"I didn't," he says, but in his broken heart and his subverted groin he can tell that he has lost along with his woman and his child the impulse to pursue such possibilities as have brought him abegging to darktown. "How about I cook you them cats next time?" Picturing her in his own lair, that scene of other crimes to which he has become by habit inured.

FIREWORKS THROUGH THE MILK of his whitewashed windows. A ruddy glow to suffuse walls hieroglyphed with one man's history. Finn rolls over in his lonesome bed and rises up like the dead at a great noise from without, an explosion as big as what remains of the world, and he runs down the stairs to stand upon the long front porch and watch while a crippled northbound steamboat, the Wallace P. Greene, erupts into flame. He has not been in bed for long, and with a befogged brain he stands to observe and marvel. The Wallace P. Greene's boiler has exploded, the fault of an engineer who fell asleep at his works on account of a sleepless night prior spent arguing with a cantankerous wife who had been busy all week nursing a sick child, the resultant high-pressure blast killing a sweat-greased black tender by driving the blade of a coal shovel through his throat and severing his head clean. The shock wave from the burst boiler has rocked the furnace upon its moorings and blown off its door and opened a seam from which a torrent of fire spills lavalike onto the decking. The engineer is the second to die, trapped amid wreckage and fire, but he will not be the last.

From Finn's vantage on his riverward porch the Wallace P. Greene is soon become a variegated fountain of flame, not just from its tall twin stacks but from the open lower deck with its cargo of cotton and livestock and coal, and soon enough from the windows of the upper deck as well. The sternwheel seizes and shudders and begins to turn backward as the mighty vessel gives in to the river, and when at last she yields up her aim and begins to turn upon the current small figures appear one by one and two by two at the railings attired wraithlike in nightshirts and nightgowns. They hold hands and assume various theatrical postures of uncertainty and desperation and woe, strung along the rail like gemstones lit by fire. Some turn to look over their shoulders as if seeking a loved one, some dash momentarily back toward the flames only to emerge once again coalescing against the fierce redness that has repelled them. Ultimately they jump alone or in small groups into the black water and thrash against it to free themselves from the gathering power of the steamboat bound ultimately like themselves downstream.

Finn watches all of this, along with the arrival of an army of men in a fleet of smaller boats to rescue those gone overboard and corral the willful ball of flame that was once the Wallace P. Greene, with a kingly sort of detachment. Only when the steamboat shifts-its stern running up against a sandbar and hanging there to let the bow swing broadside to the channel and with the force of the current accelerate its turning until it breaks free and takes aim downriver as if the entire Wallace P. Greene were itself a great cannon with its flaming maw aimed squarely at Finn's violate and piratical presence-only then does he register that there may be some part for him to play in this maritime spectacle. Straight for his overhanging porch comes the steamboat, its twin stacks crumpling over in paired showerings of sparks and its every plank afire and its cargo of livestock bellowing like demons. As intimately as he knows the current and the channel he knows that the Wallace P. Greene will not veer away in time, and as much as he would prefer to escape by jumping barenaked into the river and swimming for it he calculates from the boat's speed and course that he will do better running out the back door and down the stairs and concealing himself and his nakedness in the woods behind the house. This he does, his darting passage a flicker in the night, and beyond the outhouse he crouches shivering like a wild thing with his red eyes afire and his scraggly goatlike balls adangle to watch while the boat surges slow as death on the unfurling current toward his exposed overhanging house.

Upriver and down the air vibrates with a high and many-voiced keening which he does not register. The boat itself makes only the variegated noises of its burning. He watches it drift downriver like some inexorable ghost ship acrackle with the sounds of timbers popping and containers bursting and plate glass shattering from the outward force of great contained heat; he watches it drift downriver consuming itself as it comes like some cancerous thing alive, fueled and reduced at once by its own selfsame diminishing weight. The pilothouse breaks loose of the texas and tumbles forward and then down two full stories to crash upon the main deck amid bales of cotton already blooming with high ragged flame, and by the resultant burst and subsiding glow the Wallace P. Greene seems even more intent upon sighting its riverside target. Her high jutting prow extends out of the water far enough to spear Finn's house before she runs aground.

