He said very conversationally, “Burley Coulter, damn your impudent hide.”
But he stood to his work. He had to, of course. He made the drive past the Cordles’ as magnificent as you please, proudly and calmly in control of his spirited team that was plunging on the bits, with his pants down around his ankles and his shirttail flying out behind. As we went past, I glanced up at Annie May and, so help me Jesus, she was smiling and waving—a good-hearted, patient, forgiving, well-fleshed girl, just right for Big.
Well, old Big did keep his team in hand. He never let them out of a short lope. Pretty soon he stopped them and got his pants back up more or less where they belonged, and took the long way home so he wouldn’t have to pass the Cordles’ again. He never looked at me or said a word. He wasn’t speaking.
But when we finally got back to his place and had put away the mules, which were a good deal better broke by then, I felt obliged to have a serious talk with him.
“Big,” I said, “you’re going to have to ask that woman to marry you, after you’ve done showed yourself to her the way you have.”
You couldn’t beat him for good nature. He just grinned, clean back to his ears. He said, “All right. I reckon I will.”
So he was speaking to me again. And afterwards he told me all about it. He was giggling, red in the face, and absolutely tickled almost to death.
He gave up all his clever notions about courting, and was forthright. When he saw Annie May in town next time, he said, “Come here. I want to talk to you.”
She followed him out of earshot of the other people, and he said, “Well, you’ve done had a look at my private life. Don’t you reckon me and you ought to get married?”
She looked straight back at him and laughed. She laughed right into his face like the good old gal she was.
She said, “I would like to know why not!”
Thicker than Liquor (1930)
WHEN THE telephone rang, Wheeler Catlett was thinking about his future. Not that he knew much about it. The future was going to surprise him, as it had surprised all his mothers and fathers before him, but he had hopes. He had come back from his eastern law school four years ago, set himself up as a lawyer in two upstairs rooms overlooking the courthouse square in Hargrave, and increased his yearly income from nearly nothing to almost a living, with prospects for improvement. And now he was a married man with a future that needed thinking about.
Between his own hard times and those of the nation, Wheeler had grown familiar with the scarcity of money—indeed, as the son of a struggling small farmer, he had never known an abundance of it—and the present year of drouth and depression certainly offered no promise of financial astonishment. But he had worked hard, been careful, paid attention, lost no time, wasted nothing, and in spite of the hard times, he now and again had a few small bills to rub together. And that was partly what he was thinking about: the heartwarming friction of one piece of legal tender against another. These were not thoughts that could be considered mercenary; he had no yearning for mere money in a pile. He was thirty years old, he had been married just under a month, and money, for him, was as symbolic as it should be. His need for it tended as much toward substantiality as did his love for his bride. He was thinking about a home of his own, a place of his own. He liked his thoughts—which were, in fact, visions of Bess as happy as she deserved to be—and that was why he let the phone ring three times before he answered.
“I’m trying to get hold of Mr. Wheeler Catlett.”
“This is Wheeler Catlett speaking.”
“Mr. Catlett, this is the desk at the Stag Hotel in Louisville. We have a message for you from Mr. Leonidas Wheeler, who is staying here.”
“Well, what’s the message?”
“He says to tell you that he’s sick, and he has no way to get home.”
“Is he drunk?”
“I’m afraid so, sir. And, ah, his situation with respect to his bill appears to be somewhat embarrassing.”
“I’ll bet it is.” Wheeler looked at his watch. “All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He hung up, and then rang and asked for his home number.
“Hello,” Bess said.
“Would this be the beautiful young widder Catlett?”
“Herself. What did he die of?”
“Love, of course.”
“For me?”
“For you.”
“Well, wasn’t that sweet!”
“Bess, my star client, Uncle Peach, requires my services at Louisville.”
“Oh goodness! Is Uncle Peach having one of his attacks?”
“He’s about down to the lower side of one, it sounds like. I don’t know when I’ll be home.”
