Finn

by Jon Clinch

  He climbs the stairs and opens the door and does not even bother inquiring upstairs as to her presence for he knows that she is gone. The whiskey jug he puts in the kitchen and the slim contents of his pocket he spills out upon the table, some string, a fishhook, a button, two or three coins. Enough to finish paying off her debt to Connor, if he chooses. Out on the porch he steps around the horsehair couch to make certain about the one thing that he has decided might matter, and surely enough the boy is gone too. His pallet lies empty and oddly yearning in the moonlight.

  He returns to the dim kitchen and pours himself a tall dose of whiskey in a jar and brings it back to the porch to drink by reflected riverlight. As usual at this time of night his nerves are wildly ajangle and his body is wound tight as a watchspring and he is ready for something to happen. His breath comes rapidly and his breathing is harsh as he sits taking in the few soft lights moving on the current below. One such light, at some place upstream or down, could represent the vessel in which the two of them made their escape. There is no doubt in his mind that they left by way of the river, for what other artery is there for making serious time and distance. Unless they went to darktown, which would after all be just like that woman.

  He tilts his head back and tips the jar fully upward to empty what remains therein down his throat in one impatient sluicing, careless of how much may go into his mustache and his beard and run from there on downward along the sinews of his neck to soak into his shirt collar. The empty jar he places on the railing like a sacred totem, and he sits before it like a dead man with his hands hanging between his spread knees as if it might soon begin working magic. There is in fact some conjury in the way it reflects and absorbs and refracts such bits of light as come to it. Moonlight, starshine, lamps on silent boats below, the jar captures them one and all and mingles them together with diffuse reflected riverlight and trades them one for another as if they are all equal and all equally distant. From such materials as these it creates a localized and mysterious moving galaxy within which this watcher might easily find himself lost, and upon which his own deep alcoholic alchemy overlays its own twinings and taints and endless entanglements. Spots that might be spiders, and twists that might be snakes, and other dark amorphous things lurking indiscernible and beyond differentiation. One of them he fixes his attention upon, a tar-black thing that has either lowered itself down upon a filament or emerged whole from some concealed portal. He tilts his head from one side to another and back again to make it out more clearly but cannot no matter how he tries, for it seems willfully to resist him, concealing itself in the passageways of light and dark within the jar’s surface like some world-destroying entity out adrift among the stars. Once he nearly catches it, and he freezes, preparing to pounce, but it slips away again as a lamplit boat drifts by below disturbing the arrangement of light and dark. Furious and frustrated he decides to leap all the same, ill timed and ill aimed, and with the back of his hand he strikes the jar, which plunges noiselessly into the water. He is too weary to go to the kitchen and seek another jar or a glass or whatever other container he may find, perhaps even just the comforting jug itself, and so he kneels down upon the boy’s empty pallet and falls upon his side there with his back to the wall and drops into a fitful sleep.

  IN THE MORNING it is either search the river or search darktown, and even with a throbbing head he is wise enough to know which of the two will prove simpler. He makes haste downstream and ties up just below the village on the invisible margin where darktown begins. Down the single street he prowls, alert for any sign that she and the boy might have passed this way. Each glance that falls upon him and caroms off in its habituated manner looks suspicious this morning, and the posture of each individual he sees—whether a naked child at play in a hardpacked dooryard or an ancient gray-headed grandmother smoking her corncob under a willow tree—speaks to him of a secret just barely kept. He stops at Connor’s, turning with an appraising look to survey the low shack with its broken backbone and its long porch jammed with useless junk both for sale and otherwise. Then he goes to the door, careful as any regular to skip the one treacherous sprung step on the way, and admits himself.

  The place is as empty of life as a depot after the last stage has come through, and the unaccustomed silence both satisfies Finn and sets his nerves on edge. “You Connor,” he says at half-volume, the first words he has spoken all day, and the phrase as it passes from his lungs turns into a great throat-clearing cough that he stifles on his sleeve.

  No answer.

  “I’d reckon a nigger bastard could show himself long enough to take a white man’s money,” he says to the darkness, hoping that the woman is hiding somewhere nearby so as to witness both his disdain and his faithfulness. For in both of these qualities he is demonstrably and by his God-given disposition the natural superior to any of her race.

  No answer.

  He proceeds toward the rear of the shack, past where Connor keeps work implements hung and certain dry foodstuffs in barrels and various second- or thirdhand treasures making their sad rounds again in a display case built from the frame of a rowboat. He proceeds toward the counter, behind which that grinning squat old orangutan Connor holds court day after day. His cashbox is present, right below the counter on the little shelf where he is known to keep it, and this fact puzzles Finn as well. He bends over the counter to touch the cashbox with one finger as he would toe some dead thing he’d found lying in the road, just to assess its condition and see if there might be any danger in approaching more closely. There is plenty of weight to it, he discovers. There also may as well be a string attached, for no sooner has he pushed at it than Connor comes careening in through the front door as if the world is on fire and Finn has sounded the alarm.

  Finn turns as if he himself is the proprietor of this place. “Don’t hurry on my account.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Finn. I was just.”

  “No harm done.”

