Doc Brackett
Doc Brackett didn’t have black whiskers.
Nonetheless, he was a fine man.
He doctored in Our Town for many years. He doctored more people than any other doctor in Our Town but made less money.
That was because Doc Brackett was always doctoring poor people, who had no money to pay.
He would get up in the middle of the coldest night and ride twenty miles to doctor a sick woman, or child, or to patch up some fellow who got hurt.
Everybody in Our Town knew Doc Brackett’s office over Rice’s clothing store. It was up a narrow flight of stairs. His office was always filled with people. A sign at the foot of the stairs said: DR. BRACKETT, OFFICE UPSTAIRS.
Doc Brackett was a bachelor. He was once supposed to marry Miss Elvira Cromwell, the daughter of old Junius Cromwell, the banker, but on the day the wedding was supposed to take place Doc Brackett got a call to go out into the country and doctor a Mexican child.
Miss Elvira got sore at him and called off the wedding. She said that a man who would think more of a Mexican child than of his wedding was no good. Many women in Our Town agreed with Miss Elvira Cromwell, but the parents of the Mexican child were very grateful to Doc Brackett when the child recovered.
For forty years, the lame, and the halt, and the blind of Our Town had climbed up and down the stairs to Doc Brackett’s office.
He never turned away anybody.
Some said Doc Brackett was a loose character, because he liked to drink whisky and play poker in the back rooms of saloons.
But he lived to be seventy years old, and then one day he keeled over on the sofa in his office and died. By this time his black hair had turned white.
Doc Brackett had one of the biggest funerals ever seen in Our Town. Everybody went to pay their last respects when he was laid out in Gruber’s undertaking parlors. He was buried in Riverview Cemetery.
There was talk of raising money to put a nice tombstone on Doc Brackett’s grave as a memorial. The talk got as far as arguing about what should be carved on the stone about him. Some thought poetry would be very nice.
Doc Brackett hated poetry.
The matter dragged along and nothing whatever was done.
Then one day George Gruber, the undertaker, said that Doc Brackett’s memorial was already over his grave, with an epitaph and all. George Gruber said the Mexican parents of the child Doc Brackett saved years ago had worried about him having no tombstone. They had no money themselves, so they took the sign from the foot of the stairs at Doc Brackett’s office and stuck it over his grave. It read: DR. BRACKETT, OFFICE UPSTAIRS.