Boone

By John Isaac Jones

“Boone” is the second story in The Billy Johnson Collection. When Billy was eight years old, he spent the summer of 1949 with an aging, backwoods southern farmer who had a psychotic love for his invalid wife. This is the story of a man who, although a master at breeding farm animals, could never have children of his own. It would be a summer Billy would always remember.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Isaac Jones
• Release date: Jul 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476246024

John Isaac Jones

John Isaac Jones is a retired journalist currently living at Merritt Island, Florida. For more than thirty years, "John I.," as he prefers to be called, was a reporter for media outlets throughout the world. These included local newspapers in his native Alabama, The National Enquirer, News of the World in London, the Sydney Morning Herald, and NBC television. He is the author of five novels, a short story collection and two novellas.

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BOONE

By

John Isaac Jones

SMASHWORDS EDITION

*****

PUBLISHED BY:

John Isaac Jones on Smashwords

BOONE

Copyright © 2012 by John Isaac Jones

Thank you for buying this ebook.

All rights reserved.

Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

This ebook is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are reproductions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

I hope you enjoy this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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BOONE

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For as long as I can remember, my mother was a practicing registered nurse. Throughout my childhood, when I was near my mother, I was constantly surrounded by hypodermic syringes, penicillin tablets, skin ointments, potions for the eyes, mercurochrome swabs, adhesive tape, antiseptics, bandages, cotton balls and a whole host of other nursing-related articles too numerous to mention.

Although she was licensed to work in a hospital, a doctor’s office or a nursing home, my mother specialized in at-home, private care for the terminally ill. Caring for people who were awaiting their final, inevitable end held a special fascination for my mother. She felt it was somehow her personal destiny to be with the dying in their final days. She was very proud of those cases in which she had helped care for, counsel and prepare patients to meet their deaths as calmly and as resignedly as possible.

In the late spring of 1949, when I was eight years old, my mother undertook the care of an invalid woman named Miss Mary McDaniel, a gray-haired, bedridden woman in her late sixties who had become paralyzed after a stroke several years earlier. Initially, her husband, Boone, had hired a neighbor woman named Crick to come live in the home and care for his wife. For several years, Crick ran the household, cooked and cleaned and took care of Miss Mary’s medical needs as best she could. In the winter of 1948, however, Miss Mary had a second stroke and the doctor told her husband that she needed full-time, professional nursing care.

With that, Boone asked Miss Mary’s physician, a Dr. James Fordham, if he knew of a good private-duty nurse he would recommend. Dr. Fordham said, as a matter of fact, he did and explained that my mother had just finished a case with an elderly man near Attalla who had died after a terrible bout with pancreatic cancer. Dr. Fordham explained how my mother had provided expert