by Jon Clinch
She goes down and makes breakfast, at which development the widow is sufficiently satisfied to don her dressing gown and shuffle downstairs herself, acting when she sets foot in the kitchen astonished and delighted but no more astonished and delighted than she truly is and then excusing herself for an urgent and long-overdue visit to the outhouse. Soon the clatter of pans and the smell of food and the voices of the two women in the kitchen conspire to wake the boy, who flings himself from the bed and darts along the hallway and slides all the way down the railing as if he has decided all at once that he owns the place.
“What on earth?” The widow, alarmed by the crash of his two-footed landing in the front hall.
“Huck!”
“Mama!” Charging down the hall and bursting into the bright fragrant kitchen with a look of such joy upon his face that neither one of the women can bear to criticize him, at least not this morning, at least not this once.
Mary has responded to the abundance of the widow’s pantry by cooking everything in sight, and the widow has not seen fit to restrain her. Eggs and bacon, flapjacks and country ham, biscuits and red-eye gravy—and not a single stinking catfish in sight. This must surely be paradise. The boy is ravenous and so is she and among the three of them they clean their plates and leave not a crumb. Huck has pocketed a biscuit or two but no one notices nor minds.
“I must say you do just fine in the kitchen,” says the widow.
“You haven’t seen supper.”
“I could use the help. Lord knows.”
“You could.” On her feet, looking for an oversize pot to boil water for washing up.
“Bottom shelf.” As if she has been reading her mind. “The cistern’s out back.”
“I’ve found it.”
“There’s no well. We’re up too high.”
“I hadn’t thought.” Out the back door she goes to fill the pot.
Through the open door: “And you do seem to have initiative.”
“You noticed.” Returning and daring to give the widow a playful glance, enough to indicate that she has recognized this morning’s activities for the test that they have been, should the widow care to confess or even merely acknowledge.
“You’re sure you’re not a runaway.”
“Not from slavery.” With a look toward the boy.
“Whyn’t you get some fresh air,” says the widow to him, but before he goes he lets erupt into that bright welcoming kitchen the dark question that has plagued him ever since last night: “Did that baby of yours die in our room?”
“Now Huck,” says his mother.
“Shoo, you impertinent thing,” says the widow. She waggles her fingers at him like twigs, but something in her manner indicates that she does not mind his having raised so delicate a question.
“Forgive him.”
“He’s a child.”
“I know it.”
“We all were, at one time or another. Rich or poor, Negro or white. We all started out the same.”
“You’re very kind.”
“I’m very old,” says the widow. “God help me if I haven’t learned something along the way.”
“He’ll learn too.”
“I know,” says the widow. “He will.” She sips at her tea, not minding that it has gone a little cold. “Perhaps we can even help him along some. Find a way to get him a little schooling.”
Mary’s eyes brighten, but the light that rises within them dies out as rapidly as it has come. “Not Huck. Not a mulatto boy.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“I know it.”
“Have faith.”
“I don’t know.”
“As for me, what I’ve learned is that I can use some help in this world.”
“So you’ll take me on.”
“I need to make some inquiries first. Inquiries with the marshal. With the banker.”
“I see.”
“Just so we know where we stand with respect to each other.”
Mary stands waiting for the water to boil.
“And of course there’ll be the legal ramifications,” says the widow, thinking out loud as is her custom.
“This being Missouri.”
“This being Missouri,” she agrees, “and not Illinois.”
THE MARSHAL HAS FEW REPORTS of an escaped slave woman with a boy child, and no reports in particular of an escaped slave woman with a decidedly light-skinned boy child sufficiently unlike her to have been stolen from somewhere, and so he assumes that these are just two more nameless elements in the constant flow of desperate mankind that runs beneath the surface of a nation divided. The widow has no surname to report to him, for Mary truly does not recall her own and has refused to part with the identity of Mrs. Fisk. Even had she confessed that one detail, no lawman in America would have made a connection to her Vicksburg childhood, since for the last ten years the kindly Mrs. Fisk has possessed nothing more of her beloved Mary than a fond memory and a bill of sale from the owners of the steamboat Santo Domingo.
The banker allows that on a monthly basis the widow can afford to feed two extra mouths, plus a little besides. He desires to know how much she will be paying to take ownership of the woman and the child, but the widow prefers to keep her own counsel. He will learn soon enough, is all she will say.
Judge Thatcher tells her that she will be able to claim the woman and child after six months of unfettered residency, should they desire to stay that long. “They don’t tend to linger in one place, these free Negroes, but I suppose you have a plan to keep this one handy.”
“I can’t say that I do,” says the widow.
“That would be your decision.”
“We’ll just have to see.”
“So we shall, so we shall.”
The judge makes some tentative inquiries as to the woman’s identity and origin, but the widow informs him that she has already considered all of this with the marshal and has no desire to travel that road again.
“Where has she been?”
“Up Lasseter way.”
“And who’d be the boy’s father?”
