Chapter: 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 dearly 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."

 Toms grandmother raises Tom Foster. The grandmother has had a tough life, going from place to place eking out a living for herself and for Tom after Tom's parent's death. They get an opportunity to return back to Winesburg when she finds a pocket book containing some money. So both pack their belongings, and return to the grandmother's hometown. Tom is quiet, unassertive boy, who fits into any background, be it among the tough gang boys of Cincinnati, or the quiet folks of Winesburg. The grand mother finds work for herself at Mrs. White's house. Tom at first too works there, but then leaves it and rents a room for himself. Tom does odd jobs to fill his stomach, and otherwise just loafs around listening to people and enjoying life in Winesburg. Small and inconsequential things make him happy, like the smell of roasted coffee, or sleeping near a warm stove. One day, Tom decides to get drunk. He has seen ugliness and crime in Cincinnati and is abhorred by the sight. Sex too seemed vile to him. But here in Winesburg something has stirred in him and he finds himself in love with Helen White, his former employers' daughter. The night Tom gets drunk he gets wild. He begins talking to himself about Helen and his flame of love seems to grow brighter. By late in the night, he is thoroughly drunk when he meets George Willard. George tries to calm him down but he cannot. Though when he hears Tom speak about Helen, he gets infuriated and insists that he shouldn't speak about her. Finally Tom explains, in his drunken state that it is his state of happiness that speaks such thoughts. Getting drunk has been good for his system. He wanted to learn suffering but didn't want to hurt any one else. So he got drunk and this also teaches him something.

