Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

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.

“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!”