When he left the house to load his stock, he would be as clean and neat as Miss Minnie’s repeated instructions and inspections could make him. He would be washed and shaved and combed, dressed in his best everyday clothes, which would be spotless, as stiff with starch as if made of tin. By the time the stock were loaded, all the creases would be crisscrossed with wrinkles; there would be mud and manure on his shoes and britches and maybe on his shirt; he would have a loose cuff or suspender; after much head scratching, his cap or hat would be on crooked and some stray swatch of hair would be hanging in his eyes or sticking out over one ear.

  After they got to the stockyards and got unloaded, Tol followed a procedure that in its general outlines never varied. And Sam always went along in a state of alert expectancy, because in its details it was never twice the same. Say it was in the fall. They would go back through the yards to where Tol’s steers were penned, and lean against the gate to wait for the buyers to come around. But it wasn’t just the buyers, Sam knew, that Tol was waiting for. Tol always had good steers—good in their individual quality, uniform as a lot, and well finished, showing a lot of bloom—and he liked to hear them praised. And so he stood there, leaning proprietarily against the gate, watching the drovers and the commission men and the farmers go by. And when one of them stopped to look into the pen at Tol’s cattle, Tol would look at him in such a way that the fellow nearly always asked, “Those your steers?”

  And Tol would say, “Yessir!” as if it ought to have been obvious.

  And then the fellow would say something like “Mighty nice” or “Well, they’re the right kind.”

  And Tol would say, “Yessir!” in a way that showed he knew the fellow had made pretty much of an understatement—which sometimes caused the fellow to try to say something even better and more intelligent about the cattle, and sometimes did not.

  If it did not, Tol would turn the conversation to the subject of the fellow himself—what his name was, where he was from, whom he had married, how his family was, how much rain he’d had, how his crops had turned off, and so on. Tol loved that kind of visiting, and he talked to everybody he met whether the body in question wanted to be talked to or not. Sam followed these conversations with as much interest as he followed baseball. The thing was that Tol mostly liked everybody, and because he liked them he was genuinely interested in everything about them, and he pumped information out of them, Sam figured, that would be news to their wives. Tol never forgot them or anything he learned about them, and he was always glad to see them when he met them again. He had got acquainted with a lot of people in this way. But Sam knew that on these trips, because they were his adventures, Tol much preferred strangers to acquaintances.

  When the cattle were sold and the talking was finished, they went to the office for their checks. Except for the few times when Tol thought his stock had been graded too low, Sam never heard him complain about the size of his check. He appeared to accept it simply as the necessary completion of a business in which he had ceased to have any live interest the moment the cattle ceased to belong to him.

  And then Tol would invite Sam to be his guest at a certain saloon where, if it was fall, they would eat fried oysters, which Tol loved. The meal lasted an hour or two. They stood at the bar and ate, and Tol talked to whatever stranger happened to be standing next to him. Now, for Sam, the quality of the interest changed, for here Tol was less likely to be talking to a farmer and more likely to be talking to some city fellow who would not appreciate a stranger’s interest in his personal affairs. Sam had seen Tol get into some pretty tough spots. He was never sure that Tol ever realized that he was in a tough spot when he was in one; and Tol always got out of whatever tough spot he was in, and he never got out of it either by fighting or by shutting up. It was better than baseball, when Sam could maintain his detachment; when he couldn’t, it was worse.

  After the oysters, Tol would always have something or other he wanted to buy that he couldn’t buy closer to home. And even if it wasn’t but one thing, shopping for it would take exactly all the rest of the time they had.

  The time I am going to tell you about, Tol was looking for navy beans. He and Miss Minnie always grew a big garden and put up most of the stuff they needed, but something they never tried to grow was navy beans. And so one of Tol’s regular fall chores was to buy a two-bushel bag of them, which was usually enough to see them through the winter—some to keep and some to give away, according to the first rule of the Proudfoot household.

  This year, Tol had found no navy beans in Port William and none in Hargrave. And so he made them the business of his and Sam’s annual cattle-selling trip to Louisville. Sam followed him through the Haymarket, a couple of steps behind, picking his teeth, watching Tol with the patient interest with which a man already satisfied awaits further satisfaction.

  Navy beans were scarce in Louisville, too, it turned out, for Tol visited all the likely places he knew without luck, and then they worked their way out into strange territory.

  They finally went into a store that was not the sort of feed-and-seed establishment usually patronized by farmers, but a grocery store obviously set up to cater to the city trade—and, by the look of it, prosperous. There was a long wall of shelves full of canned goods, and a long counter in front of that, and in front of that a long row of wire baskets of fresh produce: potatoes, turnips, parsnips, eggs, cabbages, apples, and pears. In the back there were three fellows in suits—drummers, Sam thought—standing by a big iron stove, for it was cold that day. And behind the counter, talking to them, was a dapper fellow with a round face and round eyeglasses, his hair parted in the middle, garters on his sleeves, and a cigar in his mouth.

  When Tol walked in with Sam behind him, the drummers and the clerk quit talking and looked. And they kept on looking. By that time, Sam said, Tol had been beyond the reach and influence of Miss Minnie long enough to look unusual. He looked as tall and wide as the door. He wore a sheepskin coat, unbuttoned, that flared out at the back and sides, giving the impression of great forward momentum. Half his shirttail was out. The bill of his next-best winter cap hovered between his right eye and his right ear. His britches legs were stuffed into the top of a pair of gum boots plastered with manure. He had bought a big sack of hard candy as a gift for Miss Minnie, and the twisted neck of the sack now stuck out as though he carried a setting goose in his pocket.

