Free Ragged Company by Richard Wagamese

you.”
    “Monochrome,” I said.
    He looked at me for a moment and I saw his puzzlement. “Yes. One cold, flat, ache of colour that’s not really sadness, not really regret, not really sorrow but maybe a shade or two of them all.”
    “Yearning,” I said quietly, and he nodded.
    “Yes. All you know is that the day, the day that’s all around you, is inside you too, and you think that it’s a perfect fit. But you go outside and you walk in your woe. You take it to the streets or the fields or wherever and you walk in it. And then it rains. Not a real rain. Not a downpour or even a shower. A mist. A thin sheen of rain that doesn’t really hit your skin so much as it passes over it.”
    Like a hand, he said, and I knew what he meant.
    “That’s how that movie felt,” he said. “Fine. Fine like the rain sometimes.”
    I don’t know about the rest but I just sat there looking at my hands. Feeling those words and feeling like that movie had moved me beyond where I was too.
    Amelia raised her head and looked around the table at each of us. Then, she reached over and patted the guy’s hands that were folded on the table just like mine. “That’s a beautiful description,” she said. “I guess I know what fine is now.”
    The guy took a sip from the whisky he’d ordered.
    “I know what that means too,” I said.
    Everyone looked at me, as surprised at my willingness to talk as much as I was. I swallowed some beer and went on.
    “When I was a boy I used to stand at a window just like you were saying,” I said. “It was a farmhouse and the window looked over the forty acres that kinda flowed down to where a railway track ran across at the bottom of the hill. I used to wait for the morning train and try ’n guess where it was going, who was on it, all those kinda kid games you play.
    “And something about the train moving through the fog and the mist at the end of those forty acres used to really get me somehow. Made me want to cry. I don’t know why. It just did. So when you talk about the rain like that, I know how that feels.”
    He nodded.
    “The movie took you back to that window, Timber?” Amelia asked.
    “Yeah, I guess it did.”
    “How about you, Digger? Did it make you feel fine?” she asked.
    Digger swallowed all of his draft in one long gulp.
    “Look,” he said, wiping at the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, “what I think is what I fucking think, and I don’t share that with anybody. Ever.”
    “Come on, Digger,” she said, “all I want to know is if you can tell me what fine means to you.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s all.”
    “No scooting around in my head, trying to get me to talk about shit I don’t wanna talk about?”
    “No.”
    He waved for another beer. “Okay. Okay. Well, here then. Fine is like that half-empty bottle of brandy I found that time. Remember, Timber?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I remember.”
    “Fucking thing had a name we couldn’t even pronounce. Got a couple bucks for the empty, too. Anyway, strangely enough it was raining that day and we were all cold and wet and miserable. We were in the alley back of the fucking Mission and man, that fucking stuff slid down my throat and into my belly like fucking sunshine. Now that was fine. And after a few swallows it changed the fucking colour and the light of things for me too, guy,” he said, staring at the Square John and swallowing the new draft as soon as it landed.
    “Fine’s like Sunday brunch at the Sally Ann,” Dick said suddenly.
    We all looked at him and he took a nervous gulp of his draft.
    “Like you gotta go to chapel first ’fore they’ll feed you. Most people don’t like that an’ kinda sit there all pissed off, but me, I like it on accounta it’s different. I like the songs. Especially the one about gatherin’ at the river. I like that one. But after, when you all move downstairs an’ line up for food an’ you gotta wait even though you’re hungry as hell an’