And then came the spring night when he got drunk.  Tom was wild on that night.  He was like an innocent young buck of the forest that has eaten of some maddening weed.  The thing began, ran its course, and was ended in one night, and you may be sure that no one in Winesburg was any the worse for Tom’s outbreak.

In the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk.  The trees along the residence streets of the town were all newly clothed in soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were puttering about in vegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush, a waiting kind of silence very stirring to the blood.

Tom left his room on Duane Street just as the young night began to make itself felt.  First he walked through the streets, going softly and quietly along, thinking thoughts that he tried to put into words.  He said that Helen White was a flame dancing in the air and that he was a little tree without leaves standing out sharply against the sky.  Then he said that she was a wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out of the darkness of a stormy sea and that he was a boat left on the shore of the sea by a fisherman.

That idea pleased the boy and he sauntered along playing with it.  He went into Main Street and sat on the curbing before Wacker’s tobacco store.  For an hour he lingered about listening to the talk of men, but it did not interest him much and he slipped away.  Then he decided to get drunk and went into Willy’s saloon and bought a bottle of whiskey.  Putting the bottle into his pocket, he walked out of town, wanting to be alone to think more thoughts and to drink the whiskey.

Tom got drunk sitting on a bank of new grass beside the road about a mile north of town.  Before him was a white road and at his back an apple orchard in full bloom.  He took a drink out of the bottle and then lay down on the grass.  He thought of mornings in Winesburg and of how the stones in the graveled driveway by Banker White’s house were wet with dew and glistened in the morning light.  He thought of the nights in the barn when it rained and he lay awake hearing the drumming of the raindrops and smelling the warm smell of horses and of hay.  Then he thought of a storm that had gone roaring through Winesburg several days before and, his mind going back, he relived the night he had spent on the train with his grandmother when the two were coming from Cincinnati.  Sharply he remembered how strange it had seemed to sit quietly in the coach and to feel the power of the engine hurling the train along through the night.

Tom got drunk in a very short time.  He kept taking drinks from the bottle as the thoughts visited him and when his head began to reel got up and walked along the road going away from Winesburg.  There was a bridge on the road that ran out of Winesburg north to Lake Erie and the drunken boy made his way along the road to the bridge.  There he sat down.  He tried to drink again, but when he had taken the cork out of the bottle he became ill and put it quickly back.  His head was rocking back and forth and so he sat on the stone approach to the bridge and sighed.  His head seemed to be flying about like a pinwheel and then projecting itself off into space and his arms and legs flopped helplessly about.