He can see in his mind's eye the damage sure to be done, the prow blasting at an angle upward through the pilings and into the main house in one blow, hanging there momentarily as if at rest, and then when the irresistible power of the current and the weight of the massive flaming boat take over tearing laterally southward slicing the house in two, like a sharp knife gutting a sunfish.

"Least I'll see her go," says Finn.

But he does not.

For the men in their boats have managed to get lines around one strut of the sternwheel, the only part of the steamboat not yet fully engulfed, and the sudden yank of their ropes going taut is sufficient not to arrest the Wallace P. Greene but to alter its course the slightest. The prow turns as the boat shifts on its axis and rather than plunge swordlike into Finn's riverside house it only clips the southernmost of its pilings and heaves on past oblivious. The piling collapses into the water like another timber of the wrecked steamboat, like the useless pilothouse itself, leaving Finn's dwelling to sag riverward as if impatient for the hour of its own destruction.

19.

SPRING.

The boy has expanded his orbit through the long cold months of winter, wordlessly making clear to his mother the untruth with which his father has rendered him both cursed and cured. He has gone pale and sad during these pale and sad days. The widow has made attempts to warm him by the fireside and to help him with his studies but he rejects both her comfort and her aid for he desires them no more than he desires the attentions of the woman who once was his mother and then was his secret and now is merely a signifier of all that he has lost without knowing it. He possesses at least the sensitivity not to confront her with his burden of truth and thereby break her heart; this much he has unwittingly inherited from this figure who now, against her will, retreats into a dark corner of that which was once his life.

"Soon we shall need to make a decision," says the widow on a fine spring morning when no person could desire a single thing more in life than to remain forever upon this high and airy hill so far above the world. The boy has gone down ostensibly to school but actually to recapitulate the best and freest and most true aspects of his father's life, out on the mudflats with a cane pole and a blackened corncob pipe. He will release what he catches and eat the lunch Mary has prepared for him and stretch out full upon a sunny rock until the time has come to return to the widow's house bearing tales of the other boys' mischief-making with tacks and chairs and inkwells and braids. Neither woman will attend in the least to these stories of his, and not merely because they have heard each word of them one hundred times before. Instead they will find themselves preoccupied by the implications of a decision that even now, even while the boy loafs under a pine tree at the margin of the river dangling his line, they are about to reach.

"Where will you go if you don't stay on?" asks the widow. She sits in the porch swing and Mary sits on the step beneath her.

"I don't know."

"The boy is certainly happy here." She makes this observation as if it settles everything, which it practically does. "If you don't mind my saying so."

"I know it."

"I've treated you two properly, haven't I?"

"Yes ma'am." Thinking of winter nights at the fire, the three of them more a family than any she has known since fate swept her away from the care of Mrs. Fisk and the high hopes of her father and left her shipwrecked and friendless in the wretched cabin behind the Judge's house with Finn for her keeper. She knows that this widow woman could be Huck's own Mrs. Fisk, faithful and kind and expecting the best despite all odds. Yet. "I can't be a slave again."

"Child," says the widow, "what on earth can you know of slavery?"

"No more than what I hear." Recalling that once upon a time she lied to the widow about having been stolen away from it at an age too early to remember.

"All folks do things differently. There are circumstances and there are circumstances."

"I know it."

"Nothing will change."

Mary purses her lips and looks out at high clouds adrift like steamboats.

"I'll keep up your pay."

"Thank you kindly," says the woman, but she shakes her head.

"What will you do? Go back to that Finn?" Thus speaking aloud the changeless and unapproachable fear that Mary herself for these past months has dared not contemplate. Yet downstream lies sure slavery, and upstream lies bleak uncertainty, and across the broad Mississippi lies some lonesome solitary life deprived not only of the boy but of all who have ever known him. Finn, the devil she knows, is barely distinguishable among the sorry alternatives.

The clouds collide and separate and drift on, changed in their aspect but immutable in their nature. "If you go to him," says the widow, "you surely can't think of taking the boy. He'll hurt that poor thing too. Sooner or later. You know it sure as I do." The widow raises to Mary a finger as frail and stern as any that she has seen since she left the hopeful care of Mrs. Fisk. "Do as you like with yourself, but think of the child."

His mother sits for a moment in the spring air and the open light, drawing inward upon herself and closing some door in her mind and opening another. Then she stands and levels her gaze at the widow: "Wherever I go, you need to understand something." Drawing one slow breath. "He's truly not mine."