  “Something doing back to the house.” For in recent years Connor’s merchandise has so filled his little shack that it has finally crowded him out altogether and into a place down the alley.

  “I’ll bet.”

  Connor ties a white apron around his barrel of a midsection, an affectation he has lately acquired from shopkeepers in the village proper, and with an eye on the cashbox with which Finn has recently been toying he moves behind the counter. “What can I do for you?”

  “The usual.” Finn reaches into his pocket and draws forth from it his coins, and then one by one he lays them out upon the counter. “I reckon that about puts us square.”

  “You are a gentleman and a scholar, Mr. Finn.” He can see from the ridge of dust on the shelf that the cashbox has been lately disturbed, and he decides that the coins upon the counter are about to go back where they came from. No harm done. He will be glad to be shut of this Finn, make no mistake about that, and if he needs to pay a few cents for the privilege then so be it. He puts away the coins and opens the ledger and makes some marks therein, ending with a broad flourish. “No catfish today?”

  “No catfish no more, I reckon.”

  “Now, now. Just because we’re square don’t mean you need to be a stranger.” He lays his hands on the counter and puts on the old smile, but it doesn’t seem to fit.

  Finn has the impression that the savvy old man desires their interview to be over even more urgently than usual. “So what’s the matter back at the house?” As if he has ever extended a conversation of theirs so much as one word past its necessary length, and as if he could possibly care about the private life of this individual or any like him.

  “Nothing. Sick child.”

  “Honest to goodness.”

  “Honest to goodness.”

  “Ain’t that a damn shame.”

  “It is that.” His smile faltering a little. Finn has never attended entirely to the humanity of this being, preferring to watch him at some remove as he would observe a caged animal or some potential prey, but on this occasi
on he detects in his eyes and in his stance and in his weak smile a furtive quality that he does not like in the least.

  “You seen her, ain’t you.”

  “The child. Yes. My grandbaby.”

  “Not her. The other.”

  “She woke up with a mighty high fever.” Not thinking that Finn cares to know this but sensing that he wants to know something.

  “The other, I said.”

  “The other.” A question and a reassurance and an admission of bafflement all at once.

  “That woman of mine. You’ve seen her.”

  “No.” Yanked back into this moment by the scruff of his neck. “She run off?”

  “Don’t lie to me, boy.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I won’t tolerate it.”

  “I ain’t seen her.”

  “Don’t you lie to me.” He picks up a varnished stick that Connor uses to fish bolts of fabric down from high places and takes a single step backward and sights down its length toward him. “It won’t do neither one of you no good.”

  “Come over see my grandbaby, you don’t believe me.”

  “You think I won’t.”

  “No. I wouldn’t put nothing beyond you.”

  “You’re one smart nigger. You know that?”

  “I don’t mean to be.”

  “Let’s go.” Waving one end of the stick doorward.

  Connor bends to take up the cashbox rather than leave it unguarded here once more, and along the way he gives Finn a little sycophantish smile of explanation: “A person might wander in, take advantage of this useless old nigra.”

  Finn watches the way he moves and listens to the way he speaks and realizes all at once. “You think I done that.”

  “Done what?”

  “Took money from your cashbox.”

  “Now Mr. Finn.”

  “You said you wouldn’t put nothing past me.” He raises the stick and pushes one end of it into the storekeeper’s chest, stopping him cold.

  “I said that, I did. But I didn’t mean nothing by it.” Holding the cashbox to his white-aproned belly as Finn pushes harder on the stick, hard enough to back him up against the wall. His breath comes short and he feels a building pressure against his sternum, as if this avenger intends to lean upon his weapon until it pierces him through.

  “There best be a sick baby in your house yonder,” says Finn, leaning on the rod and giving the tip of it a cruel half-turn, “or I’ll gig you like a goddamn bullfrog.”

  CONNOR’S DAUGHTER IS BATHING her child in a tub of cool water when the two of them burst in, her father hung at the end of a pole like a dancing marionette and the man behind him ablaze all over with a kind of dark and furious light. “Lorena,” says Connor, “show this man your baby.”

  She believes for a moment that in spite of the visitor’s terrifying appearance he must be a doctor, perhaps the only one remaining who will do business in darktown, and she is thus prepared if only for the briefest of instants to throw herself and her child upon his mercy.

  The child cries out and her mother cradles her head in her hand and the ferocious white man says to both of them, “That’ll do.”

  “Your business here’s done.” Connor, feeling safe in his own house and pulling away from his tormentor and clutching his cashbox to his side.

  “But you seen her. I know it.”

  “I done told you. I ain’t.”

  Finn cares not for his reassurance and sets about to investigate every cranny of his back-alley shack with the lever of his long straight stick. He pries open each door and lifts each threadbare curtain and tries each loose floorboard, and when he is finished he swats at the baby’s basin for good measure.

  “If she ever was here, she ain’t here no more.” Peering out the back door and letting himself out into a yard stripped bare and packed down hard as rock.

  “She weren’t.”

  “So you say.”

  “I guess you got to try somewheres else.”

  “I know it.”

