"I'd spend it on whiskey before I'd throw it away."

"Just being neighborly," says McGill, looking a little crestfallen over how the indicator of this riverman's improved finances has misled him.

Dixon returns to the bar to find the two conversing like old conspirators and he asks if McGill has heard the news.

"Way I hear it there ain't none."

"You heard wrong." Without thinking and surely without seeing the look by which Finn means to silence him. "Finn here's going to be a pappy."

"Well now," says McGill, who knows the same truths as everyone. "Under those circumstances I believe I'd get drunk too."

Finn removes one foot from the barstool and braces it upon the floor. "You be careful."

"I'm just saying."

"I know what you're saying."

"Just saying what I'd do."

"You mean the woman."

"I prefer the free and easy life."

"You mean the woman."

"She's no concern of mine."

"I know she ain't." Considering that McGill seems to have withdrawn his objection or perhaps not even to have stated it specifically in the first place, Finn returns to his less coiled position on the barstool and helps himself to an additional dose of the bottled whiskey with no threat of interference from Dixon.

"There's alternatives," says the dandy as he turns to continue on his way to the jakes. "There's always alternatives."

"I reckon you'd know." Finn rises and reaches out to take McGill by the collar. The man is two thirds his size and he arrests him without effort. "You and your free and easy ways."

Dixon restores the whiskey bottle to its place behind the bar and advises the pair of them to head outside if they have differences in need of settling. "Go on now, you two."

"I like it fine right here," says Finn.

"I'll not have it."

"You brung it on."

Which Dixon does not dispute.

"I didn't mean nothing," says McGill.

"So you say."

"Honest."

"Next time you don't mean nothing, maybe you oughtn't say nothing."

"I won't."

Before he lets him go Finn gives him a shake hard enough to rattle his teeth, like a lioness toying one last time with some ravaged carcass. McGill goes off leaving his cards and his money on the table and he will not come back for them this night.

"I'm proud of you, Finn." Dixon, mopping the bar.

"I figure I ought to get in the habit." Which is easy enough to say while the child is still mere potential.

"You ought."

Finn nurses his jug whiskey and looks over at the card game, which shows no sign of breaking up. He puts down his glass and goes in three steps to McGill's empty seat and pockets the coins left stacked before it upon the table. Then with a drunkard's rough disdain he pushes the man's abandoned cards back toward the dealer. "Go on shuffle these back in if you've a mind to. I believe he's finished."

THE BOY EMERGES squalling from his mother's womb as do all children regardless of parentage: dark with contorted rage and the bare willful containment of his own pulsing lively fluids, adrip with blood like some wrathful demon plucked from hell. His mother gives him his name, perhaps in anticipation of a dusky quality of skin that to his good fortune never quite returns after the first fading bluish-purple blush of his entry into this world.

Huckleberry.

It is a poor name for a boy but then she is poor in judgment, hardly past childhood herself, and the father is more interested in celebrating the boy's pale skin than in helping her choose. It is a name doomed to suggest not only the boy's curse but the raw pure accident of his creation and the unstraightened path down which he must tread. It is a name that bespeaks the simplest and most natural of freedoms, given at birth to a boy whose accursed birthright may prove to admit none.

His father pays the midwife with a bundle of fish and they resume their life as if nothing has changed. In a few days Will sends a note that his brother cannot read but Mary can. Its contents are not entirely congratulatory but more in the line of acknowledgment and advice.

"I reckon word gets around."

"Be glad he thought."

"People got no right to talk."

"Now Finn."

"They don't."

"You can't stop them."

"I'd like to."

"You can't stop them all." Taking the child to her breast.

"I know it."

In the back of his mind is the individual to whom no one speaks other than the variously accused and the constitution of the State of Illinois and under certain circumstances Almighty God Himself. No doubt the Judge will have heard of the child nonetheless. Possibly he has foreseen his coming for months. Finn looks at the boy and his mother nestled together content upon the horsehair couch and he half wishes that the Judge could see his circumstances now if only to condemn his behavior even more stridently than has previously been his habit. The woman and the child are a strange and cumbrous burden but they are a burden his alone, and he believes them thus deserving of acknowledgment.

WILL REMAINS CHILDLESS and unwed, and so Finn is the only one of the pair to have engaged in the continuation of any sort of family life however attenuated or odd. It is as if Will has decided that the Judge's lineage shall descend this far and no farther, or as if by agreeing to handle his father's financial affairs he has given himself over to the preservation of a dynasty long dead and thus finds himself with no spirit remaining for the pursuit of any living future.

"And how are you today, Mr. Finn?" asks the waitress at the Adams Hotel, a tall slender woman of middle age whose name Will has never made a point of catching.

"Quite well, thank you." He waits for her to finish filling his water glass and then waits another moment or two before reaching out for it and lifting it to his lips so as not to seem overeager. He dines alone as usual. Others in his line of work have never dared associate with him, some because they fear seeming to cultivate his friendship so as to influence the Judge, and others-those who know the Judge better-because they know that they would gain no benefit from bothering and might even come to suffer for it. And so he has become a highly esteemed pariah.

The waitress observes no such boundaries. On the contrary, over the years his solitariness has persuaded her that he must be more in need of human contact than her other patrons. Although it pains Will to accept her unbidden daily attentions he nonetheless persists in lunching here, for the Adams is directly across the street from his office and the food is both familiar and plentiful.

"That brother of yours," she says with a rueful shake of her head. He is seated at his usual table in the corner near the dead fireplace and far from the other customers, and she adopts for the occasion of their interchange a hushed kind of exasperated cluck.

