What happened to me that winter was that Tom Kincaid sold the drugstore to a chain company, and the first thing a chain company does is renovate. Clara suggested I move my office into the first-floor parlor of the inn. Pointed out it had a separate entrance. After hemming and hawing and looking her straight in the eye to see if I could tell what was going on with her, I agreed. I knew that was the door Clara had come out of in the negligee. But I also knew that moving my office into the Red Lantern, I might help spread a little goodwill where it was needed most. Clara didn’t go into town much, just for what shopping she had to do, and some of that she shunted onto me. The women were cold toward her, crossed the street when they saw her coming, things like that. She never was sociable. Loving people didn’t come natural to her. She’d learned a lot in prison, but not about loving.
The day after I moved my office in, she was watching me put things away where I could find them. She was being lazy, which was unusual for Clara. I put my violin case on the top of the shelves for my law books. I never played it at home. Too lonesome.
“Fiddle us up a tune,” Clara said.
“I’m getting terrible arthritic,” I told her, but I got the fiddle out and tuned it. I don’t get asked so often anymore.
Clara, sitting half off, half on the side of my desk, the sunlight playing round in her hair, looked prettier than I’d seen her since she went to prison. Not a bit like her sister Maudie, who I’d thought she was getting to resemble more every day.
“Anything special you got in mind, Clara? You know my repertoire.”
She grinned at me and gave her nose a crinkle. “How about a lullaby, Old Hank?”
It was going on ten o’clock when I got a call from Clara. She wasn’t feeling so good and wanted me to take over the desk. I asked her if she didn’t want me to get in touch with a doctor for her. I hadn’t mentioned it till then. She hadn’t either. Now she exploded.
“What in hell for? Go to bed, Hank. You’re getting to be a nag, a nanny. You’re more old maid than I am.”
I guess that was the truth. There was a storm coming sure, that dead quiet when even the crickets stop to listen. They’re better forecasters than radio or television, closer to home. I still live in the house I was born in, and going out, I locked the door. I wasn’t sure when I’d get back.
Clara was sitting in the lobby, sweating and bubbling gas. Like I’d thought, all eight room keys were hanging in a row. Nobody was coming off the interstate that night. Webbtown wasn’t even on the interstate, three miles from the nearest exit.
“I’m going upstairs now,” she said, and lifted herself out of the chair, real careful. Didn’t show much, but she was a big woman, and a heck of a lot stronger than I was.
“I could fix that storeroom off the kitchen for you, Clara. I could set up a bed in there. You’d be more comfortable.”
“Think so, Hank?” Real sarcastic.
She went up the stairs one creaky step at a time. From the landing she called down to me, “Better fire up the hot water. Feels like we’re going to need it soon.”
No point in going into details here, but my first trip upstairs she warned me if I tried to call a doctor she’d get up and pull the hall phone clear out of the wall. When she got to moaning and twisting the brass rungs of the bedstead, I couldn’t take any more of it. I started out of the room and said I’d come back soon.
“You better, Old Hank. I did fifteen years on account of you.”
You don’t take serious what people say to you at a time like that, but I sure felt it.
“I didn’t mean to say that ever. It’s this ornery little son of a bitch inside me trying to get out.”
I just nodded and went on, but I’d been standing there long enough to notice that fancy negligee draped over the chair like somebody invisible was sitting in it.
The wind was rattling shutters like they were castanets when I got downstairs. The telephone operator got the county hospital for me, but there wasn’t anything they could do if I didn’t bring her in, baby and all if it got born on the way. The one doctor on duty was already in the delivery room. They’d try to hold him till we got there. I knew I could get a mountain to Mohammed a lot easier.
I called Faith Barnes, the pastor’s wife. Pastor was having an asthma attack. This weather brought it on every time and she wasn’t going to leave him. “Are you sure it’s a baby, Hank?”
I just asked her who she thought I could call.
“I can do that much for you. I’ll try and find someone willing to go up there. People are scared of her. And now this... She’s got to be near fifty years old.”
I’m not much for quoting Scripture, but I said to think of John the Baptist’s mother, how old she was when he was born.
“She at least had a husband,” Faith said and hung up.
The phone was crackling and the lights flickered whenever there was a big gust of wind. I got two hurricane lamps and a couple of farm lanterns from the storeroom. I’ll say this for Clara, they were on the ready, chimneys clean, wicks trimmed, and a big can of kerosene with a funnel. I took one of the lamps upstairs with me in a hurry. When she was quiet it was almost worse than when she was hollering. She looked like something done up for Halloween, her hair in strings, her eyes popping, her face in a kind of green sweat.
“It’s recess time,” she said, “unless he’s got himself tied up in there. Come here, Hank.” She took my hand and put it where she wanted it over her nightgown. “Feel anything?”
I did feel a tiny pulse. It could have been my own, but I said yes. I could feel her heart pumping like an oiler.
She let go my hand and groped for the brass rungs behind her head. “Here he comes again, the little bulldozer.”
I suppose I was thinking, What if it’s a girl? but what I said was, “Who is he, Clara?”
“Jeremiah McCracken.”
The wind kept whistling at the window, and Clara howling every time the pains hit her. She told me to bring up two buckets to haul water from the bathroom and told me where to find more towels. I was to bring the kitchen scissors she used to cut up chickens. The light hanging over the bed would swing and stay off longer every time. I put the kitchen matches by the hurricane lamp, and what flashed through my mind was when my mother was dying and I came home from law school. She went so quiet when I got there. That was over sixty years ago, and it was just as though it happened yesterday.
Clara went quiet and stared at me like she was listening with her eyes. “There’s someone in the house.”
“I’ll go see,” I said.
“You stay here. I got pa’s shotgun under the bed.” And at the top of her lungs she shouted, “Get out! Whoever’s there, get out!”
The lights went down again and then went off. I’d left a lantern burning on the desk below, and now through the bedroom doorway I could see its wavering light move up the stairs. When the electric light came on again there was Big Mary Toomey already in the room.