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

Hank’s Tale by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Although Dorothy Salisbury Davis is the creator o£ series detective Juke Hayes, a New York City amateur sleuth, she has mainly produced, in her fifty-year career as a crime writer, nonseries hooks that have less to do with detection than with the understanding of character. Ms. Davis is a grandmaster of the MWA, and as this new story shows, she can write as convincingly of rural life as she does, in the Hayes hooks, of New York City.

It was a grey raw day when we buried Billy Baldwin. The wind turned the women around on the church steps, tugged at their skirts, and tossed their hair. The Reverend Barnes, who’d begun to show his years, didn’t seem sure of who he was talking about or when he’d died, and he was usually at his best at funerals, knowing everybody in Webbtown. But he hadn’t been called to the Baldwin house till Billy was cold and some time dead. Of a heart attack, according to the coroner, who had a Doctor of Medicine degree, which I guess entitles you to work on dead people if that’s your preference. He’d come from Ragapoo City, the county seat, routed out of his bed at four in the morning. Even at that he’d got there ahead of Reverend Barnes.

But everything got worked out by the time of the funeral. The sheriff examined Billy’s trap at Lookout Point, where he always stopped on his way home from work to pick up whatever small animal was waiting for him to put it out of its misery. There was a fair amount of trapping done in the Hills that time of year. Still is. Nancy Baldwin is famous up and down the valley for her hasen-pfeffer. Never had much stomach for it myself. The sheriff brought the trap down with him. Had to spring it and break the lock. Billy was working on it, it looked like, when he slipped and tumbled halfway down the hill. It was scrambling up again and getting himself home safe, the coroner reported, that brought on the heart attack. I sure thought about those words, home safe. Dead. I asked Prouty what he thought happened. Prouty’s the undertaker and my friend. It was in his cold room they did the autopsy. But Prouty didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, nobody in the whole town did, including me.

I did pay attention to who was at the funeral and who was not. Mostly women were there. They take to funerals better than men, certainly to this one they did. Mary Toomey was sitting next to Nancy in the front pew. Big Mary sat in the front pew of most things, especially since she’d been made president of Webbtown State Bank. First woman to hold the job. Nancy looked mighty frail and kind of scared. Every once in a while she’d let out a big, wet sob that started the little one in her arms wailing. Big Mary — we’d called her that since she was a bulging-out teenager — would clamp her hand on Nancy’s and you’d have thought it was a tourniquet, the way it stopped the tears for a while. If the baby didn’t let up, Mary took hold of her and gave her a shake that must’ve cured her of everything but breathing. I’d heard it was Mary who’d called Prouty from the Baldwin place. Said she’d been with Nancy when Billy died. I guess you could call that the truth if you wanted to, and I didn’t know of anyone who didn’t. Across the aisle, next to the plain coffin he’d steered into the church, was Prouty, as pale as any corpse he ever got ready for a last viewing. In the next pew back were the four pallbearers Mary Toomey recruited on Nancy’s behalf. I was one of them. During silent prayer I heard Mrs. Prouty clear her throat. Prouty gave a little flex to his shoulders when it happened so I assume it was Mrs. Prouty sending some kind of message he picked up. Alongside her was the pastor’s wife, Faith Barnes. She sat straight and solid as a farm silo. She’d always stood for what the pastor preached, even ecumenism when it came along. It was a word most of us found hard to say, but we swallowed it. Didn’t mean much except to Pastor, who tried to keep up with what was going on in the world. We’re a one-church town unless you count the itinerant alleluia-sayers who show up regular and get us hollering. I mention them now because one of them was going to show up before long, though we didn’t know it then.

One person who wasn’t at the funeral was Clara McCracken. I might as well say now, I don’t think I’d have lived as long as I have if it wasn’t for Clara McCracken. I’m a lawyer, and I’ve practiced in Webbtown ever since I first hung my shingle upstairs of Kincaid’s drugstore, some six decades ago. I don’t have much of a practice left, but I’ve played the fiddle for pleasure all my life, and if I’m not better known for fiddling than I am for the law, I’m sure better liked for it.

