A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

“Afternoon,” a voice said faintly.

I knew he did not look at me but only at that great cloudless spread of shimmering sky.

“Afternoon,” I said.

I started up the dirt road toward the town. One hundred yards away, I glanced back.

The old man, still seated there, stared at the sun, as if posing a question.

I hurried on.

I moved through the dreaming late afternoon town, utterly anonymous and alone, a trout going upstream, not touching the banks of a clear-running river of life that drifted all about me.

My suspicions were confirmed: it was a town where nothing happened, where occurred only the following events:

At four o’clock sharp, the Honneger Hardware door slammed as a dog came out to dust himself in the road. Four-thirty, a straw sucked emptily at the bottom of a soda glass, making a sound like a great cataract in the drugstore silence. Five o’clock, boys and pebbles plunged in the town river. Five-fifteen, ants paraded in the slanting light under some elm trees.

And yet—I turned in a slow circle—somewhere in this town there must be something worth seeing. I knew it was there. I knew I had to keep walking and looking. I knew I would find it.

I walked. I looked.

All through the afternoon there was only one constant and unchanging factor: the old man in the bleached blue pants and shirt was never far away. When I sat in the drugstore he was out front spitting tobacco that rolled itself into tumblebugs in the dust. When I stood by the river he was crouched downstream making a great thing of washing his hands.

Along about seven-thirty in the evening, I was walking for the seventh or eighth time through the quiet streets when I heard footsteps beside me.

I looked over, and the old man was pacing me, looking straight ahead, a piece of dried grass in his stained teeth.

“It’s been a long time,” he said quietly.

We walked along in the twilight.

“A long time,” he said, “waitin’ on that station platform.”

“You?” I said.

“Me.” He nodded in the tree shadows.

“Were you waiting for someone at the station?”

“Yes,” he said. “You.”

“Me?” The surprise must have shown in my voice. “But why …? You never saw me before in your life.”

“Did I say I did? I just said I was waitin’.”

We were on the edge of town now. He had turned and I had turned with him along the darkening riverbank toward the trestle where the night trains ran over going east, going west, but stopping rare few times.

“You want to know anything about me?” I asked, suddenly. “You the sheriff?”

“No, not the sheriff. And no, I don’t want to know nothing about you.” He put his hands in his pockets. The sun was set now. The air was suddenly cool. “I’m just surprised you’re here at last, is all.”

“Surprised?”

“Surprised,” he said, “and … pleased.”

I stopped abruptly and looked straight at him.

“How long have you been sitting on that station platform?”