Embracing Darkness by Christopher D. Roe Read Free Book Online

Along with his cigarette-, pipe-, and cigar-smoking, Dr. Poole also retreated there for his infrequent drinking.
    Mary Margaret Brennan-Poole was a pious woman, a good Catholic who believed drink to be the devil incarnate. Even though she knew she wasn’t strong enough to sway Robert Poole into complete sobriety, she did manage to quarantine his frankly light drinking. She once told him, “If I can’t smell it, hear it, or see it, I can convince myself it’s not around.”
    One day after his wife’s ultimatum Robert decided to get some wood from a neighbor down the road and build himself a shed a good distance behind the house. This way he would have a place to do what he needed, things he was unable to do with his wife underfoot. And so it was agreed upon. The virtuous Mrs. Poole kept her house clean, both spiritually and physically, while Dr. Poole retired daily to his shed out back.
    Dr. and Mrs. Poole were a mismatched pair. She was a fairly attractive, petite woman with red hair, freckles, and a pleasant smile. Her strict Irish Catholic upbringing, however, gave her a hardness and a mistrust of people who were not like her. And this was how Robert Poole saw her during their first meeting.
    Robert, on the other hand, was a New England WASP whose family could well have come over on the Mayflower . He was in almost every respect the antithesis of lovely Mary Margaret Brennan. A tall, skinny man, he was already beginning to show signs of balding and still had acne at thirty-two. Initially raised a Congregationalist, Robert Poole had abandoned religion at a young age. By the time he graduated from school at eighteen, he’d forgotten all about God and turned his faith toward medicine.
    It wasn’t until Robert’s last year in residency that he met then nineteen-year-old Mary Margaret Brennan. Her father had brought her to the hospital in Exeter to be examined after she’d splashed boiling water on her arm while emptying a pot full of potatoes.
    “I’ll be askin’ ye ta be lookin’ after me daughter like you would yer own sister, Mr. Doctor-Whatever-Yer-Name-Be,” Seamus Brennan had said to Robert. “An’ don’t be givin’ me none o’ yer shenanigans!” he added angrily. “I’m wise ta all yer pokin’ n proddin’, lookin’ fer sometin’ tha’ taint there! Tryin’ te get more money outta poor folks what don’t know the insides o’ the human body any better ‘n they know what the inside o’ Buckingham Palace looks like!”
    Amused by the accent of this old fool, Dr. Robert Poole was beguiled by the beauty of Brennan’s daughter and so simply smiled at the wary father. “No need to worry, Mr. Brennan.” Robert stated, winking at Mary Margaret. “I’m sure I haven’t been practicing medicine long enough to cheat you. I’d obviously need twenty years of experience to put anything over on someone as alert as you.”
    “You tell me what you gotta do to get me daughter right as rain again,” Seamus Brennan continued, as though Robert had said nothing to him. “She’s got chores ’round the house. Her ma’s been taken from us early with the consumption. Always cold she was. Even in dead o’ summer, an’ always coughin’ up blood! It got so’s I had to sleep in the barn. I couldn’t take the coughin’ no more. The trials and tribulations, I tell ya! After she passed on, we came here to America, me daughter an’ me. But what I be doin’ tellin’ ya me life story for when you got work ahead o’ ye, boy? So do what you need to, sonny, an’ remember. I’m on to you and yer shenanigans!”
    Seamus Brennan, not taking his eyes off Robert Poole for a moment, sat in the chair opposite Mary Margaret’s bed. Robert held her burned arm gently. He could feel the old man’s eyes trained on him, so he turned his back fully on Seamus and winked at Mary Margaret.
    “Hush now, Da,” she said softly to her father, and then turned her head back to look at Dr. Poole. “Tell me, Doctor. Just how bad