My next bout with John Barleycorn occurred when I was seven. This time
my imagination was at fault, and I was frightened into the encounter.
Still farming, my family had moved to a ranch on the bleak sad coast of
San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. It was a wild, primitive
countryside in those days; and often I heard my mother pride herself that
we were old American stock and not immigrant Irish and Italians like our
neighbours. In all our section there was only one other old American
family.
One Sunday morning found me, how or why I cannot now remember, at the
Morrisey ranch. A number of young people had gathered there from the
nearer ranches. Besides, the oldsters had been there, drinking since
early dawn, and, some of them, since the night before. The Morriseys
were a huge breed, and there were many strapping great sons and uncles,
heavy-booted, big-fisted, rough-voiced.
Suddenly there were screams from the girls and cries of "Fight!" There
was a rush. Men hurled themselves out of the kitchen. Two giants,
flush-faced, with greying hair, were locked in each other's arms. One
was Black Matt, who, everybody said, had killed two men in his time. The
women screamed softly, crossed themselves, or prayed brokenly, hiding
their eyes and peeping through their fingers. But not I. It is a fair
presumption that I was the most interested spectator. Maybe I would see
that wonderful thing, a man killed. Anyway, I would see a man-fight.
Great was my disappointment. Black Matt and Tom Morrisey merely held on
to each other and lifted their clumsy-booted feet in what seemed a
grotesque, elephantine dance. They were too drunk to fight. Then the
peacemakers got hold of them and led them back to cement the new
friendship in the kitchen.
Soon they were all talking at once, rumbling and roaring as big-chested
open-air men will, when whisky has whipped their taciturnity. And I, a
little shaver of seven, my heart in my mouth, my trembling body strung
tense as a deer's on the verge of flight, peered wonderingly in at the
open door and learned more of the strangeness of men. And I marvelled at
Black Matt and Tom Morrisey, sprawled over the table, arms about each
other's necks, weeping lovingly.
The kitchen-drinking continued, and the girls outside grew timorous.
They knew the drink game, and all were certain that something terrible
was going to happen. They protested that they did not wish to be there
when it happened, and some one suggested going to a big Italian rancho
four miles away, where they could get up a dance. Immediately they
paired off, lad and lassie, and started down the sandy road. And each
lad walked with his sweetheart--trust a child of seven to listen and to
know the love-affairs of his countryside. And behold, I, too, was a lad
with a lassie. A little Irish girl of my own age had been paired off
with me. We were the only children in this spontaneous affair. Perhaps
the oldest couple might have been twenty. There were chits of girls,
quite grown up, of fourteen and sixteen, walking with their fellows. But
we were uniquely young, this little Irish girl and I, and we walked hand
in hand, and, sometimes, under the tutelage of our elders, with my arm
around her waist. Only that wasn't comfortable. And I was very proud,
on that bright Sunday morning, going down the long bleak road among the
sandhills. I, too, had my girl, and was a little man.
The Italian rancho was a bachelor establishment. Our visit was hailed
with delight. The red wine was poured in tumblers for all, and the long
dining-room was partly cleared for dancing. And the young fellows drank
and danced with the girls to the strains of an accordion. To me that
music was divine. I had never heard anything so glorious. The young
Italian who furnished it would even get up and dance, his arms around his
girl, playing the accordion behind her back. All of which was very
wonderful for me, who did not dance, but who sat at a table and gazed
wide-eyed at the amazingness of life. I was only a little lad, and there
was so much of life for me to learn. As the time passed, the Irish lads
began helping themselves to the wine, and jollity and high spirits
reigned. I noted that some of them staggered and fell down in the
dances, and that one had gone to sleep in a corner. Also, some of the
girls were complaining, and wanting to leave, and others of the girls
were titteringly complacent, willing for anything to happen.
When our Italian hosts had offered me wine in a general sort of way, I
had declined. My beer experience had been enough for me, and I had no
inclination to traffic further in the stuff, or in anything related to
it. Unfortunately, one young Italian, Peter, an impish soul, seeing me
sitting solitary, stirred by a whim of the moment, half-filled a tumbler
with wine and passed it to me. He was sitting across the table from me.
I declined. His face grew stern, and he insistently proffered the wine.
And then terror descended upon me--a terror which I must explain.
My mother had theories. First, she steadfastly maintained that brunettes
and all the tribe of dark-eyed humans were deceitful. Needless to say,
my mother was a blonde. Next, she was convinced that the dark-eyed Latin
races were profoundly sensitive, profoundly treacherous, and profoundly
murderous. Again and again, drinking in the strangeness and the
fearsomeness of the world from her lips, I had heard her state that if
one offended an Italian, no matter how slightly and unintentionally, he
was certain to retaliate by stabbing one in the back. That was her
particular phrase--"stab you in the back."
