The Bridegroom Got Drunk

THE TOM-WALKER (372 pp.)--Man Sandoz--Dial ($3).

People called Milt a tom-walker/- because he lost a leg marching through Georgia with Sherman, and thereafter wore a peg strapped to the stump. One day in 1866, when he was barely 17, Milt swung himself off the steam cars at Cincinnati and hobbled off to see his family again and his best girl. Lucinda took one look at his peg leg and wept. But they were married anyhow, and after the ceremony the bridegroom got drunk, punched his best man in the teeth, and sang bawdy songs for the guests. "Oh, the vulgar, degrading army," moaned his mother next morning. Milt, his head aching almost as badly as his stump, figured he had better light out for the West.

This novel by Nebraska's Mari Sandoz trails Milt the Tom-Walker and his descendants for 80-odd years into the future. It is practically three books in one: like Miss Sandoz' Old Jules, a character study; like her Slogum House, a family chronicle; like her Capital City, a crankily "liberal" political tract. Small shakes as a novel, it is long on period history, melodrama, local color and wondrously rowdy soldier, sod-hut and ranch-house talk.

/-Circus slang for a man on stilts.

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