He walks back to town slowly—a gaunt, paunched man in a soiled panama hat and the tail of a coarse cotton nightshirt thrust into his black trousers. ‘Luckily I did take time to put on my shoes,’ he thinks. ‘I am tired,’ he thinks, fretfully. ‘I am tired, and I shall not be able to sleep.’ He is thinking it fretfully, wearily, keeping time to his feet when he turns into his gate. The sun is now high, the town has wakened; he smells the smoke here and there of cooking breakfasts. ‘The least thing he could have done,’ he thinks, ‘since he would not leave me the mule, would have been to ride ahead and start a fire in my stove for me. Since he thinks it better for my appetite to take a two-mile stroll before eating.’
He goes to the kitchen and builds a fire in the stove, slowly, clumsily; as clumsily after twenty-five years as on the first day he had ever attempted it, and puts coffee on. ‘Then I’ll go back to bed,’ he thinks. ‘But I know I shall not sleep. But he notices that his thinking sounds querulous, like the peaceful whining of a querulous woman who is not even listening to herself; then he finds that he is preparing his usual hearty breakfast, and he stops quite still, clicking his tongue as, though in displeasure. ‘I ought to feel worse than I do,’ he thinks. But he has to admit that he does not. And as he stands, tall, misshapen, lonely in his lonely and illkept kitchen, holding in his hand an iron skillet in which yesterday’s old grease is bleakly caked, there goes through him a glow, a wave, a surge of something almost hot, almost triumphant. ‘I showed them!’ he thinks. ‘Life comes to the old man yet, while they get there too late. They get there for his leavings, as Byron would say.’ But this is vanity and empty pride. Yet the slow and fading glow disregards it, impervious to reprimand. He thinks, ‘What if I do? What if I do feel it? triumph and pride? What if I do?’ But the warmth, the glow, evidently does not regard or need buttressing either; neither is it quenched by the actuality of an orange and eggs and toast. And he looks down at the soiled and empty dishes on the table and he says, aloud now: “Bless my soul. I’m not even going to wash them now.” Neither does he go to his bedroom to try sleep. He goes to the door and looks in, with that glow of purpose and pride, thinking, ‘If I were a woman, now. That’s what a woman would do: go back to bed to rest.’ He goes to the study. He moves like a man with a purpose now, who for twenty-five years has been doing nothing at all between the time to wake and the time to sleep again. Neither is the book which he now chooses the Tennyson: this time also he chooses food for a man. It is Henry IV and he goes out into the back yard and lies down in the sagging deck chair beneath the mulberry tree, plumping solidly and heavily into it. ‘But I shan’t be able to sleep,’ he thinks, ‘because Byron will be in soon to wake me. But to learn just what else he can think of to want me to do, will be almost worth the waking.’
He goes to sleep soon, almost immediately, snoring. Anyone pausing to look down into the chair would have seen, beneath the twin glares of sky in the spectacles, a face innocent, peaceful, and assured. But no one comes, though when he wakes almost six hours later, he seems to believe that someone has called him. He sits up abruptly, the chair creaking beneath him. “Yes?” he says. “Yes? What is it?” But there is no one there, though for a moment longer he looks about, seeming to listen and to wait, with that air forceful and assured. And the glow is not gone either. ‘Though I had hoped to sleep it off,’ he thinks, thinking at once, ‘No. I don’t mean hoped. What is in my thought is feared. And so I have surrendered too,’ he thinks, quiet, still. He begins to rub his hands, gently at first, a little guiltily. ‘I have surrendered too. And I will permit myself. Yes. Perhaps this too is reserved for me. And so I shall permit myself.’ And then he says it, thinks it That child that I delivered. I have no namesake. But I have known them before this to be named by a grateful mother for the doctor who officiated. But then, there is Byron. Byron of course will take the pas of me. She will have to have others, more remembering the young strong body from out whose travail even there shone something tranquil and unafraid. More of them. Many more. That will be her life, her destiny. The good stock peopling in tranquil obedience to it the good earth; from these hearty loins without hurry or haste descending mother and daughter. But by Byron engendered next. Poor boy. Even though he did let me walk back home.
He enters the house. He shaves and removes the nightshirt and puts on the shirt which he had worn yesterday, and a collar and the lawn tie and the panama hat. The walk out to the cabin does not take him as long as the walk home did, even though he goes now through the woods where the walking is harder. ‘I must do this more often,’ he thinks, feeling the intermittent sun, the heat, smelling the savage and fecund odor of the earth, the woods, the loud silence. ‘I should never have lost this habit, too. But perhaps they both come back to me, if this itself be not the same prayer.’
He emerges from the woods at the far side of the pasture ‘behind the cabin. Beyond the cabin he can see the clump of ees in which the house had stood and burned, though from here he cannot see the charred and mute embers of what were once planks and beams. ‘Poor woman,’ he thinks. ‘Poor, barren woman. To have not lived only a week longer, until luck returned to this place. Until luck and life returned to these barren and ruined acres.’ It seems to him that he can see, feel, about him the ghosts of rich fields, and of the rich fecund black life of the quarters, the mellow shouts, the presence of fecund women, the prolific naked children in the dust before the doors; and the big house again, noisy, loud with the treble shouts of the generations. He reaches the cabin. He does not knock; with his hand already opening the door he calls in a hearty voice that almost booms: “Can the doctor come in?”
The cabin is empty save for the mother and child. She is propped up on the cot, the child at breast. As Hightower enters, she is in the act of drawing the sheet up over her bared bosom, watching the door not with alarm at all, but with alertness, her face fixed in an expression serene and warm, as though she were about to smile. He sees this fade. I thought—” she says.
“Who did you think?” he says, booms. He comes to the cot and looks down at her, at the tiny, weazened, terracotta face of the child which seems to hang suspended without body and still asleep from the breast. Again she draws the sheet closer, modest and tranquil, while above her the gaunt, paunched, bald man stands with an expression on his face gentle, beaming, and triumphant. She is looking down at the child.