Liars by Glenn Beck

aggressive.
    One drunken evening, Old Soak ambled up to the Wheelers’ front porch to show off his impressions, but his kind face had transformed into a sneering picture of horror. Joseph Wheeler took the man’s arm and walked him home. As Wayne watched the silhouette of his father and this pitiable, broken man amble off down the road, the young man promised himself he would never touch alcohol.
    But none of those run-ins with drunkards compared to what happened one fateful July day.
    Wayne had piled up bales of hay and was loading them into a wagon. The choreography of lifting a hundred-pound hay bale into the air and then onto a cart was something to behold. Wayne had worked out a fluid rhythm: his pitchfork plunged into the hay bale, up it went, and then it leaped forward in a graceful arc onto the back of the wagon. Once he got into a groove, Wayne could fork bales forever.
    That was when he heard the voice. “Hey, boy!”
    The call came from the other side of the wagon. He’d been so busy he hadn’t noticed anyone approaching. Around the side staggered Hank, a new farmhand Wayne’s father had hired for the season. Just a few years older than Wayne himself, Hank already had a deep, gravelly voice, a mustache, scraggly hair, and a deep tan earned from many seasons in the sun. Wayne knew he was one of the hands who drank, but he’d never caused any problems.
    Wayne had never seen Hank drunk like this, though. He was staggering, leaning on his own pitchfork like a staff. Wayne could see the top of a glass flagon poking up from the pocket of Hank’s coveralls. It swished and sloshed with every step the man took.
    â€œHey, boy!” Hank said again, advancing on Wayne. “Ol’ man says we ga-go farster.”
    Wayne couldn’t understand. “What’s that?” he asked.
    â€œGa-go farster!” Hank repeated. “Farster!”
    Was he saying “faster”? Wayne could barely understand his drunken gibberish.
    â€œFarster!” thundered Hank, almost shouting.
    With that, he took his pitchfork and tore into Wayne’s bales of hay, flinging them about in a desperate, frenzied attempt to throw more of them onto the wagon. He was making a bad job of it; strands of hay and larger chunks were flying every which way. Wayne’s hard work was on the verge of being ruined.
    â€œHank, stop!” Wayne implored.
    Hank’s arms were moving like pistons, pumping up and down as he shoved the pitchfork into the hay and brought up again, pointing in the general direction of the wagon but instead scattering the hay into the low Ohio wind.
    â€œStop, Hank, stop!”
    Hank stood straight for a moment, a wild look in his eye.
    Wayne froze. He could hear Hank’s grunting breaths and smell the stink of liquor from his lips.
    Then Hank lunged forward once again, unsteady on his feet, seemingly aiming to grab another chunk of hay with the pitchfork. Instead, the sharp metal prongs plunged deep into Wayne’s leg.
    The pain blinded Wayne for a moment. When he opened his eyes again, he was on the ground, surrounded by hay, the pitchfork still in his leg. Hank had backed away and was swaying where he stood, looking not at Wayne but around aimlessly at nothing in particular. Clearly, he had no conception of what he’d just done. And more important, he would be of no help.
    Wayne looked toward the house and saw some figures running across the field, no doubt attracted by his scream. One of them looked to be a woman, her shawl trailing behind her in the breeze. His mother? His sister? He couldn’t focus his reddened vision long enough to see. Closing his eyes to try to block some, any, measure of the pain, he began to crawl toward the house, his bleeding leg burning as the pitchfork tines shifted with every small movement.
    He looked over his shoulder and saw Hank shuffling around the wagon, hands in his pockets, whistling an infuriating tune. The smell of