Finn

by Jon Clinch

  “You bring a jug?” Poking the fire.

  “Damn. Left it in the skiff.”

  “Ain’t you the great idiot.” In all the world there live only two sorts of men who speak with the luxurious immunity enjoyed by this blind bootlegger: those in positions of great power, and those locked safely behind prison bars. Bliss imagines himself to possess certain qualities of both, and about this he is correct.

  “I reckon I’ll just have to drink it all at one go.”

  “I reckon.”

  The delight that Finn takes in Bliss’s whiskey begins at a level hardly describable as such and perhaps more accurately understood as its inverse. So it is with the bootlegger’s company. But over the passage of an evening’s time each one of these variables—whiskey and companionship alike—improves on a steady upward curve whose course proceeds through ascending parallel strata of pleasure and brotherhood. Still they both must peak eventually, and as the moon completes its circuit and Finn’s head begins to throb he usually begins to ruminate upon the course of his life and the various hurtful influences upon it and how they have conspired to bring him to such a sad destination as this. Drinking in the deep woods with a blind man who tolerates him for pay. Tomorrow night he will return, but he will like it no better.

  THE WOMAN IS HUNGRY and the boy is hungry and Finn is hungry too, but he of them all does not care much. He has eaten a little during the day, bits and scraps acquired by bargaining and stealth along his circuitous route, and so his stomach although empty is not quite so entirely void as theirs. She lacks sufficient flour to dredge the sunfish he has begrudged them for their supper, and the tobacco sack that she once concealed in the bottom of the sugar barrel now lies exposed like a bone unearthed in a hard land. The boy has thought to ask her about it on more than one occasion, but each time the shame attached to having opened the sugar barrel without permission has overcome his curiosity.

  “I’d think Connor must be paid off by now,” she says with a kind of dreamy resignation, in a voice pitched to suggest neither harm nor doubt.

  “You’d think.”

  She chews thoughtfully and slow, the muscles in her jaw sliding over and alongside one another as patient as the haunches of moving cattle. She chews as if she might by rumination extract more value from these poor scraps than they contain, the way a scholar might by study glean more from some volume than its author intended to be contained there.

  “Could be you got in deeper than you knew.” Desiring neither acknowledgment nor admission.

  “You would have more understanding of that than I would.”

  “Amen.”

  She has been for the past year and more a prisoner in this slanting riverside house and the boy a prisoner too, although for the most part he has had the good fortune to be asleep during those black hours before dawn when his father stumbles up the stairs from his nightly rendezvous with Bliss. She sleeps then too because there is nothing else for her, but he awakens her each time with a rough hand upon her shoulder or her breast or her leg—and once, by the most evil of chances, upon that tender place high on her temple where the wound from the jagged rusty dipper was not yet healed. At first he took her at these moments, facedown or faceup or however he happened to find her, but lately while the food has dwindled and his misery has ripened and increasing sums of the money that should by rights have gone to Connor have been going to Bliss, he has found himself frustratingly unmanned and blamed it upon her and sought thus his furious satisfaction in other more brutal ways.

  I’ll not be starved to death in my own house, she tells herself one damp autumn morning when he has left to go about his business. And I’ll not be beaten to death, for that matter. And so she fetches the money from the tobacco sack and calls the boy in from where he has gone digging for worms in the yard, and they gather up such belongings as they might claim for their own into a single tow sack, and together they walk south along the mudflats toward Lasseter proper.

  “We going to darktown?”

  “Not this time. Not ever again, if I have my way.”

  They stop at the landing, mother and child. Beholding the two of these ragged fugitives any observer would think them far from home and despairing of potential return, a sad pair of wasted refugees displaced from such lives as they might have ever hoped to know, rootless and lost and doomed to wander forever beyond the reach of the familiar until misery and death shall take them at last. The society and commerce of Lasseter, even here at the landing, where anything can happen, eddies around them at a decent remove as if they have been poisoned.

  Traffic upon the river is light, but at this nexus it folds inward upon itself and commences to clot like blood. A flatboat laden with coal, the skiffs of fishermen whose lines and haunts are downstream of those kept by Finn, rafts piled high with grainsacks and other goods for sale both upstream and down, these mingled vessels and more interweave their complex courses in silence save for the shouts of the rivermen and the occasional blast of a steam whistle from a sidewheeler not yet visible around the long rightward bend to the north. Mary’s heart rises to hear it as it always does, even as it has thus risen unfailingly during her years in the riverside house, for the distinctive high warning bellow of that instrument reminds her of her lost childhood and her daring father and their single great doomed adventure aboard the Santo Domingo. It stabs at her eardrums and it reverberates in her gut and it brings to her heart unbidden thoughts of freedom.

  Yet she lacks sufficient funds to book passage anywhere. This much she knows without inquiring. And so it is that she begs transport upon a keelboat bound downriver to St. Petersburg, a place she does not know but that can only be superior to this. The captain is a stern and pious individual as broad as a cotton bale and just as tightly bound, but the look of her and the look of the boy conjure up within his heart a reflexive pity that he mistakes for the irresistible will of God. St. Petersburg is not far downriver but it is as far as he shall go today, and Mary and the boy hardly notice that they are stepping out upon the banks of Missouri when they leave his care.

