by Jon Clinch
“But.”
The Judge tilts his head back and his eyes vanish into the shadowy reaches above the lamplight. “In the meantime,” he says, “you are at liberty to wait for that day in some more hospitable location.”
“A man can only do so much.”
“Do as you wish, but you’ll get nothing for your troubles from me.”
“I ain’t asking for money.” Thinking of his boy’s six thousand.
“Good. For you’ll get from me neither funds nor forgiveness nor any other sort of gratification.”
“I know it,” says Finn. “I know it now.”
His mother has been drawn downstairs by the murmur of their two voices and she awaits him in the kitchen. She has poured him coffee and drawn him a glass of cool water from the well, not knowing which he will prefer or guessing that in the end he will want neither.
“You told him.” Her mouth drawn up into a little incipient smile in spite of the evidence written large upon her son’s face.
“I see why you wouldn’t bother.”
“It’s not that.”
“You knew he wouldn’t change his mind.”
“I thought maybe if you’d.”
“You said he had faith in me.”
“I had faith in the both of you.” Lifting the coffee, an offering.
“Only one of us deserved it.”
“I didn’t mean any harm.” For who truly means harm in all this world.
RAIN COMES EARLY on the second day and settles in, and he crouches in his skiff to run the lines and then lets the little boat find its own way downstream along the mudbanks of darktown, where under better weather he would expect to see his blanket and the rest of it drying upon her line. He thanks God that he can produce an income fair weather or foul, then waits another day before returning on foot for his things, which he can hardly recognize when she presents them.
He shakes his head in wonderment and fishes in his pocket for a coin. “This is a help.”
She stands in the open door holding up the laundry, tall and slim and elegant as some Egyptian statuary. He makes such a show of searching for his money that she suspects for a moment he might be intending not to pay at all, and even as this possibility comes dawning upon her she remains impassive for she has endured worse.
At last he yields it up, presenting it to her as if he has minted it himself.
“Thank you, mister.”
“Finn.”
“Mister Finn.”
“Finn alone’ll do.”
“Thank you.” Perhaps acknowledging his request and perhaps ignoring it.
“Folks around here used to know me.” He tests the waters for some sign of the ill fame that his presence engendered in the period after he’d come back to Mary and Huck from his imprisonment at Alton.
“I don’t.” Shaking her head.
“Now you do,” he says with a display of teeth.
“I reckon.”
“Whyn’t you see can your husband fix that door.”
“He can’t.”
He gives the hinge a look of respectful puzzlement, as if it has somehow bested a better man than he, but he inquires no further as to the reason. “I could give it a try. It won’t be no trouble.”
“No. Thank you. But I’m obliged.”
Nonetheless he returns in a day’s time with a sack of tools purloined from the shed where old Bliss keeps such things, prepared to rectify at least this one wrong and earn thereby her gratitude. At the outset she looks upon him as if he has taken it upon himself to desecrate a holy shrine, but he seems so intent that she can find within herself no strength to resist. He removes the door entire and takes the hinges off and hammers them straight upon a rock. The bit of rawhide he discards upon locating the upper pin where it fell unseen on that awful night, in a crack between the floorboards and covered over with a scrap of rug. He refits the latch and with a plane and a file and a crosscut saw for which he can imagine Bliss having no earthly use he trims the rough splintered edges away from the door before rehanging it.
“That’ll keep out the weather,” he says. Swabbing his brow with the back of his forearm.
“It weren’t the weather broke it.”
“Is that so.” Inviting her to tell more or nothing, howsoever she might desire.
Although every woman, child, and man in darktown knows the story, she can see that he does not. Such is the manner in which information, like water or blood, flows only where it is admitted and fills up only those places wherein it may be confined. Permit two white men to batter in a darktown door and steal a woman’s child and murder her husband by means of a bullet through the neck, and from that night forward those two masked men or their simulacra shall be forever breaking down doorways into the dreams of every last mother and child in that forlorn place—while elsewhere their fame shall go unbespoken. The white children of Lasseter may have monsters of their own, but none of them are exactly these.
The sadness that creeps into her eyes Finn either does not notice or else takes for appreciation of his kind act.
“’Tweren’t nothing.”
“Thank you,” she says, perhaps the slightest bit late. “I’m obliged.” The hand in her apron pocket clutches tight to the coin he gave her yesterday and he can see it hiding there just as he once saw a certain girl’s hands thrust into her own apron pocket for other reasons altogether. Concealed things of this order are to him like fish lurking just beneath the surface of a placid river pool, endlessly fascinating and deeply desirable and capable of being read only by one who knows how to attend to their signs.
“How about we take it out in wash,” he says.
“That’d be fine.”
“Though it ain’t necessary.”
“It is.”
“Fixing that door was my idea.” He is gathering up the tools taken from Bliss and returning them one by one to his sack. “You never said you required it.”
