Marce, who was the most craftsmanly of farmers, the artist of his particular domain of earth and flesh, stood outside this push and pull of opposition. He was Uncle Peach’s opposite, all right, but Marce could stand opposite without opposing. Dorie opposed Uncle Peach because she loved him. Wheeler had opposed him, so far, because he was affronted by him. Marce merely maintained his difference. He was a man of simple preferences and complex abilities—a better carpenter, for instance, in answer to his own occasional need to be one, than Uncle Peach had ever been. He simply knew what he desired, and worked toward it with whatever means he had, without fuss. Not having inherited Uncle Peach, he patiently tolerated as much of him as he thought tolerable. The rest he ignored.
Wheeler, who loved his father and liked his ways, assumed that he thought and felt as his father did. But Wheeler loved his mother too, and so he inherited Uncle Peach. When he returned home, Uncle Peach devolved upon him.
When the train stopped, Wheeler stepped off so quickly that he did not stop. He went through the station to the street, and set off on foot for the hotel, too impatient to wait for a streetcar. He went through the Haymarket, stepping past boxes and bags and bins and baskets of produce, crates of eggs, chickens in cages along the edge of the sidewalk. And then, the street opening in front of him again, free of encumbrances, he went on toward the stockyards and its satellite businesses and shops catering to the needs and the weaknesses of country people.
He came to the hotel, a turreted corner building of dingy elegance, with its name in white block letters on windows and door, went in, and stopped and let the door shut behind him. He stopped because at that point he had come to a place he would never have come to on his own. He had been there before, for the same reason, and the lobby was familiar to him: the white tiled floor mopped with dirty water, the black wainscoting, the hard chairs pushed back to the walls, the spittoons gaping up at the pressed-metal ceiling—a room meager and stark from the expectation of hard use. In the chairs a few men merely sat, as they had been sitting, so far as Wheeler could tell, when he was there last.
Behind the desk, the clerk stood leaning against a wall of pigeonholes, reading a newspaper. When Wheeler crossed the lobby and stopped at the desk, it seemed to him that he came to the end of the slant he had been on; now he spoke the words that sent him, like a diver, into the air: “Mr. Leonidas Wheeler?”
“Oh,” the clerk said, looking up and folding his paper, “you must be Mr. Catlett.” He fingered his ledger.
“What’s his bill?”
The clerk named the sum, and Wheeler paid.
“Thank you very much, sir.”
And then the clerk spoke to a Negro porter who was mopping the floor in the hallway off the lobby: “Take him up. Mr. Wheeler’s room.”
“This way, sir,” the porter said, and led the way to the elevator in long, pushing strides. He held the door for Wheeler, and then shut it, and they started up.
“You Mr. Wheeler’s kinfolks?” the porter asked over the bumping and groaning of the elevator.
“I’m his nephew.”
The porter gave a somewhat embarrassed laugh, as unwilling to intrude as to leave Wheeler unwarned. “Mr. Wheeler done got hisself plumb down.”
Before the elevator even reached the floor where Uncle Peach’s room was, Wheeler could hear him roaring. “Oh ho ho ho!” he was saying. “Oh, Lord! Oh, me! Oh ho ho ho ho!”
Wheeler glanced at the porter, who smiled obligingly and said, “He been doing that quite some time.”
When they unlocked the door and went in, Uncle Peach never even heard them. It was a tiny room, its one window looking out at a blank wall across an alley, and it was as much a shambles as one man could have made it without the use of tools. The room’s one table and chair were turned over on the floor. Uncle Peach’s pants, shirt, shoes, socks, necktie, coat, and hat were scattered all over it. Bedclothes and pillows had been flung off the bed in several directions. Beside the sagging bed was a wastebasket that Uncle Peach had attempted to vomit into, but missed. Uncle Peach was lying on the bed under a blanket with his feet sticking out, his face a mess, his eyes shut tight, still hollering.
“Be still, Uncle Peach!” Wheeler said sharply.
Uncle Peach instantly quieted down.
“Huh?” he said. “Who is it?”
“It’s Wheeler. What in the world have you done to yourself?”
