"I didn't bring you up a liar."

"I ain't one."

"They teach you that in school?"

"I ain't no liar. I told you."

"You drop that school now, hear?" For he has reminded himself of one of his favorite subjects of conversation, more beloved even than money or whiskey for about these last two there is little to say.

"The widow makes me go."

"Ain't nobody can make you put on airs over your own flesh and blood. Not unless you want to."

"I."

"Your own mother couldn't read nor write before she died," Finn interrupts.

"I know it."

"So you leave off."

"I will." For he has had this conversation before.

"Now give." Holding out his palm.

The boy burrows in his pocket to produce a fishhook and a bone and the dollar, which the man snatches away.

"But I wanted it for."

"I'm thirsty, boy." As if he needs to construct an argument. Still he is the boy's father and there may be some useful sentiment to be mined there. Moreover the urge for whiskey has worked its weakness upon him and at this moment he is feeling for the stuff a kind of paternal tenderness that anyone could perceive, even this child. "Now where's the rest?"

"I give it to the judge," says the boy, and Finn's blood turns cold.

"You didn't."

"I did."

"No. He wouldn't have it."

"I swear."

He unsheathes his belt, drawing it forth snakelike from under his coat and sending his stove-in hat tumbling to the floor as he does. "He wouldn't have it nor nothing else. Not from you." Rising to his feet in the dark corner of the dark room, his shadow cast large behind him by the light of the boy's receding candle.

From out of his other pocket the boy produces a thick sheet of vellum, densely lettered and sealed and signed, and in his high ringing voice he reads it off to his father like a lesson.

"Judge Thatcher," says the man when he has finished, understanding this much at least. A different judge entire.

"I told you," says the boy.

"I'll see about him," says Finn, and out the window he goes with the dollar clutched tight in his fist.

DOWN THE FROZEN CENTER of the street he marches like some mud-formed golem drawn by revenge or moonlight until the lamps of a tavern catch his fierce eye and he turns at once, lighter on his feet than any observer might guess, and mounts the steps to the door and enters into the place accompanied by snow and black wind.

"You Finn," says a voice from the darkness. "You old dog, you."

And welcomed thus, without so much as responding or even looking to respond, he steps to the bar and presents the dollar with ceremony befitting a magus and the barman brings the bottle. "There'll be plenty more," says Finn grandly. "You'll see." But as the night wears on and the whiskey dwindles he offers up no further proof of his assertion, and so having kept his apocryphal riches to himself by morning he awakens in the village jail with his head afire and his dollar used up and his black coat stained with vomit.

The marshal works a splinter of firewood between his teeth and leans backward in his chair. "You'll be seeing Judge Thatcher."

"I know it." As if he has planned it this way from the beginning.

"That boy of yours."

"What of him?"

"You know what of him. I'm surprised it took you this long to get down here, is all."

"I come as quick as I could."

"I'll bet you did."

Finn washes himself and eats a breakfast of fried eggs and flapjacks swimming in butter and syrup brought over from the Liberty Hotel and he wonders for the briefest moment if it might be worth giving up whiskey to luxuriate in a fancy start like this every day of the week for about the same money. Then he remembers the six thousand and comforts himself that he will no doubt be enjoying the twain of these luxuries before long, both the whiskey and the cooked breakfast too and God knows what all else besides. But the eggs go straight to his gut and the marshal has to escort him out back to the frozen-over jakes before they head out to see Judge Thatcher, who isn't holding court today but is instead sitting peacefully in his study at home surrounded by lawbooks.

"We haven't seen this one around for a while," says the marshal by way of introduction. He is still working the splinter in his teeth, only now he's grinning around it as if he and the judge are playing a lovely joke upon their guest.

"Time served for the drunkenness," says the judge, who needs no more evidence in the case than Finn's wasted appearance and high acrid smell. "And open that window a crack if you insist on bringing foul creatures like this into my presence." Pointing imperiously.

The marshal leaps to do his bidding. A girl skips past the study door on her way to school, oblivious to the men within. She has two long braided pigtails the color of caramel, and Finn takes subtle note of her from the corner of his eye.

"You," says the judge, marking Finn's wandering attention, one finger aimed straight between his eyes like doom.

"Your Honor." Finn's attention regathers itself into a fine point and he blinks away the last tatters of his headache. He can't remember if he needs to call him Your Honor here in the house but he figures it can't hurt.

"I'll thank you to keep your mind where it belongs."

"Sir."

Thatcher tamps tobacco into his pipe and puts flame to it. "I don't know where that son of yours got his intelligence."

"His mother, Your Honor." Sycophantish, though the judge seems not to notice.

The marshal laughs through his teeth, a single wheeze like a dying concertina, the gasping end of merriment in spite of itself. "He got that right, Judge."

Thatcher blows smoke, theatrical. "What of that woman, Mr. Finn? What does she think of your habits? Does she know what to do with you?"

"No sir. I reckon she don't. Not no more."