“I’ll expect you when I see you?”
“I’m afraid so, Bess. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll miss you. Give my love to Uncle Peach.”
“I don’t think I will,” Wheeler said.
When he had hung up, he sat still for a minute to think, and then he counted the few doomed bills that he had in his wallet.
Wheeler’s earliest associations with Uncle Peach were among his privileges. In those days, when he was sober, and Wheeler only knew him sober in those days, Uncle Peach was a good-looking, good-humored man who could be charmingly attentive to a small boy. He was the first man Wheeler wanted to be like when he grew up.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” his father asked him. It was after supper, and Wheeler was sitting in his father’s lap by the kitchen stove.
“I want to be like Uncle Peach.”
His father laughed. “Well, I’ll be damned! You do, do you?”
And his mother said quietly, “Marce.”
And then one night—it must not have been long after that, Wheeler must not have been more than five—he was waked up by a commotion in the house, and when he went to see what it was, he met his mother coming out of the spare bedroom, carrying a lamp.
“Go back to bed. Uncle Peach is sick.”
“What’s he got?”
“He’s having one of his spells. Go back to bed, now, like I told you.”
But he did not go back to bed. He went into the spare room where his mother had left Uncle Peach.
Uncle Peach had all his clothes off down to his underwear. “Hello, Wheeler boy,” he said. “Uncle Peach is sick. Uncle Peach been going at a fast pace through the thorns and thistles that the ground has brought forth.” And then he said, “Oh, me!”
Uncle Peach was standing in the middle of the floor, aiming at the bed, his feet wandering here and there and the rest of him staying mainly still.
“It’s coming around!” he said. And he watched the bed and said again, “It’s coming around!”
He made a mighty leap then toward the bed, but it was coming around too fast and he missed. He landed in the corner by the washstand, and lay there the way he fell, with his arms and legs strewn around him. Wheeler’s mother came running back into the room. “Oh, Peach!” she said, in a way Wheeler had never heard her talk before. “What is ever to become of you?”
And Uncle Peach said, “Sing ‘Yellow Rose o’ Texas’ to me, madam.”
Uncle Peach was Dorie Catlett’s trial. He was her baby brother. Their mother died when Peach was born, when Dorie, the oldest child, was thirteen. Their father never remarried. The story was that Andrew Wheeler had to take Peach to the field with him to plow when Peach was still a baby in arms. Andrew would take off his coat at the field edge, and spread it on the ground with his purse and all his money in one of its pockets and Peach asleep on top of it. Andrew’s brother, James, would say later that if a thief had stolen Peach and all the money and left the coat, Andrew would have had the best of the trade. That was a story that Wheeler had often heard his mother tell. And she always quoted Uncle James and laughed, and then said, “Hmh!” not in refusal, Wheeler thought, but simply in dismissal; it was a judgment that she understood but did not find possible. She had had much of the
raising of Peach, and he was her failure, or so she felt.
He never married, for the reason, according to him, that he could never accomplish a short courtship; no woman who came to know him well enough to make up her mind about him would make it up in his favor. And so his dependence on Dorie continued. He was always departing from her in a spirit of high resolve, going off, a new man, to seek his fortune, and always returning to her failed, drunk, sick, and broke, to be nursed to sobriety and health again, and reinfused with the notion that he was master of a better fate than available evidence encouraged even her to expect. He was her trial because she let him be, because she loved him and would not give him up.
He was Marce’s trial for the opposite reason. Marce did not love him. He was constrained to be kind to him without benefit of love. He tolerated him, was patient with him, even helped him so far as he was able, for Dorie’s sake, and for the sake of principle, but he found no excuse for him, and he gave up on him on fairly short acquaintance.
As a child, Wheeler was soon aware of his father’s judgment and his mother’s grief, and after the time when he wanted to be like Uncle Peach there was a time when he held him in gleeful contempt. Once, when Uncle Peach had come in drunk, and eaten, and fallen asleep in his chair, his head tilted back and his mouth open, Wheeler and Andrew his older brother took the pepper shaker and half filled Uncle Peach’s mouth with pepper, and Uncle Peach woke up after a while and said, “I feel like I’m going to sneeze!”
