An Irish Country Doctor Read Free

assistant?”
    Barry had thought so, but after the ejection of Seamus Galvin he wasn’t so sure.
    “Well, I—”
    “Course you do,” said O’Reilly, pulling a briar from his jacket pocket and holding a lighted match over the bowl. “Golden opportunity for a young man.”
    Barry noticed that he kept sliding forward on his seat. Try as he might, he had to brace his feet firmly on the carpet and keep shoving his backside upwards.
    O’Reilly wagged his index finger. “Practising here in Ballybucklebo. Most satisfying thing in the world. You’ll love it. Might even be a partnership in it for you. Course you’ll have to do as I tell you for a while until you get to know the ropes.”
    Barry hitched himself back up his seat and made a quick decision. He might work here if he were offered the job, but he sensed—no, he
knew
—that if he didn’t establish his independence immediately, Doctor O’Reilly would walk all over him.
    “Does that mean I’ll have to hurl patients into the rosebushes?”
    “What?” A hint of pallor returned to the big man’s nose. Was that a sign of temper? Barry wondered.
    “I said, ‘Does that mean—’“
    “I heard you the first time, boy. Now listen, have you any experience with country patients?”
    “Not ex—”
    “Thought not,” said O’Reilly, emitting a puff of tobacco smoke like the blast from the funnels of RMS
Queen Mary
when she blew her boilers. “You’ll have a lot to learn.”
    Barry felt a cramp in his left calf. He shoved himself back up his seat. “I know, but I don’t think a physician should chuck patients—”
    “Rubbish,” said O’Reilly, rising. “You saw me pitch Galvin into the roses. Lesson number one. Never, never, never”—with each “never” he poked at Barry with the stem of his pipe—“
never
let the customers get the upper hand. If you do, they’ll run you ragged.”
    “Don’t you think dumping a man bodily into your garden is a little—?”
    “I used to … until I met Seamus Galvin. If you take the job and get to know that skiver as well as I do …” O’Reilly shook his head.
    Barry stood and massaged the back of his leg. He was going to carry on the debate about Galvin, but O’Reilly began to laugh in great throaty rumbles.
    “Leg stiff?”
    “Yes. Something’s wrong with this chair.”
    O’Reilly’s chuckles grew deeper. “No, there’s not. I fixed it.”
    “Fixed it?”
    “Oh, aye. Some of the weary, walking wounded in Ballybucklebo seem to think when they get in here to see me it’s my job to listen to their lamentations ‘til the cows come home. A country general practitioner, a single-handed country GP, doesn’t have that sort of time.” He pushed his spectacles further up his nose. “That’s why I advertised for an assistant. There’s too much bloody work in this place.” O’Reilly had stopped laughing. His brown-eyed gaze was fixed on Barry’s eyes as he said softly, “Take the job, boy. I need the help.”
    Barry hesitated. Did he really want to work for this big, coarse man who sat there with a briar stuck in his wide mouth? Barry saw O’Reilly’s florid cheeks, the cauliflower ears that must have been acquired in the boxing ring, and a shock of black hair like a badly stooked hayrick, and he decided to play for time. “What have you done to this chair?”
    O’Reilly’s face broke into a grin that Barry thought could only be described as demonic. “I fixed it. I sawed an inch off the front legs.”
    “You what?”
    “I sawed an inch off the front legs. Not very comfortable, is it?”
    “No,” said Barry, pushing himself back up the seat.
    “Don’t want to stay long, do you?”
    Barry thought, I’m not sure I want to stay here at all.
    “Neither do the customers. They come in and go out like a fiddler’s elbow.”
    How could a responsible physician ever take a proper history if his practice ran like a human conveyor belt? Barry asked himself. He rose. “I’m not sure I do want to