by Jon Clinch
“Careful,” says the Judge, his smile an ironic mask.
“Why? Does this one bite too?”
Finn takes his hand and churns it. “I see you do know that brother of mine.”
Perhaps Whittier is humoring the Judge or perhaps he is blinded by the old man’s legendary stature or perhaps he is himself just more a man of the people than his elegant appearance suggests, but he gives the impression of being genuinely delighted to have made the acquaintance of this ragged and wild-eyed figure. “Will you be joining us for supper?”
“He will not.”
“I reckon I already had a little something.” Rolling his eyes toward the bar and the barman and the standing bottle.
“Then perhaps we ought to have a little something more.” Whittier indicates the bar with his upturned palm and addresses his suggestion more to the Judge and his wife than to Finn, who he can see is always ready for anything in the way of a drink.
“I’m in.”
His mother demurs and starts off toward the dining room, which leaves the Judge to choose between accompanying her and looking after the best interests of his unsuspecting guest. As much as it distresses him he follows the two of them to the bar, where they have already taken up positions on either side of the bottle.
“How long you known Pap?”
“Not long.”
“I reckoned so.” Confidentially: “He ain’t got much patience for drink.”
“Now, now,” says Whittier as the Judge settles onto a stool and shakes his head at the ready barman. “All things in moderation. Isn’t that correct, Judge Finn?” Lifting his glass.
The Judge ignores his impudence. “Mr. Whittier is out from Philadelphia, your mother’s birthplace.”
“I know where she’s from.”
“He’s an attorney, representing us in certain matters having to do with her parents’ estate.”
Finn gawks, incredulous. “When’d they pass on?”
“They’ve been in the ground for years.” The Judge tips his great knowing head toward Whittier for sympathy, but Whittier offers him none for he believes that his son’s ignorance is a great and bracing joke.
“You’ve got your own way of looking at the world,” he says, a step away from clapping the younger man on the back. “Do you know that?”
“I know it. I reckon I’m what you call the black sheep.”
“Me too,” says Whittier. “My people are day laborers, one and all. It broke their hearts when I took up the law.”
“Ain’t no good never come of it.”
“And very little good has come of hard labor, either. Not so far as I’m concerned.” He raps with his knuckles upon his wooden shin loud enough to make Finn jump. “Taken off by an overturned hay wagon. I was just a child. It reformed me then and there, and set my course in life.”
The two of them put their heads together to work on the bottle of whiskey for a few minutes and the Judge watches them as he would study a nest of insects, curious about their ways but wary of their intent.
The barman whispers to him. “The feller told me who he was, sir, but I thought he was all wet.”
“Thank you,” as if he has received a high compliment long overdue. “Oddly enough, he seems to possess a power for entertaining my houseguest that is well beyond my own capacity.”
“Folks are different.”
“I know they are.”
“That’s one thing I’ve learned.”
The Judge sniffs.
Finn lifts his voice. “I’ve been telling Mr. Whitfield here how I’m at loose ends.”
The Judge to his visitor: “My son’s income has always been, how shall I say it, uncertain.”
“I ain’t talking about them kind of loose ends. I mean the woman.”
“Please.” With a freezing look that would bind and gag him if it possibly could, and manacle him to the bar for good measure.
Whittier raises his glass in a toast. “Your son tells me that he and his wife have gone their separate ways.”
“Not exactly. Not exactly my wife, I mean.” With an animal grin.
“That’s correct, Mr. Whittier.” The Judge agrees with his son for once. “Not exactly his wife.”
“Now, I’m not bothered in the least if you folks want to do things a little differently out here.”
“We do not do things differently. We live by the same precepts here as in any other civilized place.”
“I don’t want you thinking I’m shocked is all, just because I’m from the big town back east, if a fellow wants to take up with a little old gal.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I’ve seen a bit of the world.”
“I suppose you have,” says the Judge.
