PAPER PILLS
HE WAS AN old man with a white beard and huge
nose and hands. Long before the time during which
we will know him, he was a doctor and drove a
jaded white horse from house to house through the
streets of Winesburg. Later he married a girl who
had money. She had been left a large fertile farm
when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and
dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she
died.
The knuckles of the doctor's hands were extraordinarily large. When the hands were closed they
looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as
large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He
smoked a cob pipe and after his wife's death sat all
day in his empty office close by a window that was
covered with cobwebs. He never opened the window. Once on a hot day in August he tried but
found it stuck fast and after that he forgot all about
it.
Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the seeds of something very
fine. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner Block
above the Paris Dry Goods Company's store, he
worked ceaselessly, building up something that he
himself destroyed. Little pyramids of truth he erected
and after erecting knocked them down again that he
might have the truths to erect other pyramids.
Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one
suit of clothes for ten years. It was frayed at the
sleeves and little holes had appeared at the knees
and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster
with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed
scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of
paper became little hard round balls, and when the
pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the
floor. For ten years he had but one friend, another
old man named John Spaniard who owned a tree
nursery. Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor
Reefy took from his pockets a handful of the paper
balls and threw them at the nursery man. "That is
to confound you, you blathering old sentimentalist,"
he cried, shaking with laughter.
The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the
tall dark girl who became his wife and left her
money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious,
like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the
orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by
the pickers. They have been put in barrels and
shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in
apartments that are filled with books, magazines,
furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few
gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They
look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One
nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little
round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree
over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted
apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the
few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship
on a summer afternoon. He was forty-five then and
already he had begun the practice of filling his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls
and were thrown away. The habit had been formed
as he sat in his buggy behind the jaded white horse
and went slowly along country roads. On the papers
were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings
of thoughts.
One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made
the thoughts. Out of many of them he formed a
truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth
clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded
away and the little thoughts began again.
The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because
she was in the family way and had become frightened. She was in that condition because of a series
of circumstances also curious.
The death of her father and mother and the rich
acres of land that had come down to her had set a
train of suitors on her heels. For two years she saw
suitors almost every evening. Except two they were
all alike. They talked to her of passion and there
was a strained eager quality in their voices and in
their eyes when they looked at her. The two who
were different were much unlike each other. One of
them, a slender young man with white hands, the
son of a jeweler in Winesburg, talked continually of
virginity. When he was with her he was never off
the subject. The other, a black-haired boy with large
ears, said nothing at all but always managed to get
her into the darkness, where he began to kiss her.
For a time the tall dark girl thought she would
marry the jeweler's son. For hours she sat in silence
listening as he talked to her and then she began to
be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity
she began to think there was a lust greater than in
all the others. At times it seemed to her that as he
talked he was holding her body in his hands. She
imagined him turning it slowly about in the white
hands and staring at it. At night she dreamed that
he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were
dripping. She had the dream three times, then she
became in the family way to the one who said nothing at all but who in the moment of his passion
actually did bite her shoulder so that for days the
marks of his teeth showed.
After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy
it seemed to her that she never wanted to leave him
again. She went into his office one morning and
without her saying anything he seemed to know
what had happened to her.
In the office of the doctor there was a woman, the
wife of the man who kept the bookstore in Winesburg. Like all old-fashioned country practitioners,
Doctor Reefy pulled teeth, and the woman who
waited held a handkerchief to her teeth and groaned.
Her husband was with her and when the tooth was
taken out they both screamed and blood ran down
on the woman's white dress. The tall dark girl did
not pay any attention. When the woman and the
man had gone the doctor smiled. "I will take you
driving into the country with me," he said.
For several weeks the tall dark girl and the doctor
were together almost every day. The condition that
had brought her to him passed in an illness, but she
was like one who has discovered the sweetness of
the twisted apples, she could not get her mind fixed
again upon the round perfect fruit that is eaten in
the city apartments. In the fall after the beginning
of her acquaintanceship with him she married Doctor Reefy and in the following spring she died. During the winter he read to her all of the odds and
ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of
paper. After he had read them he laughed and
stuffed them away in his pockets to become round
hard balls.
Hands