"No one even asks his opinion anymore. All of that learning gone to waste. All of that wisdom."

"He had his run."

"He'd be surprised to see you here."

"I reckon."

"It must be a special occasion." The look that she gives him is sly and knowing and coquettish all at once.

"I guess he ought to know I've broken if off with that woman."

The mother dares to speak her name, as if there could be any other.

"That's the one."

"After all this time."

"I know it."

"Your father knew you'd come around."

"Did he."

"He had faith in you."

Finn gives off with his hat and turns to unlatch the shutter and look out. The view from this elevated spot is the finest in Lasseter and it extends all the way down to the river, although thanks to the deep summer greenery of the trees and the comfortable clustering together of neat clapboarded houses one against the next he cannot make out his own place.

"He did," she says, as if to make herself believe it.

"You think so."

"I do."

"Then you tell him." Squinting at a boat upon the river and past that at a plume of smoke rising into the air from somewhere over on the Missouri side.

"No."

"Tell him I was here and tell him what I done."

"I will not."

He stands chewing his lip for a moment and then turns to face her. There upon her settee she has drawn herself up to her largest and most imposing aspect and although she doubtless intends to demonstrate her resolve thereby she looks to Finn like a foolish and willful child.

"I'll not run your errands," she says.

"You never would."

"Come back."

"I will."

Finn leaves his mother in the parlor and proceeds back down the long hill toward that house upon the river which now stands empty of all life save his own. His lines need running and he will get to them by and by, but no sooner has he passed his brother's office than he finds himself waylaid by the open door of a tavern. The proprietor is mopping up from the night previous and he shows him his back along with as much uninterest as he dares.

"How about a whiskey on account."

"I ain't open."

"Your door is."

"That's no matter."

"It is to me."

"I can't help you." Swabbing intently at a place he's already done.

"I'll take my custom elsewhere."

"Be my guest."

"I will." Looking away out the door he came in. He abandons the pursuit of whiskey not because the proprietor has successfully dissuaded him but because he sees across the street, just about to turn down the alley that leads alongside the Adams Hotel, a certain tall and lovely black woman with a bundle of laundry balanced upon her head. Bedsheets or towels, he reckons, done at home and brought back. He can imagine the misery and duress of her life well enough, for he knows without looking twice that she is managing somehow to get on without the boy whom the preacher drowned in the river after buggering and without the husband whom he himself shot clean in the throat mainly by a stroke of good fortune. He can see in his mind's eye the line upon which those towels or bedsheets have dried, for it is the selfsame line upon which the preacher spied the boy's overalls silhouetted. He desires to speak to her but denies himself the pleasure, not because he fears that she would recognize him without the mask-for her attention at that fateful moment in darktown was no doubt occupied by the preacher's assault on her boy's pallet and by the harsh report of the pistol that slew her husband-but because of the conversation that he has just had with his mother and the promise that he has made both to her and to himself regarding his reformation. Yet something inexorable within him stirs. And after she has vanished down the alley he returns home as if drawn by some power, and he climbs the stairs to the bedroom, and there upon the wall in anguished word and picture he describes the story of his urge and of his longing and of his despair over the fate of his poor doomed immortal soul.

HIS HAND IS BLACKENED and his face is blackened from the damp dirty recurring touch of it. The long ropes of his hair are drawn back and bound in a scrap torn from her dress, a scrap fingered likewise dark and thoroughly soaked as well for he has been hard at work in the airless bedroom documenting his dissolution. On the porch he drinks a dipper of water and then another after it without pausing. Sated and wet of hand he goes to the kitchen and fills a glass with whiskey and drops it and it shatters upon the planking, and before the whiskey can soak in he has flung himself prone and lapped up such of it as his desperate tongue can locate. He pays no mind to the slivers of wood and the rusty ill-driven nails that get in his way, although now and then a shard of glass does serve to impede his progress. He reckons that the more he presses forward the less he will have reason to mind, and in this he is after a fashion correct.

When he has recovered all that he can he rises upon knees now bloody inside his pantlegs and searches for the other glass in the jumbled depths of the cabinet. Slick with blood and whiskey his hand falls upon it at last, and he hoists it tenderly out into the last dying rays of the riverward sunset only to be disappointed, for he has unearthed not the glass at all but a baby bottle, a baby bottle gone cloudy with dust and cobwebs and perhaps a lingering sentimental scum of milk. Packed into its open end is a rag stopper half gone to dust. He considers for a moment whether or not such a bottle will do for whiskey, but in the end he decides that he would prefer something more capacious. Still he keeps it in the pocket of his overalls even after he has found the other glass and begun making use of it.

