DEATH

The stairway leading up to Doctor Reefy’s office, in the Heffner Block above the Paris Dry Goods store, was but dimly lighted.  At the head of the stairway hung a lamp with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a bracket to the wall.  The lamp had a tin reflector, brown with rust and covered with dust.  The people who went up the stairway followed with their feet the feet of many who had gone before.  The soft boards of the stairs had yielded under the pressure of feet and deep hollows marked the way.

At the top of the stairway a turn to the right brought you to the doctor’s door.  To the left was a dark hallway filled with rubbish.  Old chairs, carpenter’s horses, step ladders and empty boxes lay in the darkness waiting for shins to be barked.  The pile of rubbish belonged to the Paris Dry Goods Company.  When a counter or a row of shelves in the store became useless, clerks carried it up the stairway and threw it on the pile.

Doctor Reefy’s office was as large as a barn.  A stove with a round paunch sat in the middle of the room.  Around its base was piled sawdust, held in place by heavy planks nailed to the floor.  By the door stood a huge table that had once been a part of the furniture of Herrick’s Clothing Store and that had been used for displaying custom-made clothes.  It was covered with books, bottles, and surgical instruments.  Near the edge of the table lay three or four apples left by John Spaniard, a tree nurseryman who was Doctor Reefy’s friend, and who had slipped the apples out of his pocket as he came in at the door.

At middle age Doctor Reefy was tall and awkward.  The grey beard he later wore had not yet appeared, but on the upper lip grew a brown mustache.  He was not a graceful man, as when he grew older, and was much occupied with the problem of disposing of his hands and feet.

On summer afternoons, when she had been married many years and when her son George was a boy of twelve or fourteen, Elizabeth Willard sometimes went up the worn steps to Doctor Reefy’s office.  Already the woman’s naturally tall figure had begun to droop and to drag itself listlessly about.  Ostensibly she went to see the doctor because of her health, but on the half dozen occasions when she had been to see him the outcome of the visits did not primarily concern her health.  She and the doctor talked of that but they talked most of her life, of their two lives and of the ideas that had come to them as they lived their lives in Winesburg.

In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other and they were a good deal alike.  Their bodies were different, as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker.  Later, and when he grew older and