can tell that he is recently released by the two colors of his scalp, burnished brown on the one side and pale as a fish belly on the other. Beyond this visible bifurcation and a redoubled urge to take up his former life he is apparently unchanged.
At the river’s edge he seeks transportation upstream to Lasseter, but opportunities are few and he finds no willing souls. The few rivermen he meets take him for a murderer most likely unreformed and they desire nothing to do with him or any other such risky cargo. Upstream he walks along the mudflats past green islands and snags and shallows, past children playing hooky and rivermen running their lines, until he comes to a spot where a few battered skiffs are tied up to a post and to one another and there above the river he spies a place not much different from Dixon’s. With a dollar that Will left for his release burning a hole in his pocket he climbs the stairs.
“So what’d you do?” says the man behind the bar.
Finn has had plenty of time to reflect upon this question, but on account of the vow of silence prevailing at Alton he has had during the entire year’s passage no opportunity to answer it aloud.
“I run afoul of the authorities,” is what he says.
“Next time,” says the barman, “don’t get caught.”
“Easier said than done.” His voice has gone a little creaky from disuse but the barman takes pity upon him and starts him off with a decent whiskey on the house. Finn has missed the drink more than he reckoned and he fishes out his dollar and places it upon the bar.
“Got folks waiting at home?”
“I reckon so.”
“And nobody come to get you. Ain’t that the way it goes.”
“I got a brother would have tried.”
“What put him off.”
“I did. He ain’t no use to me.”
“Any man who’ll provide passage home is of use.”
“I can provide my own.” Pushing the glass forward for more whiskey.
When the dollar is gone he descends the stairs and helps himself to a skiff and poles upstream. Someone shouts down from the bar but too late and they know neither his name nor his destination. He keeps his head low lest there be gunfire and stays to the shallows, thrusting with the pole and feeling strong and a good bit drunk and happy to be out upon the river again.
WHEN THE NIGHT GROWS too dark for navigation he ties up and sleeps beneath the cover of an overarching willow. In the morning he plunges his face into the water and wishes he had not parted with his dollar so rashly, and then he leaves the skiff tied where it is and sets out upon a path leading inland to a cabin. He detects the smell of breakfast from the place long before he sees it, biscuits and fatback bacon and coffee too. A woman of his age or perhaps a little less is alone in the kitchen.
“Take what you want,” she says to him when he comes to stand in supplication at the door, for she can see the hunger in his spare frame and the strangeness written upon his face.
“I’d be obliged.”
“If they ask, I ain’t seen you.”
“They won’t.”
“They’ve asked before.”
“Not about me they won’t.” He takes from his pocket his release papers and flattens them upon the table. Between the two of them they have sufficient reading to confirm his freedom, and she gets another plate from the cupboard and invites him to sit if he will.
“I believe I could set here just about forever,” he says in a moment of candid relief and gratitude, for he realizes that under certain circumstances he just might. She does not ask him his crime nor inquire as to his destination and he admires the curve of her throat as he helps himself to her provisions.
After breakfast they adjourn to a pair of chairs upon the porch and she tells him of her husband gone these many years. The woman’s voice soothes him after his months in the harsh silence of Alton and makes him wonder how far it is back upstream to where he belongs, and she tells him exactly how far it is then asks what’s his hurry. For he has told her nothing about himself.
“Folks waiting.”
“They know you got out?”
“I don’t reckon.”
“Someone would’ve come for you.”
“It ain’t that easy.” He sits and studies the woods and thinks of the river, imagining its southward flowing and picturing overlaid upon it his own unfinished journey north. “Besides, they know I can look out for myself.”
“They can count on you.”
“I reckon.”
He splits a pile of wood in exchange for her kindness and then drinks a dipper of cool water from her well, and as he prepares to go he catches her looking at him despite his shaven head and his particolored skin in a manner suggestive of certain possibilities that he has alrea
dy rejected. If he were in possession of his old slouch hat he would tip it as he leaves but he goes on his way in the absence of such niceties, back to the river and the skiff and his long day’s journey upstream, penniless and indelibly marked but heading for home.
