"It is to him. To the Judge it's every bit that simple."

"Still."

"I suppose you've had some revelation."

"I've had a few."

Will leans back as the waitress brings their plates, the bluegills arrayed upon them delicate and fragrant in ways that Finn has never imagined much less witnessed. They have left his presence ordinary and returned transformed, and he barely recognizes them for his own nor dares disturb them with knife and fork.

"Eat up," says his brother. He selects his cutlery with the intensity of a duelist. "So you've learned some lessons."

"I have."

"That will please the Judge to no end."

"I know it."

"Is that what you want?" His mouth full.

Finn thinks. "I reckon it may as well be."

Will gives his head a rueful shake, not as if he disagrees with his brother but as if he is reflecting upon the tragic loss of him. "Times have changed."

Before Finn can ask him to clarify his meaning a gentleman dressed all in white linen approaches from across the room, one hand outstretched. "Will, you old hound dog," he calls, although by the appearance of him and the refinement of his voice he seems unlikely to have been much in the presence of hound dogs.

Will stands to greet him and while they shake hands the stranger takes the attorney's right elbow in his own left hand as if the two of them are the dearest and most long separated of companions.

"Senator Farraday," says Will. "Good to see you again. Do you know my brother?"

The senator runs the fingers of his left hand through the gray tangle that rides high upon his head like a storm at sea. He leans theatrically back to assess Finn from his great height, a stance yielding the impression that if he were wearing galluses he would be about to snap them. "Only by reputation," he says. And then he plunges a hand toward Finn and smiles from under his mustaches as if their entire encounter is the purest of delights. "The pleasure is mine."

Finn does not even have a chance to follow his brother's lead and rise fully to his feet before the senator is through with him and gone, striding back to his table where he dampens a napkin and wipes his hands and calls for the waitress to bring 'round a replacement.

"He didn't mean anything by that," says Will.

"How do you know."

"I just know."

Finn turns his head to one side and the other, assessing his position in the room. "The way people look at me." His voice low.

"The way you look to them, if you don't mind my saying."

"That ain't it." Reaching a filthy hand toward a mountain of hot biscuits piled under a gleaming napkin.

"It's some of it."

"I am what I am."

"Leaving her won't change that."

"It might for the Judge."

"Don't get your hopes up."

"Look at you," says Finn, pointing with a biscuit. "You fit in. You got a place in the world."

"So do you."

"It ain't much. And half of it I owe to you. More'n half."

"That's nothing. And anyhow it's not what I'm talking about. I mean you've found your own way. You've taken your own direction. With no help from the Judge."

"Which is more'n you can say for yourself, I reckon."

"I reckon," says Will.

Finn sops up what remains on his plate with the biscuit and studies the filmy residual streaks of butter and grease as if hoping to divine some truth from them.

"Besides," says his brother, "he won't love you any better for abandoning that woman."

"He might."

"I suspect he'll hate you more."

"Why."

"He'll decide you're weak. He'll accuse you of vacillating."

"He might."

"He'll dismiss you and your best intentions altogether."

"I reckon he could."

"You know the Judge."

"I do."

Will raises his hand for the check. "No matter what you do now, he'll never forgive you for what you've already done. That's his way. All you can do by struggling is make things worse."

"I know it." Like a fish on a line.

NONE BUT BLISS has time or temperament for him.

He poles past Dixon's in the lowering rainy dark, looking up from the river as Dixon's wife lights the lamps and draws the threadbare curtains. Under circumstances such as these even so poor a place as this acquires an ethereal and inviting glow for those who are forbidden its delights, among which scattering of sad outcasts Finn must number himself on account of his continuing indenture to Connor for the woman's debt. He'll be damned if he'll buy whiskey from that black bastard with the few cents he permits himself and he lacks enough to so much as get started at Dixon's, and back home under his own roof confined with those two he feels as if he may as well be back at Alton. So these days he can be counted upon at nightfall to tie up to a branch and thread his way in the darkness to that secret spot in the woods where Bliss's fire is constant and his whiskey is cheap and his hospitality is reliable if not quite freely given.

"I ain't running no tavern hereabouts," says the blind man as Finn emerges from the treeline.

"I know it."

"You bring a jug?" Poking the fire.

"Damn. Left it in the skiff."

"Ain't you the great idiot." In all the world there live only two sorts of men who speak with the luxurious immunity enjoyed by this blind bootlegger: those in positions of great power, and those locked safely behind prison bars. Bliss imagines himself to possess certain qualities of both, and about this he is correct.

