"Not now." She cannot bring herself to mention those six months that the law has seen fit to grant unto the likes of them, those six months already commencing their inevitable accelerating vanishment.

"So?"

"Things could change. I can't much help it for myself, but I don't want it for you."

"I don't see how there's."

"I'd give anything." Stabbing the ground.

He fetches up the onions and puts them into the basket which he bends to lift with all his might, straightening his back and swaying a little, rehearsing for a lifetime.

"I'd give anything," she says again. "I believe I might even give you." As he drops the basket she reaches up with a knuckle to brush at the corner of her eye.

"Mama."

Letting go the fork and kneeling alongside him in the dirt. "You hear me. From this day forward, as far as anyone beyond this house knows, you are a poor motherless child."

"Motherless." He knows her intent as any would.

"That's right. We know better, but nobody else needs to."

He sits stunned.

"You'll go to school like any white boy."

"Mama." At least now his alarm has found a focus.

"Don't mama me."

"Pap hates."

"I know it. But you're going to grow up different from your pap. Different from either one of us, come to that. Better too."

"How?"

"Don't you worry. I'll be here to help." Thinking of the six months. "Just as long as I can."

"But."

She points a finger at him. "You came here to St. Pete with me, but you aren't mine. That's all anyone needs to know. And let that be an end to it."

NIGHT HAS DESCENDED upon the widow's house, and the boy has gone complaining off to bed as boys will. His mother sits on a hard chair opposite the widow's rocker patching a hole in his trousers while the widow reads from the family Bible. The little parlor is bright with many lamps, bright enough to be visible from the river below, bright enough that these two may pursue their separate aims at their ease despite the woman's weariness and the widow's fading vision. Mary's concentration, whether on her sewing or on her fate, is sufficiently complete that the widow discovers she can lower her book and lift her eyes and study her over her glasses without being noticed. Thus she sits for a time until her lack of movement draws Mary's attention, for prior to this moment she has been sliding the tip of her finger across the page of her Bible and fluttering her lips around the lineaments of the words she finds there.

"Ma'am?"

Raising the finger that has been tracing the Gospel, and pointing it trembling at the scar upon Mary's cheek: "Did he give you that?"

"Yes ma'am, he did."

"A white man." She spits out the words as she would expel a cherry pit. "A white man did that to you."

"The white man I left."

The widow closes the Bible on her finger. "You're more intelligent than he is."

"I hope so, ma'am. And thank you for your kindness." But now that the widow has unlatched this door for so long sealed Mary feels arising within herself an upwelling of grief and grievance, a burgeoning of truths forever withheld and forever likewise unresolved. She rolls up one sleeve and displays the soft tender pale underside of her forearm, marked. "He did this. And this too." Her wrist. "And this." Her ankle. One twisted finger broken and healed that way unset. A gash concealed just under the tattered collar of her dress. Beneath the smooth dark curve of her hair, a red-rimmed and puckered cavity torn from one ear by his strange and brutal teeth. Displayed and duly witnessed here in this quiet and well-lit room with the boy asleep upstairs and the river creeping past far below and the limitless darkening sky yawning overhead, she is a palimpsest of her own degradation.

"You poor child."

"Now you see why."

"I do." The widow has an impulse to set down the book and lean forward in her rocker and bless the poor beaten girl with a touch, but she knows not where to begin. She opens the volume and takes one last look at the place within it where her finger lies as if she might find there some eternal truth with which to comfort Mary, and then she closes it again and rests it in her lap, where it lies impotent against incarnate personal evil such as this. "Did he touch the boy?"

"Not like this."

"Does the boy know what he's done?"

"Some. Enough to have come away with me."

"Yes," says the widow, and "yes" again. "Of course he does." The Bible in her lap has become a dead weight and a heavy burden and she absently fiddles with the purple satin bookmark that runs its spine as the river runs the valley. After a time a question occurs to her and she recognizes that there will be no better occasion to ask it and so ask it she does: "Do you suppose he'll come looking for you?"

"Yes ma'am. I believe he will."

"Mary." Fixing her with a look that will admit no denial.

Mary puts down her work.

"The man's name is Finn, isn't it. Finn."