AT THE OVERHANGING frame house he steps into his own captive skiff from out of the one he has poled all this distance, leaving the borrowed one to find its way back downstream however it might. Thus is one more displaced wanderer set free in this time of transformation.
He climbs the stairs in the dark and admits himself without knocking, whereupon she greets him with the gun as she would greet some common criminal. She very nearly fires to see him there in the doorframe with his shaven two-colored skull, imagining him some odd tattooed fugitive from the carnival recently passed through town and now returned to work mischief, but at the last second he takes the gun from her hands and speaks her name in the softest whisper so as not to awaken the boy.
“Mary,” he says. “I come home.”
She throws herself upon him and he drops the gun in his startlement but the clatter does not begin to rouse the boy, who sleeps out on the porch over the river as upon his own mother’s breast. They take themselves to the bedroom upstairs where every particle of her body returns to his consciousness inch by inch, replacing the dull repetitive textures of Alton with the thrill of her life and her liveliness, and although when they are finished she would rather talk than sleep he is too hungry to do either for long. There are biscuits in the breadbox and she brings him a plate.
“I missed you.”
“I missed you. And them biscuits.”
“I’ll make another batch come morning.”
“Make two or three.”
“I will.”
“While you’re at it.”
“I don’t mind.”
He holds up the last of them into the moonlight and riverlight and studies it as if it is some fetish or source of wonder. “How’d you get by all this time?” Thinking of Will, and of whether his brother may have worked to redeem himself while he was gone.
“I wrote you how kind people have been.”
“I know it.”
“I mean I don’t have family, but.”
“Neither do I.”
“But you’d swear I did.”
“We’ll make it up to them, every one.”
She sits at the end of the bed and smiles upon him as if he is a dear child who has come to her with a notion ten times as big as he is but entirely too lovely for deflating just yet.
When morning comes he stands on the porch studying the steaming water and watching the slow early-morning traffic float past his high place like a procession in a dream, while the boy sleeps at his feet upon a pallet of corn husks. His sleeping place looks more the dwelling of a muskrat than a human child, but the boy curled there upon it smiles a smile so unconscious and beatific as to befit an angel. In repose he is the same Huck.
Finn leaves him there and goes down to see about his lines, which some samaritan has coiled up and hung on nails beneath the house to keep them safe from the weather in his absence. He locates a good deal of rot which he cuts away and mends, and some of the hooks are broken off and rusted through which he can do nothing about just yet, but in the end these raw makings yield two lines for every three original and he trusts that this will be sufficient for now. The shallows are agleam with silvery minnows just as he recalls, and he catches a netful for a place to begin again.
The skiff needs patching. He can see that the boy has been working to keep it bailed, for it is only half sunk when he sets foot in it, and he figures that he ought to find a little pitch later on when he has the chance and show him how it’s done now that he’s big enough. Between the bailing bucket and the lines he is busy out upon the water, so busy that he does not look back up at the house until he has drifted some distance and there upon the porch, with his straw hat askew and his hands upon the railing, stands the boy. He is even taller than his father would have imagined possible, now that he is awake and upright. They meet beneath the house, the child paying no mind to his father’s strange appearance, and since there is nothing to do about the lines now but wait they join hands and return upstairs to Mary as one.
13
FINN KNOWS THE WOMAN’S SHACK by its location and by its stove-in door and by the line strung across the alley upon which hangs drying a batch of sheets and pillowcases from the Adams Hotel. Working silent as some bereft spirit in his own empty house above the river he has gathered together his washing—a ratty woolen blanket, two pairs of socks that he won’t have use for until winter, and such else as he can make do without for a time—and he has bundled them all up and brought them here to this place as offering or bait or some other. The laundress, whom he has seen both in town and in her farthest extremity, struggles to swing the door open on hinges that she has thus far lacked the means to repair. Someone has run a bit of rawhide through the broken part of the upper and hammered the lower almost straight, but the door is still not right and looks to remain thus. Between the ragged bundle in his arms and the air of trepidation on his face she takes her visitor for an itinerant, and although she would wish it otherwise she has nothing to offer him and says so.