“But I did all the same. I required it.”
“But you never said.”
“I know.”
“So it was my idea.”
“I know it.”
He finishes with the sack and ties it off and leans it against a log that marks the edge of the street, and then he makes himself comfortable on the ground alongside it. “Might you have a dipper of water handy?” Such is the least she can do.
14
THE MORNING FOG has just begun to burn off the river when he returns from baiting his lines. As he draws closer a man appears on the steps beneath the house, the darkness of his form wavering and unresolved within the white density of the fog that still hangs palpable along the margin of the river and up into the dense riverbound trees and even beyond the trees up the slope thinning along streets of increasing prosperity until it surely gives out altogether near the place where the village reaches its height and the white mansion and the limestone courthouse stand side by side implacable. Finn steadies himself and narrows his vision to assess movement, desiring to know if the figure is going up the stairs or down or merely standing upon them in wait for someone, perhaps himself. The boy and the woman are still in bed so far as he knows.
The figure of the man moves not as Finn approaches in his skiff, and as they draw near the two of them eye one another like phantoms arrived from differing realms.
“Morning.” By his voice alone Finn can discern the man’s color.
“It’s that.” Wondering if this interloper has come to call upon Mary and for how long this kind of behavior might have been going on among these creatures whose ways are inscrutable to him despite the years.
“Them lines hold up?”
“I suppose.” Perhaps the man has come to trade for fish, although now that they have come nearer together in the fog he can see nothing about him that would suggest preparedness for trade, neither bundle nor package nor jug. Which suits him fine for he would hate for this waterside place to become a nigger trading post on account of its location and his own untoward preferences in women.
<
br /> “They was in the water a good while ’fore I hung them up.”
“They spend a lot of time in the water.”
“When you was in prison I mean.”
“I know when you mean.” Tying up and gathering his things and unbending himself, yet seeming for all of his readiness incapable of ever coming entirely ashore—as if he is not a man at all but some yearning spirit bound to this place for remembrance or repudiation.
“A year’s a long time,” says the black man.
“I know it.”
“I guess you ought to.”
“Whyn’t you go on home, boy.”
“Name’s George.”
“That’s fine.”
“I just come to see about them lines.”
“You thought I ought to know my benefactor.”
“I thought.”
“What else you done around here while I’m gone?” Finn has begun to move down the length of the boat toward the big black man.
“That’s all I done.”
“You certain.”
“I am.”
“Then I suppose I ought to be grateful for that too. Like I ought to be for them lines.”
“I don’t reckon.” Stepping down from the stair and making as if to move off.
“You want gratitude, you can get it from her.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s a good idea.”
Finn goes from under the house toward the open stairs and the samaritan George backs away from his path, stepping cautiously through the rough dry tangle of late-summer weeds and keeping the distance between them constant.
Above in the house the boy is asleep and she is adding wood to the stove. “Were you talking to somebody?” When he has come in and closed the door behind him.
“I was not.”
“I thought I heard.”
“It weren’t nothing.”
“So it was somebody then.”
“A nigger.”
“I see.” She purses her lips and takes down a bowl of eggs from the shelf above the dry sink. “You fetch me that bacon, just a little for the pan?”
“You can fetch your own,” he says, “if it ain’t too much trouble.” Then he goes out to the porch to sit resting his feet upon a corner of the boy’s pallet and watching the river steam past until she has finished readying his breakfast.
“I expect the man had a name,” she says when she brings his eggs and biscuits and coffee to the table.
“Let it go.” Sitting and digging in with a kind of urgency. “He come around here looking for something I don’t have.”
“Manners, I might think.” Distracted by the sight of the boy stretching himself awake on his pallet out on the porch, she says it half under her breath in the way she has acquired through no fault of her own during the past solitary year, more to herself or to no one at all than to him.
“How dare you.”
“I didn’t mean.” With the beginnings of a dismissive look.
“You apologize.”
“I didn’t mean a thing.”
“First that presumptuous old nigger meddles in my business, then you dare judge my manners.”
“Which presumptuous old nigger would that be?” Angling to distract him and get her answer all at once.
“The one fooled with my lines.”
“You mean George.”
“That’s the one.”
“He doesn’t mean any harm.”
“He wants to keep out of my business if he knows what’s good for him.”
“He did what he thought was right.”
The boy stands and yawns and approaches the table, where sits his father with his face twisted into a scowl and his particolored skull bent over his plate like the lowered head of some scavenger.
“He did what was right,” his mother goes on.
“Don’t you tell me.” Without looking up.
She rises and fetches some biscuits for the child. “Without help from the likes of him, I don’t know what we’d have done. Isn’t that right, Huck?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You didn’t take no charity.” Without looking up from his plate.
“Share and share alike was more the nature of it.”