“You know damned good and well what I’ve done to myself.”
“I got your message,” Wheeler said. “Are you ready to go home?”
Uncle Peach groaned. He lay still a moment. And then he opened his eyes and looked at Wheeler. He cleared his throat. “I’m ready, Wheeler boy, but I’ve got to have a drink before I can move.” As his way was at such times, he spoke of himself so matter-of-factly that Wheeler knew he was telling the truth.
Wheeler turned to the porter, who was still standing in the open door. “Can you give him a bath and a shave?”
“Yes, sir. For a consideration.”
Wheeler grinned at the delicacy of that. “What do you consider a consideration?”
“One dollar.”
Wheeler handed him a dollar. “As cold as possible,” he said.
In the street again, Wheeler stopped to think. He knew beyond doubt, having seen the evidence, that whiskey was within reach, but he did not know where to find it. He had not asked Uncle Peach for directions because he knew that Uncle Peach’s directions, even when he was sober, were not followable. He was almost ready to turn back and lay his problem before the desk clerk, when he saw a man coming toward him in a swaying, hobbling gait that he recognized unmistakably. It was Laban Jones, Wheeler’s friend from childhood, a Port William farmer’s son, crippled from birth, who was working in an office at the stockyards. Wheeler caught his arm. “Laban,” he said. The face that turned to look at him was as sweet and honest as the day itself.
“Why, hello, Wheeler. How in the world are you?”
“All right,” Wheeler said. “Nearly all right. I need a half-pint of whiskey, and I don’t know where to find it.”
“You do, Wheeler?” Laban laughed. As always his hat was set far back on his head as if that was just the place he kept it in case he might want to put it on.
Wheeler laughed too. “I may need it before this is over. But at present Uncle Peach is the one in need.”
Laban widened his eyes and nodded. “I see. You’ve got to patch him up and get him home.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, come with me.”
Laban turned and started back the way he had come, hobbling along at a pace Wheeler had to hurry to keep up with. Laban’s eagerness to be of use was familiar to Wheeler, but it was strange to him to have Laban as a guide. Always before, it had been the other way around. Wheeler had been the one who knew, Laban the innocent who learned late. Once he had actually sawed off a tree limb that a squirrel was on, forgetting that he himself was standing on the same limb. Now he was guiding Wheeler through the invisible world that lay beneath the visible one. Wheeler walked along beside him obediently and asked no questions.
They went several blocks, and then Laban abruptly entered a hardware store. Wheeler walking behind him now, they went through the store, through a large stockroom at the back, winding their way among stacks of boxes, crates, and kegs. And then Laban opened another door and they emerged in the bottom of what appeared to be a deep shaft, brick walled, with a tiny patch of sky at the top. It was a dark, damp place, smelling of mold, as hidden from the rest of the world as the bottom of a well. The place astonished Wheeler, and he was grateful not to be there alone.
Laban pointed to a ragged hole in one of the brick walls. “Hand a dollar bill through that hole.”
“Through that hole?” Wheeler said.
Laban was grinning, greatly amused. “That’s right.”
Wheeler did as he was told, although, as much as he trusted Laban, he did not do so gladly. But he felt the bill gen
tly withdrawn from his fingers, and felt the cold glass of a small bottle pressed firmly upon the palm of his hand.
He slipped the bottle into his pocket, and followed Laban back out through the meanders they had come in by and into the daylit street.
“Well, that ought to fix him up,” Laban said. “He’ll be a new man now.”
“He’s been a new man many a time before this,” Wheeler said. “Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” Laban said, and hobbled away before Wheeler could ask the question he had in mind.
Uncle Peach, scrubbed, shaved, and reassembled in his blue suit and tie, his hat, reshaped, on his knee, was sitting in the chair in the middle of the room, which the porter was now setting to rights. The suit was the only one Uncle Peach had; he used it only to get drunk in. It was a garment a man could feel comfortable either wearing or walking on, as need might be. And Uncle Peach looked as old and exhausted as his suit, pale and wasted, his neck too small for his collar. And yet his head, despite its snow-white hair, was somehow still a boy’s head, the ears sticking innocently too far out, the hair, which had been wetted and combed down, already drying and rising stiffly like the hackles on a dog’s neck. Wheeler could see a crooked vein pulsing at his temple.