“No ma’am. I got laundry.” Offering it up.
She considers the bundle and the figure carrying it and although she is poor beyond knowing and could make use of whatever he might desire to pay she wants nothing to do with either one. “I don’t do much,” she says. “Just the hotel, mainly.”
“I sure could use the help.”
“I know it, but.”
“I’m all alone in this world.”
“I understand.” For she of all people does.
The look that he gives her is so laden with beseeching that her heart nearly breaks and she realizes that she cannot bear to turn such a one from her door. She takes to herself the bundle and names a price, which he calculates in forty-rod whiskey and agrees to. He asks when.
“I’ll need two days at least. Maybe three.”
“Don’t hurry on my account.”
“I won’t.”
“You around most times?”
“Same time as this in three days, if that suits you.”
“It does.”
“Fine then.”
“I’ll be obliged.” He hates saying it to a person of her color, but he reckons it can do no harm this once.
FINN RETURNS to the mansion at the top of the hill and lets himself in this time without the assistance of the hired man’s wife. He is in the kitchen scavenging through the cupboards like some sneak thief or stray starveling beast when she comes upon him, and although she has seen him infrequently enough until that recent prior visit one daunting glare from beneath those shaggy brows and she identifies him as the Judge’s son all right and none other. She leaves him alone to do as he pleases.
Fortified with coffee and a slice of pie consumed over the sink he mops his face and beard with a sleeve and proceeds down the back hallway to the Judge’s study. The door is closed as it has always been. Even with no living creature in the house other than his own cowed wife and the timid ghost of the hired man’s woman, the Judge requires for himself isolation or at least confinement.
Finn knocks at the door and there is no answer.
Within, the Judge assesses the tonality of the knock and evaluates the silence that went before it and chooses to hold his ground.
“Pap.” Finn, with his lips to the door.
Nothing.
“I seen your carriage in the barn.”
Nothing. Nothing beyond perhaps the merest whistling breath of an old man, which the son detects as he would detect the twitch of a cornered rabbit’s eyelid or the slow rhythmic underwater pulsing of a carp’s fin.
“Pap.”
“Don’t think I’m hiding from the likes of you.” Lifting his voice to be heard through the door.
“I don’t.”
“You’re not welcome her
e.”
“I know I ain’t.”
“Neither in my house nor in my study.”
“I know it.”
“Nor anywhere upon these premises.”
“I broke it off with that woman.” Daring to unlatch the door, which for all its constant closure is nonetheless unlocked.
“You’ll find another.” As if he knows.
“I won’t.” He stands back and lets light spill in from the hallway to his father’s dark precincts, where it gleams muted against picture frames and polished hardwood and gold-stamped leather bindings all thick with dust.
“You probably already have.” There behind his massive oaken desk the Judge is as broad as he ever was, smaller perhaps by a shade than his son remembers but no less fierce for the bow of his back and the slope of his shoulders. The light of a single oil lamp illuminates his collapsed visage from below and casts shadows that creep upward along the creases and protuberances of his face and then merge together into one great blackness above the line of his heavy brow, giving him in this small space the ghastly judgmental aspect that he possessed in even the brightest of daylight for those hundreds of poor damned miscreants who passed before his bench during his prime. “No doubt you’ve already found yourself another nigger bitch,” he continues, proud of himself and of his wisdom, “if I know you.”
“I ain’t done it.” Then a pause. “Maybe you don’t know me like you think.”
“I know you better than you know yourself.” He uncurls two fingers from around the corner of the lawbook he’s been studying and uses them to wave his son off as he would shoo a fly.
“Maybe not.”
“Go,” says the Judge. “You and your ridiculous claims are dismissed. Your presence here is neither required nor tolerated.”
“I know it. But if I’ve changed.”
“Even if you have, I shall be ten lifetimes forgiving you.”