DRINK

Tom Foster came to Winesburg from Cincinnati when he was still young

and could get many new impressions. His grandmother had been raised on

a farm near the town and as a young girl had gone to school there when

Winesburg was a village of twelve or fifteen houses clustered about a

general store on the Trunion Pike.

What a life the old woman had led since she went away from the frontier

settlement and what a strong, capable little old thing she was! She had

been in Kansas, in Canada, and in New York City, traveling about with

her husband, a mechanic, before he died. Later she went to stay with

her daughter, who had also married a mechanic and lived in Covington,

Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati.

Then began the hard years for Tom Foster’s grandmother. First her

son-in-law was killed by a policeman during a strike and then Tom’s

mother became an invalid and died also. The grandmother had saved a

little money, but it was swept away by the illness of the daughter and

by the cost of the two funerals. She became a half worn-out old woman

worker and lived with the grandson above a junk shop on a side street

in Cincinnati. For five years she scrubbed the floors in an office

building and then got a place as dish washer in a restaurant. Her hands

were all twisted out of shape. When she took hold of a mop or a broom

handle the hands looked like the dried stems of an old creeping vine

clinging to a tree.

The old woman came back to Winesburg as soon as she got the chance. One

evening as she was coming home from work she found a pocket-book

containing thirty-seven dollars, and that opened the way. The trip was

a great adventure for the boy. It was past seven o’clock at night when

the grandmother came home with the pocket-book held tightly in her old

hands and she was so excited she could scarcely speak. She insisted on

leaving Cincinnati that night, saying that if they stayed until morning

the owner of the money would be sure to find them out and make trouble.

Tom, who was then sixteen years old, had to go trudging off to the

station with the old woman, bearing all of their earthly belongings

done up in a worn-out blanket and slung across his back. By his side

walked the grandmother urging him forward. Her toothless old mouth

twitched nervously, and when Tom grew weary and wanted to put the pack

down at a street crossing, she snatched it up and if he had not

prevented would have slung it across her own back. When they got into

the train and it had run out of the city she was as delighted as a girl

and talked as the boy had never heard her talk before.

All through the night as the train rattled along, the grandmother told

Tom tales of Winesburg and of how he would enjoy his life working in

the fields and shooting wild things in the woods there. She could not

believe that the tiny village of fifty years before had grown into a

thriving town in her absence, and in the morning when the train came to

Winesburg did not want to get off. “It isn’t what I thought. It may be

hard for you here,” she said, and then the train went on its way and

the two stood confused, not knowing where to turn, in the presence of

Albert Longworth, the Winesburg baggage master.

But Tom Foster did get along all right. He was one to get along

anywhere. Mrs. White, the banker’s wife, employed his grandmother to

work in the kitchen and he got a place as stable boy in the banker’s

new brick barn.

In Winesburg servants were hard to get. The woman who wanted help in

her housework employed a “hired girl” who insisted on sitting at the

table with the family. Mrs. White was sick of hired girls and snatched

at the chance to get hold of the old city woman. She furnished a room

for the boy Tom upstairs in the barn. “He can mow the lawn and run

errands when the horses do not need attention,” she explained to her

husband.

Tom Foster was rather small for his age and had a large head covered

with stiff black hair that stood straight up. The hair emphasized the

bigness of his head. His voice was the softest thing imaginable, and he

was himself so gentle and quiet that he slipped into the life of the

town without attracting the least bit of attention.

One could not help wondering where Tom Foster got his gentleness. In

Cincinnati he had lived in a neighborhood where gangs of tough boys

prowled through the streets, and all through his early formative years

he ran about with tough boys. For a while he was a messenger for a

telegraph company and delivered messages in a neighborhood sprinkled

with houses of prostitution. The women in the houses knew and loved Tom

Foster and the tough boys in the gangs loved him also.

He never asserted himself. That was one thing that helped him escape.

In an odd way he stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to

stand in the shadow. He saw the men and women in the houses of lust,

sensed their casual and horrible love affairs, saw boys fighting and

listened to their tales of thieving and drunkenness, unmoved and

strangely unaffected.

Once Tom did steal. That was while he still lived in the city. The

grandmother was ill at the time and he himself was out of work. There

was nothing to eat in the house, and so he went into a harness shop on

a side street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out of the cash

drawer.

The harness shop was run by an old man with a long mustache. He saw the

boy lurking about and thought nothing of it. When he went out into the

street to talk to a teamster Tom opened the cash drawer and taking the

money walked away. Later he was caught and his grandmother settled the

matter by offering to come twice a week for a month and scrub the shop.

The boy was ashamed, but he was rather glad, too. “It is all right to

be ashamed and makes me understand new things,” he said to the

grandmother, who didn’t know what the boy was talking about but loved

him so much that it didn’t matter whether she understood or not.