“As I was saying,” Finn resumes, helping himself to the bottle, “I done set myself free of that woman.”
“And as a result you expect me to be proud of you.”
“Speaking for your son, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I assure you that my son knows all there is to know about shame, Mr. Whittier. He could teach both of us volumes.”
Whittier eyes Finn with something approaching a new appreciation.
“I shall be forthright with you, Mr. Whittier. My son has possessed an untoward predilection for nigger women since young manhood. He has lain with one in particular for many years now, and their unnatural union has yielded unto this world a bastard mulatto child.” He rises a bit, as if pronouncing a sentence. “The shame that he has rung down upon his family and his race is beyond any reckoning.” He excuses himself to check on his wife, and when he returns from the dining room his misbegotten son and the Philadelphian Whittier and the half-drained bottle are all three of them gone off into the night, the barman knows not where.
THE TWO MEN, one broad and bullying as a grizzly and the other dangerously slim in his elegant woolen coat and beaver hat, one slightly astagger and the other reeling on his mismatched legs, make their way down the hill sharing a bottle between them. It does not last long, the bottle, and Finn underhands it riverward when they reach the pier and together they stand to watch it go circling end over end upward and upward into the moonlight and then down again knifing into the water with nary a splash.
“That’s that,” says Finn.
“That’s that.”
“You got money.”
“I happen to be filthy with it.”
“God bless you for a gentleman,” says Finn. “Myself, I’m a little poorly just now.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing.” Whittier puts his hands on his hips and surveys the night river. He turns to his guide and presents him with a slow smile of infinite mischief and delight. “Your grandparents’ estate takes good care of its executor.”
“And that would be you.”
“That it would.”
Finn lowers his chin and cackles into his beard with a certain unmitigated glee. “Whitman, you’re a man after my own black heart.”
“And who would have guessed?”
“Not the Judge.”
“No. Surely not the Judge.”
They choose a skiff and Finn poles it up to Dixon’s place and introduces his newfound benefactor all around. Dixon has plenty of whiskey and Whittier has plenty of money and between them they strike an agreement that leaves everyone happy save perhaps Dixon’s wife who hates a drunkard. An angular black man playing a banjo in the corner names a rollicking number after him and the cardplayers let him win a harmless hand or two, and by closing time his misspelled name along with the date or some date close to it have been carved into the wainscoting beneath the bar by a grateful individual gone belly up and fish-like thanks to Whittier’s memorable largesse.
“Where to?” says the Philadelphian when everyone else has gone home and Dixon’s wife has shown these last two the door.
“I know a feller.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
They stumble down the steps and untie and make for the dense patch of woods
on the river’s edge where the trail that is not a trail to Bliss’s cabin begins. Even for Finn, who knows it well, the passage seems to camouflage itself anew each time he seeks it, and as he proceeds along it now he could swear that every turning has shed its prior geometry or traded places with some other. The woods are silent save the tree-to-tree movement of these two, whose steps are not half so stealthy as they would desire or believe.
“Bliss can hear a cricket fart at a hundred yards,” says Finn. “So we better start stepping light.”
“Won’t he be asleep?”
“You can’t never tell. Not with Bliss. He don’t do nothing regular.”
“Why don’t we just wake him up and buy the stuff?”
“Now Whit,” says Finn with a look of comic derision visible by moonlight through a high canopy of leaves, “where’s your sense of adventure?”
“I have money. I don’t need a sense of adventure.”
Because Finn cannot deny the wisdom of this sentiment he chooses to ignore it, and so rather than answering he lifts a finger to his lips. Together they plunge ahead into the depths of the woods as quietly as any two staggering drunks, one of them city-bred and afoot in the wilds of Illinois for the first time in his life and hampered by a wooden leg on top of it all, possibly could.
