by Jon Clinch
“YOU FORGOT THE FLOUR.”
This is how he wakes up, this and a head that feels as if Bliss had fired that pistol of his straight through it and then dragged him here to this bed and left him bleeding in it to die. She is calling to him up the stairs, calling to him as if he can do anything about her lack of flour from where he lies in his bed of pain.
“You forgot the flour.”
Silence.
“There’ll be no biscuits today.”
This suits him fine as long as she goes quiet for a while in the bargain, which she does.
Later he troops down the stairs and plants himself at the table and stares across the water with a headful of poison. The coffee tastes vile but he drinks it boiling until he begins to sweat and then he drinks some more and when the pot is empty he goes outside to relieve himself. All the while the woman and the boy eye him as they would watch a snake, and maintain a safe distance.
“You go on run them lines,” he says to the boy when he returns. “I didn’t get to them last night.”
“All by myself?” The boy is as thrilled as he is uncertain.
“I said you go.”
The boy does, gladly and with some pride in the newfound role into which he can feel himself maturing. The woman says nothing as he leaves. She has no fear for his safety nor doubt that he will produce a fine catch, but like any mother she desires all the same to advise caution and invoke good luck. Yet the chill that the man has brought into the room suggests that they will all be better served if she permits the boy to go about his father’s business without remark, and so she sits in silence. He is barely down the stairs when his father begins.
“There weren’t money for flour once I begun paying your debts.”
“My debts.”
“Weren’t money for flour nor nothing else. And we’re still in the hole.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know what I mean and you know where I been.”
She picks up a dish and rises and moves toward the kitchen.
“Sit.”
She sits, and she says what she knows. “You been to Mr. Connor’s store.”
Finn lifts an eyebrow. “That his name? Even a sly old worthless nigger like that one got to have a name, I reckon.”
“He does.”
“And you’d be the one to know it, you running up your tab there and all.”
“I had no choice.”
“You living on credit like the goddamn Queen of England while I ain’t here.”
“It’s not what I wanted.”
“A person don’t do what he don’t want.”
She looks him in his bloodshot eye. “And I suppose you wanted nothing more than to spend our grocery money on corn whiskey.”
He raises a finger, indicative of his entire ready hand. “Don’t question me.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“You got yourself in deeper’n you know.”
“Did I.”
“And white men’s laundry ain’t the way out. Not no more it ain’t.”
“He told you.”
“I figured.”
“I wanted to keep it quiet,” she says. “I knew you’d be.”
“You knew right.”
He rises and strides out to the porch, where he can stand looking across the river with one hand visoring his brow. For a moment he watches the boy running the lines. All along the valley the sky is stacked high with clouds and from time to time one passes between the boy and the sun drowning him in a temporary space of moving shadow. The father draws water from the rainbarrel and stands drinking it while shadows of his own making pass across his face. “You ain’t to go down there no more.” Showing her only his broad back.
“Down to Connor’s.”
“Down to darktown I mean. You got to be broke of that, now I’m home.” He lowers the dipper into the water and raises it up and drinks some more. “I aim to break you of it right quick.”
“Where was I to go.”
“That’s no business of mine.”
“You were in the penitentiary.”
“I know it.”
“I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but white or colored, people aren’t generally solicitous of a woman in my position.”
He turns like machinery and neither puts down the dipper nor hesitates as he steps back inside the door to where she sits at the table with her hurt feelings and her effrontery. The dipper is an old one he found somewhere long ago, its bowl half eaten with rust and its handle twisted like a branch, and he grips it tight enough to slice a less callused hand across the palm. The momentum of his passage brings him to her straightaway and gives the backhanded swing of his right arm untold power, and accelerates the arc of that rusty implement into a stroke as fierce as a lash. Had she not flinched she might have lost an eye but as it is the jagged metal edge cuts her temple down to white bone, white bone instantly drowned in red blood and black flecks of rusty iron and a spattering of residual water that trickles down her face like the tears that she will not permit herself to shed either now or later.
“I’ll teach you to tell me my business,” says Finn, craving solitude and silence and perhaps a little whiskey.
15
ALL ALONE IN THE WORLD he passes the shacks and the sheds and the shuttered storefronts of darktown. Along past Connor’s he goes, a place where he is known for having years ago paid off his woman’s debts and then kept his own promise never to trouble those premises again unless burdened by a parcel of carp or some other worthless fish that no other trader in the valley would lower himself to buy. Today he has no catch and only the memory of any closed obligation, and so he directs his tread toward the door of that regal woman whose life he not only helped ruin but has since set about rebuilding according to his own lights.
He finds her tending her cauldron on the riverbank behind the house, and he admits himself into her presence uninvited. He had meant to bring an item or two of laundry but forgot in his eagerness and haste, and so he produces from the pocket of his coat an undershirt that he stripped off while still afloat on the skiff. His shirt is haphazardly tucked in and he fears for a moment that she will surely guess his deception, but if she does she gives no sign of it or at least none that he can detect.
