Home to Harmony (4 page)

M
y best friend in childhood was Uly Grant. At school we sat in alphabetical order, so Uly sat just behind me in Fern Hampton's first-grade classroom.

I had known Uly before that because his family owned Harmony's hardware store, the Grant Hardware Emporium. It was a big brick building with a display window full of Zebco fishing rods, Schwinn bicycles, and Case pocketknives. I would stand and look at them on Saturday mornings. There was a Miss Hardware calendar back in the corner office, which I wasn't permitted to stand and look at.

Uly Grant was alleged to be a direct descendant of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and United States president. The town folklore was that the general's son, Ulysses S. Grant II, began the Grant Hardware Emporium in 1872. Like his father, the younger Grant yearned for life on the battlefield. But then he fell in love with a Quaker from our town—a Miss Penelope Hastings. She was unusually beautiful, and
he was so stricken with love that he went to her father and asked for her hand in marriage.

“She's not mine to give away,” her father said. “Ask her yourself.”

So he did, and Penelope declined his proposal. She told him, “I cannot in good conscience marry a man whose business is the destruction of human life.”

Those old Quakers were not to be trifled with.

Ulysses S. Grant II tried to forget Penelope, but couldn't. Her beauty was etched on his mind. In 1870, he surrendered his military commission and they were married at the Harmony Friends meetinghouse. President Grant was not present, in deep opposition to his son marrying a Quaker and fathering pacifist children.

They stayed in Harmony, where U. S. Grant II became a Quaker and founded the Grant Hardware Emporium in 1872. He built it on the southwest corner of the town square, where it still sits—one block west of the Harmony Public Library and next to the Johnny Mackey Funeral Home.

In the early years of their marriage, accounts of President Grant's drunken behavior reached Harmony, though the subject was never raised in his son's presence. His son was grieved and pledged never to imbibe. Even as I was growing up, we avoided the topic. When we studied the U.S. presidents in sixth grade and came to Ulysses S. Grant, Miss Fishbeck gave a nervous smile, glanced at Uly, and said, “Ulysses S. Grant was our eighteenth president. He was a great general and a fine man, except for one weakness which need not be mentioned.”

Then she moved quickly to Rutherford B. Hayes, who never drank anything except water and lemonade.

 

I
t was the custom in Harmony for Mr. Squier, the history teacher, to take the eighth graders on a bus trip the week after school let out. We'd work all through the year raising money—selling popcorn at the basketball games, holding car washes, and selling Christmas fruitcakes door to door. People would see us coming and bolt their doors.

I remember the year it was our turn to go. The first Monday of summer vacation, Uly and I stood, bleary-eyed, on the sidewalk in front of the junior high school at five in the morning. We waited in the damp air with the other kids and Mr. Squier and a few adult chaperones, waiting for the charter bus from the city to roll down Main Street, past Harvey Muldock's car dealership, and up the park hill before pulling to the curb in front of the school.

It was a blue diesel bus with reclining seats and headrests and a bathroom at the back, which was in constant use the entire trip. It was pure fascination—a bathroom on a bus. We wondered what happened when you flushed the toilet. Uly thought maybe everything just sort of fell down on the road. We weren't sure. We asked Mr. Squier where it went.

He said, “There's a holding tank at the back of the bus. It goes there. The only thing is, if the bus gets hit from behind, that tank will explode, and if that happens, you want to be sure to duck.”

Uly and I moved up front behind the driver and put on our raincoats.

 

U
ly was lucky to be going. For the past twenty-three years the eighth graders had gone to Washington, D.C., but Mr. Squier was tiring of that city. Twenty-three years in a row had tested his enthusiasm. He was looking for something new, something fresh, which was when he hatched the idea of our class touring the Civil War battle sites of the South.

We'd start with Antietam and move on to Shiloh, then to Chancellorsville and Chickamauga. We'd point the bus toward Charleston, South Carolina, where the Great Sorrow had begun on April 12 in the year of our Lord 1861. On the way home, we'd stop at the Appomattox Court House, where the war had limped to its tired end.

