"Runaway Spirits of My Youth"

Essay: To the Uncles Who Drank

 by Hank Nuwer

Hank Nuwer, Rover, and Grandfather Josef, Alden, NY

Both sets of my grandparents had farms doomed to fail, although their ability to raise livestock and vegetables for self-consumption kept us from the despair and poverty affecting farmers who lose their property to banks. This was in Alden, a town in Western New York, and the terrain looked very much like the land surrounding my adopted home in Waldron, Indiana. Perhaps this is why I find the Hoosier farmlands both beautiful and comforting.

The farm owned by my mother's father was cut in two by a set of railroad tracks, leaving farmland on one side and tangled shrubbery and woods on the other where red fox built their dens and I came to dream and imprison butterflies in jars. When I was four or five, I snuck out of the farmhouse, walked through a single row of corn that went on for acres, and crossed the railroad tracks. To my delight, a train--not one of the old-fashioned steam engines but a gleaming modern engine--came toward me, and I giggled in near hysteria as a roaring whistle and tremors from the passing train enveloped me. In between cars there were gaps, of course, and at some point I became aware of my mother on the other side, her mouth open in what looked like a shriek, although I could not hear her.
    
Later, in the parlor eavesdropping like the writer I was meant to be one day, I heard the story that explained my mother's terror.  Her brother Walter had accompanied Norman, my dad's kid brother, on a celebratory outing to send Norman off to the army.  This was the end of WWII, and my Dad was overseas, a tank driver fighting his way through North Africa, Normandy, Belgium and Sicily under Gen. Patton.

Norman never made it to Europe. The celebration got in the way of his good judgment, as well as in Walter's way.  Norman stalled the family car up on railroad tracks, and as poor as the Nuwers were he stayed with the car to try getting it started. At the last second, Walter bailed, and in my mind's eye I envision him hearing the awful impact of cowcatcher on car metal, the metal screaming as the train pushed the car along the track, tearing apart doors, fenders, running board and driver.

Did Norman scream? Did Walter, his voice flung like a rag into the country air. If they did, Walter's was the longer scream, of course, his terror total and absolute. And even louder than his scream, I imagine, was the total silence in the country air when the train's brakes finally caught and the engine rested for a moment until workers dropped like crickets to the earth.




The tragic, brief life of Norman Nuwer (center) haunted me as a young boy.
I rarely saw Art (left) or Henry (right), my dad, drink and never to excess.

That wasn't the only tragedy in my family chalked up to alcohol.  My Uncle George and my Uncle Louis were the town drunks of Alden, New York, although a counselor pal of mine once admonished me for using those words to describe them. Say unhealthy drinkers, he said, stressing that people were not their addiction.

Alcohol was part of family rituals, and my Grandfather Josef, an escapee from the Russian army, opened family outings with a bottle of vodka and passed-along shot glass.

I had my first drink at four, a small glass of beer given me by an uncle with a German heritage for whom moderate drinking came as naturally as the eating of sausages. But my second drink, at five, was hard cider, somehow manufactured with battery acid I later was told though I know not the specifics of its manufacture. Uncle George gave me that drink because I'd joined him in the milkhouse while he was taking many a snort and snootful, and I expressed a desire to taste the forbidden raisins in the bottom of his glass. He poured me a tall glass, and in short order I was intoxicated, and that's how my father found me on the driveway gravel, my knees scraped bloody and my giggling unceasing.
My father's roars and his furious threats directed toward George caused even my giggling to stop.

Louis's drinking was plain embarrassing. He found ways to end up just stinking plowed even when one of the Nuwer cousins who was a priest visited the farm.  I liked being around Louis when he drank.  Ever the young opportunist, I found he was easily separated from quarters and dimes when in a generous state of intoxication.

I was around when George and Louis died long before their biological clocks normally would have stopped.  At the end, Louis couldn't stop telling me about a stone fence he built as a boy in the local St. John's cemetery. Later I learned that Louis was a class cutter, and a priest used to corral him to build a fence rather than go back to school.

Likewise, George used to take me around the farm and showed me every tree he had planted as a boy. These were huge and lovely, and his pride in them was tremendous. Often out of work, of little use on the farm, he spent weekends hitting me, his baseball-mad nephew, ground ball after ground ball with the axe handle he used as a bat when money was tight. His death wasn't pretty. Liver disease bloated his belly until he looked like something killed along our country road.

Walter lived on until two years ago. At the end, my mother said, his dying words made her think he was back on the railroad tracks with Norman, moaning.  But in all my years I never saw Walter take more than one beer. He lived a long, useful life and was much beloved by his children, nieces and nephews.

The lessons these four relatives taught me, albeit not intentionally, will live with me always. Intense and vulnerable to dares of pals and drawn to pretty faces in roadside bars, I intuitively always felt that I had to watch out for alcohol--even when I didn't watch out. I always knew that alcohol would bite me and bite hard and not let loose its jaws if I wasn't careful. Yet I remember being a runaway spirit and those stretches in my life when I regarded alcohol as something romantic and appealing--something I associated with Hank Williams and Hemingway and Faulkner and Mickey Mantle and F. Scott Fitzgerald -- my boyhood heroes.

That was long ago. Whether enough drinking now could turn me into a full-blown alcoholic is something I do not know, nor something I will ever find out.  A lonely stretch of my life many, many years ago after a divorce showed me that alcohol and loneliness mixed badly, and it affected my decision making and put my head on pillows where it didn't belong. To sum up, I don't have a great tolerance for drink, and now I almost always abstain—though I insist on drinking on special occasions (wine in Europe, a beer with an old bud). I'm the perennial designated driver all my friends can count on. Alcohol isn't something I crave, nor miss. I advise Bacchus at Franklin College in Indiana, and I’ve adopted its position on responsible drinking (even though I worry when I see students using “responsible” as a euphemism for getting hammered every now and then, just not every day).

I'm not sure I would have been smart enough to turn away from drinking some time ago had it not been for the ghosts of George and Louis and Norman. We still have the family farm, and on my rare visits I still like to explore the barn and its rafters. More often than not I find a half-filled bottle hidden beneath straw or inside rotted walls of our big barn.

I suspect that a good many people here have a George or a Louis in the family. Some, even, may have lost a version of Norman. Some may have a guilty and guilt ridden version of Walter. That is why I shared their stories.

My conclusion? Just because we don't end up full-bore alcoholics does not mean we are problem free when it comes to drinking. If, even once, you find yourself shamed over something you did while drinking, you might want to ask yourself honestly whether quitting or cutting way back might be your best options.

Here's to you, dear uncles.

You did not mean to teach me, but you taught me awfully well. You might even have saved my life.

                    --Hank Nuwer

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