Now, although I had been eager to see Black Matt kill Tom Morrisey that
morning, I did not care to furnish to the dancers the spectacle of a
knife sticking in my back. I had not yet learned to distinguish between
facts and theories. My faith was implicit in my mother's exposition of
the Italian character. Besides, I had some glimmering inkling of the
sacredness of hospitality. Here was a treacherous, sensitive, murderous
Italian, offering me hospitality. I had been taught to believe that if I
offended him he would strike at me with a knife precisely as a horse
kicked out when one got too close to its heels and worried it. Then,
too, this Italian, Peter, had those terrible black eyes I had heard my
mother talk about. They were eyes different from the eyes I knew, from
the blues and greys and hazels of my own family, from the pale and genial
blues of the Irish. Perhaps Peter had had a few drinks. At any rate,
his eyes were brilliantly black and sparkling with devilry. They were
the mysterious, the unknown, and who was I, a seven-year-old, to analyse
them and know their prankishness? In them I visioned sudden death, and I
declined the wine half-heartedly. The expression in his eyes changed.
They grew stern and imperious as he shoved the tumbler of wine closer.
What could I do? I have faced real death since in my life, but never have
I known the fear of death as I knew it then. I put the glass to my lips,
and Peter's eyes relented. I knew he would not kill me just then. That
was a relief. But the wine was not. It was cheap, new wine, bitter and
sour, made of the leavings and scrapings of the vineyards and the vats,
and it tasted far worse than beer. There is only one way to take
medicine, and that is to take it. And that is the way I took that wine.
I threw my head back and gulped it down. I had to gulp again and hold
the poison down, for poison it was to my child's tissues and membranes.
Looking back now, I can realise that Peter was astounded. He half-filled
a second tumbler and shoved it across the table. Frozen with fear, in
despair at the fate which had befallen me, I gulped the second glass down
like the first. This was too much for Peter. He must share the infant
prodigy he had discovered. He called Dominick, a young moustached
Italian, to see the sight. This time it was a full tumbler that was
given me. One will do anything to live. I gripped myself, mastered the
qualms that rose in my throat, and downed the stuff.
Dominick had never seen an infant of such heroic calibre. Twice again he
refilled the tumbler, each time to the brim, and watched it disappear
down my throat. By this time my exploits were attracting attention.
Middle-aged Italian labourers, old-country peasants who did not talk
English, and who could not dance with the Irish girls, surrounded me.
They were swarthy and wild-looking; they wore belts and red shirts; and I
knew they carried knives; and they ringed me around like a pirate chorus.
And Peter and Dominick made me show off for them.
Had I lacked imagination, had I been stupid, had I been stubbornly mulish
in having my own way, I should never have got in this pickle. And the
lads and lassies were dancing, and there was no one to save me from my
fate. How much I drank I do not know. My memory of it is of an age-long
suffering of fear in the midst of a murderous crew, and of an infinite
number of glasses of red wine passing across the bare boards of a
wine-drenched table and going down my burning throat. Bad as the wine
was, a knife in the back was worse, and I must survive at any cost.
Looking back with the drinker's knowledge, I know now why I did not
collapse stupefied upon the table. As I have said, I was frozen, I was
paralysed, with fear. The only movement I made was to convey that
never-ending procession of glasses to my lips. I was a poised and
motionless receptacle for all that quantity of wine. It lay inert in my
fear-inert stomach. I was too frightened, even, for my stomach to turn.
So all that Italian crew looked on and marvelled at the infant phenomenon
that downed wine with the sang-froid of an automaton. It is not in the
spirit of braggadocio that I dare to assert they had never seen anything
like it.
The time came to go. The tipsy antics of the lads had led a majority of
the soberer-minded lassies to compel a departure. I found myself, at the
door, beside my little maiden. She had not had my experience, so she was
sober. She was fascinated by the titubations of the lads who strove to
walk beside their girls, and began to mimic them. I thought this a great
game, and I, too, began to stagger tipsily. But she had no wine to stir
up, while my movements quickly set the fumes rising to my head. Even at
the start, I was more realistic than she. In several minutes I was
astonishing myself. I saw one lad, after reeling half a dozen steps,
pause at the side of the road, gravely peer into the ditch, and gravely,
and after apparent deep thought, fall into it. To me this was
excruciatingly funny. I staggered to the edge of the ditch, fully
intending to stop on the edge. I came to myself, in the ditch, in
process of being hauled out by several anxious-faced girls.
I didn't care to play at being drunk any more. There was no more fun in
me. My eyes were beginning to swim, and with wide-open mouth I panted
for air. A girl led me by the hand on either side, but my legs were
leaden. The alcohol I had drunk was striking my heart and brain like a
club. Had I been a weakling of a child, I am confident that it would
have killed me. As it was, I know I was nearer death than any of the
scared girls dreamed. I could hear them bickering among themselves as to
whose fault it was; some were weeping--for themselves, for me, and for
the disgraceful way their lads had behaved. But I was not interested. I
was suffocating, and I wanted air. To move was agony. It made me pant
harder. Yet those girls persisted in making me walk, and it was four
miles home. Four miles! I remember my swimming eyes saw a small bridge
across the road an infinite distance away. In fact, it was not a hundred
feet distant. When I reached it, I sank down and lay on my back panting.
