"Them times are gone."

"Maybe so."

Finn sits upon the bed and reaches under it to draw out a bottle. He uncorks it with his teeth and takes a long satisfying pull.

"Is this all you do anymore?" Looking from his brother to the walls and back again.

"It ain't so bad." He pounds the cork back in with the heel of his hand. "I fish a little bit. Either way, it's all I got left in the world."

"You've got the Judge."

"I know it." Pulling on his drawers and his shoes. "There's always the Judge. I believe he'll outlive me, the sonofabitch."

"The Judge," says Will, "is sure to outlive us all."

The day is hot and sunny and Finn exits into it with the fierce sudden pain of the newly awakened dead. The light burns his eyes and his head throbs and he can hardly keep pace up the hill with his own perpetually deskbound brother.

"You'll go it alone from here," says Will as they reach his office door. The white sign with its black letters gleams in tumultuous leafshot daylight, and the nest of spiders has cast forth its young to scatter themselves abroad like so many rumors of catastrophe. Finn tips his broken slouch hat to his brother and walks on wordless.

Spring seems to him more advanced the higher into the village he goes, perhaps because its bright signifiers are more readily available to and cultivated by residents of higher strata. Flowers bloom in gardens and window boxes and hanging planters, and as intimate as he is with the elements of the natural world he cannot tell one of these domesticated blossoms from the next. The Judge's mansion alone remains unbedecked. Finn keeps his pace steady as he travels the walk and strides across the porch with his cross-marked boots. Then hat in hand he knocks.

"The Judge wants me." To the hired man's wife or at least a vertical sliver of her, bright in narrow sunshine through the cracked door.

"I'll tell him." She goes off neither closing the door nor opening it farther and he remains behind. When she returns he follows her down the hall to the Judge's sealed room and knocks, and lets himself in without waiting to be admitted.

"Pap."

"You look a fright."

"I know it."

"Sit." The Judge closes a ledger book and files it and spends a moment or two stacking up papers that he has positioned around about his desk like dealt cards. He makes a study of each one as he raises it into the light of his oil lamp, and midway through he stops, reconsiders, and sorts them all over again into a different arrangement.

Finn clears his throat.

The Judge attends to his work.

"You sent for me," says Finn.

"I am aware of that. Sit." Without looking up at his son or glancing away at anything other than whatever artifice of paper he is devoted now to constructing. His reading glasses have slipped down his nose and he keeps his great hairless head tipped rearward as if he has detected upon the air some troubling scent brought by his prodigal son into this place. Finally he ties the pages off in a slim leather portfolio with a tourniquet of dark red ribbon, and aligns the packet in the dead center of his desk. He folds his hands upon it, waiting.

"Pap." Beginning again.

"For some time I have been reflecting on our agreement."

"I know it."

"Do you recall its terms?"

"I do." For he has labored beneath them since the night when through no fault of his own the poor luckless Philadelphian went to meet his maker.

"You'll be glad to make an end to it, then. I can see that."

"I will be."

"Good."

The Judge slides his elbows forward and raises his hands to place the palms and fingertips together. Then he tips his hands over slowly until they point toward his son, and he angles his head and sights along them over his reading glasses as he would sight down the barrel of a gun.

"That child of yours. That mulatto creature."

"Huck."

"How old would he be now?"

"Ten years, I reckon. Maybe eleven. Maybe more." With a shrug. "He run off."

"He did."

"Some while back."

"How long."

"A year or two."

"Your chronology is a little vague." Flattening his hands back down upon the desk.

"I don't keep no calendar."

"So I see."

"I don't have much need." This audience is proceeding better than Finn had expected, and he permits himself to sag a little in his chair. He slides one booted foot out to the side, making himself just the slightest bit at home.

The Judge for his part stiffens. "Do you know where he's gone?"

"More or less." He goes cagey.

"But you can find him. You're a man of the woods, a man of the river, the sort of highly capable individual who could track down a fugitive creature like that with his eyes closed. Isn't that correct?"

"I reckon it is." Although his father's tone is abrupt and more than a trace sarcastic, the Judge has never before spoken such respectful words to his son, and so Finn receives them now with a little self-conscious smile.

"Very well then. I shall give you the opportunity to make good-not only upon your vaunted abilities as a woodsman, but upon the promise you made to me over the body of that godforsaken Whittier."

"And then we'll be square."

"Then we'll be square."

"It's been a long time coming," says Finn. "God knows I've tried."

