Sara, Hally, and The Man Who Drank

     The sky was starry that night, with nearly a full moon when Sara and Hally met the Man who drank. Sara was walking home alone at a late hour, which she assumed was a risk for a woman of her class. Behind her, a man stumbled. He had fallen straight onto the ground where Sara laid her feet seconds earlier. She turned around to meet a middle-aged man clad in black rags, and offered to help him stand.

     The Man who drank passively refused, and struggled to push himself up. Sara, insistent, forced her arm to interlock with the Man’s. She helped get him standing, then carried his shoulder over hers to walk him down the street.

     The Man who drank muttered to her, “And with thee fade away into the Forest dim.” His voice quivered, “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget…” his voice trailing even quieter, so Sara could not hear.

     She asked him what he said, but he gave no response. Because the Man could not recall how to get to his home, or perhaps he did not have one, Sara took him to her own.

     Hally was hesitant to have strangers inside their house. Yet Sara fought her, convincing Hally he would be of little disturbance.

     The Man who drank appeared unfazed by Sara’s victory, but he lay down anyhow.

     Hally crouched by the Man who drank, giving him water. She snuck her hand into his pocket to take the booze she had spotted so he couldn’t worsen his pitiful condition. He clutched her hand before she could steal it away, and as he stared her down he recited Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale,

“O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

     Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret.”

     Hally kept her eyes wide and unblinking, and frightened she parroted T.S. Eliots’ Little Gidding,

“Ash on an old man’s sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspended

Marks the place where a story ended,”

foretelling the future she was sure he held.

     Sara came with a cold cloth for the Man Who Drank’s forehead. Her bitter response to Hally was this,

“It is not to ring the bell backward

Nor is it an incantation

To summon the spectre of a Rose.”

The Man who drank looked at Sara, and again he said the words he held so dear,

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!”

.

Sara, whose mouth hung open slightly, gently set her hand over her chest. Hally nodded to him and slid her hand off the booze. She said sweet things to him,

“All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.”

Sara nodded, and answered the man,

“Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated

What they had to leave us—a symbol:

A symbol perfected in death.

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well.”

Sara held his hand and let him pass into his dreams. The three of them knew ‘twas sometimes better to let oneself forget.

The girls sat there watching the Man who drank sleep for too long before going to bed themselves.

When they woke the next morning, the man was gone. Nothing was stolen, broken, or missing like Hally had expected, except for the Man.

Some nights, when possible, Sara walks down that same alley, checking behind her every few yards.

The women suspect he passed away, but when they speak to each other they say he must have sobered up, and found a family. Lies keep them. Though they knew the man briefly, he had such an impact that they sometimes cried. They long to see the Man who drank one last time, to comfort him more.

Forlorn is their search for the Man who drinks, and prolonged, too. Yet they hold it close, and pride themselves in having met him.

Somewhere, a voice calls,

“Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music;-do I wake or sleep?”