Home to Harmony by Philip Gulley Read Free Book Online Page A

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 basement steps and watch him, fascinated, just as Uly had watched his own father years before.
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    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.
    â€œHave a drink,” he said, and offered me the bottle.
    â€œNo 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.
    â€œSleeping 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.
    â€œHow 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?”
    â€œYes,” 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