"Yes."

"I thought so."

"You did."

"I made inquiries."

"I know it."

THE BOY GOES OFF to school for the first time.

"But Pap always said."

"Never you mind what Pap always said. Pap always said a lot of things."

Thus does his luxurious idyll, atop the green sward of Cardiff Hill, freed of running lines and gutting fish, in the gentle company of two women who perhaps without even knowing it have been competing these weeks pie after pie and song after song and story after story for his love in spite of his straitened circumstances and his uncertain future, thus does his idyll come to an end: with a whine and a shrug and a vision of Finn as his absent savior.

In the classroom he proves a fast learner but inconstant. The other children are of mixed ages and although the boys his own size have much to teach him about the local geography they have nothing whatsoever to show him as regards to capitalizing upon it. They point out the church, and Huck climbs to the belfry to sermonize by moonlight in the company of bats. They talk of caves high up on the riverbank, and Huck explores them with a stolen ball of yarn unwound to mark his return. They gossip of a slave reputed to own a prophesying hairball, and Huck befriends the individual and divines his own future by means of the relic's mysterious power. He becomes in short the children's secret untouchable prince, their authority on all things mysterious and forbidden, the raiser of their antes and the taker of their dares.

Parents and pastors and teachers alike urge the children to keep a cautious distance once his ill fame has risen up to the level of their awareness. Some know of Finn and some know of his extended dalliance with a black woman and some know or have at least heard tell of how that selfsame personage has lately enslaved herself and the child as well to that poor bereft widow Douglas in her child-empty house on Cardiff Hill. Some on the other hand have heard the official story of the boy's unknowable origins, and some even believe it. This footloose and misbegotten child, with his fortunate pale skin and his experimental corncob pipe, with his intimacy with slave lore and his confounded gift for looking ragged even in clothing freshly pressed by none other than a white woman or so they say, this child can surely be no positive influence on their young, no positive influence at all. By denying him they make him irresistible, and like a sturdy weed he thrives upon their neglect.

The autumn gives way to winter and the Mississippi begins to glaze over in places. From the boy's window on certain bright mornings it glints along its margins like a woodland path strewn with gemstones, and he tells his mother that he would go down and retrieve them one and all if only he could and then make for her a necklace. She laughs and tells him that she deserves neither the necklace nor him, which he denies but takes to heart nonetheless without seeing for even a moment the depths of his ready faithlessness. By the time he heads for school the frozen patches are gone and the river has recovered its quality of ambiguous bank-to-bank sameness, which the boy knows from his father's teachings is only a facade to mislead the ignorant and starve the inexperienced.

For his part the father is upon the river every afternoon, pursuing a catch that grows more scarce as the winter deepens. He mends old lines and acquires new ones and steals still others, and with them he widens his range by appropriating the fishing grounds of lesser men unwilling to contest his claim until the Illinois side of the river is his from above Lasseter to below it, traversed by a latticework that he transits each day to fuel his meager needs and then some. He thinks rarely of the boy and less rarely of the woman, mainly when there are chores to be done or a fire to be built in the old iron stove. Mornings he endures by staying in bed and evenings when he returns home longing for a little warmth he satisfies himself with whiskey. That warm-blooded African girl with her memories of Vicksburg would have kept the stove red-hot night and day, and as he swallows and shivers and swallows again he takes pleasure in realizing that at least he is not outdoors chopping wood so that she might waste it.

A storm blows down the river late one day and catches him unsuspecting past the southernmost perimeter of his workings, below Smith's trading post by half a mile, nearly as far downriver as St. Petersburg. Icicles are adangle from his slouch hat and his beard is rimed with ice and even his eyebrows beneath that sagging hatbrim are crusted over by the time he has poled to within sight of Smith's, which looms white against the white storm and looks, as usual, abandoned. On the verge of such a night as this the vituperative Smith will be in no mood to buy fish or offer credit, so Finn settles on tying up downwind against the little pier and sleeping the night there in the protection of its lee side rather than risk the fat man's reflexive and pitiless ire. The catch will keep until morning under its bed of snow.

