Free-For-All Fiction Contest

Joe Finley, Family Man

Joe Finley was raised in a wealthy political family in West Virginia, his father was a Republican state senator for twelve years of Joe's life. Joe was raised to be a politician, but that was not what he desired. He desired to be a preacher. From the young age of five, Joseph feared the lord and went to church three times a week to get away from his father and the fighting that occurred at his house. His father, Carl Finley, let fame and fortune get to his head, he constantly came home and committed beatings and cheating against his family. He abused Joe and his mother thoroughly, and then would on most occasions, bring home many a woman to his bed. He was your typical predator, in Joseph's opinion at least. When Joseph turned fifteen, his father came to his party drunk, unannounced and uninvited, with a twenty-five year-old prostitute by his side. He said to Joe: "Here's your gift party-boy, enjoy it." That is when Joe lost it. He grabbed his father and struck him in the face. Carl was mad, and he fought back. He attacked Joe with a plastic knife, and Joe was almost stabbed in the neck. They were bloody and bruised by the time that other party guests could break up the madness. Joseph told his mother that he wanted to move to a small mountain town and she said she would go with him. He and his mother bought a mountain house and moved there a few weeks later. It was there that Joe fell into depression, and he became an alcoholic. The only time he was sober was when he was hunting. It was a chance to get away from the reporters asking him why he had gone bad. Joseph used his father's name to get what he wanted, despite his hatred for the man that on some occasions, Joe thought has the mind to kill him. When applying to Yale, Joseph convinced the president that he had fixed his issues and would not be like his father. Joe later became class president at Yale. He also used his name as a way to attract attention. When asked why he had chosen not to run for state senate after college, he answered: "It's too much for a young boy like me to try to run for office, I wouldn't survive, considering West Virginians are too critical of their leaders." Then a week later when quoted in the newspaper, he would deny saying the very things that had caused him such a bad reputation. He was the rich kid fresh out of college who was accused of having an arrogant, naif attitude, but he was really just a good kid stuck in a vicious cycle. But one day, three deer showed him a way out, and a way into the good favor of God.
The Buck and her fawn were darting quickly through the brush of the forest.
They had just witnessed the most terrifying site any single mammal could imagine, the death of a family member. Joe Finley had just snagged a beautiful doe, when he saw a dart from behind a tree in his peripheral vision. He realized that it was not just a lone doe, but a family, and instantly realized that a Buck could be near. Instinct told him to accept the doe he'd graciously received from mother nature, but his gut told him to pursue such a fine looking buck. The buck's instinct told him that the hunter would come after him,and he decided protect his son, and he tried. He stopped to face the hunter, and yelped to his son to run, and the fawn went. Mr. Finley raised the gun and stated: "hasta la vista!", but then the Buck patted its hoof on the ground and began to charge. It was shocked to find Joe standing alone beside him. Joe had his gun on the ground, and said plainly, "I get it now, you can go on, I won't hurt you." Joe was aghast, here he was, about twenty feet away from the buck of his life, honestly thinking he was going to come home and have two new sets of antlers to hang on the wall. He thought and thought until his brain hurt and he needed a drink. Then Joe had an epiphany, he saw now that God had showed him what he had secretly always dreamed of as the perfect father. The Buck was what Joe thought of as an ideal parent, willing to stand up for their children, even in the face of adversity. This was something that Joe had not experienced in his childhood with his father, his dad had just given him money and a good education and blown off the rest of his family, including his wife. Joe could not believe that after all these years, he hadn't attempted to let his father know what he thought. He decided to go talk to his father, and find some sort of closure with the man that Joseph had sworn under the moonlight slipping through his venetian blinds when he was 12 that he wouldn't listen to ever again. This was a big risk for Joe, but he knew that this would be the first step back on track, and that he needed more than just closure, he needed to win senate.
After that Joe sobered up and he gave up hunting. He went to his father, old, tired of scandals, and lonely, and told him he just needed to know why he had gone so wrong in life. His father replied: "I was so caught up in fame and my life as a politician that I lost track of what mattered, I was a sex addict and an alcoholic and I couldn't take the stress of co-running the state, so I took it out on my family, if I had the chance I'd go back and change everything I did wrong, I'm so sorry for what I did." Carl Finley had a stroke and died, he died peacefully two days later in his home with Joe by his side. Joe was astounded by the shocking abrupt death of his father at the age of forty-seven. The doctors explained that his liver was destroyed from alcohol, and his arteries were clogged from all of his drug addictions and smoking issues. Yet somehow Joe was okay because he knew that he was destined to have closure with his father, and he did. He had no transgressions anymore because of his praying for forgiveness every Sunday and Wednesday at his local Lutheran Church.
Ten years later Joe was in a state of peace and harmony, he finally met someone of interest to him, a beautiful girl named Sharon Johanssen, who lived in suburban Charleston, and her grandfather was governor at one point in her childhood. They instantly connected, after they met at a political support party for Joe's upcoming attempt to clear his father's name and run for the state senate seat his father once held. Joe used his religion as a way to lure in the religious extremists in the state. He said that he would uphold what Christianity stood for but he assured the other religious groups that they would have continued religious freedom. He campaigned towards the younger generation as well. He attended many West Virginia and Marshall football games and gave speeches as the halftime show. He appeared on the state news and such. Within six months he and Sharon were married, both of them agreeing on having a family. They had male twins by the next year, and then nine months later, a baby girl. They named the twins Carl and Joseph Jr., the girl they named Sharon and called her Sweetie. As the election came closer, Joe became more confident of victory, at his final speech before the election, at a televised rally in Bridgeport, he stated that: "Despite my family's tainted name and my late father's previous struggles and the struggles I had in my younger years, I feel that I currently have a strong sense of family and that all of my problems are behind me, my father is my hero despite his issues because at the end of the road in his life, lying on his deathbed, he stated to me that if he 'could go back and change everything I did wrong then I would, I'm so sorry for what I did'. That moment in my life gave me a greater sense of family and the ups and downs of life because I made mistakes and I was never willing to admit them, but then my father, the man I feared more than anyone in the world at points in my life, admitted to his, something I'd never seen before from a man like him. That changed my life." He went on to state that he would run the Government with the help of the lord and with the help of his father's memory, and do everything in his power not to let the people of West Virginia go a day without knowing that he cared about their interests.
Joe won the senate seat and held it for eighteen years, until he was at the weakened age of fifty six, and he loved every minute of it. He was voted man of the year by Time magazine because of his efforts to stop the constant debate in West Virginia over the money put into secondary education as opposed to state college football coaches. He was a leader in the fight in Afghanistan for many years, supporting the offensive against the Taliban all the way through the end. He saw his boy Carl and Joe Jr. grow into fine young men with ambitions of their own. Carl became a politician like his father and then became a supreme court justice. While Joe Jr. became an author and a historian. He wrote detailed accounts of the Afghanistan war and even traveled to war sites and wrote of the many horrors the Taliban committed. Sharon grew up and went to Harvard, she later became a freelance Journalist for the New York Times and later an Anchor for NBC. Sharon was by Joseph 's side when he died peacefully of old age in his home at the age of eighty two, he died the most beloved politician and family man in West Virginian history.


The End