The air on the porch is cooler and the traffic on the darkening river provides distraction or at least a pleasant counterpoint to the whiskey. He leans against the rail and hollers once or twice across the water to passing rafts, with no intent beyond livening up the evening. Upon the ears of whatever raftsmen or wanderers or runaways are aboard these silent craft his voice from the elevated porch must fall like that of a lunatic or an idiot or an idle god, speaking from on high in a language unknown to ordinary men. His tongue bleeds in his mouth and from time to time he nurses it by causing it to lie still in an anesthetic puddle of whiskey until he can wait no longer and must swallow, and from this act so elegantly combining self-medication with restraint he derives a certain unmistakable satisfaction.

Black with coal dust and blood he lies upon the horsehair couch and drinks straight from the jug, for his glass is on the railing and he is too encumbered by drink to reach it. The baby bottle is still in his pocket and it pokes into his hip by way of reminding him of itself until he reckons that he knows exactly the place where it belongs and resolves to climb the stairs and place it with such care as he can manage into the broken-backed chest along with the gun belonging to that preacher. Up there in that hallowed place must go these things for which he dares hazard no further use, these things that ought by rights to go straight over the porch rail and into the slow hungry mouth of the river if only he were strong enough in spirit but he is not. And so he gathers himself and climbs the steps one by one to his limbo and his purgatory, where contrary to his best intentions he falls asleep on the hard frame bed and the bottle slips out of his pocket and drops to the floor without making sufficient sound even to awaken him.

11.

IN TIME MARY CONCEIVES and they are to have a child. During the months prior he imagines the burgeoning creature aswim in her belly, needful and blind and oddly imperious, as enigmatic as some new constellation hung in the darkness over the face of the Mississippi. He knows within certain limits what manner of fish his lines will bring up each day and how many, but the nature of this new thing is inscrutable and troublous.

"It's mine, ain't it?" he says to her as they lie side by side in the frame bed one morning, light coming in through the gabled windows. The lean flat surface of her belly has begun to distend and he is fascinated by it.

"Who else's would it be?"

"I don't know."

"You think too much."

"I know it."

She is unwell these mornings and she visits the outhouse in a desperate hurry and then returns to the upstairs room not entirely better but at least some relieved.

He takes up his thread again, for he has been considering something in her absence. "Boy or girl, you suppose?"

"I don't care." Lying back down with her face to the ceiling and her hands folded upon her stomach.

"I hope a boy."

"I'm sick enough for it."

"What's that mean?" For he knows nothing of such matters.

"They say you're sicker with a boy is all."

"Do they?"

"They do."

He lies contemplating. A steamboat passes on the river and in its wake he asks, "White or nigger?"

"They both say it the same. Everybody knows it."

"I mean the child."

She turns her head to look at him.

"White or nigger?"

She understands now. "The child could look either way, I suppose."

His gaze flicks down to her belly and back.

"You suppose."

"There's no telling."

"It could be someplace in between."

"Bound to be someplace in between. Just where in between is the question."

"I know it." He lies thinking. "I just thought maybe."

"Just maybe on account of how much experience I have with this kind of thing?"

"Just maybe you had a feeling."

"This doesn't come with any kind of a feeling."

"I don't reckon so."

"If I had any kind of a feeling I'd surely tell you."

"I know it." For he trusts that she would and he understands that there are some mysteries in the world that must wait until the lines are run.

Later he ties up at Dixon's place and climbs the rutted steps for whiskey. He has been ruminating about his prospects and considering the shape of his future in light of both his shameful devotion to the woman and his own wondrous and overweening potency, and as he sits he concludes that someone other than the two of them ought to know about the child and that it may as well be Dixon as any.

"I reckon I ought to make a better father than the Judge," is how he introduces the subject, hardly above a whisper.

"You mean that?" says Dixon. There are others in the place, six or eight boisterous men gathered around a table playing cards and a handful more on the porch, but Finn prefers to sit by himself and nurse whiskey from a jug without distraction.

"I do. I mean it."

"With that one?"

"There ain't been none other."

Dixon cogitates for a moment. Whether he is pleased for Finn or embarrassed is beyond saying, but either way it is none of his business. "You old dog."

"I reckon."

"This calls for a little something." Reaching for a bottle.

"Long as it's on you." He has not had a taste of the bottled merchandise since the Judge threw him out and ruined his financial prospects.

"It is," says Dixon. "It's on me for sure."

"Just a small one then." Knowing that a small one is all he will get as long as Dixon's eagle-eyed wife is in the kitchen. "You having some?"

"Not while I'm working."

"Then let me have yours too."

"I can't."

"I know it." But it was worth a try.

Dixon sets down the bottle and goes to the kitchen. One of the cardplayers, McGill by name, passes by on his way to the jakes and observes Finn with a bottle at his elbow instead of the customary jug. "What's the occasion?" His clothing has a scoured-clean look to it and his hair is greased back with a pomade that Finn can smell from where he sits.

"Ain't no occasion." He does not know whether to ignore the bottle or to help himself as if nothing has changed, so he does neither.

"You certain." The dandy cocks his head.

"I am."

"I was thinking maybe you come into some money."

"I wish I did."

Indicating the card game. "We could use another."