I made a note recently about Sherwood Anderson, and I can’t move on without mentioning his remarkable story about a country doctor.
Dr. Reefy wore a linen duster around the office. He put scraps of paper into the huge pockets. The paper gradually rolled into balls — little paper pills — and the doctor would sometimes throw them at his only friend, a nurseryman named John Spaniard.
Reefy had been a lonely sort when a pretty girl who’d inherited a farm suddenly married him. She died within a year, leaving the doctor well off.
This is the story of how the young woman, never named, suddenly had suitors and how she went to the doctor when she got pregnant.
On those scraps of paper that Dr. Reefy put into his pockets were “thoughts, end of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.”
“One by one, the mind of Dr. Reefy had made the thoughts.”
Perhaps the young woman should have run for the hills. Instead, she wanted to stay.
An illness ended the pregnancy, and a second illness ended her life.
One of the themes in this story involves the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Anderson’s imaginary town of Winesburg, Ohio. These apples aren’t much to look at, but they are sweet.
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