Finnie Walsh Read Online Free

including an eye patch and a surly attitude. We waited eagerly that night for the trick-or-treaters to arrive; Louise and I had decided to forgo our own trick-or-treating in favour of watching our father and we were not let down. His performance was nothing less than mortifying, so frightening that it sent several children, screaming, back to their waiting parents before any candy could be procured. One small boy became so distraught that he actually wet his pants and had to be taken home by his mother. She saw my father’s act from the curb and thought that he had gone too far. My father scared so many children that it wasn’t long before word got out that our house was to be avoided at all costs. As a result, there was plenty of candy left for me and Louise.
    By mid-November, I noticed my father was acting even more strangely. He had never had so much free time on his hands, so to speak, and he spent a lot of it sitting on the back deck, thinking. My mother got a job as a secretary in a lawyer’s office downtown so, from the time he woke up in the morning until the time she got home, my father completed whatever domestic work he could manage and then for the rest of the day he just
thought
. This changed him, I believe, even more than the loss of his arm.
    One day near the end of November I came home early from school. I had not had a good day and felt a little ill, but mostly I was just discouraged. I was having trouble with math and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t seem to understand the problems in my textbook. Finnie wasn’t any better than I was; actually, he was a poorer student, but it didn’t bother him the way it did me. I think it was because, in Finnie’s case, his poor grades were the result of a lack of effort, whereas mine were the result of limited intelligence.
    When I got home, my father was out on the back deck. He heard the front door slam and, knowing it was too early for me to be home, came to investigate. He saw me just as I kicked off my shoe considerably harder than I had meant to. It flew across the hallway and smacked against the wall, leaving a dark smear on the wallpaper.
    “Paul!” he scolded.
    “Sorry,” I said sheepishly. Frustrated with the day’s events and mad at myself for just about everything, I started to cry.
    “Follow me.” His voice was stern. My father was a tall, thin man with a leathery face and a receding hairline and, although he was not physically imposing, he had recently developed a certain quiet intensity that I had not yet become accustomed to.
    As he led me through the house and out the back door, I thought that maybe I was in for a spanking. My father hadn’t spanked me more than a couple of times before he lost his arm, but Louise and I had secretly speculated that one possible benefit of his disability might be that he could do so even less now. He hadn’t so much as raised his voice to me since the accident.
    My father had me sit in one of the folding chairs set out on the deck. He sat down beside me, retrieving something from his pocket and placing it in my hand. “Here, hold this. You’ll feel better.”
    That was all he said. For the better part of an hour after that he remained silent, staring out at our tiny yard, occasionally lighting a cigarette or taking a sip of orange pekoe tea, which he had recently taken to drinking instead of coffee.
    He had given me a rock, a very ordinary rock, special in no way that I could see. I sat there looking at the rock, trying to figure out why the hell my father had given it to me. I was just about to ask him when he stood up and ground his cigarette under his heel.
    “Guess I’d better start supper.”
    Later I told Finnie what had happened and showed him the rock. He turned it over in his hands, shaking his head. “Your father is a very smart man,” he said.
    “What? I don’t get it. It’s just a rock.”
    “Exactly.”
    I didn’t understand what Finnie meant any more than I understood why my