Clarkton by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

nursed nine children. She had started at sixteen, and now the children were grown, married, dead, and strayed, and her attachment to the Abbotts was both permanent and indefinite.
    Danny Ryan grinned as the doctor and his wife came into the waiting room. He was a very small man, five feet four inches high, and he appeared to derive an endless amusement in measuring himself against Abbott, the very fact of their juxtaposition delighting him. His age was somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five, he being that kind of a dry man whose shrinkage is good and leathery. He had blue eyes in a dark face, and he was and had been these past six years a dinker in the big plant; half of two fingers on his right hand had gone for that. He introduced the man with him, younger than he, worried looking, a heavy chin and a mass of black hair. “This is Mike Sawyer,” he told the Abbotts. “Mike is the new full-time, working out of Springfield. I guess you never met Mike before, but he knows about you.”
    Both Elliott and his wife shook hands with Sawyer, who said, “I met you once in Spain, but that was so long ago I guess you forgot. I was in the South, but I got scurvy real bad and they sent me up and you examined me. I remember you said something about how does it feel to have teeth like beads strung too loose, but I guess you forgot.”
    Elliott said, no, he didn’t remember, but he was glad to meet Sawyer again, and he hoped he would like Massachusetts.
    â€œI’ll like it by and by, but it’s always the same when you get into a new place. Everything happens all at once, just to welcome you.”
    â€œIt never fails in a new place,” Danny Ryan said.
    â€œBut it’ll work out. And it’s pretty country around here. I never worked in country as nice as this.”
    Ruth asked him where he had been before, and he said in the army. He had been discharged five weeks before, but if they needed people, what were you going to do?
    â€œTell them to walk away,” Danny Ryan said. “Off—don’t bother me. If I been in the army four years, I get on my back and say, walk off, don’t disturb. I want to rest.”
    Sawyer grinned, and Ruth went to the kitchen to start the coffee. Abbott asked them if they’d have cigars, and Sawyer shook his head, but Ryan accepted with great formality, a ripe, rich, Irish sort of formality that had in it just a touch of disdain, the very faintest quality of mockery, and then bit off the end, lit it, and took his first puff with solid appreciation. The doctor had a cigar he had wanted all evening, but had resisted because he knew Lois could not bear the smell, and would not have mentioned it, but would have simply borne it with such quiet suffering as would eventually have killed the evening for everyone present. Now they all sat in the big, deep, overstuffed and ugly chairs of the waiting room, tacitly avoiding the subject until Ruth returned, and being so full of it that they could not very well discuss anything else. After a minute or two, Ryan went over to the radio and turned it on; he was quick and birdlike, filled with a nervous energy that not only became apparent to others; but pricked them unpleasantly. The loudspeaker whimpered:
    â€œPut me in your arms and rock me, I’m cradled in your heartstrings, baby; please don’t drop me down and shock me …”
    â€œJust a few minutes for the coffee,” Ruth said, coming back into the room and in a sense restoring it, knitting each of the three men into place with a glance, but looking at Sawyer longer than at the others. Sawyer was puzzled by her; her body was young, but her freckled face was dry and not pretty at first, and she was too exactly the type who would be at home in a place like Clarkton and correctly the wife of a big, amiable, slow-moving back-country medic like Abbott. But for Ryan, she was something else as Sawyer realized from the way Ryan snapped off