“I figured your husband’d be home.”
“He ain’t these days.”
“Ain’t home.” Making a grim little unobtrusive joke to himself but not to her for she cannot know that he knows.
“Ain’t been for a while,” she says.
“He’ll be coming back, though.”
“I don’t reckon.” Stirring with a peeled branch she edges around the pot in Finn’s direction, which has the result of putting her slender back toward him. He is uncertain what to make of this shift for he cannot see the tear gathering in her eye, and he would still be uncertain what to make of it even if he could.
“He run off?”
“He got himself killed.” Her voice rises barely above the inaudible, and a single crack from the fire would be sufficient to drown her out and wipe clean her slight speech from the consciousness of this world forever.
“I’m sorry,” says Finn.
“Two men done it by night.”
“No.”
“Stole my boy and killed my husband.”
“You had a boy.” As if he has forgotten or never known.
“The two of them broke down that door and come in together.”
“You was home?”
“We was all of us asleep. Until then.”
Finn cogitates for a minute, watching the steam rise and inhaling the dizzying smell of her homebrewed lye soap. “At least they didn’t touch you.”
Turning to show him her face. “I’d die right this minute if I knew how.” Turning it away again.
Finn considers asking whether it was white men or black who committed the crime, and then wonders for a moment whether he should ask if the murderers or kidnappers or whoever they are
have yet been found, but by the set of her shoulders even he can see that the time for such curiosity or whatever else it might be is well past.
He turns to go. “I’m glad I could make that door right.” Almost as if it doesn’t matter.
“You didn’t have no idea.”
“A person notices.”
“I’m obliged.”
“Don’t worry none. You got troubles enough.”
16
SLICK AND GLISTENING with bluegill scales the boy slides onto the couch alongside his mother there on the sunshot porch, and together they watch as his father poles upstream with the morning’s gutted catch. The boy is surprised to find her resting here at a moment when she is usually occupied, but not as surprised as he is to detect a kind of despair both in her posture and in the dispirited way she answers his greeting. And not half as surprised as he is to discover the bandage on her swollen and pale face when she turns to look upon him and admit him thereby into her shame and her fury.
“What happened?”
“It was an accident.” Which she means to make true, because it is her intention that a thing such as this shall not be permitted to happen again.
For his part Finn sells all his catch but a handful and invests most of the proceeds in a quantity of Bliss’s forty-rod. The remainder he spends begrudgingly on certain necessaries, and after he returns home and ties up and tells the boy to bring in the groceries and you’ll be careful with them jugs if you know what’s good for you, he takes the last few of the fish and bundles them freshly in wet reeds and wraps them in a clean cloth sack and starts uphill.
“I thought you could use some,” he says to his brother when he finds him.
“I don’t cook much.”
“I know it.”
“Perhaps I’ll have them fry them up over at the Adams. For lunch.”
“Beat the hell out of whatever’s on the menu.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.”
“Don’t know who they’re buying from these days.”
“Some lesser supplier, no doubt.” He sighs, flicking bits of dust from the gleaming top of his desk and sniffing the unwelcome odors of fresh bluegills and his own kin.
“I didn’t come here to talk about business,” says Finn.
“Or fish.”
“Neither one.”
“What then?”
“I come here to let you know he’s right.”
“The Judge.”
“Not all the way right, but.”
“But he has a point.”
“You could say.”
“He’s right about some things.”
“I reckon.”
“Nobody’s wrong all the time. Not even the Judge.” Will wrinkles his nose and points with one finger at the sack. “Let’s take those across the street right now, shall we?”
The sun is directly overhead, high as the smell of bluegills and brother as Will locks up and the two of them step down from the porch into the street. They enter the dim cool fastness of the hotel lobby through great swinging double doors, Will first and his brother behind by only a step or perhaps two yet nonetheless visibly subordinate. The lawyer gives the impression that he was born here. The riverman on the other hand looks as if he is hunting something or perhaps being hunted himself.
Beneath the arched doorway to the dining room Will whispers in the ear of the octoroon Lovett, who takes the bundle from him as if it is infected and strides with it toward the kitchen. Will waits to be shown to his table, where he takes up his usual post and lets his brother sit where he may. He raises one hand to dissuade the waitress from leaving menus and orders tea with lemon for himself. His brother orders whiskey but then thinks better of it and in the end orders nothing, not so much as a glass of water to wash down his own catch.
“So what’s the old man right about?” Leaning forward to create a space of confidentiality between them in the vast high-ceilinged room.
“My troubles.”
“That covers a good bit of ground.”
“The woman.”
