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town.
    Most of his patients were local businessmen and professionals. Yet, for all that, my father still lived in what seemed to me a state of perpetual crisis. Night and day were pretty much indistinguishable in our house. Babies had to be born when they were ready, and people hurt or frightened came to him for help regardless of the hour.
    There weren’t many nurses in those days, and so after my mother died young, while attempting to have a second child, it was up to me to assist my father, to boil the water and arrange the instruments, to light the lanterns and put out the heavy cotton gauze and bandages, and at times to press down hard on someone’s arm or leg or chest to keep him from injurying himself while he thrashed about in pain.
    In those days medicine was a muscular profession—even for a nine-year-old boy.
    From time to time people from the rural areas would wander in, bringing their various sufferings to our door. I remember them well: large women in flour-sack dresses and men in soiled gray shirts. Their children seemed to be hardly dressed at all. They were brought only when their parents had to bring them, when they had been sick so long or so terribly that their parents had finally become frightened for them.
    Often too late.
    Often they died.
    Billie Withers died. He was a small, thin boy of four or five. His hands had a certain female delicacy to them, very soft and pale. Sometimes now when I reach over to take my wife’s hands, I remember his.
    The Withers were mountain people. And that is not to say they were stubborn or independent. It is not just to say they held to a code of silence or endurance.
    They were mountain people in the sense that mountain life was the only life they knew. The ridges and granite cliffs were their cosmos. They could not imagine a world beyond them.
    That in Istanbul muezzins called the people to prayer from lofty minarets or in Paris women danced barebreasted upon ornate revolving stages or in India people worshipped a god with an elephant’s head—it was not that these things were unknown to the Withers and their neighbors; they simply did not exist for them.
    What existed was the mountains, and they lived within their limited reaches like flowers captured in a vase. The farthest ridge was for them a beach, and all which lay beyond it an unknown, unknowable sea.
    John Withers brought his son Billie to our house on a cold December night. When I opened the door, he snatched his hat from his head and held it reverently in his hand. “Is Doctor Franklin here?” he asked.
    He was wearing a pair of denim overalls over a faded yellowish shirt with a frayed collar. His face was drawn, worried. He looked as though he had lost a good deal of sleep.
    â€œYes, sir,” I said.
    Mr. Withers nodded shyly at the small boy cradled in his arms. “Mah boy’s in bad shape, I thank,” he said.
    I stepped back and asked him to come in.
    He hesitated, started to move, then drew back as if his boots had rooted to the porch. “I hate to trouble you so late.”
    I opened the door a bit farther. “It’s all right. I’ll get my father. Come on in.”
    Mr. Withers stepped through the door into the foyer and glanced timidly left and right. “I shore do hate to put you to this trouble.”
    â€œJust stay here,” I said. “My father will be out in a minute.”
    I walked quickly back to the kitchen where my father was having one of his hasty late-night snacks. He had gotten used to never going to bed before midnight during the early days of his practice and had never been able to readjust his hours.
    â€œWho’s at the door?” he asked.
    â€œA man with a little kid.”
    He pushed himself away from the table, still looking longingly at a half-eaten piece of chicken. “All right, go make sure my office is straightened up.”
    I ran to my father’s examining room and began putting things in their