A drunken Oscar Hummel is trying to find his way home one night, following a few stars down a dark road. Confused, he wanders into the wrong yard and shouts for his friend Fiddler Jones to help him. Instead, A. D. Blood bursts out in his nightshirt, furious about saloons and the “criminals” they create. He beats the unsteady Oscar with a stick until Oscar collapses and dies. The whole account is told in Oscar’s own flat, disoriented voice, which makes the violence feel even more chilling. There’s a grim irony at the center: Blood claims to be outraged by moral decay, yet he kills a lost, defenseless neighbor in his yard. The mood is dark, lonely, and quietly horrifying—less about drunkenness than about how easily a moment of confusion can turn fatal.
Oscar Hummel — Summary
I staggered on through darkness, There was a hazy sky, a few stars Which I followed as best I could. It was nine o’clock, I was trying to get home. But somehow I was lost, Though really keeping the road. Then I reeled through a gate and into a yard, And called at the top of my voice: “Oh, Fiddler! Oh, Mr. Jones!” (I thought it was his house and he would show me the way home. ) But who should step out but A. D. Blood, In his night shirt, waving a stick of wood, And roaring about the cursed saloons, And the criminals they made? “You drunken Oscar Hummel,” he said, As I stood there weaving to and fro, Taking the blows from the stick in his hand Till I dropped down dead at his feet.