Free Finn by Jon Clinch Page B

arm. “I’m obliged.”
    “Damn right you’re obliged,” says the doctor, “not that I’ll ever see any good from it.”
    “Where’s your coat?” The judge.
    “Drunk it.”
    “So this is where my kindness leads.” Indicating the arm.
    “I reckon.”
    “Pray that I never see you in my courtroom again.”
    “I will.” With a little dip of his shaggy head. Then he turns to the doctor. “Obliged.” And he shambles out, holding his arm across his chest like a baby child.
    “You gave him a coat?”
    “I did. And a suit of clothes and a pair of boots and a hot supper and more. Never again.”
    “He has limitations, that one.”
    “I see.”
    “The earlier you learn that, the better.”
    “I’ve learned it now.”
    “The only way you’ll ever improve him,” says the doctor, “is with a pistol.” A locution which the judge finds so very amusing and insightful that he repeats it at every opportunity, until at length it enters the common lectionary of the village and becomes thereby Finn’s calling card and his sentence and his fate.

    F INN WORKS SOME NAILS out of a piece of lumber that’s come floating down the river and caught on a snag upstream of the cabin and he straightens the nails upon a rock and then with another rock he drives them into the heel of his new left boot to keep away the devil. Thus girded he scrubs out his breakfast dishes in the river and sets them upon the bank to dry and climbs aboard his skiff with a two-gallon jug and a couple of empty sacks and a mess of fish gutted and wrapped in reeds. With his one good arm he poles upstream to St. Petersburg and ties up at someone’s dock just as bold as if he owns it and half of the others strung along the waterfront too. With the jug adangle from his forefinger and the reed-wrapped fish bound up neatly in a sack he makes for the white double front door of the Liberty Hotel but thinks better of it at the last second, his cross-heeled boot barely on the threshold. So down the boardwalk he goes toward the river again and then up a narrow alleyway to a weed-grown yard aswarm with feral cats and mined with fishbones and dotted with the inverted skeletons of ruined rowboats. Beyond the jakes and the overgrown garden he finds the kitchen, and he kicks open the door with the toe of his marked left boot and heaves the sack of fish up onto a counter within. “Where’s Cooper?” He addresses a black woman of middle age, her name unknown to him despite years of nodding acquaintance.
    “It’s Monday.”
    “I know it.”
    “Mr. Cooper ain’t in on Monday.”
    “Since when?”
    “Since ever’ Monday I can recall.”
    “Well these fish won’t wait.”
    “I don’t reckon they will.” She dusts the counter with flour that sifts down like snow or scattered seed and she rolls out a great lump of dough upon it and scatters some more flour and then bows to her kneading, oblivious.
    “A dozen good-size cats there and a couple of bluegills. What’ll you give?”
    “I ain’t authorized.”
    “Not money. I ain’t talking about money.”
    “I ain’t neither.” Locating the wooden rolling pin in the depths of a drawer and setting to work. In a mere moment, precise as Noah with his cubits, she has fashioned this lump of pure white dough into a flat slab as round as a dinner plate and three eighths of an inch deep and no deeper from edge to edge and back again.
    “Come on now.” He takes a single step toward her, turning as he does one shoulder away from the bundled fish as from a child either defended or left to its fate.
    “I ain’t authorized. I tole you.”
    “Who’d know?”
    “I just ain’t.”
    “Those fish there are worth three pounds of salt pork anyhow plus a fill-up.” Bringing the jug down on the countertop hard enough to raise a cloud of flour from the entire surface, bare wood and flattened dough dusted alike and alike disturbed.
    “I don’t know where he keeps it.”
    “You do.”
    “No sir.” She picks up the