  The village is not large, although it is larger by far than her experience of the world. Her inclination is thus to remain on its periphery, and although she would like nothing better than to march up the main street and forge there some instance of the new life she has foreseen for the two of them she instead takes the boy by his hand and edges off to one side of the bustling riverfront square, where they stand as if enchanted while the society of little St. Petersburg manifests itself before them. Only when the boy loses patience with what he sees—with the men unloading barges and the men bartering over fish and the men playing mournful music upon a banjo and a fiddle under the partial shade of a whitewashed gazebo—only when his attention wanes and his gaze wanders away from the square and up the adjoining grassy slope of Cardiff Hill does the village present an alternative aspect to these two wayfaring strangers, for there in the sunlight upon the hill stands a house, a shingled house slate-roofed and foursquare in aspect, angular and clean as a block of salt, imposing as a mausoleum. It draws them as if it possesses a lodestone buried in its foundation.

  They climb the hill upward and away from the bustle of the village, she with the tow sack over her shoulder and he freed of all burdens save his own young life. The hill is fringed upon the far side with a crown of evergreens and tall oak trees just now in full but fragile leaf, and they move toward the house and its rearward encirclement as toward a fortified castle. A fence rings it and a wooden mailpost stands guard at the gate where like pilgrims they arrive expecting God alone knows what.

  “You girl,” comes a voice from the sunblind shadows behind the open door.

  “Ma’am?” For the voice clearly belongs to a woman and an old one at that. Mary touches her fingertips to the gate as she would touch the head of a child.

  “Can I help you?”

  A question she has heard rarely enough. “I hope to find work, ma’am.”

  “You and the boy too?”


  “He’s mine.”

  “You don’t look much alike.”

  “I know it.”

  The shadow behind the door and the voice emerging from it conspire to incorporate themselves into a resolving outline, the crooked but potent figure of a sturdy old gray-headed woman who steps now into the sunlight of the porch as if birthed there all at once by the power of their desiring. She has about her an air at once refined and severe, suggestive of the city and the frontier both, as if from her lofty post high on Cardiff Hill she has seen the future of this land and its past and has through an act of will incorporated certain elements of each into her aspect. She lowers her jaw and squints through her glasses, taking in every element of these two wanderers as if to make them her own by mere observation.

  “Runaways.”

  “No ma’am.”

  “I can always tell.”

  The boy gives his mother a pleading look.

  “Truly,” she says. “I was stolen once, I suppose you could say, but I’ve never run.”

  The woman leans against the doorframe. “You surely look it.”

  “I know.” Studying her hand where it lies upon the gate like a bundle of knobbed sticks, studying the shoes that over the years have nearly vanished beneath her tread in spite of all her caution, studying the boy, for whom anyone with a heart or even eyes would desire better.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Upstream. Lasseter.”

  “That’s Illinois.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re in Missouri now. Did you.”

  “I hadn’t even.” Not desiring to interrupt yet already sufficiently comfortable with the old woman to engage thus.

  “Things are different here.” Neither comfortable nor uncomfortable but oddly oracular.

  “As long as the work isn’t too much harder, I suppose I’ll get by.” Desiring to indicate her desirability as a helpmate by exhibiting both her amenable nature and a certain inborn ironic grace.

  “Why don’t the two of you come on inside. Let me explain a few things.”

  The house upon the hilltop is open to the four winds and shot through with the high clean scents of pine needles and long grass and oak leaves. Although clearly the domain of a thrifty old woman given to rag rugs and lace doilies and protective antimacassars, it has by dint of its elevated position an open and free and shiplike aspect. To the boy and his mother it feels like a place from which a person could jump off and land almost anywhere. Even the clouds seem closer.

  Her name is Douglas, and her neighbors call her by the most elevated title she has ever earned: the Widow. She has lived alone in this house since her husband met his Maker in an accident upon the water perhaps twenty years ago, and although he chose this place for its vista of the river below she can hardly bring herself to look out the windows anymore. Only into the woods behind the house, which seem to her at least close and fixed and comforting.

  Unaccustomed to visitors and undeterred by the oddity of these two she responds to this vagabond mother and child as she would to any forlorn and starving creatures. Her pantry shelves hold an untapped bounty which she spreads before them as before royalty. The woman helps her, this woman at home nowhere and everywhere whose child sits at the kitchen table in rapt and ravening anticipation, and together they discover a rhythm of movement that suits them both.

  “Help yourselves,” says the widow at last, and help themselves they do. Under his mother’s gaze the boy despite his appearance eats with the delicacy and grace of a cherub. For herself the widow consumes nothing save a cup of pale tea, but watching the two of them feast upon her accumulated riches brings to her heart a pleasure far deeper and more satisfying than they can know.

  “So you’re looking for work.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Pausing just long enough to swallow and answer and smile.

  “You eat,” says the widow, nursing her tea. “I’ll talk.”

