"I guess you got to try somewheres else."

"I know it."

He passes down the alley using the rod as a walking stick and occasionally rapping upon a wall or fencepost with it as his anger rises and falls within his breast like respiration. When he reaches the mudflats he turns upriver and flings the stick into the water as if it is tainted, as if it harbors poor luck, as if it has been handled too many times by that black storekeeper with his recordkeeping and his greed and his falsehearted smile. It whirligigs through the air and lands flat on the surface, refusing to enter the water, and then it gathers momentum and commences to float downstream as do all things dead and useless.

He poles upstream and runs his lines and thinks. Each cat and carp rises to him like a coin drawn up from some secret sunken hoarding, and he reflects as he works that he is surely better off without the woman and the boy to live upon his largesse and take advantage of his hard work and generosity. Without them he could accomplish much more while requiring less. He could eat at Dixon's more often, move up to a better grade of whiskey, perhaps even put a little something by now that he is out from under her and her carelessly accumulated debt. He poles to the bank and guts the fish and wraps them in wet reeds then poles up to Dixon's. The packed dirt and twisted roots and fallen limbs that rise from the river like a stairway are slick with dew and will be slow to dry in the autumn damp, but he climbs upward upon them and tries the door to find it locked. The back door leading straight into Dixon's living quarters is open a crack and from within comes the sound of argument, more precisely the sound of Dixon taking his customary abuse at the hands of his harridan wife. From his own newly elevated position as a freed man Finn takes pity upon him, but not enough to let him suffer his wife's revilement in privacy. He knocks, listens, and knocks again until Dixon comes sheepish to the door.

"Hey, Dix."

"Ain't seen you around."

"Ain't been. But that might change."

"It's early for drink."

"Not that." Finn raises his bundle. "Thought maybe I'd beat out whoever else you been using."

Dixon's wife: "You tell him to go around front if he's got business."

"I reckon you heard."

"I did."

Dixon shrugs. "The counter's up there and all."

"Ain't the kitchen back here?"

"Just go on."

Go on he does, and he waits at the door while Dixon draws on his trousers and buttons his shirt and makes his way through the place to unlock it and let him in with his bundle of fish wrapped in reeds and dripping wet.

"Got a mess of cats. Fiddlers too."

"Is that so. To what do I owe the honor."

"Lucky I reckon."

"You or me."

"Either one." Shouldering his way through the door and back toward the counter that separates the bar from the backroom where Dixon's wife remains isolate.

"I reckon we can use every last one of these," says Dixon when he has pushed back the bunched wet reeds and assessed Finn's offering. "Not just them little ones. Ain't that right, honey?"

"Suit yourself," she calls from the back, as if she is ostentatiously deigning to grant him some concession.

Finn raises his eyebrows toward the woman's voice. "Mine done run off, God bless her."

From Dixon he gets a look of mingled curiosity and compassion. "Whereabouts?"

"She ain't gone home, I can tell you that. Not home to Vicksburg."

"So where."

"Ain't sure. Ain't sure I care."

"How about the boy."

"Gone too."

Dixon gathers up the fish. "He's a good boy."

"I know it."

"You'll miss that one."

"I reckon I will. Sooner or later."

THERE IS A BRUSH on the dresser and after a few moments of hesitation and any number of false starts Mary takes it up and begins working her hair into a smooth and glossy braid. While she sits occupied in this slow meditative manner she watches the boy asleep angelic upon the widow's soft spare featherbed, and she thinks for once that she desires for him nothing less than exactly this, forever and ever. The house is quiet, silent in itself and isolated from the rising sounds of the waking village and alive only to the music of birds and the buzzing of insects. The widow must be a late riser, which Mary thinks odd for one her age, since Mrs. Fisk hardly slept a wink and complained about her weariness with every breath she drew.

She is playing possum, the old woman, waiting to see just how her visitors will comport themselves in the absence of her guiding presence. Still as a mummy, desperate to make use of the chamber pot but committed to seeing this experiment through to its end, she lies and waits and listens like some predator. Her heart beats and she draws breath and the inner flesh of her eyelids scrapes again and again across the sticky glass of her glaucous dried-up old woman's eyeballs, but beyond these small movements she may as well be dead.

A wall away Mary bends into the sunlight of the window and removes from the hairbrush all signs of her use as meticulously as she would sweep clean a gravestone, and then she moves across the room to return the thing silently and with infinite care to its place upon the dresser. The boy is still asleep. She permits herself one last moment of rest in the ladderback chair by the door, letting her vision fall upon the vista of the river below. The positions of the window and the chair angle her view southward, far downstream, away from Finn and his riverside habitation but toward the world of her youth to which she dares not return nor cares to. She feels herself a princess locked in a turret, the sort of figure Mrs. Fisk would read to her about in the old slave days in Vicksburg, back when being royalty confined in a high castle chamber seemed the most desirable fate in the world. As often as not those stories included a banquet that materialized mysteriously upon an intruder's entry into some ruined palace, and Mary realizes that if she waits for magic or hospitality or some other power to lay such a feast before her and the boy she will have done her years under Mrs. Fisk no honor.

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."