No Sale, uh, No Loan

Amos was a good friend of me Grandpa Joe. He was a good man at heart too, but like so many of us he had his foibles, his issues. Two were that he was tight and that he liked his drink. Yet he was also honest, doing his very best to be right by folk.

One day he ran into a buddy on the street, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who remarked, "Remember you owe me $20, Amos."

"Since when do I owe you twenty bucks?" Amos demanded.

"I loaned it to you in the bar the other night," Cloyce said.

That bugged Amos. He couldn't remember borrowing the money. But he had been drinking, so maybe his memory was faulty.  And if he owed the money he had to pay it back, as right was right. Yet he couldn't imagine he actually bummed the cash.

Amos was beside himself what to do. Eventually he returned to the watering hole which was supposedly the scene of things. It happened that the guy behind the bar was the same as the night in question. "Did I get $20 off Cloyce when we were here?"

"Well, I can't say as I never saw any money change hands. But I seen Cloyce in here for years and he ain't never had no more than five bucks on him at a time," the barkeep explained.

At that revelation, Amos figured he was off the hook. Cloyce was trying to fleece him, take advantage of his drunken state and sense of honor. They never spoke again.

James and Cloyce

I'm going to try to get this story right. I'll just ask all of you out there to remember that stories and memories can get garbled over time.

Me Great Grandpa James wasn't a drinker. Yet one day he found himself with a jug of whiskey; I just don't recall how. But as he tooled along in his horse drawn wagon headed for Church one Sunday (this would have been in early 1900s Illinois) he noticed the town drunk ambling towards him. I'll call the guy Cloyce just to give him a name.

Anyway, me great grandfather could tell that Cloyce was ailing. So he pulled up and asked what was wrong. He was recovering from a drunk, Cloyce explained, and that maybe a little hair of the dog would help. Yet he didn't know where he might find any that morning, a fine Sunday morning as it were. James simply gave him the whiskey he had and went about his business.

He ran into Cloyce a few days later and asked how the whiskey was. "Just fine, sir, just fine," Cloyce answered. "Any worse and I couldn't have drunk it, and any better and you wouldn't have given it to me." 

As an aside, me Great Grandpa later found out that Cloyce had been going all over town bragging that he had gotten a drink from old Jim Cosgriff, and on a Sunday morning no less. But great Grandpa James didn't mind such tales making the rounds.