It went something like that, and I could see he was going to get several Sunday dinner invitations. Might even get “the Call” if we came to a vote on it. I thought I might have made a mistake measuring him on my early impression. And then there was the way Jeremiah and him took to one another.
Clara couldn’t wait for me to come up to the Red Lantern to tell her about it. I told her what I could remember. She was disappointed, expecting hellfire and brimstone. “Where was Big Mary in all this?”
“She was there in her pew. And pouring coffee afterwards, come to think of it.”
“Pouring coffee, la-de-da.” She’d seen that on the television, but I didn’t say so.
“She was kind of holding back. She’d done what she could for him, getting the petition to the convention,” I said.
“And pushing poor old Barnes off the cliff.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“I know human nature better than you do, Old Hank.”
She’d ought to, I thought, having all that time to think about what she’d done to Reuben. And to poor Billy. Then she said the craziest thing: “I don’t think she could have a baby, do you?”
I wasn’t going to answer that one.
She pouted for a minute or two. Then: “Hank, you know where he’s living now. He’s got his trailer on the fairgrounds by River Junction. People come miles to him for real baptisms. I want you to drive over there and arrange Jeremiah’s before the weather gets any colder.”
“You mean you’re going to let him plop your baby like a duck egg in the river?”
“It’s called immersion, baptism by immersion, and I want him done right.”
“Then get yourself another godfather. I ain’t going to stand out there and get pneumonia.” Which wasn’t what I meant to say at all.
“Hank, just go over and let him show you how he does it. Real quick and into a warm blanket. All the praying’s done ahead of time.”
I guess I don’t have to tell you, I went to see Isaiah Teague just as I was told to, and the next Tuesday, after all the school buses had driven by the junction, Jeremiah Henry McCracken was dipped into a Monongahela inlet and came up Christian, smiling.
We went back to the Red Lantern and fired up the furnace. A couple of oil inspectors were signing in that night. Phoned to make reservations, which tickled Clara. The Ritz. Isaiah stopped on his way into town and I brought the bottle of Old Kentuck from the back bar into the kitchen. I made hot toddies for Clara and me, and Clara put a drop of watered whiskey on the tongue of Jeremiah.
“Me, too,” Isaiah said, which sure made us laugh.
But Clara took a tablespoonful and poured it into his mouth, forcing him to open up. “Hank, you won’t tell Big Mary, will you?” she said, a spark in her eye.
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Isaiah said. “I’m supposed to be a peacemaker.”
“I say what’s on my mind and do what I have to do.”
“We must have a discussion about that some day, Miss Clara.”
“Hank, go get your fiddle.”
Isaiah looked at his watch. It was getting on toward noon, but he didn’t say anything. I noticed from my office window he’d parked his aging vehicle right alongside mine at the back of the inn. You wouldn’t notice it just driving by. Nothing could stop me from remembering — in and out of mind again — where Billy Baldwin parked his car the night of the stones. I’d wondered which woman drove it home, with him in it, Nancy or Big Mary. It had to’ve been Mary who transported him. Nancy was falling-down frail that night.
It was Big Mary herself who asked me to head a committee to make a farewell purse for Parson Barnes. She came out to where I was at the cashier’s window in the bank and invited me into her office. It was plain but tidy — some rubbery plants and a picture of her father, one of those paintings a traveling artist paints from a Brownie snapshot. I guess you’d say it was a lady’s office, but the smell of cigar smoke was going to last till they tore the building down.
I protested that the only way I could raise money was with my violin and a tin cup on a Saturday night. But she got her way with flattery and a first contribution. It wasn’t diplomatic of me — in fact, it was kind of sly — when I asked her if there was any word yet from the Convention on how Reverend Teague stood with them.
“Better than you’d think, Hank, but they feel they have to make conditions.” She was blushing like a schoolgirl. She gave a funny little toss of her head, as though maybe she had a fly on her nose. “We’ll just have to wait and find out.”
I realized I was seeing Big Mary in love, and I was as embarrassed as she was. I thought one of those conditions would want the parson to be a family man and she was working on it. I was trying not to say anything like that, so I said something worse, meaning money for the retirement purse: “I’ll be doing my best, Mary, but you can’t get blood from a stone.”
We could’ve choked on the silence.
“Good old Hank,” she said then and gave me a cold smile. She ought to have known I wasn’t smart enough to make that insinuation on purpose. But what she’d be pretty sure of now was that I knew what the women did that night, and how her and Faith had got Billy home where they could say he died in his own bed.
What made Christmas special that year was Jeremiah. There hadn’t been a tree at the Red Lantern since before Clara went away. She wanted to know if I thought he’d understand if we got one for him. I said we’d be lucky if he paid it attention at all, and I told her about the Christmas I remembered most. I’d have been five years old. My folks didn’t have much money, and what Ma and I did, we went out in the woods back of where we lived, picked out a tree, and made Pa come and chop it down. I told Clara the whole story, how we stuck it in a bucket of coal and decorated it with pictures of toys and bicycles and sleds we cut out of the Sears Roebuck catalogue. I’ll be darned if she didn’t make me do the same thing and herself got out the Sears catalogue and cut it up. They don’t make catalogues like they used to, but Jeremiah didn’t know that, and he kind of liked the whole celebration.
On Christmas Eve, a dozen or so youngsters with Isaiah leading them, and Anne Pendergast, Mrs. Prouty, and Faith Barnes a kind of rear guard against defections, came up from the town and sang carols below the Red Lantern sign. I stood out on the veranda and waved my hands like I was directing them. I wanted to take Jeremiah out, but Clara said no and took him into the storeroom again till they were gone.
There wasn’t going to be a better time to ask Clara a question that’d been nagging at me since Jeremiah’s arrival, so I just blurted it out. “What are you going to tell him when he starts asking about not having a father like other kids?”
“I’m going to tell him about a hunting accident,” she said, and got a dreamy look in her eyes. “It was way up north in Canada, bear country, during a terrible blizzard. His pa was hurt bad and his partner went looking for help. Got somebody, but they got lost on their way back and couldn’t find him. They looked and looked and they called and called, and all they could hear back was their own voices. They never found him. All they found was bear tracks in the snow. Ain’t that beautiful, Hank?”
I figured there was no point in reminding her about bears hibernating in the winter.
By Groundhog Day, no word had come from the Convention. Faith Barnes, who was trying to pack up a lifetime, invited Isaiah to board with her and Pastor for the last months of winter, but he said no, but thank you kindly. He called the trailer his hermitage, said the solitary life was good for him. He stopped by most times he came to town, pinched Jeremiah’s toes and talked real soft to Clara. Left her a Bible I never caught her looking at, but maybe she did. Even a good baby gets tiresome when you don’t know what he’s saying back to you.