"It's not your place to know the mind of the Judge, nor is it mine."

"I'm just."

"Everything happens for a reason." Which to her is an article of doomed faith and to him is an explanation of the webwork of causality in which he finds himself trapped.

RETURN THE JUDGE DOES, in due time and burdened down with his own ideas and understandings. He drags a divisive trail of misery behind him as a mule drags a plow, and by its passage the landscape in his wake is altered day by day. The Judge's reputation, a reputation long and fairly earned, is that none save himself shall be satisfied by his rulings. Some say that even he despairs with each grim final blow of his gavel, for the harsh justice that he measures out can neither sufficiently punish the guilty nor fully restore the wronged. Some say this, gathered muttering in damp prison cells or sipping tea in the parlors of great houses, but they cannot know for certain and the truth is more likely that they are manufacturing ordinary human emotions to overlay upon his transient and inscrutable self and make him thus both knowable and known.

The boy returns from a rare and contrite day at school to find the Judge's black bowler hat already brushed clean and hung upon its hook in the entryway like some inky aperture in the white wall, and his dizzy dreamlike urge is to escape by squeezing through it and out the other side into a place where men are neither parted nor linked by such fierce impassive implements as the Judge shuttles day by day across the virgin hills of Illinois.

His mother is in the kitchen and with the blank thin expanse of her back she instructs him to linger not but instead to go direct to his father's study, which he does, and when the door opens to expel him later like the whale casting out Jonah he is neither in the mood for sympathy nor likely to receive it. He is to do the neighbor's laundry for a month, and moreover he is to do this penance and everything else in purposely muddied drawers of his own, donned damp and sticky and permitted to dry into a harsh scratchy encrustation upon his legs and his ass and his privates. The halfwit Tyrell finds this punishment amusing to no end, a circumstance that might refute the Judge's alleged belief that justice, though necessary, is never fully possible, and he lingers about the laundry room when he should be at his chores, eyeing the boy's leaking shorts.

"You shit yourself again today, boy?" With an inquisitive sniffing that makes his narrow face look even more like a rabbit than usual.

"No sir."

"Then what you got up there?"

"Nothing." Bent over the washboard.

"You hiding a nigger up in there somewheres?" His head cocked.

"I don't reckon I could."

"You don't know much."

"I know enough."

"Next time, you have that nigger take a bath a'fore he climbs in."

The boy rakes Tyrell's things across the washboard as if to abrade them down to nothing but scraps and buttons and loose wet fibers of homespun. Some residual urge causes him to wish that the Judge were present to defend him against Tyrell's weirdly troubling innuendo, but in his heart he knows that this is precisely the punishment or some variant thereof that the Judge has had in mind from the beginning. And so he steels himself. "I don't have no truck with niggers," he says. "Filthy or clean."

"They's only one kind." Tyrell laughs with a kind of fierce hiccup, the halfwit proudly superior to the boy. "They's only one kind of nigger. That's the first thing you got to know."

"I know it," says the boy.

6.

FINN LINGERS at his fencepost and permits the heat of the sun to draw him back from his reverie of that upstream house sloping riverward under its burden of remembrance. Two men stroll past his resting place, one black and one white, each of them paler and more bookish than the other. Head to grizzled gray head they converse like a pair of old philosophers. The black man is by a slight degree the more fastidious, dressed like a diplomat in a gleaming white shirt and a woolen suit the color of a chestnut, balancing upon his head an elegant brown bowler and bearing in his right hand a silver-headed cane that he uses only sparingly, as if he is loath to soil its chalk-white tip upon the ground of St. Petersburg. He walks with his shoulders thrown back and his narrow chest cutting the Missouri air like the prow of a ship, his slender hands are gloved in a pale off-white only shades lighter than his yellow skin, and from time to time he opens his mouth wide and laughs a deep round laugh from between bright white teeth as if everyone within earshot were appreciative of his refined sense of humor. Finn squints at him as he would squint at a bright light or the arrival of apocalypse.

The two men pause a little distance away to greet another gentleman, this one known to the white but not to the black. Once their introductions are complete and their gloves have been removed as needed to permit the shaking of hands and then donned all over again, the third gentleman tips his hat and proceeds on his way with an appreciative nodding of his head-while the other two continue toward Finn.

"New in town?" says Finn from his seat by the fencepost. "Your friend I mean." Looking straight at the white man and the white man only, with an intensity that makes a show of excluding the other.

The white man has been so long so far beyond contact with an individual like Finn that he accepts his question without reservation and stops as eagerly as if he has been invited to dance. "Why, yes," he says, and again: "Why, yes indeed."