The widow cocks her old head.

"I love him, but I'm not his mother."

"Is that a fact," says the widow. She would have promised not to claim him anyway, even without Mary's resorting to this dreadful lie by way of repudiating his parentage and clearing his name and title. She was prepared to promise anything, any kindness within her power, if only she could keep the boy and raise him as a simulacrum of her own lost child, and so her heart wells up with love for this woman's final act of denial. "You know who he belongs to?"

"Finn. Old Finn in Lasseter, who doesn't care in the least for him."

"And his mother?"

"Dead," says Mary.

FINN PLIES THE RIVER with his wooden skiff and strung lines, small on a boundless expanse, as if plundering immensity itself. He sells his catch and buys back a little of it fried up by Dixon's wife and sits drinking whiskey on Dixon's high porch as the sun sets far beyond the river in wilder territory than this.

"That's it," he says after a while to nobody except perhaps the absent Dixon, and he raps his scabby knuckles on the table and shoves off. Since no one seems to be looking, he takes the jug.

He permits the skiff to meander southward on its own, standing amidships in the dark with the jug in one hand and his unloosed self in the other, blessing the downbound Mississippi with his own slight augmenting stream. As long as he has it out he considers doing a little something further with it, but the whiskey has gotten the better of him and in the end he decides that he ought to save himself anyhow, for who knows what opportunities tomorrow may bring.

Downriver he goes past the steamboat landing, past the huddled shacks of darktown, past the trading post belonging to Smith. He poles where he can pole but mainly he drifts in deep water, making good time on the fast high springtime current that hurtles south as if eager to bear him to his destination. Just north of St. Petersburg he angles around the far side of an island and makes for the Missouri shore, permitting the skiff to slide past the ramshackle docks and the deserted levee and drawing up instead onto a muddy bank below the quarry. He ties up in a brushy spot overarched with willows and sleeps while the rest of the world does likewise.

In the morning he rises and strips naked and throws himself into the river, and then lizardlike upon a rock he dries his flesh in the sun and drinks what remains of the whiskey, growing warm both inside and out. He dresses after a while and ties back his hair with a bit of line and throws the jug into the river as if to turn over some new leaf, and then without further thought or consideration he stalks up Cardiff Hill.

The woman is already out among the washlines, and she comes upon him behind a flapping sheet as upon a spider beneath some rock.

"Mary."

He holds up a hand in a kind of innocent greeting, and she takes a half-step backward. He keeps the hand raised and with its fingertips he holds back the sheet, making of it a proscenium beneath which she might witness one version of her life's remainder enacted.

"You Finn." Looking over her shoulder for the widow, who will not come.

"Is that any way."

"I don't know."

He smoothes back his damp hair with the flat of one palm. "I been keeping an eye on you."

"Have you now."

"I have."

"From whereabouts?"

"From around," he says.

"The boy too?"

Huck is to him a mere impediment, but the look in her eye prevents him from saying so. He remarks instead upon the length of her absence, and how it has seemed to him an eternity.

"Is that a fact."

"It is." He lets go the sheet and steps past it, and with the other hand he takes her wrist in a grip whose pressure is calibrated as precisely as any line he has ever tugged, any blade he has ever pressed, any trigger he has ever squeezed. His touch communicates a thousand shades of yearning and insistence and possibility. "Come home," he says.

THEY ARE TOGETHER upon the frame bed in the high bedroom in absolute dark, the dense clouds above and the sluggish river below each likewise invisible. By his potency and the rapt hypnotic attention that he focuses upon her she judges that he has given up whiskey in her absence, and this she takes for the greatest of miracles.

"At the beginning I feared you'd come for us."

"I known where you was all along." A lie for its own imperious sake.

"But you didn't." Trailing off.

"I reckoned a person wants to make her own bed ought to sleep in it a while." Upon her belly he traces with his finger a line from navel to breastbone. "It weren't so bad being all by my lonesome. I got by."

"Did you tell the Judge?"

"Thought about it. Reckoned it weren't no business of his."

"You could have told him you put me out."

"I know it."

"Years ago you said you would. When he found us in the cabin you said you'd drop me, just like that, on his account." Never again since that day has she called him on this denial, and yet it has remained all this time upon her heart like another scar.

"I know."

"Did you mean it?" she says. "That you'd drop me?"