For a year Tom Foster lived in the banker’s stable and then lost his

place there. He didn’t take very good care of the horses and he was a

constant source of irritation to the banker’s wife. She told him to mow

the lawn and he forgot. Then she sent him to the store or to the post

office and he did not come back but joined a group of men and boys and

spent the whole afternoon with them, standing about, listening and

occasionally, when addressed, saying a few words. As in the city in the

houses of prostitution and with the rowdy boys running through the

streets at night, so in Winesburg among its citizens he had always the

power to be a part of and yet distinctly apart from the life about him.

After Tom lost his place at Banker White’s he did not live with his

grandmother, although often in the evening she came to visit him. He

rented a room at the rear of a little frame building belonging to old

Rufus Whiting. The building was on Duane Street, just off Main Street,

and had been used for years as a law office by the old man, who had

become too feeble and forgetful for the practice of his profession but

did not realize his inefficiency. He liked Tom and let him have the

room for a dollar a month. In the late afternoon when the lawyer had

gone home the boy had the place to himself and spent hours lying on the

floor by the stove and thinking of things. In the evening the

grandmother came and sat in the lawyer’s chair to smoke a pipe while

Tom remained silent, as he always did in the presence of everyone.

Often the old woman talked with great vigor. Sometimes she was angry

about some happening at the banker’s house and scolded away for hours.

Out of her own earnings she bought a mop and regularly scrubbed the

lawyer’s office. Then when the place was spotlessly clean and smelled

clean she lighted her clay pipe and she and Tom had a smoke together.

“When you get ready to die then I will die also,” she said to the boy

lying on the floor beside her chair.

Tom Foster enjoyed life in Winesburg. He did odd jobs, such as cutting

wood for kitchen stoves and mowing the grass before houses. In late May

and early June he picked strawberries in the fields. He had time to

loaf and he enjoyed loafing. Banker White had given him a cast-off coat

which was too large for him, but his grandmother cut it down, and he

had also an overcoat, got at the same place, that was lined with fur.

The fur was worn away in spots, but the coat was warm and in the winter

Tom slept in it. He thought his method of getting along good enough and

was happy and satisfied with the way life in Winesburg had turned out

for him.

The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose,

was why people loved him. In Hern’s Grocery they would be roasting

coffee on Friday afternoon, preparatory to the Saturday rush of trade,

and the rich odor invaded lower Main Street. Tom Foster appeared and

sat on a box at the rear of the store. For an hour he did not move but

sat perfectly still, filling his being with the spicy odor that made

him half drunk with happiness. “I like it,” he said gently. “It makes

me think of things far away, places and things like that.”

One night Tom Foster got drunk. That came about in a curious way. He

never had been drunk before, and indeed in all his life had never taken

a drink of anything intoxicating, but he felt he needed to be drunk

that one time and so went and did it.

In Cincinnati, when he lived there, Tom had found out many things,

things about ugliness and crime and lust. Indeed, he knew more of these

things than anyone else in Winesburg. The matter of sex in particular

had presented itself to him in a quite horrible way and had made a deep

impression on his mind. He thought, after what he had seen of the women

standing before the squalid houses on cold nights and the look he had

seen in the eyes of the men who stopped to talk to them, that he would

put sex altogether out of his own life. One of the women of the

neighborhood tempted him once and he went into a room with her. He

never forgot the smell of the room nor the greedy look that came into

the eyes of the woman. It sickened him and in a very terrible way left

a scar on his soul. He had always before thought of women as quite

innocent things, much like his grandmother, but after that one

experience in the room he dismissed women from his mind. So gentle was

his nature that he could not hate anything and not being able to

understand he decided to forget.

And Tom did forget until he came to Winesburg. After he had lived there

for two years something began to stir in him. On all sides he saw youth

making love and he was himself a youth. Before he knew what had

happened he was in love also. He fell in love with Helen White,

daughter of the man for whom he had worked, and found himself thinking

of her at night.

That was a problem for Tom and he settled it in his own way. He let

himself think of Helen White whenever her figure came into his mind and

only concerned himself with the manner of his thoughts. He had a fight,

a quiet determined little fight of his own, to keep his desires in the

channel where he thought they belonged, but on the whole he was

victorious.

And then came the spring night when he got drunk. Tom was wild on that

night. He was like an innocent young buck of the forest that has eaten

of some maddening weed. The thing began, ran its course, and was ended

in one night, and you may be sure that no one in Winesburg was any the

worse for Tom’s outbreak.

In the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk.

The trees along the residence streets of the town were all newly

clothed in soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were

puttering about in vegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush,

a waiting kind of silence very stirring to the blood.