Bliss’s shack is darker than the dark woods themselves and many times as threatening. Despite his frequent visits to the still and the secret cache of whiskey and the broad tree-shaded porch, Finn has never set foot within the cabin itself and so he does not know exactly where inside it Bliss might lie sleeping or beneath which open window his ready ear might lie cocked. The crumbling place stands in its clearing like a ruined mausoleum by moonlight, the air around it still redolent of woodsmoke and alcohol. Finn spies it first from the fringe of the woods, and he reaches back to place a hand on Whittier’s chest, thereby arresting his progress.
“Are we getting close?” Whittier, hissing.
“Have you gone blind now too?” The outline of the house is plain enough to him as to be illuminated. He cannot imagine that Whittier is having difficulty resolving its squarish silhouette from the tangle of woods and brush that surrounds it, although by the light of day the very boards and shingles and struts of the decrepit place seem intent upon merging themselves back again into the organic earth.
“Oh,” whispers Whittier, making it out plain as day now that he knows it is before him. “Excuse me.”
Finn believes that Whittier means to make apology for his incompetence as a woodsman, and he is about to forgive him when from the direction of the Pennsylvanian there issues a noise as of strong rain on a flat rock. To avoid his companion’s inadvertent overspray Finn steps into the clearing where his foot lands with a single sharp report upon a twig laid by chance traplike upon another just like it.
“I done heard that.” Bliss’s voice from within the cabin.
“It’s Finn.”
The bootlegger’s silhouette appears dark against the inner dark of the cabin against the outer dark of the woods and Finn can see it moving within the doorframe.
“You taking a leak in my woods.”
“I reckon so.”
“Christ Almighty ain’t you got no decency at all. First you wake a man up in the middle of the night and then you start in to pissing in his front yard. God damn you.” The man has clearly been in his cups and between the fog induced thereby and a certain unsatisfactory measure of sleep prematurely interrupted he is perhaps even more irascible and off balance than is his custom.
“I need whiskey.”
“I need my sleep.”
At which moment Whittier completes his business and tops it off with a long grateful bellow of sighing respiration. The Philadelphia lawyer’s friends and family and descendants, if he has any, will be either comforted or saddened to know that he enjoys at least this one moment of unmitigated luxury before Finn’s bootlegging associate Bliss raises that ivory-handled pistol of his and fires it into the oblivious dark at the woods’ edge and puts a ball straight into Whittier’s unsuspecting shoulder.
“Damn,” says Whittier. “You weren’t lying.”
“Who’s your friend?” says Bliss.
“Nobody special.”
“Leastways I didn’t kill him. My aim must be off.”
“You’ve had a few.”
“I know it.”
Out from the woods comes Whittier with his bleeding shoulder darkly agleam in the light of the moon despite the layers and absorbency of his thick woolen coat. His beaver hat is gone, knocked off in the woods or fallen from the skiff or perhaps cast off back at Dixon’s, and freed from beneath it his hair is wild and clumped with leaves. Nonetheless thanks to the whiskey he has drunk he is gay of mood despite having been shot, and if pressed he would even go so far as to admit that receiving a ball in the left shoulder should not slow his drinking down even for the short term but will on the contrary serve forever in his mind as a badge of honor and a treasured memento of this wild-and-wooly occasion.
They go to the porch and Finn asks for a lamp but the bootlegger has none.
“Rags then. Clean if you got any.”
They leave Whittier upright in one of Bliss’s rockers with a jar of forty-rod in his good right hand while the two of them go off each on his own errand, Bliss for rags and a basin, Finn for some sticks of wood and a little fire from the banked coals beneath the still. They return and make a torch and douse it in whiskey and wring it out dry, and then Finn wedges it into a knothole in the porch floorboards and touches fire to it.
Finn’s course of action is clear so he helps himself to some drink and Bliss does likewise just to keep him company. They strip off Whittier’s coat, the man moaning in his chair as they peel it away from his wrecked shoulder. In the torchlight the wound is mysterious and wet and black.
“Go on pour some into that basin,” says Finn.
“Goddamn if whiskey ain’t the most useful thing on earth.”
