“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
A trapeze artist circus performer climbing
the tallest ladder up to the tent roof climbing
up toward the sky in soft silk slippers climbing
a ballet dancer’s grace each arm over arm climbing
each foot over foot steady tempered calm stepping
onto the platform as the trapeze comes swinging
slap my rosined hands fingers grasp a hold waiting
By Sherwood Anderson (1876 – 1941). Revised and abridged by James Gonda.
He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. He was a doctor and drove a white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg. Later he married a girl who had money. When her father died, she inherited a large farm. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark. To many people she was beautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after their wedding, she died.
Doctor Reefy was also tall. He had worn one suit of clothes for ten years. Pieces of thread dangled from its sleeves and little holes had appeared in the knees and elbows. In his office he also wore a linen duster with huge pockets into which he stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps became little hard round balls. When the pockets could hold no more paper balls, he dumped them onto the floor.
The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl is very curious. It is delicious, like the twisted 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 pickers have already taken the best-looking apples. They went to the cities to apartments with books, magazines, furniture, and people. Left on the trees are only a few gnarled apples rejected by the pickers. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them; they are delicious. Their sweetness has gathered into a little round place at the side of the apple. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples. Only a few know the sweetness of these apples.
The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon. He was forty-five and had begun the practice of filling his pockets with scraps of paper. The habit started as he sat in his buggy behind the horse and clomped along country roads. On the papers he wrote thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts . . . .
The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because she was in the family way. She was also frightened. She became “with child” because of a series of curious circumstances.
The death of her father and mother and the acres of land that had come to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years she saw callers almost every evening. Except two they were alike. They talked of passion and there was a strained eager quality in their voices and eyes. The two who were different were much unlike each other. One of them was slender with white hands. He was the son of a jeweler in Winesburg and talked on and on about 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 he always managed to get her into the darkness and 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. 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 that as he talked, he was holding her body in his hands. She imagined him turning it about and staring at it. At night she dreamed he had bitten into her body, his jaws dripping. She had the dream three times. Then she came in the family way by the one who said nothing at all. In the moment of passion, he had bitten her shoulder. His teeth marks showed for days.
After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy she never wanted to leave him again. She went into his office one morning and without her saying anything he knew 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. The woman who waited held a handkerchief to her mouth and groaned. Her husband was with her and when the tooth came out, they both screamed. Blood ran down the woman’s white dress. The tall dark girl did not pay any attention. After the woman and the man had gone the doctor smiled and said, “I will take you driving with me into the country.”
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 went to the city apartments. She married Doctor Reefy in the fall after the beginning of their acquaintanceship. Then she died the following spring. During the winter before her passing he read her the thoughts on the bits of paper. After he read them, he laughed and stuffed them away in his pockets to become round hard balls.
It was a Spring Day. I could smell the rain walking home from sixth grade at Van Antwerp. The sun was shining as it sprinkled. The next day I would learn that Martin Luther King Jr had been shot. My sister would be back home from Hawaii and my brother from Montana. My father had made the calls. I was feeling good.
A week before, she was standing by the kitchen table. It trickled down her leg and a warm yellow puddle widened at her feet. She was nodding her head toward the right, moving her lips, and not making a sound. My father would take his first action after doing a week’s worth of dishes in the bathtub. He called Dr. Z.
“Sugar diabetes can do this,” my father quoted the doctor. She went straight to Ellis, and they had started insulin. But the next day the nurses said a neurologist was needed because there were seizures.
They found a brain tumor the size of an orange. My father told me the neurosurgeon was good and had worked for six hours straight. There was a risk of blindness because of where it had been. But my father was glad because she woke up and could count his fingers. “We’ll get your mother back the way she used to be,” he said. She hadn’t been like that for a long time, so it made me hopeful. I went to school the next day.
I hastened down Palmer from Story Avenue, past Grand Boulevard, The Plaza, and Plum Street to our first floor flat. After skipping up the gray front porch steps, I pulled the aluminum storm door open. Turning the brass knob, I pushed the heavy wooden door and stepped inside.
They were all in the living room. My sister turned to me with a sad grimace, “Mom died.” My father, crying, put me into an uncomfortable and unaccustomed hug. “It’s just you and me now son.”
Then my sister explained how the hospital that morning had asked for them to come down.
“The patient died but the operation was a success,” is what my father heard just before he fainted. “He really said that, the neurosurgeon,” my father croaked.
The back bedroom was mine and I went there. On the wall was my mother’s crucifix with Jesus on it. I had kneeled there earlier all week to beg and bargain. Now I was very mad. That lasted a long time. My sister said I should have cried.
While in college Elaine spent a semester in Costa Rica. She stayed with a host family. “El Agua Dulce,” Sweet Water, depicts Elaine with her Costa Rican “brother” and his cousins cooling off in a local river. Elaine is the figure on the far right.
