Finn (32 page)

“I done heard that.” Bliss’s voice from within the cabin.

“It’s Finn.”

The bootlegger’s silhouette appears dark against the inner dark of the cabin against the outer dark of the woods and Finn can see it moving within the doorframe.

“You taking a leak in my woods.”

“I reckon so.”

“Christ Almighty ain’t you got no decency at all. First you wake a man up in the middle of the night and then you start in to pissing in his front yard. God damn you.” The man has clearly been in his cups and between the fog induced thereby and a certain unsatisfactory measure of sleep prematurely interrupted he is perhaps even more irascible and off balance than is his custom.

“I need whiskey.”

“I need my sleep.”

At which moment Whittier completes his business and tops it off with a long grateful bellow of sighing respiration. The Philadelphia lawyer’s friends and family and descendants, if he has any, will be either comforted or saddened to know that he enjoys at least this one moment of unmitigated luxury before Finn’s bootlegging associate Bliss raises that ivory-handled pistol of his and fires it into the oblivious dark at the woods’ edge and puts a ball straight into Whittier’s unsuspecting shoulder.

“Damn,” says Whittier. “You weren’t lying.”

“Who’s your friend?” says Bliss.

“Nobody special.”

“Leastways I didn’t kill him. My aim must be off.”

“You’ve had a few.”

“I know it.”

Out from the woods comes Whittier with his bleeding shoulder darkly agleam in the light of the moon despite the layers and absorbency of his thick woolen coat. His beaver hat is gone, knocked off in the woods or fallen from the skiff or perhaps cast off back at Dixon’s, and freed from beneath it his hair is wild and clumped with leaves. Nonetheless thanks to the whiskey he has drunk he is gay of mood despite having been shot, and if pressed he would even go so far as to admit that receiving a ball in the left shoulder should not slow his drinking down even for the short term but will on the contrary serve forever in his mind as a badge of honor and a treasured memento of this wild-and-wooly occasion.

They go to the porch and Finn asks for a lamp but the bootlegger has none.

“Rags then. Clean if you got any.”

They leave Whittier upright in one of Bliss’s rockers with a jar of forty-rod in his good right hand while the two of them go off each on his own errand, Bliss for rags and a basin, Finn for some sticks of wood and a little fire from the banked coals beneath the still. They return and make a torch and douse it in whiskey and wring it out dry, and then Finn wedges it into a knothole in the porch floorboards and touches fire to it.

Finn’s course of action is clear so he helps himself to some drink and Bliss does likewise just to keep him company. They strip off Whittier’s coat, the man moaning in his chair as they peel it away from his wrecked shoulder. In the torchlight the wound is mysterious and wet and black.

“Go on pour some into that basin,” says Finn.

“Goddamn if whiskey ain’t the most useful thing on earth.”

“I know it.”

He bunches a rag and wets it and dabs roughly at the wound, which causes Whittier to flinch and forces a sizzling sound from between his clenched teeth. The ball has dug itself a deep passage down into muscle which gapes and puckers like a small mouth and leaks a slow insistent pulsing of blood.

“Will I live?” Whittier’s good humor returns the instant Finn leaves off mopping at the wound, and his right hand raises the jar.

“I reckon you will.”

“How bad I get him?”

“I’d like to see that ball out of there.”

“It can wait,” says the patient. “There’s a doctor in this town, isn’t there?”

“It ain’t in all that deep.” Pulling out his clasp-knife. “I’ve cut further cleaning a rabbit.” Finn cleans his knife with an alcohol-soaked rag and permits himself a long pull from Whittier’s jar. “Have another’n yourself,” he says. “You might need it.” He slides the lawyer out of his chair and gets him faceup on the porch and plants his weight astride his chest, and then he instructs Bliss to take the lawyer’s left forearm between his knees lest it move when he starts cutting. Between the chairs and the torch and the basin of bloodied whiskey there is some confusion on the porch and at one point Bliss’s right foot is up to its ankle in the stuff but soon enough this rough-hewn operating theater is ready and Finn bends to touch the black wound with the tip of his knife.

“Ow.”

“Don’t be a goddamn baby.” Finn grins down at the Pennsylvanian’s upturned face like some willful cannibal king who has passed his judgment and whose hand will not be stayed.

“That won’t help.”

“It weren’t meant to.” Turning his gaze to the wound pulsing doubly with its own blood and the torch’s flicker.

“I’d prefer a doctor.”

“I’m the doctor in these woods.” He reconsiders his strategy and takes the jug and splashes whiskey upon the wound, washing it clean again and making Whittier jump beneath their two pairs of clasped knees. “Drink up,” he says, as if the wound were the mouth it resembles. And then he applies the knife.

Certain buried obstacles catch the leading edge of the blade and strive mutely to deflect it from its intended path, and although each one of them may be the ball each one of them in time proves itself otherwise. Whittier lies gasping and beating his legs both natural and wooden against the floor against the railing against the chair while frustrated Finn withdraws the knife and prods deep with his own rough finger.

“There she is. I swear it.”

But the lump is just a round bit of bone or gristle and prying upward upon it does no good, so he mops his drenched brow and fortifies himself and the patient and Bliss alike for good measure and delves in again with the knife clenched spoonlike in his fist.