“I know it.”
He bunches a rag and wets it and dabs roughly at the wound, which causes Whittier to flinch and forces a sizzling sound from between his clenched teeth. The ball has dug itself a deep passage down into muscle which gapes and puckers like a small mouth and leaks a slow insistent pulsing of blood.
“Will I live?” Whittier’s good humor returns the instant Finn leaves off mopping at the wound, and his right hand raises the jar.
“I reckon you will.”
“How bad I get him?”
“I’d like to see that ball out of there.”
“It can wait,” says the patient. “There’s a doctor in this town, isn’t there?”
“It ain’t in all that deep.” Pulling out his clasp-knife. “I’ve cut further cleaning a rabbit.” Finn cleans his knife with an alcohol-soaked rag and permits himself a long pull from Whittier’s jar. “Have another’n yourself,” he says. “You might need it.” He slides the lawyer out of his chair and gets him faceup on the porch and plants his weight astride his chest, and then he instructs Bliss to take the lawyer’s left forearm between his knees lest it move when he starts cutting. Between the chairs and the torch and the basin of bloodied whiskey there is some confusion on the porch and at one point Bliss’s right foot is up to its ankle in the stuff but soon enough this rough-hewn operating theater is ready and Finn bends to touch the black wound with the tip of his knife.
“Ow.”
“Don’t be a goddamn baby.” Finn grins down at the Pennsylvanian’s upturned face like some willful cannibal king who has passed his judgment and whose hand will not be stayed.
“That won’t help.”
“It weren’t meant to.” Turning his gaze to the wound pulsing doubly with its own blood and the torch’s flicker.
“I’d prefer a doctor.”
“I’m the doctor in these woods.” He reconsiders his strategy and takes the jug and splashes whiskey upon the wound, washing it clean again and making Whittier jump beneath their two pairs of clasp
ed knees. “Drink up,” he says, as if the wound were the mouth it resembles. And then he applies the knife.
Certain buried obstacles catch the leading edge of the blade and strive mutely to deflect it from its intended path, and although each one of them may be the ball each one of them in time proves itself otherwise. Whittier lies gasping and beating his legs both natural and wooden against the floor against the railing against the chair while frustrated Finn withdraws the knife and prods deep with his own rough finger.
“There she is. I swear it.”
But the lump is just a round bit of bone or gristle and prying upward upon it does no good, so he mops his drenched brow and fortifies himself and the patient and Bliss alike for good measure and delves in again with the knife clenched spoonlike in his fist.
The knife scrapes against bone and glances off to press against something soft that gives way and before he knows it Finn has an eyeful of blood and Whittier is bucking fit to catapult him off the porch. The leather straps holding the artificial leg tear loose, letting the wooden thing flail within Whittier’s pantleg like some furious weapon gone self-aware until it works its way free and lands spent upon the floorboards at some remove from Whittier himself who flails on while Finn squints through blood. “Let him go,” he hollers at Bliss, who is eager to comply. “More rags. Dip them.”
With two fistfuls of bunched wet rags he leans his considerable weight upon the Philadelphian’s pinned shoulder, not caring if he breaks every bone in it so long as he exerts pressure sufficient to stanch the bleeding. Bliss wets the man’s lips with whiskey and nearly loses a finger for his kindness, and as the moments tick by and the stars wheel overhead the rags grow sodden with blood and Finn nearly falls asleep with his weight upon the man’s chest and shoulder and the bleeding slows but does not stop entire.
Finn comes to his knees and pulls back the rags and examines the shoulder by torchlight. Whittier’s breathing is shallow and ragged but his forehead is cool to the touch, which the riverman takes for a good sign until with a burbling and a sudden hideous stench the wounded man brings up a portion of everything he has consumed since breakfast. On his back he lies strangled, not able even to gasp, while a shock goes through his body and out his helpless leg which kicks at the railing again in a kind of hopeless automatic fury.