Description:
A black and white photograph shows a cluttered desk on which rests an oil lamp, medicine bottle, loaf of bread, napkin, and letter holder. The desk sits in front of a worn drapery with many holes.
Label Text:
"If not complicated by worms, Toomey had a sure cure for pimples; if complicated he had a sure cure for worms. One long day was allowed in the worms seemed to be gaining, and a pot garlanded with flowers was provided. The patient was free to sit staring at the wooden Indian, or browse in his pile of western magazines. To deceive the worms he was first starved for a day, then fed a tumbler of juice squeezed from cigar butts. That was how Toomey described it, and that was how it tasted. Nothing else in this world would get a worm so long from a boy so short. But it left unexplained why a man as smart as Toomey would burn in the summer, freeze in the winter, then wait to be found dead on a horsehair sofa full of more life than he was. He had no cure for whatever it was that ailed him. Yet he lived out his sentence and somehow lived longer than doomed men do elsewhere, facing the day like a blindfolded man propped up to be shot."
God's Country and My People, 1968
Tags:
medicine; realism; rural; still lifes; interiors; food; bread; windows; curtains; lamps; lighting; domestic space Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2013.01.2 |