  The three drummers and the proprietor looked at Tol. They watched him come back through the store, and then the drummers looked at each other and grinned. The proprietor watched Tol until he stopped and faced him across the counter.

  “What can I do for you, Otis?” the proprietor asked. He never cracked a smile, but he gave the drummers just the slightest little wink, and the drummers chuckled.

  None of them saw the look that crossed Tol’s face, drawing one eye just a fraction of an inch narrower than the other, and if they had seen it they probably wouldn’t have known what to make of it. But Sam, who was hanging back near the door, did see it, and did know what to make of it, and he made himself comfortable against the doorjamb and folded his arms.

  Tol’s eyes were set under bristly brows, and were much wrinkled at the corners. Mostly there was great candor in them; you could look through them right into his mind. But sometimes you could not see into his mind. At such times, thinking was going on in there that Tol didn’t want anybody to find out about. When Tol thought, Sam Hanks said, he looked like he wasn’t thinking at all; he looked like he was listening to a low rumble in his guts. And that was the way he looked for maybe about three seconds after the proprietor called him “Otis.” And then, as if suddenly remembering where he was, he looked back at the proprietor.

  “Two bushel of navy beans, if you go ’em, please, sir,” said Ptolemy Proudfoot. If they had known their man, the proprietor and the drummers might have heard a very precise comment in the way Tol said “sir,” but they missed that, too.

  “I don’t customarily sell them by the bushel, Timothy,” the proprietor said, “but I believe I can let you have them.”

  “I’d be mightily obliged,” said Tol.

  The proprietor walked to a door in the back and called, “A bag of navy beans for Mr. Wheatly here.”

  Every time he called Tol by a new name, he glanced at the drummers, who seemed to be appreciating his wit a great deal, for they were grinning and nudging each other and whispering. And Sam appreciated it, too, in his way, for he knew, as they did not, that they were watching a contest.

  A colored fellow came through the door in the back with the bag of beans on a hand truck and stood the bag up beside Tol.

  The proprietor beat a little drumbeat on the edge of the counter with his hands. “Will that be all for you today, Mr. Bulltrack?”

  “Well, I believe so,” Tol said. “How much, if you please, sir?”

  The proprietor told him, and Tol began grabbling in his pocket. He held his suspenders with one hand and grabbled with the other, and finally drew out clenched in his fist an assortment of wadded bills, some coins, half a cut plug, a pocketknife, and the last three inches of a pencil. He made order of all this on one large stretched-out palm, and laid the price of the beans a bill or a coin at a time on the counter in front of the proprietor, the exact amount. And then he poked around in his hand and came up with a quarter.

  He smiled over at the proprietor. “Ever see one of them disappear? I can make that disappear.”

  “Why, you’re a magician, too, are you, Mr. Briarly?” the proprietor said, winking at the drummers. “Let me see.”

  Tol made a violent jerk with his right hand that sent the coin bouncing to the floor between two baskets of produce. He got down, grunting, onto his hands and knees and laboriously retrieved it. The drummers were laughing out loud now, and the proprietor’s face had begun to wear the smile of the successful host.

  “He’d done lost me,” Sam would say later when he would tell the story. “Looked like he was trying to make a fool of himself. I thought, ‘Now what?’”

  “Well, you made it disappear, all right,” the proprietor said.

  “Wait a minute,” Tol said, coming up with the quarter. “Watch it this time.”

  He made the same jerk, and sent the quarter spinning under the stove, and crawled after it. The drummers were holding onto themselves.

  “Well, that ain’t all the tricks I can do,” Tol said. “I’ll bet you this quarter I can jump into that basket of eggs and not break a one.”

  “Well, Spud, old boy, I’ll just bet you can’t,” said the proprietor. And then he caught that look in Tol’s eye that Sam had been watching all along, and his own eyes got wide. “Wup,” he said.

  He was too late. His lips had just shut on that little “wup” when Tol leapt into the air as light as a fox and came down with both feet in the basket of eggs. There was a loud crunch that totaled up the breaking of many small shells, and a viscous puddle began to spread slowly around the basket.

  Tol’s light leap and heavy descent were funny, Sam told me, but nobody laughed.

  “Didn’t you laugh?” I asked him.

  “Hell, naw!” he said. “I was trying to act like I was there by myself. It was as quiet as a church with nobody in it. It was as quiet as a graveyard at midnight.”

  Tol stood in the basket of broken eggs with what Sam described as “a sweet, innocent smile,” holding his quarter out to the proprietor. “Well, you got me. Dogged if you ain’t a hard man to get ahead of.”

  The proprietor stood looking at Tol’s quarter with his mouth open. “And then,” Sam told me, “I swan if that fellow didn’t reach out, still not quite able to get his mouth to shut, and take that quarter and put it in his pocket.”

  Tol stepped out of the basket, shouldered his sack of beans, and walked to the door, which Sam was holding open.

  I heard Sam Hanks tell the story in town one July afternoon, and the next time I stopped by to see Miss Minnie, it occurred to me to ask her if she had ever heard it.

  She had, of course. And she told it much as Sam had told it, but a good deal shorter. She was sitting in her rocker in the kitchen of the little house where she and Tol had passed the time their lives had been joined together. Now, their lives put asunder, Miss Minnie told the story with the mixture of approval and amusement with which she usually remembered Tol. When she finished the telling, she laughed. And then she sat in silence, reflecting, I knew, on the opposing claims of charity and justice in the story, and on the conflict of extravagance and gentleness in Tol’s character. The late sun threw a patch of warm light on the wall behind her. The clock ticked.

  “Mr. Proudfoot was that way,” she said, and smiled. “But he was half sorry just as soon as he did it.”

  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.