“Oh.” He flutters his napkin loose and arranges it upon his lap. His brother tucks his own into his collar and smoothes it down. “I see.”
“I don’t believe she’s worth the trouble.”
“So you’re giving in.”
Finn goes ruddy above his white napkin. “It ain’t that simple.” But keeping his voice down, intimidated by the high room and the bustling staff and the lunchtime crowd just beginning to filter through the door, lifting their hands in restrained and respectful greetings to his brother one by one.
“It is to him. To the Judge it’s every bit that simple.”
“Still.”
“I suppose you’ve had some revelation.”
“I’ve had a few.”
Will leans back as the waitress brings their plates, the bluegills arrayed upon them delicate and fragrant in ways that Finn has never imagined much less witnessed. They have left his presence ordinary and returned transformed, and he barely recognizes them for his own nor dares disturb them with knife and fork.
“Eat up,” says his brother. He selects his cutlery with the intensity of a duelist. “So you’ve learned some lessons.”
“I have.”
“That will please the Judge to no end.”
“I know it.”
“Is that what you want?” His mouth full.
Finn thinks. “I reckon it may as well be.”
Will gives his head a rueful shake, not as if he disagrees with his brother but as if he is reflecting upon the tragic loss of him. “Times have changed.”
Before Finn can ask him to clarify his meaning a gentleman dressed all in white linen approaches from across the room, one hand outstretched. “Will, you old hound dog,” he calls, although by the appearance of him and the refinement of his voice he seems unlikely to have been much in the presence of hound dogs.
Will stands to greet him and while they shake hands the stranger takes the attorney’s right elbow in his own left hand as if the two of them are the dearest and most long separated of companions.
“Senator Farraday,” says Will. “Good to see you again. Do you know my brother?”
The senator runs the fingers of his left hand through the gray tangle that rides high upon his head like a storm at sea. He leans theatrically back to assess Finn from his great height, a stance yielding the impression that if he were wearing galluses he would be about to snap them. “Only by reputation,” he says. And then he plunges a hand toward Finn and smiles from under his mustaches as if their entire encounter is the purest of delights. “The pleasure is mine.”
Finn does not even have a chance to follow his brother’s lead and rise fully to his feet before the senator is through with him and gone, striding back to his table where he dampens a napkin and wipes his hands and calls for the waitress to bring ’round a replacement.
“He didn’t mean anything by that,” says Will.
“How do you know.”
“I just know.”
Finn turns his head to one side and the other, assessing his position in the room. “The way people look at me.” His voice low.
“The way you look to them, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“That ain’t it.” Reaching a filthy hand toward a mountain of hot biscuits piled under a gleaming napkin.
“It’s some of it.”
“I am what I am.”
“Leaving her won’t change that.”
“It might for the Judge.”
“Don’t get your hopes up.”
“Look at you,” says Finn, pointing with a biscuit. “You fit in. You got a place in the world.”
“So do you.”
“It ain’t much. And half of it I owe to you. More’n half.”
“That’s nothing. And anyhow it’s not what I’m talking about. I mean you’ve found your own way. You’ve taken your own direction. With no help from the Judge.”
“Which is more’n you can say for
yourself, I reckon.”
“I reckon,” says Will.
Finn sops up what remains on his plate with the biscuit and studies the filmy residual streaks of butter and grease as if hoping to divine some truth from them.
“Besides,” says his brother, “he won’t love you any better for abandoning that woman.”
“He might.”
“I suspect he’ll hate you more.”
“Why.”
“He’ll decide you’re weak. He’ll accuse you of vacillating.”
“He might.”
“He’ll dismiss you and your best intentions altogether.”
“I reckon he could.”
“You know the Judge.”
“I do.”
Will raises his hand for the check. “No matter what you do now, he’ll never forgive you for what you’ve already done. That’s his way. All you can do by struggling is make things worse.”
“I know it.” Like a fish on a line.
NONE BUT BLISS has time or temperament for him.
He poles past Dixon’s in the lowering rainy dark, looking up from the river as Dixon’s wife lights the lamps and draws the threadbare curtains. Under circumstances such as these even so poor a place as this acquires an ethereal and inviting glow for those who are forbidden its delights, among which scattering of sad outcasts Finn must number himself on account of his continuing indenture to Connor for the woman’s debt. He’ll be damned if he’ll buy whiskey from that black bastard with the few cents he permits himself and he lacks enough to so much as get started at Dixon’s, and back home under his own roof confined with those two he feels as if he may as well be back at Alton. So these days he can be counted upon at nightfall to tie up to a branch and thread his way in the darkness to that secret spot in the woods where Bliss’s fire is constant and his whiskey is cheap and his hospitality is reliable if not quite freely given.
“I ain’t running no tavern hereabouts,” says the blind man as Finn emerges from the treeline.
“I know it.”