Sunset falls on the Mississippi as a drunk does upon the public house floor – too soon and sudden, into unknowable darkness.
Huckleberry, that anachronism of thirty years composed of thirteen, stands on the east shore. There lies within his brain a presentiment of death, a piece of himself that is shriveled, wilted, and which rots away, what flesh and blood within him that can sense and regret the demise of the origin.
He has in his left hand a saw without a handle, in his right, a dusty jar of whiskey. It is absurd, perhaps, to come here so long after the fact, to collect from his father's hovel what remains that was material and his, but Huckleberry has mourned his mother, and now must do the same for his father.
Huckleberry's mother lies in the churchyard, safe in her God-fearing grave. What was mortal of that woman, that maternal parent so accustomed to whiskey, bar fights, and her husband's fist, was properly excommunicated from the realm of the living. She was pitied with just the right note of sincerity and buried in holy ground and then forgotten, as the events following a death are wont to transpire. Huckleberry had been a small boy then, small beneath amassing clouds, small before the palpable air of seriousness and gloom exuded by the priest, his hand small within his father's. The old man had been convinced that nothing ever happened in February, no one was born and no one died, because February wasn't even a proper month and so it hardly mattered. Huckleberry had begged to differ, collapsing before the shoddy cross and maintaining with every ounce of conviction in his five-year-old body that this was something, that it had happened, that it did matter.
His father had clocked him with a jug of whiskey, that sigil and reason for living rarely absent from the man.
Huckleberry's father was the misbegotten son of a fourteen-year-old parlor maid in the house of a judge out of Virginia, name of Thatcher, both long since dead. He quit that world as soon as he was old enough to take the notion and pretended up until the day he died that he had not come from nor had he ever been anything more than what he was at that moment. That was "puttin' on airs, somethin' the govment does right finely," the old man believed, "stars and stripes and hooplah, all the while lyin' like a dog with no legs. Tells you what, if'n I warn't so old I'd go on down to Warsh'ton an' shoot them blamed govment bastards in the goddamn pheelanges, them's the very words I mean an' you heard me when I says 'em an' so don't no one doubt them never nuther."
Tom Sawyer wears a bullet on a string around his neck. Huckleberry fingers it sometimes when they go swimming together, snakes his hands beneath the other boy's collar and weighs the lead in his palm, in awe of such potential for violence.
Huckleberry's father wears a bullet in his back, mud between his fingers, twigs in his hair, river water in his lungs. All of his cursing brought one down upon himselfsays Widow Douglas, nodding tersely with a terse hand gesture of what might be approval. Don't be like your father, Huckleberry Finn, you know what happens to sinners. Huckleberry does know what happens to sinners, but knows he will never understand such concepts and assumed realities as forgiveness, redemption, what decides between the good place and the bad place or even what dictates that they are so. Huckleberry knows his father threw a rock at a witch once, too drunk to hit his mark but sober enough to have the thought. Huckleberry had feared for him when he first heard what he had done, and now knows he was right to do so. Huckleberry's father had fallen off of a roof and broken his arm at the time, bad enough on the mortal plain, but Huckleberry ponders what has befallen the man in otherworld.
The sun sets across the river, brilliant and burning, Apollo's journey complete for one day. Darkness falls all around him, a stagnant air composed of stillness and death.
And as he watches the sun sink down to fiery ending, Huckleberry raises the forty-rod to his lips and feels a fizzling inheritance spark to life in his veins.