“Here,” he said. “See if that’ll help.”
Uncle Peach held the bottle of colorless whiskey up, trembling, against the window light, and looked through it, and then he pulled the cork and drank. “Ah!” he said, and made a face.
Wheeler took the bottle back.
“Ter’ble stuff ! Awful stuff!” Uncle Peach said, fighting for breath.
“But you like it,” Wheeler said and laughed. He had begun to feel a little relieved; he was involved in the problem now, getting something done.
“I like a little, from time to time,” Uncle Peach said, and then, feeling a sudden access of moral seriousness, he said to Wheeler and the porter and anyone who might be passing by in the hall, “But don’t never drink, my boys. Stay clean away from it.”
And then the three of them stayed quiet for what must have been several minutes in that little room that, even straightened up, oppressed Wheeler by its measliness, Wheeler and the porter watching Uncle Peach who was staring at the window. Slowly he seemed to grow steadier within himself. He took a deep, tremulous breath and smacked his mouth as though tasting the air. And then he reached for the bottle. “Bird can’t fly with one wing, Wheeler boy.”
Wheeler, who had flight in mind, let him have another drink. But when he took the bottle back that time he handed it to the porter. “That’s all,” he said to Uncle Peach.
“That’s all,” Uncle Peach said, in a tone of finality in which Wheeler recognized the familiar intention of reform. For a while now Uncle Peach would be a prohibitionist, a new man. “I’m going to wipe the slate clean!”
But far from flying, when they put his hat on and helped him up, Uncle Peach collapsed back onto the chair and would have continued to the floor, had they not held him. He shook his head. “Whoo!”
“You’re going to have to work at this,” Wheeler told him. “Pay attention.”
Uncle Peach paid attention, and when they got him up again, he stood. They walked him out to the elevator, they descended with him to the lobby, and then the porter walked ahead and held open the street door.
If he could keep Uncle Peach on his feet, Wheeler was determined to walk to the station. Uncle Peach needed the effort and the fresh air, Wheeler thought, and he was right, for as they went along Uncle Peach recovered some of his capabilities. He was not standing up on his own, but he was walking on his own. And Wheeler began to be a little hopeful. Maybe, he thought, he could get Uncle Peach back in charge of himself by nightfall. Wheeler wanted to go home. He imagined himself finally free of this story he was in, telling it to Bess. Encumbered as he was, he imagined how neatly and nimbly she would walk beside him.
As he and Uncle Peach made their way slowly along, they necessarily attracted the attention of the passersby—a handsome, erect, nicely dressed young man walking arm in arm with an aging drunk. Wheeler bore it well enough, for he had expected to have to, and he knew there was no escape. But the pressure of so many curious, amused, or disapproving stares produced in Uncle Peach a desire to rise above his condition. If he was a man who obviously did disgrace and degrade himself with drink, he wished at least to appear to be a man who knew that he should not.
“My boy,” he said loudly, “there’s a moral lesson in this for you, if you’ll only learn it. Here’s a awful example right before your eyes.”
“Hush,” Wheeler said. “Just please hush.”
But Uncle Peach’s heart was full. His voice was trembling. “You got a good mother and daddy. Finest a man ever had. You don’t have to be like old Uncle Peach. Let this be a lesson to you, Wheeler boy. I know what a life like mine goes to show.”
“For God’s sake, be quiet,” Wheeler said. And then, though he knew better, he said, “Lesson to me! If it’s no lesson to you, why should it be a lesson to me?”
“It is a lesson to me. I’ve learnt it a thousand times.”
Wheeler usually put up with Uncle Peach by finding him funny, which was easy enough, for Uncle Peach’s life and conversation were rich in absurdities, and Wheeler’s involvements with him invariably made good stories. But underlying the possibility of laughter was the possibility of anger, and he was close to that now. He did not need a moral lesson from Uncle Peach. He did not need Uncle Peach, so far as he was aware, for anything—not him or the likes of him. So far as he was aware, nobody did.