"I didn't." He draws breath, lifts his finger from her skin, and lies back like a man on a slab. "And I reckon he knew I didn't."

She lies breathing there beside him, her mind and heart angled at cross purposes. "The thing you told Huck," she begins after a while.

Finn grunts and scratches himself.

"I believe you did him a kindness."

"I know it," says Finn.

He was ravenous for her when he found her there among the hanging sheets and now that they are finished getting reacquainted and have rested a while he is ravenous again and hating himself for it, and thinking as he penetrates her once more of nothing other than the Judge and those pleasures in life that the Judge has forbidden him. She would rather sleep but she interprets his urgent roughness for something higher and so she acquiesces. Yet when he is finished this second time, truly and unsatisfactorily finished, and when she has stood to open the window and let in some fresh air, he rises too, unsteady on his feet and damp with her, and he dons his overalls and takes his hat from its nail and heads for Dixon's. Returning he will battle serpents on the stairs and spiders in the doorway and fall unconscious upon the horsehair couch as if she has not returned to him at all, but as the months pass he will grow accustomed to her presence once more and her good fortune will come to its natural end.

20.

TWICE WILL RAPS upon the door of the tumbledown riverside wreckage that may as well be his own for all the value in Finn's squatter's right, and when twice there is no answer he springs the latch and admits himself. The floor slants alarmingly downward to his left where the Wallace P. Greene swept one of the pilings away, and already certain flotsam has begun to accumulate in that far corner by the entry to the porch. Bottles mainly but also clothing and trash and scraps of paper and something alive that rustles invisibly there even as he looks and listens. To his right is the door to the bedroom stairs, hanging open in a frame abristle with pulled nails that sprout like so many teeth. The naked board steps before him are spattered with white paint and bare footprints marked in the blackest coal dust, with bits of charcoal littered from edge to edge and ground into each crevice and corner. He thinks the place is worse than he had imagined it, worse even than it must have been when old Anderson died intestate here and left it ripe for the salvaging, and he is half afraid to touch anything within its confines. At the turning of the stairs he begins to see if not what his brother has done then at least the markings indicative of it. They swoop and careen across the walls in great angry torrents. They intersect and overlap and contradict one another like a band of murderers making testimony. They consist where he can make them out of dead men and spraddle-legged women and lost children, of blood and bottles and long sharp knives, of words never spoken save in derision and lust and despair. Will turns his rapt gaze entirely around as he takes the last few steps, wondering what he has done by turning this riverside place into his brother's habitation and penitentiary and sanatorium. He has not long to consider the question, for even now his brother, despite the lateness of this fine bright morning when he ought by rights to be out running his lines, even now his brother has commenced to stir upon his whitewashed bed of coals.

"Will."

"What have you done."

"I can't say." For he knows not whether Will is asking about the drawings or about the things they represent or about some other perhaps less grievous crime that he may have committed as recently as last night while under the perpetual influence.

"These walls."

"I painted them up a while back, but they was too plain."

"Is that it." He asks although he does not truly desire to know.

"I reckon."

Will puts his hand on the banister and draws it back grimed over with black. "Father wants you."

"I ain't going." He staggers out of bed and slips upon a strewn deck of greasy cards, falling hard on his bony unforgiving ass. He has lost some weight since Will saw him last, lost some weight yet gone flabby in places too. He is oddly both diminished and increased, at once an echo and a refutation of his former self.

"You ain't going. Isn't that just like you."

"I ain't his to command."

"He seems to think you are." Drawing from his pocket a summons and clearing his throat and reading it aloud, with particular emphasis upon a certain passage regarding a promise that Finn has apparently made to his father in return for some kindness granted. He folds the note with one hand clean and one otherwise, and restores it thus contaminated to his pocket.

Finn regains his feet. "So what's he got on his mind, you reckon." Considering such alternatives as there may be to ignoring his father's summons, including a noose around his neck at best and a lifetime in Alton at worst. Having already rid himself for good of the woman and her taint, he cannot imagine what his father might desire or what he himself might offer the Judge by way of alternative penance or even perhaps proof that he has acceded already to his highest wish.

"I wouldn't know."

"I reckon I ought to count my blessings he ain't called on me before."

"I remember times when all you wanted was to talk to him."

"Not lately."

"Perhaps not."