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

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.