I was five years old the first time I got drunk. It was on a hot day,
and my father was ploughing in the field. I was sent from the house,
half a mile away, to carry to him a pail of beer. "And be sure you don't
spill it," was the parting injunction.
It was, as I remember it, a lard pail, very wide across the top, and
without a cover. As I toddled along, the beer slopped over the rim upon
my legs. And as I toddled, I pondered. Beer was a very precious thing.
Come to think of it, it must be wonderfully good. Else why was I never
permitted to drink of it in the house? Other things kept from me by the
grown-ups I had found good. Then this, too, was good. Trust the
grown-ups. They knew. And, anyway, the pail was too full. I was
slopping it against my legs and spilling it on the ground. Why waste it?
And no one would know whether I had drunk or spilled it.
I was so small that, in order to negotiate the pail, I sat down and
gathered it into my lap. First I sipped the foam. I was disappointed.
The preciousness evaded me. Evidently it did not reside in the foam.
Besides, the taste was not good. Then I remembered seeing the grown-ups
blow the foam away before they drank. I buried my face in the foam and
lapped the solid liquid beneath. It wasn't good at all. But still I
drank. The grown-ups knew what they were about. Considering my
diminutiveness, the size of the pail in my lap, and my drinking out of it
my breath held and my face buried to the ears in foam, it was rather
difficult to estimate how much I drank. Also, I was gulping it down like
medicine, in nauseous haste to get the ordeal over.
I shuddered when I started on, and decided that the good taste would come
afterward. I tried several times more in the course of that long
half-mile. Then, astounded by the quantity of beer that was lacking, and
remembering having seen stale beer made to foam afresh, I took a stick
and stirred what was left till it foamed to the brim.
And my father never noticed. He emptied the pail with the wide thirst of
the sweating ploughman, returned it to me, and started up the plough. I
endeavoured to walk beside the horses. I remember tottering and falling
against their heels in front of the shining share, and that my father
hauled back on the lines so violently that the horses nearly sat down on
me. He told me afterward that it was by only a matter of inches that I
escaped disembowelling. Vaguely, too, I remember, my father carried me
in his arms to the trees on the edge of the field, while all the world
reeled and swung about me, and I was aware of deadly nausea mingled with
an appalling conviction of sin.
I slept the afternoon away under the trees, and when my father roused me
at sundown it was a very sick little boy that got up and dragged wearily
homeward. I was exhausted, oppressed by the weight of my limbs, and in
my stomach was a harp-like vibrating that extended to my throat and
brain. My condition was like that of one who had gone through a battle
with poison. In truth, I had been poisoned.
In the weeks and months that followed I had no more interest in beer than
in the kitchen stove after it had burned me. The grown-ups were right.
Beer was not for children. The grown-ups didn't mind it; but neither did
they mind taking pills and castor oil. As for me, I could manage to get
along quite well without beer. Yes, and to the day of my death I could
have managed to get along quite well without it. But circumstance
decreed otherwise. At every turn in the world in which I lived, John
Barleycorn beckoned. There was no escaping him. All paths led to him.
And it took twenty years of contact, of exchanging greetings and passing
on with my tongue in my cheek, to develop in me a sneaking liking for the
rascal.