"I reckon I'll just have to drink it all at one go."

"I reckon."

The delight that Finn takes in Bliss's whiskey begins at a level hardly describable as such and perhaps more accurately understood as its inverse. So it is with the bootlegger's company. But over the passage of an evening's time each one of these variables-whiskey and companionship alike-improves on a steady upward curve whose course proceeds through ascending parallel strata of pleasure and brotherhood. Still they both must peak eventually, and as the moon completes its circuit and Finn's head begins to throb he usually begins to ruminate upon the course of his life and the various hurtful influences upon it and how they have conspired to bring him to such a sad destination as this. Drinking in the deep woods with a blind man who tolerates him for pay. Tomorrow night he will return, but he will like it no better.

THE WOMAN IS HUNGRY and the boy is hungry and Finn is hungry too, but he of them all does not care much. He has eaten a little during the day, bits and scraps acquired by bargaining and stealth along his circuitous route, and so his stomach although empty is not quite so entirely void as theirs. She lacks sufficient flour to dredge the sunfish he has begrudged them for their supper, and the tobacco sack that she once concealed in the bottom of the sugar barrel now lies exposed like a bone unearthed in a hard land. The boy has thought to ask her about it on more than one occasion, but each time the shame attached to having opened the sugar barrel without permission has overcome his curiosity.

"I'd think Connor must be paid off by now," she says with a kind of dreamy resignation, in a voice pitched to suggest neither harm nor doubt.

"You'd think."

She chews thoughtfully and slow, the muscles in her jaw sliding over and alongside one another as patient as the haunches of moving cattle. She chews as if she might by rumination extract more value from these poor scraps than they contain, the way a scholar might by study glean more from some volume than its author intended to be contained there.

"Could be you got in deeper than you knew." Desiring neither acknowledgment nor admission.

"You would have more understanding of that than I would."

"Amen."

She has been for the past year and more a prisoner in this slanting riverside house and the boy a prisoner too, although for the most part he has had the good fortune to be asleep during those black hours before dawn when his father stumbles up the stairs from his nightly rendezvous with Bliss. She sleeps then too because there is nothing else for her, but he awakens her each time with a rough hand upon her shoulder or her breast or her leg-and once, by the most evil of chances, upon that tender place high on her temple where the wound from the jagged rusty dipper was not yet healed. At first he took her at these moments, facedown or faceup or however he happened to find her, but lately while the food has dwindled and his misery has ripened and increasing sums of the money that should by rights have gone to Connor have been going to Bliss, he has found himself frustratingly unmanned and blamed it upon her and sought thus his furious satisfaction in other more brutal ways.

I'll not be starved to death in my own house, she tells herself one damp autumn morning when he has left to go about his business. And I'll not be beaten to death, for that matter. And so she fetches the money from the tobacco sack and calls the boy in from where he has gone digging for worms in the yard, and they gather up such belongings as they might claim for their own into a single tow sack, and together they walk south along the mudflats toward Lasseter proper.

"We going to darktown?"

"Not this time. Not ever again, if I have my way."

They stop at the landing, mother and child. Beholding the two of these ragged fugitives any observer would think them far from home and despairing of potential return, a sad pair of wasted refugees displaced from such lives as they might have ever hoped to know, rootless and lost and doomed to wander forever beyond the reach of the familiar until misery and death shall take them at last. The society and commerce of Lasseter, even here at the landing, where anything can happen, eddies around them at a decent remove as if they have been poisoned.

Traffic upon the river is light, but at this nexus it folds inward upon itself and commences to clot like blood. A flatboat laden with coal, the skiffs of fishermen whose lines and haunts are downstream of those kept by Finn, rafts piled high with grainsacks and other goods for sale both upstream and down, these mingled vessels and more interweave their complex courses in silence save for the shouts of the rivermen and the occasional blast of a steam whistle from a sidewheeler not yet visible around the long rightward bend to the north. Mary's heart rises to hear it as it always does, even as it has thus risen unfailingly during her years in the riverside house, for the distinctive high warning bellow of that instrument reminds her of her lost childhood and her daring father and their single great doomed adventure aboard the Santo Domingo. It stabs at her eardrums and it reverberates in her gut and it brings to her heart unbidden thoughts of freedom.