“I couldn’t abide you taking no charity. That ain’t respectful of me. Nor of my wishes.”
“You was in jail, Pap.” From a mouth clogged with biscuit.
“I know it.”
“So she done.”
“I know what she done.” Raising his head to cut the boy short and then looking from him to the woman and back again as if drawing a line between the two and then erasing it by an exercise of his solitary will.
HE AND THE BOY are on their haunches beneath the porch, gutting catfish and bluegills and looping their intricate gleaming viscera back into the water like pagan offerings, when she appears on the downward path among the weeds with a bundle of white laundry piled high upon her head. She proceeds like a goddess, erect and effortless and perfectly balanced, and Finn can see from the look of placid resignation upon her face that she has gone this way and its reverse a hundred times before under like burdens.
“What are you about?”
“My work. Laundry for the hotel.”
“Your work is here.”
She approaches the stair and reaches up with both hands and lowers the bundle down to rest it upon the third step. “My work has been taking care of that boy.”
“You can’t take care of him doing other men’s laundry.”
“And I can’t feed him if I don’t.”
“Now you can.”
“I couldn’t while you were gone.”
“I ain’t gone no more.”
“You never know.” And with that she picks up the laundry and goes on up the stairs and into the house. She crosses to the stove and adds wood to the banked fire thinking of how she has done this for a year now—this fetching of the laundry and this splitting of the wood and this boiling of the water, this scrubbing of the linens and this drying of them upon the line and this meticulous pressing of them inch by inch with a three-pound iron heated red upon that selfsame stove—thinking of how she has done all this for a year now on behalf of herself and the boy, and of how she intends not to give it up for anyone who would dare threaten to take from her such independence as she has managed through devotion and determination to earn.
He leaves the boy to finish gutting their catch, and he climbs the stairs and enters in through the door to come stealthily up behind her and take her arm and whisper his rage into her ear. “I done it for him.”
“You did it because you couldn’t help yourself.”
“Why should I.”
“And you did it because you’d had too much to drink.”
“He wronged my boy.”
“So you say.”
“He did.”
“Some would say he spoke the truth.”
“That don’t matter.”
“I suppose not.”
Strong in the belief that he has triumphed, Finn takes up a kingly position at the head of the table and watches her work for a moment and then returns to his previous concern and instructs her that this laundry is the last she will do for anyone but her own household.
“There’s no disgrace in it.” Not arguing, but merely stating something that seems to her a fact.
“Maybe not for you.”
She does not ask for clarification but keeps her back to him and takes up some lye soap and a peeled branch that she uses for stirring the pot.
He waxes expansive nonetheless. “I reckon it comes natural to some, but I won’t have none of mine washing sheets for white men to sleep on. I won’t have a string of no-good white drummers and fancy white lawyers coming through this town sleeping on sheets you washed.”
“There’s no harm in it.”
“It ain’t right.”
“It’s an honest trade.”
“Besides, you don’t need to do it no more.”
“The money’s good.”
“We’ll get by. We always did.”
“It would ease your burden.”
“My burden don’t need easing.”
“Suit yourself.”
Which he will. The only difficulty is that after a week or so, when her pay from the Adams Hotel has run out and they are left one and all to subsist again on such sustenance and trade as he and now the boy can draw forth from the river, a brief dalliance with high-quality bottled whiskey at Dixon’s bar comes to its natural end and he returns dejected to his customary poisonous forty-rod. She has set aside a few dollars in a tobacco sack at the bottom of the sugar barrel but he does not know it, else he would have spent that too on drink.
“I can’t give you no more credit,” says Dixon early one evening when Finn has barely gotten started.
“You’ll have my best cats tomorrow. Them nice little fiddlers, sweet as pie. I’ll save every last one just for you.”
“I’d be obliged.”
“Then let’s proceed.” Finn fingers his glass toward Dixon along the bar.
“I’m afraid not.”
The cardplayers at the long table quiet down to hear what comes next but Finn disappoints them all by merely looking slowly at Dixon from under his eyebrows.
“The missus thinks you’re in a little deep,” says Dixon.
“The missus does.”
“That’s right.”
“And what do you think.”
“I reckon she’s correct.”
“Tell me,” Finn says. “How deep’s too deep, exactly? I mean according to the missus.”
Dixon pulls a ledger from beneath the bar and adds up some numbers and shows the total to Finn, who possesses enough mathematics to recognize generosity and disaster when he sees them tallied together into a single figure.
“That adds up to a passel of catfish.”
“It does.”
“Even them precious little sweet ones.”
“Amen.”
“I know when I’m licked.” He pushes his stool away from the bar.
“I’m obliged,” says Dixon.
“I appreciate your kindliness.”
“Come back tomorrow with some of them sweet little fiddler cats, and we’ll start to whittle it down.”