“I don’t know. All I know is she ran off.” She sits fingering her sunbonnet, watching its pale yellow ribbon move beneath her bent fingers. After a moment’s pause she raises her eyes to the judge: “To tell you the truth, by the look of that pale child I wouldn’t be surprised if he weren’t hers at all.”
Thatcher raises a hand in a peculiar little gesture of dismissal, for he can guess her intentions regarding the boy and would not dream of denying them. Even after these twenty years he misses the companionship of her dead husband nearly as much as she does, and although he knows that the empty place left behind by her lost child will never be filled by this mulatto foundling he will let her have her way nonetheless. “The father wouldn’t be a character by the name of Finn, would he?”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“He lives up in those parts.”
“I know who he is. He has a reputation.”
“Took up with a Negro woman some time back. If yours is the one, I’ll never know why she took this long to come to her senses.”
“I can’t say.”
“Do yourself a favor,” says the judge, “and find out. Then you come talk to me. Because if that old boy’s her man, you might want to reconsider those plans you don’t have.”
“Understood,” says the widow, rising from her chair. “But if I discover that that child is as rootless as he appears, I’ll be raising him for my own instead of claiming him.”
“Sounds like a fine idea.”
“And Finn be damned.” Jamming on her hat.
She visits the grocery for some baking powder and ground coffee and tells the man behind the counter that until she advises him otherwise a certain Negro woman named Mary will be entitled to sign for the usuals on her account.
They are in the yard, mother and child, when she returns to the house atop the hill. “I’ll tell you what,” she s
ays as she drops her sack on the porch and wipes her brow with a lace handkerchief, “the first thing you can do is get in the habit of making that trip for me.”
“The first thing?”
“I’m too old to be climbing mountains every day of the week.”
“Are we staying, then?”
“If it suits you.”
Mary cannot bring herself to inquire as to the terms of her employment—not only because the discussion seems altogether too delicate, but because it has never occurred to her that such terms are something that people might discuss at all.
The widow comes to her rescue. “I can part with room and board for you and the boy, plus a little extra. You ought to be able to put something by.” She collapses upon the porch step alongside her sack. “I won’t be on this earth forever.”
Huck scrambles off toward the woods and Mary stands on the lawn before the house, surrounded by green grass and an ocean of blue and all of the space in the world. She lifts her eyes unto the universe and the widow and begins to ask: “What about the.”
“Oh,” says the widow with a smile and a wave of her hand. “We have six months to resolve that.”
“Six months,” says Mary, considering. “And then what?”
“Then you can be claimed.”
“Huck too.”
“Huck too.”
Six months. Six months is half as long as Finn spent in the penitentiary at Alton, a stretch which seemed then an eternity of composited blessing and curse. She decides that six months will have to do. It may be sufficient time to alter a life for good.
“Happily,” says the widow with a grave kind of reserved maternal delight, “happily, I have made arrangements for an alternative.”
Mary cocks her head.
“All that’s required is that we tell the world a little story.”
“A story.”
“About Huck.” The widow pats the step beside her, indicating in vain that Mary should sit.
FINN WAKES AT NOON and lies in the bed listening to the river traffic, glad that for once he is not out in it. He has not lain awake in bed like this for longer than he can remember, and the activity seems to him more luxurious than any other he might name. There are fish upon his lines, this he knows, but they will await his pleasure as the woman and the boy never could.
Finally his belly draws him downstairs, and he makes himself a pot of coffee and fries up some bacon and dines kinglike on the porch. He cannot decide whether this is breakfast or lunch and he reckons that by establishing a practice of spending additional hours in bed he can economize considerably on his foodstuffs. Two meals a day for himself, versus nine altogether with those others. At this rate a person could make some progress in life, and in honor of this liberating insight he helps himself to a celebratory whiskey which turns by and by into two or three, and then he runs his lines and sells his catch half to Dixon and half to that scoundrel Smith and returns home. At suppertime he visits the dimly gleaming precincts of the Adams Hotel dining room where he has previously ventured only with his brother, but a single glance at the menu dissuades him from his intent and he wanders instead into the bar as if he has meant to come this way all along.
“Your best whiskey,” he commands the barman. “A double.”
The barman keeps a particular bottle for the use of the hotel’s proprietor and certain influential guests like the tousle-headed Senator Farraday, and out of habit he gives it a passing glance while he considers exactly what he might pour for this uncouth apparition posted at the dark end of the black walnut bar. He reaches for a bottle of some second-rate stuff, whiskey no doubt five times as good as anything this figure has ever drunk before and ten times better than he’d have the palate to recognize, but as his fingers touch the glass Finn cuts him off with a bark.
“Not so fast. I seen where you keep the good stuff.”
The barkeep nods in acquiescence and feints as if to reach elsewhere, toward another bottle just the slightest bit more elevated.
“Don’t try me.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m good for it.” Spilling coins onto the bar. “No matter what you think.” He fixes the barman with a vicious look that turns midway along its passage into a disdainful and predatory smile. “Or did you reckon you’d overcharge me for the plain?”