Mr. Squier sent home a note to our parents announcing the trip. That's when Uly's father, Ulysses S. Grant IV, said Uly couldn't go.

He told Uly, “Us Grants aren't welcome in those parts. It's not safe. They'd make you disappear. There's people down there; they still remember it. They're bitter. You'd end up in some jail and never see the light of day. That ain't Mayberry down there, son. Not for us Grants. You're staying home.”

This troubled Mr. Squier. Uly had sold more fruitcakes than anyone, so this just wasn't fair. Mr. Squier went to Uly's house to talk with his father. He brought a brand-new wallet with him. He sat at their kitchen table
and opened the wallet to the plastic picture holders and pulled out the paper I.D. card and began to write. Except he didn't write Uly's real name. He made up a name,
Bob Lee,
and showed it to Mr. Grant. Uly's father studied it a moment and asked, “You think it'll work?”

“I think so,” said Mr. Squier. And that's how we smuggled Ulysses S. Grant V, alias Bob Lee, into Chickamauga, Georgia.

 

I
didn't see much of Uly after high school. I went on to college and Uly stayed behind to take over the Grant Hardware Emporium from his father. The Emporium was in shambles. Uly's father had forgotten the Lord and the Emporium and, despite the pleas of his sainted mother, had taken up drink.

I remember, as a child, watching Uly's daddy lifting a bottle from his desk drawer and taking a long pull. I remember Uly staring in fascination. I remember smelling alcohol on Uly's breath in high school, our senior year. I thought it was a youthful urge that would fade with time, but for Uly it only grew stronger.

In college, when I would come home for Christmas, my mother would tell me about seeing Uly wobble out of the Buckhorn Tavern. But now Uly didn't even bother with the Buckhorn. The conversation there distracted him from his main purpose, which was to get drunk. Which is what he did every night in his basement, with his little boys looking on.

Uly would close the Hardware Emporium at five o'clock, walk the four blocks home, and sit in his basement and drink. His three sons would sit on the base
ment steps and watch him, fascinated, just as Uly had watched his own father years before.

 

I
suspect Uly's three sons were the reason he finally called me after I moved home to Harmony. It was two o'clock in the morning when the phone rang. Uly asked if I could come over to his basement. I dressed, walked down the alleyway to his house the next block over, let myself in the back door, and eased down the basement stairs. It was dark. Uly was sitting in the corner, a bottle in his hand.

“Have a drink,” he said, and offered me the bottle.

“No thanks, Uly, I don't drink,” I said.

He started talking. “Sam, remember that trip we took in the eighth grade? Remember that bus with the toilet? Wasn't that some trip?”

He kept on talking, then he fell asleep. I went back up the stairs, down the alley, and back to bed. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of Uly.

Next afternoon I went to the Hardware Emporium to talk with him. Uly was sitting in the corner office underneath the Miss Hardware calendar. He looked up and smiled and said, “Hey, Sam, long time no see. How ya been?”

He called again a month later, late at night, inviting me over to talk about old times. I told him no. Told him we'd talk the next day, that I'd stop by to see him at the Emporium.

The next morning, I sat on the bench in front of the Emporium waiting for Uly. His wife and boys came at eight o'clock to open up. I asked her where Uly was.

“Sleeping it off,” she said. “I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.”

I walked over to Uly's house and let myself in. He was asleep down in the basement, on the floor next to the washer. I helped him up the stairs and sat him at the kitchen table.

I took a chair across the table from him. He raised his head and moaned. I looked him straight in his bloodshot eyes and said, “Uly, you are a drunk. If you don't get help soon, you're going to lose your family. Is that what you want?”

He began to cry. No, it wasn't what he wanted, he told me. He'd been trying to stop. Trying so hard, so long.

Uly was still a member of Harmony Friends Meeting, though he came only on Easter and at Christmas. He had been inoculated with a small dose of Christianity, which had kept him from catching the real thing.

I talked about Uly at the next elders' meeting. I said we needed to pray for him, and that we needed to start an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter at our meeting.

