Free Finn by Jon Clinch

woman answers her own question on behalf of the tongue-tied boy, saying to her husband something that by the sound of it she has repeated a thousand times prior: “Those children at school are a poor influence on him.”
    “Amen,” says Judge Stone, which remark leaves the boy reprieved and the dinner guest both dissatisfied and stunned, as if he has been expecting a mouthful of honey and received a bee sting instead.
    After supper the adults arrange themselves around the fire in the parlor, where Judge Stone speaks of temperance and charity and the overwhelming redemptive power of Christ Jesus. He folds his hands in his lap and squeezes them together until his knuckles go white as bones and Finn cannot decide whether his impulse is to pray or to prevent himself from snatching up his guest by the collar and baptizing him in the washtub. The room grows warm and Finn grows comfortably drowsy, until after a while it seems to him that Stone with his inverse-named Christ Jesus has turned the world upside down and back to front, making it over from the hard place he has understood since childhood into a place altogether different, a place where forgiveness is not merely possible but indeed the expected order of the day. Warm and full of supper and his head aswim with sleep he sees his own hands in his lap as unclean things yet things not fully beyond redemption, and he elevates them in the firelight as if they desire on their own to perform an act of invocation or some other arcane magic.
    “Those hands once belonged to a beast,” says Judge Stone.
    “I know it.”
    “But they can be washed clean.”
    “Is that a fact?”
    “Rest assured.”
    “Then so be it.”
    The judge rises and takes Finn’s right hand and shakes it without reservation. “Will you do us the honor of staying the night? It’s a good long way back to your cabin.”
    “I will.” All that he desires is sleep.
    Around midnight he awakens faceup on the sofa with the fire banked and his new boots on the floor and his new coat draped neck to knee like a blanket. His mouth is dry and his stomach is sour and one arm lurches out from beneath the coat to arrest his dead weight as he falls and falls and falls in the last remnant of a dream until his knuckles crack against the hardwood floor and the shock draws him full awake. He lies still for a time listening to his own ragged breathing and his own panicky heartbeat and the stealthy slow rearrangement of coals in the fire, trusting that he will sleep again soon, but sleep will not come no matter how hard he tries. The coat collar tucked beneath his chin smells powerfully of lanolin and he envisions sheep which he attempts to count but to no avail, for his numeric skills are as limited as his wakefulness is vast. Finally, temperance and redemption notwithstanding, he decides that in order to get a proper night’s sleep he is going to require a drink.
    He laces up his boots and dons his coat and hat and lets himself out through the front door and onto the porch, where a light dusting of snow has covered everything over. His tracks, tracks that by dint of his newly unmarked heel the devil himself might follow, go straight down the hill to the nearest tavern in the village, one about to close up for the night until Finn presents himself at the bar.
    “Throw another log on, Willis,” says the barman to a huge figure bent low over a table by the near-dead fire. “Look who’s come in.”
    “Whiskey,” says Finn.
    “Turn out your pocket.”
    Finn fishes therein with an apologetic look, as if he has somehow neglected to transfer his wealth. “New drawers.”
    “Should have saved your money for the finer things.” With a nod toward the back bar.
    “I know it.”
    “You’ve run out your credit.”
    “But my boy.”
    “Bring him in and bring his six thousand too and then we’ll talk.”
    “How about the coat?” He shucks it.
    “Got no use for a coat.”
    “It don’t resemble your usual,” says the