Tom left his room on Duane Street just as the young night began to make

itself felt. First he walked through the streets, going softly and

quietly along, thinking thoughts that he tried to put into words. He

said that Helen White was a flame dancing in the air and that he was a

little tree without leaves standing out sharply against the sky. Then

he said that she was a wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out of the

darkness of a stormy sea and that he was a boat left on the shore of

the sea by a fisherman.

That idea pleased the boy and he sauntered along playing with it. He

went into Main Street and sat on the curbing before Wacker’s tobacco

store. For an hour he lingered about listening to the talk of men, but

it did not interest him much and he slipped away. Then he decided to

get drunk and went into Willy’s saloon and bought a bottle of whiskey.

Putting the bottle into his pocket, he walked out of town, wanting to

be alone to think more thoughts and to drink the whiskey.

Tom got drunk sitting on a bank of new grass beside the road about a

mile north of town. Before him was a white road and at his back an

apple orchard in full bloom. He took a drink out of the bottle and then

lay down on the grass. He thought of mornings in Winesburg and of how

the stones in the graveled driveway by Banker White’s house were wet

with dew and glistened in the morning light. He thought of the nights

in the barn when it rained and he lay awake hearing the drumming of the

raindrops and smelling the warm smell of horses and of hay. Then he

thought of a storm that had gone roaring through Winesburg several days

before and, his mind going back, he relived the night he had spent on

the train with his grandmother when the two were coming from

Cincinnati. Sharply he remembered how strange it had seemed to sit

quietly in the coach and to feel the power of the engine hurling the

train along through the night.

Tom got drunk in a very short time. He kept taking drinks from the

bottle as the thoughts visited him and when his head began to reel got

up and walked along the road going away from Winesburg. There was a

bridge on the road that ran out of Winesburg north to Lake Erie and the

drunken boy made his way along the road to the bridge. There he sat

down. He tried to drink again, but when he had taken the cork out of

the bottle he became ill and put it quickly back. His head was rocking

back and forth and so he sat on the stone approach to the bridge and

sighed. His head seemed to be flying about like a pinwheel and then

projecting itself off into space and his arms and legs flopped

helplessly about.

At eleven o’clock Tom got back into town. George Willard found him

wandering about and took him into the _Eagle_ printshop. Then he became

afraid that the drunken boy would make a mess on the floor and helped

him into the alleyway.

The reporter was confused by Tom Foster. The drunken boy talked of

Helen White and said he had been with her on the shore of a sea and had

made love to her. George had seen Helen White walking in the street

with her father during the evening and decided that Tom was out of his

head. A sentiment concerning Helen White that lurked in his own heart

flamed up and he became angry. “Now you quit that,” he said. “I won’t

let Helen White’s name be dragged into this. I won’t let that happen.”

He began shaking Tom’s shoulder, trying to make him understand. “You

quit it,” he said again.

For three hours the two young men, thus strangely thrown together,

stayed in the printshop. When he had a little recovered George took Tom

for a walk. They went into the country and sat on a log near the edge

of a wood. Something in the still night drew them together and when the

drunken boy’s head began to clear they talked.

“It was good to be drunk,” Tom Foster said. “It taught me something. I

won’t have to do it again. I will think more clearly after this. You see

how it is.”

George Willard did not see, but his anger concerning Helen White passed

and he felt drawn toward the pale, shaken boy as he had never before

been drawn toward anyone. With motherly solicitude, he insisted that

Tom get to his feet and walk about. Again they went back to the

printshop and sat in silence in the darkness.

The reporter could not get the purpose of Tom Foster’s action

straightened out in his mind. When Tom spoke again of Helen White he

again grew angry and began to scold. “You quit that,” he said sharply.

“You haven’t been with her. What makes you say you have? What makes you

keep saying such things? Now you quit it, do you hear?”

Tom was hurt. He couldn’t quarrel with George Willard because he was

incapable of quarreling, so he got up to go away. When George Willard

was insistent he put out his hand, laying it on the older boy’s arm,

and tried to explain.

“Well,” he said softly, “I don’t know how it was. I was happy. You see

how that was. Helen White made me happy and the night did too. I wanted

to suffer, to be hurt somehow. I thought that was what I should do. I

wanted to suffer, you see, because everyone suffers and does wrong. I

thought of a lot of things to do, but they wouldn’t work. They all hurt

someone else.”

Tom Foster’s voice arose, and for once in his life he became almost

excited. “It was like making love, that’s what I mean,” he explained.

“Don’t you see how it is? It hurt me to do what I did and made

everything strange. That’s why I did it. I’m glad, too. It taught me

something, that’s it, that’s what I wanted. Don’t you understand? I

wanted to learn things, you see. That’s why I did it.”