But the Judge makes no acknowledgment. He merely swivels his head to look toward the shuttered window as if imagining a world beyond it different from this one, and then turns back to his grown son. "I want you to clear my bloodline."

Finn gives him back a look of mixed bafflement and horror.

"The creature. The child. The boy."

"I already took care of that." For he has an idea.

The Judge narrows his eyes. "You said he ran off."

"He did. I tracked him down and set him straight about that nigger woman."

"As much as it pains me to admit it, I'm having difficulty following your thread."

"I told him she weren't his mama."

The Judge shifts in his chair. "Go on."

"I told him his mama was a white gal that died giving him birth. Told him the nigger gal was just a charity case I took in. A runaway."

"My God." With an incredulous shake of his head. "You are indeed gifted at bringing things to ruin."

"Oh, he believed me all right."

"He won't keep it up for long. A mulatto child like that."

"Huck's as white as you or me. I swear it."

The Judge leans back in his chair and tugs at his lip. "So that's the way you left things with him. That his mother is a dead woman."

"A dead white woman," Finn clarifies. "And he'll never know no better."

"I suppose he won't."

"He won't go noising nothing around, that for sure. Once he got wind of that nigger woman's lie, he broke it off with her for good. Just like his old man done."

"That's all to my advantage, I must admit it."

"My pleasure to oblige."

"But still," says the Judge, leaning forward into the light of the oil lamp, recovering his old intent, "I cannot tolerate my blood passing through mulatto veins."

"I know it." Airy and agreeable, as if the storm has passed.

"So regardless of what the boy knows or does not know, I must insist upon purging my bloodline of all trace of your willful and wicked miscegenation. By which, lest there be any misunderstanding on your part, I mean to say that I am relying upon you to end the life of that bastard creature. And bring me evidence."

"But if he don't know, and nobody else knows."

"I still know." The Judge paces his words like drumbeats. "And my knowing is sufficient cause. Let that be a lesson." He leans back and withdraws his head from the light as if he has become some mythic oracle of few words and implacable intent.

"I can't do it."

"Consider the alternative."

"I considered it."

"You don't have to make up your mind now. Take a few days. You've disarmed the creature, after all, which I appreciate. Such action is grounds for a brief stay of execution, if nothing else." The idea seems to give him pleasure.

Finn sits thinking. He pushes a fingertip into one ear and draws it back and rubs the waxy residue into a ball between forefinger and thumb. He wonders how much wastage of hair and fingernails and sloughed skin, how large an accumulation of snot and phlegm and crusted sleep he has cast aside on his passage through this vale of tears, and he figures that if he had it all collected up in one place he could make of it a boy, a thing like a tar baby or some other lifeless husk yearning for his animating breath, instead of having only the boy Huck to show for his troubles, only the boy Huck not even sufficiently aware to understand the woes of his origin or to grasp the slow sure sealing of his doom.

Perhaps, Finn thinks, he might offer some alternative penance.

"The woman," he says. "The nigger woman."

"What of her."

"I didn't break it off."

Wearily: "You will now. Or you'll risk siring another mulatto bastard. And you have seen where that leads."

"No. I didn't need to break it off." Finn lowers his voice to the faintest conspiratorial hiss. "I killed her."

"Really."

"Honest," says Finn. "I done it for you."

"For me."

"There weren't no other way to get shut of her. No way that I could tell. I tried losing her but I couldn't make it stick."

"With your own two hands."

"It's what you wanted."

"I'll admit that," says the Judge. He removes his reading glasses and studies his son as if seeing him anew. There is a certain grudging and tentative respect in his look, mingled with the usual contempt and a newfound measure of something like alarm. The man before him is capable of almost anything and he sees this somehow for the first time. He sees it with all the terrible clarity of a premonition. "Very well," he says at last, folding his glasses and tucking them into the breast pocket of his coat. "Where's the body?"

"That's my business."

"It was mine from the start."

"It's safe enough all right."

"I'll need to see it." For the proof and for the pleasure and for the satisfaction of seeing his son reduced.

"I thrown it in the river."

"More's the pity," says the Judge. "If you could have shown me some evidence, I just might have given you more time to consider the boy." He dangles the idea like bait. Whether he believes that Finn has lied about the murder or lied about the disposal of the body makes no difference, for the two are signs of one and the same impulse.

"Maybe," says Finn, his mind racing, "maybe it got hung up on a snag."