"Thought so."

The white man folds his hands at his sternum and begins to declaim. "Professor Morris is visiting from Ohio, where he teaches at Kenyon College. He'll be speaking tonight at the Reform Church."

"You fixing to sell him?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Not that he's likely to fetch much." Here he permits his gaze to wander over the black man's regally slim figure. "Not by the look of him."

"Sir."

"Ain't nothing worth any less than a puny nigger. Other'n a puny nigger in a ten-dollar suit, putting on airs."

"Come along, Professor," says the white man to the black. "We're late for your introductions at the church." He takes his associate by the elbow but finds him immovable, for the professor has been turned to stone by Finn's effrontery. He spreads wide his legs and cocks his head to one side and leans forward upon his cane, transfixed by their interlocutor as he would be by a Siberian tiger in a circus parade.

"You mind your master," says Finn with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Git along now, boy."

"No man is my master," intones the black man, with the theatrical air of an individual winding up to deliver a lecture or a sermon.

"Is that so?" Addressing the white man, parting his knees to scratch at his crotch.

"If you please, sir," interrupts the black man with a schoolroom kind of sarcasm, "you may direct your questions to me. Dr. Bale here is my colleague, not my translator. And above all he is most assuredly not my keeper."

"I told you," the white man puts in, "he's a college professor. From Ohio."

"I got ears."

"He's a scholar."

"I heard."

"He comes from an extremely progressive state-a state where a man like Professor Morris is not only free, but free to vote."

"Bullshit," says Finn.

"Not at all."

Finn grunts.

"You have a lot to learn," says the professor.

"I might."

"Change is afoot."

Finn cogitates for a minute. "If a nigger can vote," he says, "then I don't reckon I'll ever vote again."

"Suit yourself."

"I don't care what state."

"Time and events will overtake you."

"Maybe they will."

"Perhaps they already have."

As the gentlemen go on their way Finn has an idea. He returns to the jail where he finds the marshal on his knees in the one cell, bent over a bucket and bearing a rag, cleaning up after Finn's own mess of the night prior.

"You tell me something?"

"What is it?"

"What's the rule for claiming a loose nigger in this state?"

"Depends."

"What on?"

"Where he's from. Certain conditions."

"From Ohio, let's say."

"You be talking about a free man?"

"So far."

The marshal drops the rag into the water and sits back upon his heels. "Anybody particular in mind?"

"I won't lie to you. That professor."

"The one over to the church tonight."

"That's the one."

"Finn, you're either the smartest man in this town or the stupidest."

"I need money. You heard that judge same as me."

"I did."

"Lawsuits cost."

"I wonder how much you'd need before you couldn't spend every bit of it on whiskey."

"I aim to find out."

"You never will."

"We'll see. So what's the rule on that professor?"

"You won't like it." He goes back to daubing the floor with his rag. "Six months to claim."

"He ain't here six months."

"I know it."

"I claim him, I'd even sell him back to that Ohio college they like him so much. He don't look like a worker to me."

"You can't do it, Finn."

"You sure about the six months?"

"I am."

"That long?"

"That long."

"A man could starve."

"Or work."

"I've run up against the law before."

"I know it."

"I don't mean this." Indicating with a flick of his eyes the cell, the crust of vomit still visible upon the bedframe, the recent past. "I mean the Judge."

"I know."

"Him and my own rightful inheritance, which it looks like I'll never get as long as I live."

"Stealing a nigger ain't the way to fix your problem."

"I reckon."

But Finn is not without alternatives. When evening comes he takes up a position in the doorway of the Reform Church, where Professor Morris will be speaking, and assumes the pose of a mendicant, hat in hand and cheeks hollow and eyes brimming with woe. To the forward-looking faithful he is the veriest picture of need, unbesmirched by such associations as his figure may possess for those acquainted with the taverns and the marshal's office and the courts, and they do unto him as they would have others do unto themselves.

He is gone before the professor climbs the steps to the pulpit, and on his tramp back to the cabin he stops at the riverside redoubt of a bootlegger for a gallon of whiskey that will hold him until he has an opportunity to use the rest of his newfound riches to lay in proper supplies.

JUDGE THATCHER PERMITS the boy three dollars and before he can make use of it Finn has claimed it for his own. He awakens in the marshal's office to discover that Thatcher is riding the circuit and he'll be seeing a new man instead.

"This one a kindly sort?"

"Don't know. Mostly he's on the circuit."