“How much will that cost?” Dale Hinshaw asked.

Dale liked a bargain. He was all for helping people as long as it didn't cost anything. Every year when we had a revival, he would take the cost of the evangelist, divide it by souls saved, and announce the results in church the next Sunday. The week after Billy Bundle, the World's Shortest Evangelist, Dale stood and announced that we had saved six souls at a cost of eighty-six dollars per soul. “Time was,” Dale concluded, “when you could save a soul for under ten dollars.” He longed for those days.

I told Dale an AA chapter wouldn't cost anything. That all we had to do was provide a place for them to meet and set out cookies.

His eyes lit up. “The alcoholics would come here? To our church?”

“Yes,” Miriam Hodge said, “but we don't want you showing up the nights they meet to see who has a drinking problem. Is that understood?”

Miriam talked about how her uncle had had a drinking problem, and how she wished there had been someone to help him.

I asked how folks could find out about the program.

Dale Hinshaw suggested sending a flier to everyone in town we thought was a drunk. He started making a list with Uly's name at the top.

Miriam said, “Put that list away. You can't do it that way. We'll contact the AA people and they'll help us get it going.”

Which we did. We looked them up in the city phone book, and they sent a man to talk with us about starting a Harmony chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. We would need a leader. But the leader had to be an alcoholic, and no one in Harmony would admit to meeting that criterion, so we had to import an alcoholic from the city.

 

H
is name was Gary. That was the first thing he told us when he came to the following month's elders' meeting.

“My name is Gary, and I'm an alcoholic,” he said. Then he told us his story. Dale sat listening, enthralled,
as Gary recalled his years of hard living and how he'd found a new life in a church basement in Ohio.

When Gary finished speaking, Dale leaned back in his chair and marveled, “Well, imagine that; and it was free!”

Gary said he'd need an assistant, someone to work alongside him, someone who could take over after he was gone. I told him about Uly. Gary said, “Let's go see him right now.”

Gary was not your typical AA member. He wasn't the type to sit around in a church basement waiting for drunks to come to him. He was a Green Beret type of AA member who believed in active intervention.

We walked over to Uly's house. Uly was in his basement, just getting started. Gary reached out with one hand and lifted Uly to his feet, and with the other hand took that bottle and poured it down the utility sink next to the washing machine.

He stared at Uly. He said, “You are pathetic. Sitting down here in your basement drinking your life away in front of your boys. What kind of man are you?”

Uly hung his head.

Gary growled, “Look at me when I'm talking to you.”

Uly raised up.

Gary said, “I'm going to help you, then you're going to help me help others. You're going to be my assistant. Have I made myself clear? As of this moment, you will no longer drink. I want you to say that, Uly. I want you to say, ‘I am Ulysses S. Grant the Fifth, and I no longer drink.' Say it.”

Uly whimpered, “I am Ulysses S. Grant the Fifth, and I no longer drink.”

Gary said, “I can't hear you.”

Uly said it even louder. “I am Ulysses S. Grant the Fifth, and I no longer drink.”

 

I
'm not certain what it was. I think it was heritage rising up. Whatever it was, something was born in Uly that evening; something old and deep within him rose up and took hold of him and made him new.

He rose to his feet and moved forward to Appomattox, to victory. He marched up the basement stairs, up from that dungeon of death, and didn't look back.

The alcoholics met every Wednesday evening at seven in the church basement. Dale Hinshaw would arrive at six-thirty and set out the cookies, then leave before anyone got there.

Gary and Uly would arrive at a quarter till and go over their battle plans.

“This is war,” Gary would remind him. “We're fighting for people's lives. Don't you ever forget that.”

Uly started coming to church. Every Sunday. Brought his wife and his boys and sat in the sixth row, in Fern Hampton's pew. For sixty-five years, that pew had not been sat in by anyone outside the Hampton family. As her mother lay dying, Fern pledged she would guard that pew with her life. But on that day, Fern looked up at Uly and his family and smiled and slid right over. There are those who claim that was a bigger miracle than Uly Grant's sobriety.