"Take off when you like. Go fishing maybe. Take a swim come summertime."

"I will."

Finn stands thinking. "So where's this widow's place, anyhow?"

"Top of the hill." Pointing with a hand that emerges from the sleeve of a coat of better quality than any Finn has possessed since his own squandered childhood.

"I seen it up there." He chews his lip and squints up toward the place.

"Reckon I might go on up and say my goodbyes. Ain't never done it proper, on account of how you two run off."

"It weren't my idea."

"I know it. I don't blame you. I blame that woman calls herself your mama." For it has occurred to him in this instant on this show-white street in this no-account Missouri village that if he does not desire to possess the boy then no one shall have him, least of all a nigger woman bound for enslavement.

The normally garrulous and amenable Huck knows not the words to make answer.

"Hear me, boy. Your mama's long dead."

"No."

"Breaks my poor heart to say it."

"No."

"Don't tell me what I know. She died giving you birth."

Tears come to the boy's eyes but he fights them back and turns to wipe his nose upon the sleeve of his coat.

"Now that nigger woman, she come along later. She's a runaway I done took in to be kindly."

"But the two of you."

"One thing led to another is all. That's the way of the world, boy." He hikes up his trousers and spits down between his boots. "I always had a fondness for her color, even though your own mama was as white as this very snow."

"She was."

"She by-God was. Look at your own self."

Confronted by the evidence of his very flesh the boy casts aside all previous assumptions on the matter and discovers that he believes. "Why did you lie to me."

"She done it, not me. I never."

"But sometimes you did. You'd call her my mama. You would."

"It weren't my idea."

"But."

"That nigger's a kindly old gal for the most part. I ain't taking that from her. I reckon she wanted a little boy of her own and I just up and give her one."

Huck looks away, distracted, off down the street to where the boys have disappeared around the turning. Despite his youth he desires in the manner of all people gone bereft to absent himself entirely from the known world, to break all bonds with it rather than let the pain of any yet unsevered connection bespeak the absence of those others already gone. Today he has lost two mothers, and he desires to be neither with his father nor with Mary nor anywhere at all. "I got to get to school," he says, hoping neither for confrontation nor for approval, but perhaps to wound his weakened father just the slightest by his willfulness.

"I know it."

"I don't go regular, but I got to go now."

"Then you go on."

"I will." Turning and making tracks.

"There a path up to that widow's house?" asks his father as he goes.

THE PATH CIRCLES AROUND the base of Cardiff Hill and skirts the upper edge of the quarry, where it intersects another path coming straight up from the edge of the Mississippi. Finn looks back and wonders how any son of his coming downhill from that house could ever choose the town path over the river, particularly when he faces no contrary force save a nigger woman and a useless old widow, but in the end he resolves that there are some things in this world that simply will not yield to reason.

He tops the hill and scuffs up the walk where the snow is thinner and windblown with his cross-heeled boot pinning down some of its tatters, and Mary answers his knock.

"You." Casting eyes upon him.

"I see that old widow's got you trained up well enough. The boy too, going to school and all."

"You saw Huck."

"I did."

The woman's eyes darken and she draws one short breath. "You can't have him."

"My, my, my." Finn rocks back on his heels, grinning through his mustache. "Ain't you gotten uppity?"

"He's better off here."

"I don't doubt it." Scanning the room behind her.

"Now Finn."

"A feller could be right comfortable in such a place."

"Don't you get any ideas."

"Yes sir, right comfortable. Provided he weren't growing up a goddamn nigger slave."

From the kitchen: "Mary?"

"I reckon your mistress is calling."

The woman cuts him with a look both furious and terrified if not for herself then for her son. She has grown comfortable here these last months enjoying the widow's wherewithal and accommodating the widow's habits and doing the widow's bidding, and now she despises this gleeful harbinger of fate for reminding her that all of it must come inevitably and one way or another to an end. She shall be either exiled or enslaved, and the decision between the two shall be entirely her own.

"I said your mistress."

"Mary?" Stretching out that second syllable as if calling a hog, the widow bustles toward them down the hall and then pulls up short to appraise this mendicant come begging around her door with his dusting of snow and his hat down over his eyes and his greasy old sack. Rarely do his kind seek comfort this high above the more ready pickings of the village, and she is unpracticed in the ways of rejection. "May I help you, sir?" Not recognizing him.

"No ma'am, your girl is doing just fine." A delicate stab that goes unnoticed at least by the widow, or else noticed and by lack of response acknowledged as mere truth.

"Have him go around to the kitchen door, Mary. He can have what breakfast Huck didn't eat. Then send him on his way."

"Mighty obliged, ma'am," touching his hat, "but I done had all the breakfast I can hold." By the time he delivers his surprising answer she is gone, circulating back into the depths of the house like some secretive fish and leaving Mary alone to dispose of him as she has been instructed.

"I done Huck a favor," he says, leaning toward her and offering a carnivorous smile.

So certain is she of the impossibility of it that she bothers not to ask what he has done. She scents the sharp tang of him and the sour rot of his breath and draws back a step.

"I told him he weren't yours."

"You." She stops, for she dares not so much as repeat the betrayal he has described lest by stating it again she should conjure it into truth.

"I done it so he don't suffer your same fate."

"You did it because you want him for yourself."

"I don't care to rear no child."

She scoffs with the last shred of dignity permitted her. "What chance would he have with you anyhow."

"He wouldn't be no slave."

"I'll tell him the truth."

"You do that. He'll believe his own flesh and blood."

Mary turns and considers herself in the hall mirror. "Then how am I to keep him?"

"You ain't."

From the back of the house: "Mary, shut the door."

He tells her what he has told the boy of his mother's death in childbirth and his kindness in taking in this desperate runaway for a substitute. "I never said you didn't care for him none."

