Old Mr. Flood Read Online Free

couldn’t find the light cord and they were on the floor and I stepped on them.” The floor around Mr. Flood’s rocking chair is always cluttered. Scattered every which way about it the last time I visited him were a wooden shrimp scoop that he knocks his cigar ashes into, a kind of fish knife known as a ripper, a whiskbroom, a Bible, two volumes of Mark Twain (he owns a ten-volume, large-type set), a scrapbook filled with yellowing clippings of Heywood Broun’s column in the
World-Telegram
, a copy of the
War Cry
, the magazine that Salvation Army women hawk on street corners, and an old, beautifully written United States Bureau of Fisheries reference book, “Fishes of the Gulf of Maine,” which he ordered years ago from the Government Printing Office and which he reads over and over. He knows the habits and ranges of hundreds of fishes, mollusks, and crustaceans; he has even memorized the Latin names of many of them. Twain and Broun are Mr. Flood’s favorite writers. “If I get to heaven,” he once said, “the first Saturday night I’m up there, if it’s O.K. with the management, I’m going to get hold of a bottle of good whiskeyand look up Mr. Twain and Mr. Broun. And if they’re not up there, I’ll ask to be sent down to the other place.” A moment later he added uneasily, “Of course, I don’t really mean that. I’m just talking to hear myself talk.”
    Mr. Flood visits the fish market every weekday morning. He rises at five, has a cup of black coffee in the Hartford dining room, lights a cigar, and begins a leisurely tour of the fish stalls, the oyster sheds, the flounder-filleting houses, the smoking lofts, and the piers. When he reaches Fulton Street, the pandemonium in the market invigorates him. He throws his shoulders back, sniffs the salty air, and rubs his palms together. To him, the reek of the fish houses is not unpleasant. “I’ll tell you a valuable secret,” he once said. “The Fulton Fish Market smell will cure a cold within twenty minutes. Nobody that works in the market ever has a cold. They don’t know what a cold is. The fishmongers are afraid the general public will find this out. It’s too crowded around here as it is, and if the public took to coming down here to cure their colds there wouldn’t be room enough to turn around in.” When making his tour, he dresses like a boss fishmonger, wearing a full-length white apron and knee-high rubber boots. The streets down there, as well as the floors of the stalls, are constantly being hosed down, and he believes in heeding the old market proverb, “Keep your feet dry and you’ll never die.” He goes first to the piers and looks on as the trawlers, draggers, and scallop dredges are unloaded. The fishermen treat him with respect and answer all his questions. They seem to think that he is an official of some kind. The call him Pop or Commissioner. One morning I was standing on the Fulton Street pier with Edmond Irwin, supervisor of the Fishery Council, when Mr. Flood came poking along. He looked down into an unloading trawler from New Bedford and yelled, “Hey, Captain, step over here!” The captain stopped what he was doing, obediently crossed his deck, and peered up at Mr. Flood, who asked, “What you got today, Captain?”
    “Nothing to speak of, sir,” the captain said. “Just a load of flounders—blackbacks and yellowtails.”
    “Fine, fine, Captain,” said Mr. Flood. “You got enough filly of sole in that load for five thousand dinners. Where’d you go this trip?”
    “We was up north of Brown’s Bank.”
    “Up in The Gully?”
    “That’s right. We was up in The Gully.”
    “Fine, fine, Captain!” said Mr. Flood, beaming and rubbing his hands. “That’s just fine!”
    Mr. Flood moved on down the pier. The captain stared after him for a moment, obviously puzzled, and then turned to Mr. Irwin and said, “Ed, who in hell is that man, anyway? Does he work for the government, or what?”
    “It’s hard to