McCrackens have run the Red Lantern Inn since the first of them came west after the War of Independence. One story says they were on the run from the revenue men during the Whiskey Rebellion. That sounds about right. The McCrackens almost died out twenty years ago, down to two sisters, Clara and Maud, maiden ladies. Maud, twice Clara’s age, was determined to marry her sister to a paint salesman who put in at the Red Lantern whenever he came through the Ragapoos. Clara wanted nothing to do with him. She wanted to run wild in the hills with young Reuben White, until the day he cornered her in the sheepcote. Maudie was accidentally shot dead that day, and Clara tumbled Reuben headfirst into the well. I defended her when she was tried for murder. She wouldn’t have any outside lawyer, and she wasn’t much use in her own defense, taking the jury to the well and showing them how she did it. She did fifteen years.

Reuben’s family didn’t get much sympathy from the town. They moved away — deeper into the hills; I suppose more in shame than sorrow — when most of the townspeople drove up to the county jail to see Clara off to prison. The one member of the family, a first cousin to Reuben, who did not move away, was Mary Toomey, Big Mary.

I brought Clara home after she’d done her time, and allowed myself to be made a silent partner so she could reopen the Red Lantern. Not much business, but it’s been going since.

If you wonder what all this has to do with the funeral of Billy Baldwin, I’ll tell you now. I’ll swear to the Almighty I saw Billy stoned — I think to death — on the veranda of the Red Lantern the night Big Mary and Nancy said he died at home after coming down from Lookout Point.

I woke up sudden that night and looked out my window. It was moonlight, cold and past midnight. A dozen or so women of the town passed under my window, silent except for their whispering feet. I knew where they were headed. There had been shenanigans, and as soon as I could get there I followed them and lay down in the hollow alongside where Billy Baldwin’s car was parked. The women were standing like statues beneath the steps, tinted pink from the light of the Red Lantern sign. I heard the commotion upstairs and saw lights going on. I heard Billy yelping and scrambling down the stairs, Nancy after him, yelling and beating at him as he plunged outdoors, naked as birth and his clothes in his arms. The women blocked the steps and picked up stones from the walk which they handed round among them. Then out from a side door came Clara, wispy as a ghost in a negligee the likes of which no woman of Webbtown had ever seen before. The women stood, stones in hand, until Clara went down the steps and got one too. Billy by then was on his knees, pleading with them, and one of the women took Nancy away. Clara threw the first stone and Billy went down in the barrage that followed. Didn’t move even when Clara went back up the steps and kicked him like he was a dead calf. The women picked up more stones and flung them at Clara. They hissed at her like snakes. When she made it into the inn I took off and never looked back.

After the funeral nobody, even at Tuttle’s Bar and Grill, where most of the men hung out, ever mentioned Billy. I felt things were hanging in a kind of delicate balance, but I could’ve felt that way because of what I’d seen. I didn’t know for a fact about Prouty or Reverend Barnes, but I was pretty sure I was the only man in town to know what really happened to Billy. It bothered me a lot at first, but after a while I got to thinking maybe I dreamt the whole thing. I sure liked it better that way.

There was a thaw in early January. It made the three-mile exit off the interstate almost impassable. I’d just come up from the town and waited on the veranda when a car and trailer pulled up in front of the Red Lantern. Both vehicles looked as though they’d had a long and hearty life. Which was more than I could say for the driver. He got out of the car and scraped his boots at the bottom step. He was tall and thin as a string bean, the eyes of a zealot, I thought. I’d seen his like among mountain preachers. His smile was practiced, on and off. His clothes were a dusty black, a topcoat that flapped open, trousers tucked into his boots. He tipped the brim of a high-crowned hat, and the first words out of his mouth were, “Are you a Christian?”

I didn’t like him asking that. “I am when I have to be,” I said.

But he took my words at their best value. “I’m the Reverend Isaiah Teague, but I’m not a prophet. I’m only a poor evangelist.” He offered his hand and I took it. I could feel the bones.

