John Barleycorn | Page 8

profoundly murderous. Again and again, drinking in the strangeness
and the fearsomeness of the world from her lips, I had heard her state
that if one offended an Italian, no matter how slightly and
unintentionally, he was certain to retaliate by stabbing one in the back.
That was her particular phrase--"stab you in the back."
Now, although I had been eager to see Black Matt kill Tom Morrisey
that morning, I did not care to furnish to the dancers the spectacle of a
knife sticking in my back. I had not yet learned to distinguish between
facts and theories. My faith was implicit in my mother's exposition of
the Italian character. Besides, I had some glimmering inkling of the
sacredness of hospitality. Here was a treacherous, sensitive, murderous
Italian, offering me hospitality. I had been taught to believe that if I
offended him he would strike at me with a knife precisely as a horse
kicked out when one got too close to its heels and worried it. Then, too,
this Italian, Peter, had those terrible black eyes I had heard my mother
talk about. They were eyes different from the eyes I knew, from the
blues and greys and hazels of my own family, from the pale and genial
blues of the Irish. Perhaps Peter had had a few drinks. At any rate, his
eyes were brilliantly black and sparkling with devilry. They were the
mysterious, the unknown, and who was I, a seven-year-old, to analyse
them and know their prankishness? In them I visioned sudden death,
and I declined the wine half-heartedly. The expression in his eyes
changed. They grew stern and imperious as he shoved the tumbler of
wine closer.
What could I do? I have faced real death since in my life, but never
have I known the fear of death as I knew it then. I put the glass to my

lips, and Peter's eyes relented. I knew he would not kill me just then.
That was a relief. But the wine was not. It was cheap, new wine, bitter
and sour, made of the leavings and scrapings of the vineyards and the
vats, and it tasted far worse than beer. There is only one way to take
medicine, and that is to take it. And that is the way I took that wine. I
threw my head back and gulped it down. I had to gulp again and hold
the poison down, for poison it was to my child's tissues and
membranes.
Looking back now, I can realise that Peter was astounded. He
half-filled a second tumbler and shoved it across the table. Frozen with
fear, in despair at the fate which had befallen me, I gulped the second
glass down like the first. This was too much for Peter. He must share
the infant prodigy he had discovered. He called Dominick, a young
moustached Italian, to see the sight. This time it was a full tumbler that
was given me. One will do anything to live. I gripped myself, mastered
the qualms that rose in my throat, and downed the stuff.
Dominick had never seen an infant of such heroic calibre. Twice again
he refilled the tumbler, each time to the brim, and watched it disappear
down my throat. By this time my exploits were attracting attention.
Middle-aged Italian labourers, old-country peasants who did not talk
English, and who could not dance with the Irish girls, surrounded me.
They were swarthy and wild- looking; they wore belts and red shirts;
and I knew they carried knives; and they ringed me around like a pirate
chorus. And Peter and Dominick made me show off for them.
Had I lacked imagination, had I been stupid, had I been stubbornly
mulish in having my own way, I should never have got in this pickle.
And the lads and lassies were dancing, and there was no one to save me
from my fate. How much I drank I do not know. My memory of it is of
an age-long suffering of fear in the midst of a murderous crew, and of
an infinite number of glasses of red wine passing across the bare boards
of a wine-drenched table and going down my burning throat. Bad as the
wine was, a knife in the back was worse, and I must survive at any cost.
Looking back with the drinker's knowledge, I know now why I did not
collapse stupefied upon the table. As I have said, I was frozen, I was

paralysed, with fear. The only movement I made was to convey that
never-ending procession of glasses to my lips. I was a poised and
motionless receptacle for all that quantity of wine. It lay inert in my
fear-inert stomach. I was too frightened, even, for my stomach to turn.