African jungle. “Don’t you worry about the devil,” he says. “He’s not permitted across the threshold of my house.”
Finn knows better but he will not say.
The food at Judge Stone’s table is not elegant but it is rich and varied and there is plenty of it. Mrs. Stone has even baked a pie, not because they have a guest for supper but because she bakes a pie most every day of the week. For Finn, whose diet changes month by month as the year unwinds, the preserved huckleberries speak of a season long gone and hitherto irrecoverable. As he chews, methodical as some old ruminant, these baked-black berries beneath the latticework of their pale and tender crust speak also of innocence undisturbed, of childhoods spent around tables like this and around others less elevated and bountiful, of secrets buried beneath time and earth and flowing water; and even in the forced absence of whiskey a vision passes before his eyes unbidden not of snakes or of spiders but of the turgid Mississippi beneath his window on the Illinois side crossed and recrossed with a cumulative ghostly weavework of fishing boats’ accidental paths and steamboats’ cautious trajectories achurn with white foam beneath which and supporting all lies dark water and darker history.
Only the children fear him. The boy is perhaps seven or eight, his sister older than that by a year, and they are formally dressed in a way that distinguishes them from the ordinary run of children, a condition that has made them disdained on one hand and elevated on the other but has nonetheless left neither unbaptized by the river of rumor that laves all of St. Petersburg’s children, a river heavy with detail about the hideous habits of Pap Finn. All the same their father is present, and their visitor is well enough dressed and better behaved, and they are safe by their own homefire, so by the time Finn has loaded up his plate with his third piece of pie and drunk his second cup of coffee the boy works up sufficient nerve to ask him a question.
“That dead body that came down the river awhile back: Did you know some folks thought it was you?”
Finn holds his fork in his fist like a club, and he freezes with it poised over a dessert plate clotted with syrup. For some seconds he does not move, not so much as an eyelash, and his presence at the table takes on by its very stoniness a kind of fearsome potency, like a mountain lion coiled to leap or a hunter waiting behind some leafy blind for the inevitable moment when his prey will step into full and vulnerable view. He is pure potential, dead silent and for all human purposes outside time, and as he hangs there during those few interminable seconds the boy realizes that he has made a dreadful mistake—until with a visible effort the dinner guest slides his lips back over blue teeth as tipsy as tombstones and gives the boy a ferocious smile and moves his head toward him just perhaps a quarter of an inch or even less, a cobra lining up his strike, and returns question with question: “What body?”
“There was a woman,” says Stone with a certain disinterest.
“Well,” snorts Finn. “I sure ain’t no woman. And I reckon I ain’t dead.”
“Where on earth did you ever hear such talk?”
But the boy apprehends neither his mother’s question nor Finn’s grim reassurance regarding the obvious. His ears pound with urgent blood and he grips his chairseat with both hands to keep himself from toppling off or running.
Finn decides to pursue a course of nonchalance, so he pensively addresses himself again to his pie and watches from underneath his shaggy brows to see what sort of punishment is about to unfold before him. His own boy he has horsewhipped for daring to enter a school spelling bee, and he is certain that in this house of judgment the child’s stoic refusal to answer his mother’s direct question will unloose consequences most immediate and dire. But Stone reaches not for his belt, and after a moment the
Finn knows better but he will not say.
The food at Judge Stone’s table is not elegant but it is rich and varied and there is plenty of it. Mrs. Stone has even baked a pie, not because they have a guest for supper but because she bakes a pie most every day of the week. For Finn, whose diet changes month by month as the year unwinds, the preserved huckleberries speak of a season long gone and hitherto irrecoverable. As he chews, methodical as some old ruminant, these baked-black berries beneath the latticework of their pale and tender crust speak also of innocence undisturbed, of childhoods spent around tables like this and around others less elevated and bountiful, of secrets buried beneath time and earth and flowing water; and even in the forced absence of whiskey a vision passes before his eyes unbidden not of snakes or of spiders but of the turgid Mississippi beneath his window on the Illinois side crossed and recrossed with a cumulative ghostly weavework of fishing boats’ accidental paths and steamboats’ cautious trajectories achurn with white foam beneath which and supporting all lies dark water and darker history.
Only the children fear him. The boy is perhaps seven or eight, his sister older than that by a year, and they are formally dressed in a way that distinguishes them from the ordinary run of children, a condition that has made them disdained on one hand and elevated on the other but has nonetheless left neither unbaptized by the river of rumor that laves all of St. Petersburg’s children, a river heavy with detail about the hideous habits of Pap Finn. All the same their father is present, and their visitor is well enough dressed and better behaved, and they are safe by their own homefire, so by the time Finn has loaded up his plate with his third piece of pie and drunk his second cup of coffee the boy works up sufficient nerve to ask him a question.
“That dead body that came down the river awhile back: Did you know some folks thought it was you?”
Finn holds his fork in his fist like a club, and he freezes with it poised over a dessert plate clotted with syrup. For some seconds he does not move, not so much as an eyelash, and his presence at the table takes on by its very stoniness a kind of fearsome potency, like a mountain lion coiled to leap or a hunter waiting behind some leafy blind for the inevitable moment when his prey will step into full and vulnerable view. He is pure potential, dead silent and for all human purposes outside time, and as he hangs there during those few interminable seconds the boy realizes that he has made a dreadful mistake—until with a visible effort the dinner guest slides his lips back over blue teeth as tipsy as tombstones and gives the boy a ferocious smile and moves his head toward him just perhaps a quarter of an inch or even less, a cobra lining up his strike, and returns question with question: “What body?”
“There was a woman,” says Stone with a certain disinterest.
“Well,” snorts Finn. “I sure ain’t no woman. And I reckon I ain’t dead.”
“Where on earth did you ever hear such talk?”
But the boy apprehends neither his mother’s question nor Finn’s grim reassurance regarding the obvious. His ears pound with urgent blood and he grips his chairseat with both hands to keep himself from toppling off or running.
Finn decides to pursue a course of nonchalance, so he pensively addresses himself again to his pie and watches from underneath his shaggy brows to see what sort of punishment is about to unfold before him. His own boy he has horsewhipped for daring to enter a school spelling bee, and he is certain that in this house of judgment the child’s stoic refusal to answer his mother’s direct question will unloose consequences most immediate and dire. But Stone reaches not for his belt, and after a moment the
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