A clock ticks in a room down the hall and Thatcher sucks on his pipe, considering, letting time pass as if he owns all of it in the world, as if in fact he runs the manufactory where it originates and owns the patent for it too. He is a small man, neat and unprepossessing as a country parson, with a pale thin thatch of gray hair and sunken cheeks. Finn wonders if there is a connection between the meager proportions of some men and their grandiose desires.

"At least that boy of yours has some intelligence. More than I had imagined, if you want to know the truth."

"That's why I."

"I have not yielded you the floor, Mr. Finn."

"I know it."

"As I was saying, the boy has some intelligence. Perhaps even wisdom."

Finn bites his tongue.

"Which came as an altogether unexpected development, as I was saying."

Finn composes his face into a blank.

"An unexpected development with unexpected implications."

No reply from the well-behaved Finn.

"By which I mean unexpected implications for you, Mr. Finn. Including the fact that however greatly you might desire otherwise, the documents that he and I signed yesterday make it impossible for you to lay so much as a finger upon that wise little boy's fortune."

Down below the desk, out of Thatcher's line of sight, Finn balls his fists upon his knees like a pair of nine-pound hammers. The marshal braces his feet square beneath him but nothing comes of it.

"Not so much as a finger-at least until he reaches his majority, should you be fortunate enough to live that long. And by that time I suspect that he will have matured into a figure quite beyond your grasp." Thatcher levels his gaze at Finn and draws thoughtfully on his pipestem, indicating that he is for the time being not only finished with his argument but quite satisfied with it and with himself and with the balance of the universe as well.

"It ain't right," says Finn.

"Oh, but it is."

"It ain't right that the widow takes the boy and you take the money and his own father his own goddamn flesh and blood gets left with nothing."

"I did not take the money, as you suggest. I have merely become, at the boy's request, its trustee."

"Same difference."

"Not at all, I assure you. I have merely taken upon myself certain fiduciary responsibilities-not limited strictly to the estate but also in fact to the boy himself, which the evidence of my senses"-here he sniffs-"the evidence of my senses tells me is more than his own flesh and blood has ever done."

A nerve in Finn's cheek commences to twitch. "I'll sue."

"A protracted lawsuit costs money."

"I can get it. I come from it."

"By my measure, Mr. Finn, you've come a very long way from it. A very long way indeed." To gauge by how his smile wrinkles backward into his sunken cheeks, the idea lightens Judge Thatcher's heart.

"Don't remind me," says Finn, but everything about the judge and his house and his lawbooks and the row of tintypes arranged like mathematical theorems on his great walnut desk reminds him. These reminders, these and the presence at his elbow of the marshal with his gun, are powers that keep Finn bound to his chair as none else could.

"It does a man good to remember his beginnings," says Judge Thatcher. "Even Satan remembers his beginnings. And therein lies the root of his eternal torment."

FINN SITS against a fencepost in the sun and studies St. Petersburg with a kind of magisterial detachment, distant as a wild beast or some grim god beyond petitioning. Even more than his brain desires the six thousand, his heart burns with shame over a single remark made to Thatcher-over how, at the commencement of their interview, he'd said that the boy's intelligence derives exclusively from his mother-for this is precisely the kind of self-effacing lie that any fawning nigger might produce so as to deflect blame and curry favor. Beast or god, he desires little at this moment beyond eradicating this remark now cemented into his history by time's passage, for as he has said it to the least of them he may as well have said it to the greatest.

Beyond this and perhaps as manifestation of it he desires to return home rather than linger penniless and disgraced in St. Petersburg or even in the woods at the squatter's shack. He pictures his riverside house and the open ladderwork of stairs leading up to it and the nailed-up doorway to the bedroom. Behind the nailed-up door he sees the stairway and above that-above the first floor just as the mind is above the body and as the spirit is above the flesh-above that he sees the painted-over and rectified room.

He sees it now not as he has left it but as it once was: her clothing strewn over the chair and his bottle standing empty upon the windowsill and starlight from the river casting a recondite message upon the far wall, and the woman asleep alongside the depression he'd made over the years in that sagging straw tick laid hard upon its homebuilt frame (for her, he'd hammered that frame together for her, as if she required or deserved better than the mere plank-thrown pallet that would have suited him well enough). He sees her sleeping there as content and enduring as a stain upon bedlinen or history or heart and he kneels beside her as if meaning to utter some confessional prayer and instead reaches out to cradle her neck and press his thumbs against the softness of her throat and thus put an end to it.