The knife scrapes against bone and glances off to press against something soft that gives way and before he knows it Finn has an eyeful of blood and Whittier is bucking fit to catapult him off the porch. The leather straps holding the artificial leg tear loose, letting the wooden thing flail within Whittier’s pantleg like some furious weapon gone self-aware until it works its way free and lands spent upon the floorboards at some remove from Whittier himself who flails on while Finn squints through blood. “Let him go,” he hollers at Bliss, who is eager to comply. “More rags. Dip them.”

With two fistfuls of bunched wet rags he leans his considerable weight upon the Philadelphian’s pinned shoulder, not caring if he breaks every bone in it so long as he exerts pressure sufficient to stanch the bleeding. Bliss wets the man’s lips with whiskey and nearly loses a finger for his kindness, and as the moments tick by and the stars wheel overhead the rags grow sodden with blood and Finn nearly falls asleep with his weight upon the man’s chest and shoulder and the bleeding slows but does not stop entire.

Finn comes to his knees and pulls back the rags and examines the shoulder by torchlight. Whittier’s breathing is shallow and ragged but his forehead is cool to the touch, which the riverman takes for a good sign until with a burbling and a sudden hideous stench the wounded man brings up a portion of everything he has consumed since breakfast. On his back he lies strangled, not able even to gasp, while a shock goes through his body and out his helpless leg which kicks at the railing again in a kind of hopeless automatic fury.

“Roll him over for God’s sake,” says Bliss, whose nose and ears have detected Whittier’s condition.

“That shoulder.”

“The hell with his shoulder. Roll that sonofabitch or he’s a dead man.”

Finn does as he has been told and gets Whittier’s face over the step, where he can work on freeing the passageway of his mouth with bloody fingers. His clasp-knife has disappeared in the scuffle and once Whittier has resumed breathing in that desperate and pitiful way he has acquired he slaps him on the back and goes off to find it by torchlight. He downs a little of the bootlegger’s whiskey while he’s at it, just to take the edge off.

“D
ID YOU GET IT?”
Whittier, buckled over on the step, hard by a pool of his own crusting vomit, his ruined coat thrown about him like a cape.

“Get what?”

“The ball.” Not even lifting his head to explain.

“I reckon it’s in there deeper than I thought.”

“Thank you, Dr. Finn.” Without a weak smile or an ironic smile or any kind of smile at all.

“We got you bandaged up fine though. It’ll hold.”

“I can’t feel a thing.”

“That’s good.”

The two sit for a time, Bliss asleep in the chair behind them. The night air has gone cold and Finn half wishes he had Whittier’s coat.

“We’d better get on,” he says by and by.

“Where.”

“Get you home.”

“I’m happy here.”

“The Judge ain’t. I don’t get you back he’ll have my hide.”

Whittier works at the torn straps of his wooden leg with fingers equally wooden until at last he resigns himself to failure and lets his head collapse down into the cradle of his cupped right hand as if this small frustration were the worst indignity he has yet been caused to suffer and the worst he ever will. Careful to avoid the Philadelphian’s mess Finn kneels before him and ties the leg in place with a rag soaked in either whiskey or blood and wipes his hands on his pantlegs and rises. He is certain there must be a shortcut uphill through the woods that will save some time and keep them off the river, and so he prizes the dead torch from its hole and throws it into the yard and then he wakes Bliss to ask.

Bliss confirms it, so the two of them let him drift back to sleep and set off into the woods. Every step pains Whittier, who clutches his coat around his neck like a shroud and winces each time he runs afoul of some stump or treelimb or thorned underbrush. “How about you go back and get that torch.”

“Won’t do no good,” says Finn. “Funny thing about this place. You can find it better in the dark.”

“How about finding your way out.”

“Don’t get smart.” Pushing the jug toward him.

“I don’t have a free hand.” For his right hand is busy with his collar and his left arm is pinned tight by bandages below which the remainder of it hangs down limp as an animal gutted and bled dry.

Finn pauses long enough to raise the jug to Whittier’s lips and tilt it back. “Easy now.”

Whittier can hardly draw breath for the tightness of the bandages wound around his chest and shoulder, but he acknowledges the whiskey and follows Finn along the trail that is not a trail into deeper and deeper woods. They press on for time indeterminate, the riverman flailing at branches and brush and the diminished lawyer calculating one step after another and stopping now and then to lean against the welcome trunk of some tree.

“We ain’t stopping here.”

“I know it.”

“Stir yourself.”

“I’ll die if we don’t stop.”

“You won’t.”

“A drink then.”

“None for you till we’re back.”

“Please.”

“I’ll end up carrying you, you great drunken baby.” Which he does in the end regardless, the leg coming loose for all his trouble and slipping inch by inch out of its pantleg and battering him about the ankles until he frees it entire and carries that too. By moonlight he emerges laden from the treeline into a farmer’s field he does not recognize and tramps onward with his back-borne burden despite fences and walls and horse-shit until the outline of a farmhouse emerges from the dark and he knows it and can tell the way home.

To his father’s porch he comes like a peddler bearing death by the sodden sackful. There is a swing at the far end and into it he lets Whittier drop, and then he slumps down against the wall and listens while its poor unused rusty chains creak a little and then go quiet.

“Are we there?”

“Yes.” His heart pounding in his ears.

“Nothing hurts.”

“Good for you.”

Finn sits for a while studying the late-night sky and the dim starlight through the vertical balusters of the porch. Whittier’s left arm droops black across the marching line of them at a haphazard angle as oblique and final as a tally mark, its line other than Finn himself the only thing off square upon the spotless white porch of the magnificent white mansion on the most elevated street in town.