Nights Below Station Street Read Online Free Page A

doctor bothered those he most loved, and argued with those he most cared about, but was obsessively polite with those he didn’t like. With Clare and Adele, for instance, he always argued. No matter what Adele said, he would contradict. One night last fall she and her mother came down to the community centre to play bingo. Adele looked as tiny as ever with a big rainbow-coloured hat on her head. There was a fierce wind against the top of the trees, the pastures were trampled and the wagon roads already covered in snow. Below, the river widened into the bay; they could see the outside of barns, and in the houses they could see lights.
    Since it was November, he began to talk about Armistice Day. Adele stood near them, listening.
    “The world’s going to blow up and there’ll be another world war by next year,” she said, sniffing.
    “I hope so,” the doctor said, looking at Adele, with snow suddenly blowing down from the trees, while Rita stood alongside them.
    “Well, I support peace – and at least everyone else in the world is in for peace, except for a dozen or so who are into war,” Adele said, holding onto her rainbow-coloured hat, and speaking up as if to be heard over the wind, and the outside door of the community centre banging.
    The building was an old schoolhouse that they’d put on skids and had hauled down here a few summers before. Then Joe and a few of the men redid the inside and put a foundation under it. They had built an outdoor arena so the children wouldn’t have to skate on the river, and they had horse-haulings behind it, where a team of horses was made to pull heavier and heavier loads. For some reason the doctor avoided horse-haulings until the last moment and then came over to stand by the fence and drink rum. Everyone considered the doctor a drunk because he drank with them – which they thought a doctor would not do unless he was a drunk.
    “I’m not in for peace at all,” the doctor said. “Peace won’t do anything to help the world, as a matter of fact it will not do a thing – and we shouldn’t be putting a lot of stock in it.”
    Then, with his face red and his head nodding to everyone who went past him, he got angry. Rita smiled and the doctor became troubled. First, because this was the first bingo Adele had come to in the evening and she was all dressed up, and her knees were shaking from the cold night wind while the bulb over the door cast light on the frozen grass. Second, because she had won a prize and held it in her tiny hands. Third, because Rita had told hernot to be rude, when the doctor felt he was as obstinate as she was.

    In the mornings people would come to his house to be treated. And Clare would take their Medicare numbers and make appointments. They would sit along two benches in his office, and he would come in through the other door, peer at them, and wave his hand to someone to follow him in.
    “Don’t be shy with me,” he would be heard telling an Indian woman from down river. “I mean I’m just feeling for the baby’s head. It’s dropped down but it’s not in position yet – so don’t go driving about bumpy roads so you’ll go into labour – no it’s not for a while yet. …”
    Then he would wash his large red hands, and come out again, his eyes piercing through his thick glasses:
    “Make her another appointment for next Thursday,” he would say.
    Every now and then Gloria Basterache would come in about some complaint. Everyone could tell that she made the cross old man nervous; because whenever he gave her a check-up he would call Clare in with him.
    After supper he would go to the hospital.
    Some nights he would go in and out of the hospital three or four times. No one ever knew what floor he was on, where he was going to. If Dr. Armand Savard was in the hospital, Doctor Hennessey would go in and out glumly. If Dr. Savard or Dr. McCeachern got together – both youthful, both in high spirits – the doctor would become more and more