The starlight fades and the sun comes up and he has all day. He takes himself downstairs and brews coffee and fries salt pork for breakfast and then he goes outside down the open ladder of steps to the ground where late summer has dampened the hardpacked earth with dew. At river's edge he unbuttons and fishes himself out and sends a long tense stream arcing into the moving water, not the last time today that he will return to the river some of that which it has given him. His trotlines prove strung with catfish great and small, and by noon he is done harvesting them and back home with money in his pocket. He lays out a tarpaulin on the bedroom floor and step by lumbering step walks an old empty barrel up the stairs to stand centered upon it, and then he throws a rope over a high beam and with the rope he binds her feet and from the apparatus thus arranged he swings her ceilingward over the waiting barrel. His knife stinks of fishguts but he keeps it honed sharp as the Judge's vengeance, and as her red blood drains into the barrel and fills the hot room with the smell of iron he steps to the open window and coaxes the last drop or two of whiskey from the bottom of the bottle and out onto his parched tongue. Then he raises the other window and hauls the body down and lays it on the tarpaulin. Like a supplicant he kneels and applies the knife in a straight line unwavering from clavicle to crotch, and thinking of fox and beaver and deer and other beasts whose pelts he has learned to separate from their edible or worthless meat he extrapolates the details of this new chore with some atavistic portion of his brain. Thus with brutal thrust and tender prod does he remove all trace of skin, arranging it in strips and sheets beside him on the tarp for disposal in Bliss's fire. Fastidious in his methods, he arranges each portion upside down or inside out, its inner surface made outer to show red and slick and fibrous but never allowed to reveal the dark curse of its hidden face. He arranges the pieces thus to speak of death and death only without particulars, as if by such transformation he can alter all that has gone before and begin anew, clean and pure and washed in the indiscriminate blood. By nightfall he is finished and he walks the barrel down the stairs and tips it into the dark river. He returns to the upper room and wraps the woman in the tarpaulin and stows the leavings in a tow sack and carries her down the stairs likewise and likewise tips her into the river with a silent ominous unfurling as of one great bloody wing.

5.

OUT OF PURE MEANNESS the boy takes down some underthings from the neighbor's washline and douses them in the shallows and hangs them up again muddy to dry, and when the question comes he blames the mischief on his brother, Will. Which everyone, including the boy himself, knows is so far beyond possible as to qualify as a confession.

The neighbor, a narrow-jawed halfwit named Tyrell, stands in the parlor door with his wife's brown drawers bunched in one fist. Muddy water runs down his arm to his elbow where it gathers like blood and drips down onto the freshly polished floor. The track that it leaves down his forearm is by some small measure cleaner than the remainder of his skin, for Tyrell has been digging potatoes and bringing in hay since before sunup, but this irony is entirely lost upon him.

"My hired man seen him do it," he says. Fixing his eyes upon the boy but speaking to his mother.

"Your Lester. Your Lester saw him."

"Yes'm. So don't you pay that boy no mind when he denies it."

"Your Lester's word against that of my son." She does not doubt for a moment that the boy is guilty, but the specifics of this means of indictment are to her so abhorrent as to require refutation. "Your black Lester's word."

"Yes'm. A man sees what he sees. Color don't make no difference."

The boy stands in the corner barefoot, willing himself to merge into the shadows gathered there.

"Go get your shoes, boy." Squeezing the damp drawers as if to wring out a confession. "We'll see from their bottoms where you been."

"That will not be necessary." She speaks like some old Divine Right royalty, and from across the room she fastens the boy to the wall with the thrust of an imperious finger. "The Judge will decide this matter when he returns at the end of the week."

"I reckon he will," says the halfwit, for by his lights this is surely the best resolution imaginable.

In the family Finn, justice delayed is justice magnified. Two days of stony looks and silent recriminations from his mother are two days more than the boy is prepared to endure, although as he grows into manhood he will learn to suffer such treatment by the yearful. With equal intensity he yearns for and dreads the moment when his father will return, and he desperately seeks out the words to tell his mother so.

"You'll get such punishment as you get when you get it." She repeats this formula any time he lifts up his fears before her, either these selfsame words or others equally well calculated to suggest the unknowable and ineluctable qualities of his fate. From time to time she adds, "There's no use in borrowing trouble," for she knows that there is indeed plenty of use in borrowing trouble, so long as she is not the one doing the borrowing.

In a shameful hidden chamber of her heart she desires that the Judge will wreak upon the boy some kind of rough frontier justice. At home in Philadelphia the decorous Quaker boys of her youth told stories of men staked out by Indians to suffer and die in the hot sun of places far deeper into the wilderness than Adams County, places populated by rattlesnakes and venomous insects and mountain lions and worse. In marrying the Judge she tied her fate to a land where such barbarity, whether the accidental work of animals or the calculated work of man, is not only possible but inevitable, and she believes that the day will surely come when through no knowable fault of her own the Judge will turn brute despite the veneer of his Philadelphia education and set about establishing an ancient and uncompromising justice in this fierce Eden to which he has delivered her. Everything decays. In this move westward with the dying sun she has taken within her breast the universal principle of dissolution, whether as cause or by effect she cannot say and does not wonder, although she does know that here beneath her feet she detects both the dawn of primordial rule and the ultimate destruction of everything and to her they look quite the same.

The boy begins to ask. "Will he."

"I can't say what he'll do, and I can't say what he won't."

"But."