Yet she lacks sufficient funds to book passage anywhere. This much she knows without inquiring. And so it is that she begs transport upon a keelboat bound downriver to St. Petersburg, a place she does not know but that can only be superior to this. The captain is a stern and pious individual as broad as a cotton bale and just as tightly bound, but the look of her and the look of the boy conjure up within his heart a reflexive pity that he mistakes for the irresistible will of God. St. Petersburg is not far downriver but it is as far as he shall go today, and Mary and the boy hardly notice that they are stepping out upon the banks of Missouri when they leave his care.

The village is not large, although it is larger by far than her experience of the world. Her inclination is thus to remain on its periphery, and although she would like nothing better than to march up the main street and forge there some instance of the new life she has foreseen for the two of them she instead takes the boy by his hand and edges off to one side of the bustling riverfront square, where they stand as if enchanted while the society of little St. Petersburg manifests itself before them. Only when the boy loses patience with what he sees-with the men unloading barges and the men bartering over fish and the men playing mournful music upon a banjo and a fiddle under the partial shade of a whitewashed gazebo-only when his attention wanes and his gaze wanders away from the square and up the adjoining grassy slope of Cardiff Hill does the village present an alternative aspect to these two wayfaring strangers, for there in the sunlight upon the hill stands a house, a shingled house slate-roofed and foursquare in aspect, angular and clean as a block of salt, imposing as a mausoleum. It draws them as if it possesses a lodestone buried in its foundation.

They climb the hill upward and away from the bustle of the village, she with the tow sack over her shoulder and he freed of all burdens save his own young life. The hill is fringed upon the far side with a crown of evergreens and tall oak trees just now in full but fragile leaf, and they move toward the house and its rearward encirclement as toward a fortified castle. A fence rings it and a wooden mailpost stands guard at the gate where like pilgrims they arrive expecting God alone knows what.

"You girl," comes a voice from the sunblind shadows behind the open door.

"Ma'am?" For the voice clearly belongs to a woman and an old one at that. Mary touches her fingertips to the gate as she would touch the head of a child.

"Can I help you?"

A question she has heard rarely enough. "I hope to find work, ma'am."

"You and the boy too?"

"He's mine."

"You don't look much alike."

"I know it."

The shadow behind the door and the voice emerging from it conspire to incorporate themselves into a resolving outline, the crooked but potent figure of a sturdy old gray-headed woman who steps now into the sunlight of the porch as if birthed there all at once by the power of their desiring. She has about her an air at once refined and severe, suggestive of the city and the frontier both, as if from her lofty post high on Cardiff Hill she has seen the future of this land and its past and has through an act of will incorporated certain elements of each into her aspect. She lowers her jaw and squints through her glasses, taking in every element of these two wanderers as if to make them her own by mere observation.

"Runaways."

"No ma'am."

"I can always tell."

The boy gives his mother a pleading look.

"Truly," she says. "I was stolen once, I suppose you could say, but I've never run."

The woman leans against the doorframe. "You surely look it."

"I know." Studying her hand where it lies upon the gate like a bundle of knobbed sticks, studying the shoes that over the years have nearly vanished beneath her tread in spite of all her caution, studying the boy, for whom anyone with a heart or even eyes would desire better.

"Where'd you come from?"

"Upstream. Lasseter."

"That's Illinois."

"I know."

"You're in Missouri now. Did you."

"I hadn't even." Not desiring to interrupt yet already sufficiently comfortable with the old woman to engage thus.

"Things are different here." Neither comfortable nor uncomfortable but oddly oracular.

"As long as the work isn't too much harder, I suppose I'll get by." Desiring to indicate her desirability as a helpmate by exhibiting both her amenable nature and a certain inborn ironic grace.

"Why don't the two of you come on inside. Let me explain a few things."

The house upon the hilltop is open to the four winds and shot through with the high clean scents of pine needles and long grass and oak leaves. Although clearly the domain of a thrifty old woman given to rag rugs and lace doilies and protective antimacassars, it has by dint of its elevated position an open and free and shiplike aspect. To the boy and his mother it feels like a place from which a person could jump off and land almost anywhere. Even the clouds seem closer.

Her name is Douglas, and her neighbors call her by the most elevated title she has ever earned: the Widow. She has lived alone in this house since her husband met his Maker in an accident upon the water perhaps twenty years ago, and although he chose this place for its vista of the river below she can hardly bring herself to look out the windows anymore. Only into the woods behind the house, which seem to her at least close and fixed and comforting.