The girls tried to lift me, but I was helpless and suffocating. Their
cries of alarm brought Larry, a drunken youth of seventeen, who proceeded
to resuscitate me by jumping on my chest. Dimly I remember this, and the
squalling of the girls as they struggled with him and dragged him away.
And then I knew nothing, though I learned afterward that Larry wound up
under the bridge and spent the night there.
When I came to, it was dark. I had been carried unconscious for four
miles and been put to bed. I was a sick child, and, despite the terrible
strain on my heart and tissues, I continually relapsed into the madness
of delirium. All the contents of the terrible and horrible in my child's
mind spilled out. The most frightful visions were realities to me. I
saw murders committed, and I was pursued by murderers. I screamed and
raved and fought. My sufferings were prodigious. Emerging from such
delirium, I would hear my mother's voice: "But the child's brain. He
will lose his reason." And sinking back into delirium, I would take the
idea with me and be immured in madhouses, and be beaten by keepers, and
surrounded by screeching lunatics.
One thing that had strongly impressed my young mind was the talk of my
elders about the dens of iniquity in San Francisco's Chinatown. In my
delirium I wandered deep beneath the ground through a thousand of these
dens, and behind locked doors of iron I suffered and died a thousand
deaths. And when I would come upon my father, seated at table in these
subterranean crypts, gambling with Chinese for great stakes of gold, all
my outrage gave vent in the vilest cursing. I would rise in bed,
struggling against the detaining hands, and curse my father till the
rafters rang. All the inconceivable filth a child running at large in a
primitive countryside may hear men utter was mine; and though I had never
dared utter such oaths, they now poured from me, at the top of my lungs,
as I cursed my father sitting there underground and gambling with
long-haired, long-nailed Chinamen.
It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night. A
seven-year-old child's arteries and nerve-centres are scarcely fitted to
endure the terrific paroxysms that convulsed me. No one slept in the
thin, frame farm-house that night when John Barleycorn had his will of
me. And Larry, under the bridge, had no delirium like mine. I am
confident that his sleep was stupefied and dreamless, and that he awoke
next day merely to heaviness and moroseness, and that if he lives to-day
he does not remember that night, so passing was it as an incident. But
my brain was seared for ever by that experience. Writing now, thirty
years afterward, every vision is as distinct, as sharp-cut, every pain as
vital and terrible, as on that night.
I was sick for days afterward, and I needed none of my mother's
injunctions to avoid John Barleycorn in the future. My mother had been
dreadfully shocked. She held that I had done wrong, very wrong, and that
I had gone contrary to all her teaching. And how was I, who was never
allowed to talk back, who lacked the very words with which to express my
psychology--how was I to tell my mother that it was her teaching that was
directly responsible for my drunkenness? Had it not been for her theories
about dark eyes and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips
with the sour, bitter wine. And not until man-grown did I tell her the
true inwardness of that disgraceful affair.
In those after days of sickness, I was confused on some points, and very
clear on others. I felt guilty of sin, yet smarted with a sense of
injustice. It had not been my fault, yet I had done wrong. But very
clear was my resolution never to touch liquor again. No mad dog was ever
more afraid of water than was I of alcohol.
Yet the point I am making is that this experience, terrible as it was,
could not in the end deter me from forming John Barleycorn's
cheek-by-jowl acquaintance. All about me, even then, were the forces
moving me toward him. In the first place, barring my mother, ever
extreme in her views, it seemed to me all the grown-ups looked upon the
affair with tolerant eyes. It was a joke, something funny that had
happened. There was no shame attached. Even the lads and lassies
giggled and snickered over their part in the affair, narrating with gusto
how Larry had jumped on my chest and slept under the bridge, how
So-and-So had slept out in the sandhills that night, and what had
happened to the other lad who fell in the ditch. As I say, so far as I
could see, there was no shame anywhere. It had been something
ticklishly, devilishly fine--a bright and gorgeous episode in the
monotony of life and labour on that bleak, fog-girt coast.
The Irish ranchers twitted me good-naturedly on my exploit, and patted me
on the back until I felt that I had done something heroic. Peter and
Dominick and the other Italians were proud of my drinking prowess. The
face of morality was not set against drinking. Besides, everybody drank.
There was not a teetotaler in the community. Even the teacher of our
little country school, a greying man of fifty, gave us vacations on the
occasions when he wrestled with John Barleycorn and was thrown. Thus
there was no spiritual deterrence. My loathing for alcohol was purely
physiological. I didn't like the damned stuff.