“There’s no moral lesson in a man’s inability to learn a moral lesson,” he said, and wondered if that was true. But Uncle Peach’s thoughts had strayed to other matters; if he heard, he did not answer.
The train was crowded, people were standing in the aisle, and the car was hot. Wheeler tried to open a window, but cold weather had come officially, if not in fact, and the windows had been locked shut.
When the train gained speed outside the city and the car began to sway, Uncle Peach became sick again. He swallowed and smacked his mouth, and drops of sweat ran down his face. Wheeler looked for a way out, perhaps to the vestibule at the end of the car, but with the aisle full of people escape appeared to be impossible, and anyhow it was too late, for suddenly Uncle Peach leaned forward and, with awful retches and groans, vomited between his spread knees. Wheeler caught hold of him and held him. All around them people were giving them looks and drawing their feet away. Wheeler gave Uncle Peach his handkerchief, helped him out of his coat, and fanned him with his hat, encouraging and helping him the best he could. But the spasms came repeatedly, with unabated violence, and with each one Uncle Peach’s gasps and groans and roars of supplication became louder. “Ohhhh, Lord!” he said. “Ohhhh, me! Ohhhh, Lord, help me!” Wheeler’s pleadings with him to be quiet might as well have been addressed to a panic-stricken horse. As soon as he would be almost recovered and quiet, suddenly he would lean forward again. “Uuuuuup! Oh, my God!” And when the spasm passed he would roll his head against the seatback. “Ohhhh, me!”
It was an awful intimacy carried on in public. To Wheeler, it was endurable only because it was inescapable. He knew that Uncle Peach was suffering, and yet his suffering seemed merely the cause, the relatively minor cause, of the calamitous uproar that he was filling the car with. And yet, in the very midst of it, Wheeler knew that it was rare. It would make a good story, as soon as he could get out of it. But it was not funny now.
Once they had landed, mercifully, on the station platform at Langlay, Wheeler steadied Uncle Peach a moment to let him secure his balance, and then he said, “Let’s go.”
“All right,” Uncle Peach said.
His hand caught firmly under Uncle Peach’s arm, Wheeler turned then to walk to his car, only to feel Uncle Peach turn in the opposite direction, a difference of intention that came close to bringing them both down.
“What are you doing?” Wheeler said, angry su
re enough now.
“Got to get the old mare and buggy.”
Wheeler turned him loose, half hoping he would fall, for Uncle Peach, who had used up the afternoon, had now laid claim to the night as well. Wheeler was not going to get home by breakfast, let alone supper. His leap had not ended yet. “Well, damn it to hell!” he said. “Let’s go get the damned old mare.”
“Got to get her,” Uncle Peach said. “Got to have her.”
And so they went to the livery stable and had Uncle Peach’s old sorrel mare, Godiva, harnessed and hitched to the buggy. Wheeler paid the bill there too, and they started for Uncle Peach’s place, Wheeler driving and Uncle Peach leaning back in the seat, holding on.
It was a long six miles. Uncle Peach’s stomach objected as strenuously to the motion of the buggy as it had to that of the train. He had long ago emptied himself, but the spasms came anyhow, prolonged clenches that left him fighting for balance and breath. And each time, Wheeler had to stop the mare and hold Uncle Peach to keep him from falling out of the buggy.
Finally, after this had happened perhaps half a dozen times, Wheeler, who had remained angry, said, “I hope you puke your damned guts out.”
And Uncle Peach, who lay, quaking and white, against the seatback, said, “Oh, Lord, honey, you can’t mean that.”
As if his anger had finally stripped all else away, suddenly Wheeler saw Uncle Peach as perhaps Dorie had always seen him—a poor, hurt, weak mortal, twice hurt because he knew himself to be hurt and weak and mortal. And then Wheeler knew what he did need from Uncle Peach. He needed him to be comforted. That was all. He put his arm around Uncle Peach, then, and patted him as if he were a child. “No,” he said. “I don’t mean it.”