  He passes down the alley using the rod as a walking stick and occasionally rapping upon a wall or fencepost with it as his anger rises and falls within his breast like respiration. When he reaches the mudflats he turns upriver and flings the stick into the water as if it is tainted, as if it harbors poor luck, as if it has been handled too many times by that black storekeeper with his recordkeeping and his greed and his falsehearted smile. It whirligigs through the air and lands flat on the surface, refusing to enter the water, and then it gathers momentum and commences to float downstream as do all things dead and useless.

  He poles upstream and runs his lines and thinks. Each cat and carp rises to him like a coin drawn up from some secret sunken hoarding, and he reflects as he works that he is surely better off without the woman and the boy to live upon his largesse and take advantage of his hard work and generosity. Without them he could accomplish much more while requiring less. He could eat at Dixon’s more often, move up to a better grade of whiskey, perhaps even put a little something by now that he is out from under her and her carelessly accumulated debt. He poles to the bank and guts the fish and wraps them in wet reeds then poles up to Dixon’s. The packed dirt and twisted roots and fallen limbs that rise from the river like a stairway are slick with dew and will be slow to dry in the autumn damp, but he climbs upward upon them and tries the door to find it locked. The back door leading straight into Dixon’s living quarters is open a crack and from within comes the sound of argument, more precisely the sound of Dixon taking his customary abuse at the hands of his harridan wife. From his own newly elevated position as a freed man Finn takes pity upon him, but not enough to let him suffer his wife’s revilement in privacy. He knocks, listens, and knocks again until Dixon comes sheepish to the door.

  “Hey, Dix.”

  “Ain’t seen you around.”

  “Ain’t been. But that might change.”

  “It’s early for drink.”

  “Not that.” Finn raises his bundle. “Thought maybe I’d beat out whoever else you been using.”

  Dixon’s wife: “You tell him to go around front if he’s got business.”

  “I reckon you heard.”

  “I did.”

  Dixon shrugs. “The counter’s up there and all.”

  “Ain’t the kitchen back here?”

  “Just go on.”

  Go on he does, and he waits at the door while Dixon draws on his trousers and buttons his shirt and makes his way through the place to unlock it and let him in with his bundle of fish wrapped in reeds and dripping wet.

  “Got a mess of cats. Fiddlers too.”

  “Is that so. To what do I owe the honor.”

  “Lucky I reckon.”

  “You or me.”

  “Either one.” Shouldering his way through the door and back toward the counter that separates the bar from the backroom where Dixon’s wife remains isolate.

  “I reckon we can use every last one of these,” says Dixon when he has pushed back the bunched wet reeds and assessed Finn’s offering. “Not just them little ones. Ain’t that right, honey?”

  “Suit yourself,” she calls from the back, as if she is ostentatiously deigning to grant him some concession.

  Finn raises his eyebrows toward the woman’s voice. “Mine done run off, God bless her.”

  From Dixon he gets a look of mingled curiosity and compassion. “Whereabouts?”

  “She ain’t gone home, I can tell you that. Not home to Vicksburg.”

  “So where.”

  “Ain’t sure. Ain’t sure I care.”

  “How about the boy.”

  “Gone too.”

  Dixon gathers up the fish. “He’s a good boy.”

  “I know it.”

  “You’ll miss that one.”

  “I reckon I will. Sooner or later.”

  THERE IS A BRUSH on the dresser and after a few moments of hesitation and any number of false starts Mary takes it up and begins working her hair i
nto a smooth and glossy braid. While she sits occupied in this slow meditative manner she watches the boy asleep angelic upon the widow’s soft spare featherbed, and she thinks for once that she desires for him nothing less than exactly this, forever and ever. The house is quiet, silent in itself and isolated from the rising sounds of the waking village and alive only to the music of birds and the buzzing of insects. The widow must be a late riser, which Mary thinks odd for one her age, since Mrs. Fisk hardly slept a wink and complained about her weariness with every breath she drew.

  She is playing possum, the old woman, waiting to see just how her visitors will comport themselves in the absence of her guiding presence. Still as a mummy, desperate to make use of the chamber pot but committed to seeing this experiment through to its end, she lies and waits and listens like some predator. Her heart beats and she draws breath and the inner flesh of her eyelids scrapes again and again across the sticky glass of her glaucous dried-up old woman’s eyeballs, but beyond these small movements she may as well be dead.

  A wall away Mary bends into the sunlight of the window and removes from the hairbrush all signs of her use as meticulously as she would sweep clean a gravestone, and then she moves across the room to return the thing silently and with infinite care to its place upon the dresser. The boy is still asleep. She permits herself one last moment of rest in the ladderback chair by the door, letting her vision fall upon the vista of the river below. The positions of the window and the chair angle her view southward, far downstream, away from Finn and his riverside habitation but toward the world of her youth to which she dares not return nor cares to. She feels herself a princess locked in a turret, the sort of figure Mrs. Fisk would read to her about in the old slave days in Vicksburg, back when being royalty confined in a high castle chamber seemed the most desirable fate in the world. As often as not those stories included a banquet that materialized mysteriously upon an intruder’s entry into some ruined palace, and Mary realizes that if she waits for magic or hospitality or some other power to lay such a feast before her and the boy she will have done her years under Mrs. Fisk no honor.