JIM
British seaman who worked his way through the ranks of Her Majesty's Navy to the Captaincy of a Destroyer. He was a non sexual being with a homosexuality that lay latent until he was seduced by a young sailor. Jim fell in love with the sailor and for the first time in his life felt happy and whole. When, quite by accident, Jim discovered that the sailor was an agent in the employ of the Soviets, he was dealt a truly horrible blow. He fell terribly ill and was transferred to his base hospital. There, he asked to be relieved of his command and be reassigned, preferably to an administrative position.The desk job, however, proved to offer little relief. Jim continued to be tortured by a raging inner conflict between his love for the sailor and his duty towards the Navy. Able to bear the turmoil no longer, Jim finally made up his mind and reported the sailor to Naval authorities. Shortly after being arrested, the sailor committed suicide in his cell.
Believing that the sailor's decision to take his own life was an anguished response to being betrayed in love rather than any act of loyalty to the Soviet regime, Jim was overtaken by a grief he could not extinguish. Gradually this grief came to be joined by shame, and the combination broke him. Jim entered a protracted period of utter self-denial. Representing an inability to bear the burden of his tragedy as well as, in all probability, an unconscious wish to punish himself, this self-denial took the form of Jim refusing to acknowledge any aspect of his past. Added to his already broken spirit, this self-denial resulted in Jim being unable to secure a position even remotely in keeping with his worth as a seaman. Knowing nothing but the sea and yet not wanting to get close to anyone lest he be tempted to feel like a human being again, Jim was reduced to taking one menial job after another; whatever was available wherever he happened to find himself. In this manner many years passed as Jim drifted from one continent to another; a true piece of human flotsam if ever there was one.
Then, one day, while working on a barge crew that had just delivered its load of coal to Fairvale's steel mill, Jim hitched a ride into town with a mill worker, to get something to eat. During the short walk down Main Street from the worker's car to the diner, Jim inexplicably, perhaps even miraculously, experienced the feeling of a great weight being removed from his shoulders immediately followed by feelings of calm and serenity that he had forgotten even existed. He ate his lunch in a daze of joyful incomprehension. Heading back down to the river, Jim felt his new found feelings leave him and the weight return. Having experienced that brief bliss of release made the return to despair all the more painful by contrast. It took only a moment to decide. Bidding his crew mates farewell, Jim left the life he had been leading, and without looking back headed up the road leading to Fairvale.
Since that day Jim has found a place in the Fairvale community and, seemingly by virtue of so doing, come at last to terms with his past and found peace with himself. After gaining permission to remodel and occupy an old house by the river that had been abandoned many years earlier after being heavily damaged by a flood, Jim used what remained of his paltry savings along with what he was earning at various odd jobs in and around town to purchase and refurbish an equally old and damaged diesel powered fishing boat. He now makes his living mostly by hiring out the boat for river cruises (with himself as Captain, of course), but he also does a bit of fishing for himself and every now and then he gives in to his latent wanderlust and takes a longer trip down river.
The town finds him eccentric but engaging and, as he has turned philosophic as a result of reopening his mind to the world around him, those people who cared to came gradually to discover that they enjoyed his worldliness and insights; a few to the point of using the hiring of him for a boat ride simply as a pretext for an opportunity to enjoy his company.
Of all the townspeople he is closest to Flannery.