Will looks helplessly at her over the menu.

"I suppose it's not my place."

"No." Yet he maintains a thoroughly professional smile that she mistakes for something else.

"But you'd think."

"You would." He orders the fried chicken, which he settles upon every day after a thoughtful examination of the entire menu.

"I suppose it happens in even the best of families." She tips her head just a hair's breadth toward the busman, a sepulchral octoroon known only as Lovett, whose grandfather was rumored to have been not only a wealthy Virginia planter but a hero of the Revolution.

"Even the best." Unfolding his napkin. "Which I am not suggesting mine has ever been."

"Oh come."

"Please."

She has no trouble detecting his embarrassment but blames it upon her forthrightness with respect to his lineage.

"If you don't mind," he goes on, aligning the silver upon each side of his plate, "I'm not entirely comfortable."

"Of course." Very nearly reaching out to touch his shoulder as she would any other individual this familiar to her and managing at the last instant to stop herself. "Forgive me."

"I do."

"These things."

"Yes."

Weeks pass before the Judge makes mention of the child to Will and then only in a fiduciary context. They are sitting together in his dim study surrounded by lawbooks and dust, the Judge himself with his black frock coat hung upon a peg but Will still dressed as formally as if he were trying some case before him. The room is close and sultry and dust motes dance in the light that slices in through the drawn shutters. The Judge holds his great noble head such that two stripes of blinding light cut across it from left to right, one upon his broad wrinkled forehead and one across his upper lip, where it illuminates a neat mustache long gone gray. They have finished reviewing his bank accounts and his investments in various stock exchanges and his positions vis-a-vis certain farmers and miners whose fortunes have lately suffered. He closes the ledger and squares it upon the desk before him and gives his son no word of thanks.

"Have you given any thought," he says, "to addressing our complication?"

Will grasps the subject immediately, and for just an instant he mistakes the question for a sign of his father's awkward and long-delayed entry into some kind of good-heartedness. He wonders if perhaps the Judge actually intends to make provision for his brother's bastard child, if only to keep him at arm's length. So much time has passed since Will has heard his father consider engaging anyone in this way-it has been his entire lifetime really, and then some-that he wonders if perhaps the man has somehow managed to soften without his noticing. He blames himself. Yet he makes only the most cautious and noncommittal answer. "How so?"

"The will. You've checked it."

"No."

"It's in your files."

"I know."

"We had not prepared for this."

"For the child."

The Judge wrinkles his brow in irritation but he does not dignify the creature by granting him a naming even this impersonal, not even within his own mind. "Yes."

"He'll get nothing."

"Who."

"My brother. And through him the boy." Still testing the waters.

"You're certain."

"Yes."

"You've checked."

"I know it."

The Judge ruminates. "Then alter the papers. He shall receive one dollar. One dollar exactly."

"Which?"

"Your brother." His eyes flare behind his reading glasses. "I'd not name that other creature in any writing of mine."

"Of course not."

The Judge goes on. "See to it that your brother receives one dollar, so that he'll have no cause for complaint. I'll not have him claiming that I forgot him altogether. I'll not have him accusing me of an oversight. I'll not have him dragging down my good name in the interest of whiskey and his nigger whore and that infernal offspring of theirs."

"Thy will be done," says Will, for this is a formula that never fails to provide the Judge a certain measure of delight-even though he is forever at pains to conceal it.

12.

THE BOY GROWS STURDY and takes after his father from the start. Anyone can see it. And although Finn never intends to enjoy such moments as they spend together he catches himself taking pleasure in them nonetheless, for even in the cradle his son is so full of mischief that looking at him is like looking into a mirror capable of reflecting the past. When the child is yet in diapers he wants to take him aboard the skiff to have his company while he runs the lines. Mary tries to dissuade him, not because she mistrusts his ability to keep the child safe from harm but because she knows too well his lackadaisical habits of sanitation. Nonetheless he prevails and does as he wishes, making a show of striding down the back stairs with one arm full of linens and the other full of boy, although once he has gone out of her sight beneath the house where the skiff is tied up to a piling he follows his own inclination and leaves the linens on a rock and climbs aboard with the boy flung over his shoulder like a floursack. And when inevitably he shits he rinses him off in the river, a proceeding that brings unstoppered joy to father and son alike.

Such is the child's baptism, and by such means does his father claim him for his own. He places no demand upon the boy as he grows save that he pull his own weight, and so the river and the tavern and the trading post become his classrooms. From his mother the boy learns different lessons entirely: songs inherited from her father and her father's father before him all the way back to Africa, poetry memorized under the pathetically hopeful tutelage of Mrs. Fisk, mysterious folk wisdom passed down from the circle of women who have woven from their tangled skeins of belief and superstition her particular history.

From her, Huck learns how to divine the future from the hairballs of cats and oxen and how to circumvent curses by means of stump water and moonlight. He listens wide-eyed and his father listens too, although he feigns some other occupation all the while, either repairing lines or drinking whiskey, thinking as he listens that from this mingled trove of the primitive and the poetic he might likewise acquire some knowledge worth possessing.

The child, perhaps five or six years old now, sits with him in Dixon's place drinking a glass of milk and watching the other men play cards, and although he longs to ask if he may join in he does not. In this way, in a world populated by none such as himself, he learns his place.

"That your boy," a cardplayer known to Finn either asks or states.

"It is."

The cardplayer has approached the bar to refresh the ale he's been drinking and has put down upon the damp wood an oversize portion of his winnings. He is in a generous mood and so he offers to stand Finn to his next round. "Assuming there'll be one."