Unbidden she comes to him in the night, a warm tender spirit coalesced from out of the cold. Mary. Under the darkness of his eyelids under the whiteness of the accumulating snow he sees her through a fog of sleep lit piercing in the absence of his usual whiskey. Snow-damped silence and the patient slow rocking of the skiff have put him to sleep beneath his tarpaulin, the night has reached some blank unknowable nadir aspin beneath ratcheting stars and cartwheeling snowflakes, and at this point or some other she comes to him unwanted but not undesired. He shivers and yearns and warms himself against her and unwittingly draws himself out to spill his milt upon the icy heap of catfish warmed slick by his sacrificial flesh. Through it all he awakens not.

Come daylight he shakes himself off and knocks on Smith's door to find the proprietor as unreceptive to his merchandise as he would have been the night before. The storm has mostly spent itself but the riverman is half frozen and dying for warmth, a thing that Smith hoards with the same miserliness that he brings to guarding his other merchandise.

"You'll frighten away my customers."

"If they're brave enough to bargain with you, I reckon they're plenty brave enough."

Somewhere deep within his mountain of flesh Smith chuckles in spite of himself, but he neither warms to Finn nor permits him to linger. "Be on your way before you begin stinking like a wet dog."

Finn obliges and tests the wind and follows it downriver to St. Petersburg, where he can trade his catch to Cooper at the Liberty Hotel. Up the hill into the village he troops with a sackful of frozen cats and bluegills, unsteady on his feet in the snow and leaving behind him a trail of crosses. Cooper gives him whiskey and pork and cornmeal from his stores and a hot breakfast fit for a king right there in the kitchen, where he and the black woman sit and yarn and wait upon orders.

"I reckon won't be many customers on a morning like this," says Cooper. "You may as well have your fill."

"I'm obliged." His coat and hat steam on a nail by the stove and the snowmelt from his boots soaks into the hardpacked dirt floor and he can hardly believe his good fortune. "I could stay here all day."

"Don't get any ideas."

"I won't."

Full and warm and drier at least than he has been, he gathers his sack and leaves down the alley. On the street he spies a group of children off to school, one of them Huck.

"You boy."

The snow is still pelting and he stands between buildings ghostly and darkly emergent.

"You Huck."

The boy turns. Deep in scheming conversation with some mischievous towhead, he recognizes his father as if growing cognizant of a dream made real before him; he notes his appearance as if a chasm in this world has opened up and let loose the inhabitants of some other.

"Pap." Soundless, just the merest dark opening of his boy's mouth in the bright snowfall. He halts and the boy behind stumbles up against him but the rest go flowing 'round about like a stream past a rock. Some look back over their shoulders and some do not and those who do avert their eyes quickly before going on their way for they have been warned about this individual.

"Where you bound, boy."

"School."

Full as he is of flapjacks and bacon and hot coffee, and pleased as he is with his haul of goods and whiskey from that burden of fish frozen solid in the skiff, he can feel the heart in his chest collapse at the sound of the word. School. All is surely lost. "No you ain't."

"The widow says."

"What widow." Brutal he is and single-minded but not lacking in imagination. The word upon his son's lips suggests that perhaps the woman Mary has declared herself thus liberated in her new life. Again: "What widow."

"Widow Douglas. She took us in."

"Not out of charity."

"No."

"What then."

"Mama works for her."

"Not in Missouri. In Missouri they call that slavery."

"She ain't a slave."

"Wake up, boy."

"The widow don't treat her like one. She treats her like help." Standing in the snow as it lightens around them both.

"What do you know about help."

"Pays her every week like clockwork."

"So tell me," Finn wheedles. "You all free to leave the premises?"

"Where would we go?" With a shrug.

"Sounds a heap like slavery to me."

The man has a point that rings true to the boy but only so far. "Mama never left the house upriver neither. Except when you was in prison."

"Them was different times."

"I reckon they was."

Finn watches the other boys vanish around the corner. "You ain't going to no school."

"Where then?"

"Wherever suits you."

"You fishing?"

"Not today." Lifting his sack of groceries. "Just back home."

"Can I come?" For the boy's great gift is of accommodation.

"No. I reckon you're better off here." Thinking of his own obligations and customs. "Just don't get in the habit of going to that school."

"I won't."