And then, my aunt was really touched. Afterward I talked to the nurse and made her a rather handsome present for her part in the affair. When the letter had been read my aunt felt overwhelmingly drawn to me. She turned her face to the wall and her shoulders shook. Do not think that I am not also touched as I write this. “Poor lad,” my aunt said to the nurse, “I will make things easier for him. Send for the lawyer.”
“UNUSED”
“UNUSED”
A TALE OF LIFE IN OHIO
“UNUSED,” that was one of the words the Doctor used that day in speaking of her. He, the doctor, was an extraordinarily large and immaculately clean man, by whom I was at that time employed. I swept out his office, mowed the lawn before his residence, took care of the two horses in his stable and did odd jobs about the yard and kitchen—such as bringing in firewood, putting water in a tub in the sun behind a grape arbor for the doctor’s bath and even sometimes, during his bath, scrubbing for him those parts of his broad back he himself could not reach.
The doctor had a passion in life with which he early infected me. He loved fishing and as he knew all of the good places in the river, several miles west of town, and in Sandusky Bay, some nineteen or twenty miles to the north, we often went off for long delightful days together.
It was late in the afternoon of such a fishing day in the late June, when the doctor and I were together in a boat on the bay, that a farmer came running to the shore, waving his arms and calling to the doctor. Little May Edgley’s body had been found floating near a river’s mouth half a mile away, and, as she had been dead for several days, as the doctor had just had a good bite, and as there was nothing he could do anyway, it was all nonsense, his being called. I remembered how he growled and grumbled. He did not then know what had happened but the fish were just beginning to bite splendidly, I had just landed a fine bass and the good evening’s fishing was all ahead of us. Well, you know how it is—a doctor is always at everyone’s beck and call.
“Dang it all! That’s the way it always goes! Here we are—as good a fishing evening as we’ll find this summer—wind just right and the sky clouding over—and will you look at my dang luck? A doctor in the neighborhood and that farmer knows it and so, just to accommodate me, he goes and stubs his toe, like as not, or his boy falls out of a barn loft, or his old woman gets the toothache. Like as not it’s one of his women folks. I know ’em! His wife’s got an unmarried sister living with her. Dang sentimental old maid! She’s got a nervous complaint—gets all worked up and thinks she’s going to die. Die nothing! I know that kind. Lots of ’em like to have a doctor fooling around. Let a doctor come near, so they can get him alone in a room, and they’ll spend hours talking about themselves—if he’ll let ’em.”