That was the last time Uncle Peach came to the house drunk. There must have been words between him and Marce about it, because after that Uncle Peach came sober and he came sick, but he did not come drunk.
When he worked, which was far from all the time, Uncle Peach was a carpenter, and for a while he was known as a good one. His failing in his younger years was merely infidelity. He was absolutely dependable as long as his pockets were empty. Money made him thirsty; once he got thirsty, he left; and then there was no getting him back until he had passed through flight, gallantry, drunkenness, devastation, and convalescence.
He was never a fast worker, but in his ponderous way, by much deliberation and some trial and error, he was capable of working well. People who were not in a hurry liked to hire him, for he cheapened his work in accordance with his own estimate of his faults, he was easy to get along with—was good company, in fact—and in the long run, if they had time for the long run, he satisfied his employers.
Later, as hopelessness and carelessness and perplexity grew upon him, his work became rougher. He declined gradually in public esteem until nobody would hire him to build a house, and declined further until nobody would hire him to build a barn. He became finally an odd-jobs man, a mender of leaky roofs, an overhauler of small outbuildings. He lost such habits of neatness and order as he had ever had, and worked in the midst of steadily increasing confusion. Whatever he was done with, for the day or the moment, he dropped wherever he was, until he built under his feet a sort of midden of lumber, scraps, and tools, in which whatever he needed at any given moment was lost.
In his puzzlement, he fell into the habit of talking to himself. He would go lurching and stumbling, sweating and puffing among the shambles of his work, picking up scraps and tools in one place, flinging them out of the way only to increase the disorder someplace else, muttering all the while to himself in steady commentary on his problem: “Now where did I put that damned saw? Did I lay it under here? No, sir. Did I lay it over there ? No, sir.” Sometimes what he was looking for was in plain sight. Sometimes it was in his hand.
Once, when he was about fifteen, Wheeler watched Uncle Peach try to untangle a hundred feet of inch rope. Instead of imposing order on the tangle, he became more and more involved in it, until finally, trying to take up a length that was looped around his foot, he fell into the midst of it. What most impressed Wheeler at the time was that Uncle Peach was not embarrassed. He seemed too implicated in his clumsiness even to be aware of it. It was Wheeler who was embarrassed. Uncle Peach lay on his back, toiling like Laocoön among the interloopings of the rope, and Wheeler was astonished. It took him a year to see that it was funny.
And still, when Uncle Peach was down and sick and needed help, Dorie would help him. She would put him in bed in the spare room at home. Or he would send for her, and Marce would drive her in the buggy the ten miles to Uncle Peach’s little farm over by Floyd’s Station. The farm had been partly Marce’s idea. He had encouraged and then helped Uncle Peach to buy it. It was the sort of place, Marce thought, that could put a sound footing under a tradesman’s economy. And he probably thought too, or so Wheeler guessed, that the ten miles would put Uncle Peach out of the way. But if that was what he thought, he was mistaken; the distance was too short for impossibility and too long for convenience.
Seeing how his mother troubled herself with Uncle Peach and mourned over him, Wheeler said, bullying her in her own defense as a seventeen-year-old boy is apt to do, “To hell with him! Why don’t you let him get on by himself the best way he can? What’s he done for you?”
Dorie answered his first question, ignoring the second: “Because blood is thicker than water.”
And Wheeler said, mocking her, “Blood is thicker than liquor.”
“Yes,” she said. “Thicker than liquor too.”
