“Hank, get her out of here! You hear me, Mary Toomey, I don’t want you here.”
“I’m not asking for hospitality. I’m doing my Christian duty. Hank, we need more light. I don’t care where you get it. Get it now.” She put what looked like a tool kit on the commode and untied it. It was medical instruments. I knew the midwife in town, but it wasn’t Big Mary.
Clara kept tossing her head and biting back crying out. I did everything Big Mary told me to. She was a born top sergeant. I’d been in the army long enough to know one when I saw one. When I’d done what she told me, she sent me downstairs and told me to stay there till she called me. Then I was to come running.
I sat in the lobby and wished the wind was louder so I wouldn’t have to hear Clara giving birth. I tried to think about Big Mary and how she’d battered her way to the top job in the bank. Nobody thought she’d make it, and she wasn’t going to do it by women’s wiles, so you had to give her credit for hard work and taking correspondence courses. And now this business of the traveling preacher — she gave us a real surprise. You had to wonder which of them had the other in the palm of their hand. I’d have thought Mary Toomey was the last person Faith Barnes would send to Clara — and maybe she was, nobody else willing. And Big Mary practicing Christian charity on Clara? I couldn’t believe that.
I didn’t even notice when the storm died down. I must’ve fallen asleep. I woke up sudden to what I thought was crows, first birds up in the morning. It was dawn, and what I was hearing was Jeremiah. The next I heard was a terrible squabble between the women. When I got upstairs both of them were pulling at the baby, him wrapped in a towel and sputtering like he’d choke. The tiniest, reddest thing I ever seen alive.
“She’s trying to kill my baby! Hank, take him away from her!”
Mary left Clara with the towel and held the creature by the feet, bare as a plucked chicken. She whacked him until he was crying again. Then she put him in a clean towel and handed him to me. I saw for sure he was a male child.
“You better get him baptized soon,” Mary said. “I don’t think he’s going to last long.”
“He’ll make it,” Clara said. “He’s a McCracken.” She was trying to get to the side of the bed.
“Can’t be more than half McCracken, can he?” Big Mary said. She was packing up the instruments, dipping them in the bucket of water first and drying them on whatever she found to do it with. When she’d tied the strap, she stood, hands on her hips, and looked down at Clara. “Why don’t you let me have him, Clara? I’ll raise him in a decent Christian house. I won’t say where I got him. Sent away to the Indian reservation — I could say that. Looks kind of like one. Old Hank won’t tell what happened here tonight.”
“Shut up! Just shut your rotten mouth.” Clara was sitting up by then and getting her feet over the edge of the bed. I knew she was aiming to get hold of the gun.
I put the baby in her arms and pushed her back in bed. He kept her busy for the minute. “You better go now, Mary,” I said. “Folks’ll be out and around cleaning up. You did a good deed, but no point advertising it, if you want my opinion.”
“Mind who you’re talking to, Old Hank. I’m running Webbtown these days, didn’t you notice?”
“You’re doing a fine job,” I said. Pure babble. I got her out the bedroom door and closed it. Clara lay back on her pillow, with that little red body making sucking noises. His mother knew what to do about it. When I went round the room, trying to tidy up where I could, I knew I should be fixing coffee and oatmeal. But being me, I had to neaten things up a bit first. That’s how I noticed Big Mary’d used the negligee to wipe up the instruments on. I just took it down the stairs with me and put it in the furnace.
Jeremiah got more human-looking every day. He sure knew where his next meal was coming from. Clara was up and doing in a day or two. She spent a lot of time filling in and scratching out the Sears catalogue order forms. You could almost hear the silence come up from the town. People drove by without looking our way. I could be standing out on the veranda and nobody seemed to notice. Even at Tuttle’s they didn’t ask if there was a baby at the Red Lantern. You’d expect that, but it was another thing they didn’t want to know. A couple of big boxes of baby things were delivered by the Pendergast twins, who said Miss Toomey sent them. Clara hid in the storeroom with the baby until the kids were gone. When I told her where they’d come from, she said to burn them. “Pour kerosene over them and put a match to it.”
I told her not to be a darn fool. He was going to puke and pee in them anyway. I did some threatening and we had words you didn’t hear from me very often, but she gave in. Didn’t have anything herself to put him in but swaddles. She called the county nurse a couple of times, and when Jeremiah was two weeks old, I drove them both to the clinic in Ragapoo City. Clara wanted to drive — she always did — and me to hold the baby, but I wasn’t ready to be seen in public doing that. They gave her such good marks at the clinic she thought she wouldn’t need to go there anymore. I figured that was why they gave her such good marks.
Fall came on as beautiful as I’d ever seen it. The rain from that summer storm had something to do with it. Or just having a child around made a difference in how things looked. Some of the same harvesters came through as last year and didn’t mind too much going down to Tuttle’s for their main meal. Just so they could come up and finish off with the beer we still called Maudie’s Own. I kept looking at one and another of them and at Clara, just wondering. Nobody but Clara would count on a one-night stand to make a baby. I knew now, if I ever doubted it, she wanted him bad.
If I’d been paying less attention to Jeremiah those days, I’d have known better what was going on in the town. I heard that Reverend Teague had taken his trailer on a camp tour that summer, and then parked it by River Junction where he preached from a platform that was part of the old county fairgrounds. Prouty and Mrs. Prouty and some others went to hear him, watched a couple of baptisms. They thought he was pretty good. He knew the Bible a lot better than they did. But most of them thought they’d stick with Pastor Barnes. Big Mary went up and gave him a few amens, and he came down now and then for a meal at her house or Faith’s, but he wasn’t living there anymore. And when he walked in town with Mary, he wasn’t just sidling along with her the way he did at first. He walked with his back straight and he always wore his hat and was sure to take it off to anyone they met. He’d turn and smile to those who didn’t stop, even if it meant showing his back to Mary. Mary was as proud and patient with him as if he was a child. When I heard this, what went through my mind, in and out, mind you, was her asking Clara to give Jeremiah to her. I never thought it was a serious proposition, just something she said to rile Clara. But where did it come from? Anyway, like Nora Kincaid said, Isaiah Teague was beginning to feel his oats.
Halloween passed with nothing worse happening at the inn than the rain barrel being toppled. I was rolling it back into its place when Reverend Teague drove up, parked, tried to help me, and was no help at all. He followed me into my office. “I hear you have a baby here in need of baptizing.”
“That’s something you’ll have to take up with his mother,” I said.
“I’ve never met Miss McCracken,” he said.
“Well, why don’t you go around and introduce yourself? She’ll know who you are.”
“A friend of Mary Toomey’s.” He cleared his throat. He’d said something that could be taken for a joke.