  The boy grins as if this is the most agreeable disposition of things he has ever hoped to encounter.

  “Things are different here from the way they are in Illinois. Missouri is a slave state, you understand. I’ve had slaves myself, or at least I had one until I decided the arrangement wasn’t doing either of us the least bit of good.” She blows air across her teacup and thinks. “If you mean to stay here for long, I can’t hire you. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “You mean you can claim me instead.”

  “I could claim the both of you.”

  Mary looks around the kitchen as if evaluating its potential as either home or prison.

  “Depending, of course, on where you came from. On your circumstances. You mentioned you’d been stolen, for example. Now, it could be that circumstances would arise under which I would have to give you back.”

  “I’ve been living free in Illinois for as long as I can remember.”

  “I hope that’s true.”

  “It is.”

  “So how do you know your full history, then?”

  “How do I know that I was stolen?”

  “Exactly.”

  “People talk.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “Folks.” Not meaning to be difficult.

  “Your parents?” Believing she has ascertained something.

  “No ma’am. In fact, I was stolen straight out of the arms of my own daddy.”

  “And whereabouts was he a slave?”

  Mary sees in this instant just how completely she will need to be on her guard, not just around the widow Douglas but anywhere at all in this treacherous godforsaken spider’s nest of a state. “I don’t recall,” she says, and with these three words she repudiates her own history and the abortive kindness of Mrs. Fisk in the interest of freeing Huck from the perils of a past once removed. “People say various places. Mississippi. Louisiana somewhere. I don’t know.”

  The widow Douglas sips her tea and offers to refill the boy’s glass with cool milk from the pitcher. The look of delight that beams from his face at this small kindness illuminates her kitchen and her heart as has no other thing in the years since her husband died or even before; it would be worth starving the child near to death all over again if she could witness once more so miraculous a recovery.

  “But in the meantime you’ve been in Illinois.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “And although you’re not a runaway, you are running from something.”

  “Please.” Indicating the boy, as though the widow has for one moment looked elsewhere since their interview began.

  “You don’t need to say it.” The widow touches her hand with her own. “I may be old, but I’m not ignorant.”

  Mary takes some relief in this reprieve, and she sits for a moment enjoying the plain bright cleanliness of the kitchen and the cool breeze that enters through its windows without bearing upon itself the dizzying intolerable stink of fish offal. “You’ve been very kind,” she says.

  “You looked overdue for a little kindness. Your boy too.” The truth of which is beyond denying. “Permit me to make some inquiries tomorrow,” she says as she commences clearing the table, “and we’ll see if I can’t be of a little further use.”

  “We have no place to.” Rising along with the widow.

  “Pshaw.” She lowers a plate back to the table with some satisfaction. “You follow your instincts and clear these, and I’ll follow mine and air out a room for the two of you.”

  NO ONE HAS SLEPT in the back bedroom for years, and although it is clean beyond question there is about it an airless quality of preserved antiquity that the boy finds immediately disconcerting. “You reckon somebody died in here?” is how he puts it, and surely enough he is correct in his guess. The widow has thrown open the one window and he leans out of it headfirst with his feet airborne, halfway eager enough to crawl onto the shed roof and down the drainpipe to the ground. The white curtains billow around his ankles as if he has already taken flight in the manner of some great
fledged bird or angel, and his mother pulls them aside and takes his feet and draws him back to safety. Upon the dresser by the window is a tiny group portrait, tilted away from the sun for preservation. It shows a serious-faced young woman, presumably the widow Douglas in the period before her widowhood, an earnest young gentleman with a slouch hat and a ten-mile glower, presumably Douglas himself, and a sour-looking baby child of indeterminate gender clothed in a long dressing gown that tumbles like falling water and pools in the young woman’s lap.

  “I told you,” says the boy when he gets a look at the portrait. “That baby’s the one died in here. Right in that bed, I’ll bet you anything.”

  Night when it descends brings with it an unearthly quiet. The river traffic to which the boy and his mother have long become accustomed, with its variegated texture of curses and shouts and creaks and whistles, is lost far below, muted and attenuated by distance to nearly nothing. A light wind whispers through the branches of the evergreens behind the house, and occasionally a bough will brush against the shingles or the slates with a weary sigh, but aside from this and the widow Douglas’s antiquarian snore the house is silent. The boy and his mother lie awake wondering what they have done and what they shall do. Around midnight the widow arises and lights a candle and creeps to the outhouse. Upon her return she pauses at their door and opens it just the slightest as if to persuade herself despite the impervious darkness that the two of them are here with her still, and when she is for no ostensible reason satisfied she closes the latch with a tender furtive caution and puts herself back to bed.

  THE RIVERSIDE HOUSE IS EMPTY when Finn returns, and when he draws near he can feel its vacancy as he would feel an intruder in his bed. There is no outer indication, no lamp lit or unlit, no signifier present or missing that would suggest as he ties up the skiff and hoists his jug of forty-rod and makes his cautious way to the foot of the open stairs that he has been left abandoned by that faithless nigger woman and her white-skinned mulatto child.