"Mary!"

HE CAN STILL SEE HER standing in the doorway of the widow's place, surrounded by that looming hilltop house like Lazarus gone stiff at the entrance of his tomb, like Lot's wife turned to statuary by the power of her own unbelief. Like her he too dares look back over his own history, and for his punishment he is tormented to distraction by a kind of desperate unholy vigor, by the inescapable conviction that he has abandoned something that he must now restore unto himself regardless of the cost. He runs his lines and drinks his whiskey and sleeps all by himself in the hard frame bed, and he dreams of Mary of Mary only of Mary after all this time and he cannot help himself.

This would be a fine time to talk with Will or even to go straight to the Judge himself and make a clean breast of it regarding his now-terminated miscegenation. He has after all found his way through these many months without her, and if it were not for his damnable weakness he could make it through as many more again and then who knows. Perhaps his kinfolk would uphold him in his efforts. He would readily pledge to reform and swear upon a goddamn Bible if they required it. And yet to be truthful with himself he recognizes these ideas for the pipedreams that they are, since regardless of such other faults as he may have he is not entirely lacking in self-awareness. In this matter as in any other he has only himself to depend upon, and regardless of his intent he grows increasingly weak of spirit.

He takes to haunting the house on Cardiff Hill, lurking in the woods for the chance to cast his covetous eye upon her. He sleeps on the edge of the abandoned quarry when the weather is fair and in the hogpen behind a farmer's cottage when it is otherwise. The boy comes and goes and he observes his passage without interest from behind a pine tree as shaggy as his own countenance. It is the woman he wants. He sees her in the yard, he sees her through the window, he sees her making her way to the outhouse and the toolshed. He reckons that the widow must judge her worth her keep, and he bemoans the unfairness of the world.

18.

ALONE IN ALL THE WORLD but for his mislaid bastard son with two mothers dead-the apocryphal white in childbirth and now the unfortunate black in bloody ceremonial repudiation of her very nature and his perverse delight in it-Finn rises from his bed and runs his lines and sells the catch as is his custom. Back to his room he returns early, thinking of nothing but the laundress. He lies upon his bed in that milkwhite room half blackened and draws himself out and dreams his insistent dreams there high above the river with the dress and the apron and the underthings of Huck's mother hanging still upon their outlined nails within his view. He thinks of her flesh, not the laundress but the mother not the mother but the laundress not either one or perhaps both together and indistinguishable, merged, transubstantiate. Visions and impressions alternate in his mind one after the other each one more lurid than the last and each one doomed and empty on its own but capable of edging him that much closer to his satisfaction. In his dream the women love him, each in her turn, regardless of what he has done and how much he may further desire. He completes his act and fetches up black charcoal from the stove downstairs and draws out upon the walls the vision he has just seen in his mind's eye, himself, the woman, the laundress, his urgent shame and his satisfaction. He cannot get it right and so he tries again and again as he has attempted the act itself again and again before achieving his release, and in his drawing his cave painting his avid repeated execution of the scene formed prior in his imagination he takes the woman and removes from her the raiments of her flesh until she is reduced to mere black bone, an armature of skeletal parts broken and bent to his ministration. By the time he is done he finds himself aroused once more, and he wipes his blackened hands one upon the other and dresses and drinks a glass of whiskey. Then he unties the skiff and poles to the mudflats of darktown.

The laundress he finds tending her cauldron. He makes no pretense of engaging her in custom this time, approaching with neither clothing to wash nor coins for payment. Because he has laved his hands in riverwater then lifted them up to pole she can see the remnants of the black residue of his work shading away into his sleeves, his white skin here and there traced and carved clean by the passage of dripping water which has traveled down his wrists and forearms veinlike.

Her face brightens at his appearance, for none there are who call upon her with half the kindness of this forlorn white. Even from her low vantage she can see that he is of such reduced caste that stooping to her assistance can have caused him no loss of dignity. He has endured some grievous pain in his life and she can see it; he has suffered a loss perhaps even greater than her own and thus sufficiently powerful to bring him lower than the very lowest of his own kind. It is at such desperate points of illimitable degradation that understanding blooms.

"Mr. Finn."

"Just Finn."

Withdrawing the peeled branch and passing the back of her hand across her brow. "What brings you here."

"I was out."

She cannot help but see upon him a look of strangeness and animal hunger, as if he has emerged from forty days' wandering in the desert beyond the precincts of civilization. He looks alarmed, astonished by his own presence within earthbound skin, returned here bursting into life by means of some dire pact with the devil.

"Can I get you something?" What she owns shall belong to him, this lone white man who has shown her unbidden kindness.

"A little water."

There is a cistern by the shack across the way, a cistern shared by these dark poor too downtrodden for declaring individual right even to this the plainest of God's mercies. She goes and dips water while he stands staring at the bubbling cauldron and the crackling fire. When she returns he takes the hand that holds the dipper forth and bends it steadily in his own that he may down the water with a greedy delicacy, and then he asks for more without so much as taking his eyes away from her.

"Are you hungry?"

"No."

But she can see his need and so she begins: "I could."

"You got none to spare."

"I do. Some."

"Then I reckon I could make a little room."

There is hard biscuit and a stew of greens whose scent carries the faintest suspicion of pork and it makes him sad and weary to eat it for it signifies to him the life from which he long ago rescued that other. "Next time I'll bring you some of them little fiddler cats," he says.

"You needn't repay me."

"I don't mean to." Just so she knows he is not beholden. "They'd go good with your greens is all."

"I reckon they would," she says, lifting her eyes.

They finish and she takes away his plate, and he sits looking at the place in the corner from which the preacher snatched the child. There lies the abandoned pallet and above it a man's overalls.

"You look like you lost something," she says over her shoulder.