The day was warm and clear, the sky an immaculate brilliance. The brighter leaves had all fallen, leaving only the oaks still darkly red or brown. After the long summer of drouth, there had been rain through the fall, and now the pastures were green. Wheeler had planned to end the day outdoors with his dog and gun. It was a day for which there were many better uses than the present one, and Wheeler was full of the bitterness of waste and loss. “Why don’t I just leave the old son of a bitch down there?” he asked himself, driving too fast down the gravel road, a long white cloud of dust blooming behind him. And though he knew very well why, the question seemed to remain unanswered.
He wanted to be done with ordeals. The summer had been an ordeal. One hot, rainless day had followed another while pastures withered, crops parched, and ponds and springs went dry. Marce Catlett kept his stock alive by hauling water in barrels from the one spring that stayed constant. He hauled load after load, day after day, dipping the water out of the walled basin of the spring with a bucket. When he could leave the office early enough, Wheeler would drive up to help him, to ease the work a little and to keep him company.
One afternoon, when they had watered the cattle and were watching them drink, Marce looked at his son and smiled. “Awful, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” Wheeler said, and he did think so. Another merciless day was ending, the sun glared on the burnt world, the cattle were poor, the grass all but gone, and the sight depressed him.
“Well, I’ve seen dry years before this, and I’ll tell you something. It’s so miserable you think you’ll never get over it. You’re ready for the world to end. But it’ll pass. There’ll come a time when you won’t think about it.”
Marce raised his hat, ran his hand over his white hair, and put his hat back on, looking sideways, still smiling, at Wheeler.
They were sitting side by side on the edge of the wagon bed. The emptied barrels gleamed where water had spilled down their sides. All around them the late sunlight slanted brazenly over the greenless, dusty fields, and over the fly-covered backs of the lean steers. And Marce Catlett sat looking at his son with a light in his eye that came from another direction entirely, waiting to see if he saw.
It was a moment that would live with Wheeler for the rest of his life, for he saw his father then as he had at last grown old enough to see him, not only as he declared himself, but as he was. And in that seeing Wheeler became aware of a pattern, that his father both embodied and was embodied in, that also contained the drouth and made light of it, that contained other hardships also and made light of them. For his father’s good work was on that place in a way that granted and collaborated in its own endurance, that had carried them thus far,
and would carry them on. Looking at his father, Wheeler knew, and would not forget, that though they were surrounded by the marks and leavings of a bad year, they were surrounded also by the marks and leavings of good work, which for that year and any other proposed an end and a new beginning.
He slowed down as he entered the town of Langlay. In the center of town he turned off the main road, drove to the railroad station, and parked his car. He did not have long to wait to catch the interurban, and soon he was seated in a nearly empty car, looking out the windows at the farms and little towns as the rail joints clicked under the wheels.
It seemed to him that for the last hour he had been passing through the stages of an abandonment of his own will, working his way toward a leap past which his own wishes would be idle dreams. At each stage, it seemed to him, turning back had become less possible. Now, sliding down toward the city along the same tracks that Uncle Peach had followed days ago, it was easy for Wheeler to imagine himself telling the desk clerk, “I don’t know anybody named Leonidas Wheeler.” But he knew better than that. He knew that he had not passed the place of turning back that day, or that year. He may, he thought, have been born on the downhill side of it.
When Wheeler headed home from law school, he did not have Uncle Peach much in mind, one way or another. But when he arrived, there was Uncle Peach, older, grayer, worse for wear, traveling at a slower pace now among the thorns and thistles that the ground brought forth, but still on the same route. And Dorie was still seeing him through.
“Blood is thicker than liquor,” Wheeler said to her, no longer mocking, but gently stating the fact as he knew she saw it.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “It is.”
And as he knew by then, she had more than that in mind. Uncle Peach was, she thought, “one of the least of these my brethren”—a qualification for her care that the blood connection only compounded. If one of the least of Christ’s brethren happened to be her brother, then the obligation was as clear as the penalty. She had long ago given up hope for Uncle Peach. She cared for him without hope, because she had passed the place of turning back or looking back. Quietly, almost submissively, she propped herself against him, because in her fate and faith she was opposed to his ruin.