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.
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