“No, sir,” says the barman, “I most certainly would not. This is a decent establishment.” He reaches for the bottle with one hand and takes up a glass with the other, although it pains him to present his back so nakedly to this individual.
“I don’t generally trade at decent establishments.”
“Is that right.” Turning, and working the cork free.
“But this,” says Finn, “is a special occasion.”
“How so.” Making a show of inspecting the empty glass.
“I done won back my freedom.”
“Really.” Pouring with infinite caution.
“That’s correct.”
The barman puts down the bottle and leaves the glass where it sits and edges closer to his customer as he might to some chained and ravenous creature brought back from the deepest jungle. “Won back your freedom.” Despite Finn’s layering of beard and hair and filth he draws his conclusion: “You don’t look it.”
“Shitfire,” says Finn, taking a certain amount of pleasure in the barman’s confusion and even more in being without doubt the first man to ever make such an exclamation here in the elegant bar of the Adams Hotel. “I ain’t no goddamn nigger. That what I just freed myself of, son. A goddamn nigger. And a woman too, all at once.”
“That’s quite an achievement.”
“Yes sir, it is.” Eyeing the distant drink. “Yes sir, you could say that.”
The barman presents the glass of whiskey upon a fancy coaster of darkly tooled leather, and then with a single professional glance he evaluates the pile of change that Finn has set out. He helps himself to most of it and goes to the register.
“You making change?”
“No sir.” Fearing the worst.
“Live and learn,” says Finn. He smacks his lips over the double whiskey and raises it to his lips like a sacrament. “There’ll be more where that come from.”
The barman turns and leans on the back rail to watch as Finn struggles with his conflicting impulses. Like Jacob with the angel the riverman wrestles, torn between desire and dignity, sipping and sniffing and eyeing the glass in the lamplight as if speculating on whether it contains some liquefied gemstone or the purest poison. Little by little he downs half of it before he completes this evaluative procedure, and then he sets the glass down flat on the coaster and puckers his lips. He sits tilting his head from side to side, thoughtful and slow as a bluetick hound.
“Well?”
“Smooth enough.” Toying with the glass, putting it up on one edge and setting it down again.
“So they say. Myself, I’ve never had the pleasure.”
Finn cogitates for a minute, then he raises the glass and downs the remainder in one gulp. “Don’t waste your money,” he concludes as he wipes his mustache with the back of his sleeve. “You’ll hardly know you drunk it, and how in hell much good is that.”
“You’ve got a point.” The barman fears that Finn may decide to part with the rest of his money on refreshment of lesser quality, but soon enough learns otherwise.
“I’m an expert in these things,” he says. Gathering up his coins.
“I guess you are. And on niggers and women too.”
“Amen,” says Finn. “And this right here,” running his finger around the interior of the glass to collect the residue and lifting that finger into the lamplight and licking it clean with satisfaction, “this right here is the one thing out of those three that I ain’t giving up.” He stands and thanks the barman kindly and sets a course for the door across the lobby, the tall double door which is just now opening to admit the night air and something else besides: a tall elegant stranger in a luxurious woolen overcoat
and a beaver hat, who holds the door wide and makes himself nearly invisible so as to permit the entry of the Judge and his wife.
In the shadows, Finn turns back to the barman. “You know that feller?”
“The tall drink of water? I don’t believe I do.”
“I mean the other’n.”
“I know of him.” Finn’s empty glass has already disappeared somewhere. “That’d be Judge Finn. The old woman’s his missus.”
Finn pulls out his few coins all over again and slides them onto the bar. “Tell me what’ll that buy.”
The barman whistles low. “Nothing much that I’ve got.”
“How about if I said that feller’s my own pap.”
“I’d say you were drunk, if I didn’t know better.”
“I ain’t lying.”
The barman rubs a fresh glass with a towel and does not even look up at the man standing eager before him. “If that’s your pap, then your money’s no good here.” Which remark Finn takes for an insult until he realizes that it is either a wager or a guarantee, between the two of which possibilities he has no cause to make any great distinction.
“You mean it.”
“I do.”
“Then pick me out a fair to middling bottle—none of your fancy stuff—and leave it on the bar.”
A SPECTER SWOOPING DOWN at him from the high chandelier could surprise the Judge no more than the sudden shambling appearance of his own son within the depths of this previously secure redoubt.
“Pap.” Hiking up his trousers as he comes.
His answer comes not from his father but from his mother, who speaks aloud his Christian name.
“Didn’t think I’d run into you,” says Finn.
The Judge stands dumbstruck beyond a theoretical margin sprung up around his own flesh-and-blood descendant, like a man tending a brushfire that has grown suddenly hotter and less amenable than he would like.
“Who’s your friend, Pap?”
The Judge looks away as if distracted, and then to the tall man in the beaver hat. “Mr. Whittier, may I present William’s brother.”
“Pleased to meet you,” says Whittier, with a smile and an outthrust hand. He teeters just the slightest, oddly like a drunken sailor in spite of his elegance, for his right leg is missing below the knee and he has never quite accustomed himself to its wooden substitute.