“I’m Hank,” I said, hoping it would be enough to get him on the road again. I didn’t offer him the hospitality of the inn. To tell the truth, I was afraid if I let him in, I wouldn’t be able to get him out, and Clara would kill me. I was glad I hadn’t been too hospitable when next he asked me if I knew of a lady named Mary Toomey in the town, and where he’d find her.

I looked at my watch. “I think you can find her at this hour at the bank.”

“She works at a bank?” he questioned and nodded approval.

“She’s president of the First State Bank of Webbtown.”

The smile came and went, and so did he.

Before he was out of sight, Clara came out to me. “What was that all about?”

“Looking for Big Mary. He’s a clergyman of some sort.”

“They know now where the money is,” she said. Which was more or less what I’d thought of him myself.

But Mary took to him from that first day. She helped him in more ways than we knew at the time. First, she did two good turns at once by getting him room and board at Nancy Baldwin’s. Billy hadn’t left Nancy more than a rabbit’s skin, and she hadn’t been the same since his death. The baby, too, was sickly. It cried most nights through, according to the neighbors. That stopped whenever the reverend was there. If you listened close you could hear him sing gospel at all hours, Annie Pendergast said, as sweet as any you ever heard on the radio. He’d go off for days at a time and come back weekends. He was laying out a summer tour of the campsites, it was told, and on one return when he stopped first at the bank, Big Mary came out and climbed into that woebegone vehicle of his and rode with him past the inn and up over Lookout Point. You had to say his attitude toward Mary was gallant, not exactly bowing and scraping, but so respectful it could turn your stomach. We didn’t begrudge her such attention, you understand. I suppose we even pitied her, the way you would anybody you thought was being taken advantage of.

What happened to me that winter was that Tom Kincaid sold the drugstore to a chain company, and the first thing a chain company does is renovate. Clara suggested I move my office into the first-floor parlor of the inn. Pointed out it had a separate entrance. After hemming and hawing and looking her straight in the eye to see if I could tell what was going on with her, I agreed. I knew that was the door Clara had come out of in the negligee. But I also knew that moving my office into the Red Lantern, I might help spread a little goodwill where it was needed most. Clara didn’t go into town much, just for what shopping she had to do, and some of that she shunted onto me. The women were cold toward her, crossed the street when they saw her coming, things like that. She never was sociable. Loving people didn’t come natural to her. She’d learned a lot in prison, but not about loving.

The day after I moved my office in, she was watching me put things away where I could find them. She was being lazy, which was unusual for Clara. I put my violin case on the top of the shelves for my law books. I never played it at home. Too lonesome.

“Fiddle us up a tune,” Clara said.

“I’m getting terrible arthritic,” I told her, but I got the fiddle out and tuned it. I don’t get asked so often anymore.

Clara, sitting half off, half on the side of my desk, the sunlight playing round in her hair, looked prettier than I’d seen her since she went to prison. Not a bit like her sister Maudie, who I’d thought she was getting to resemble more every day.

“Anything special you got in mind, Clara? You know my repertoire.”

She grinned at me and gave her nose a crinkle. “How about a lullaby, Old Hank?”

It was going on ten o’clock when I got a call from Clara. She wasn’t feeling so good and wanted me to take over the desk. I asked her if she didn’t want me to get in touch with a doctor for her. I hadn’t mentioned it till then. She hadn’t either. Now she exploded.

“What in hell for? Go to bed, Hank. You’re getting to be a nag, a nanny. You’re more old maid than I am.”

I guess that was the truth. There was a storm coming sure, that dead quiet when even the crickets stop to listen. They’re better forecasters than radio or television, closer to home. I still live in the house I was born in, and going out, I locked the door. I wasn’t sure when I’d get back.

Clara was sitting in the lobby, sweating and bubbling gas. Like I’d thought, all eight room keys were hanging in a row. Nobody was coming off the interstate that night. Webbtown wasn’t even on the interstate, three miles from the nearest exit.

“I’m going upstairs now,” she said, and lifted herself out of the chair, real careful. Didn’t show much, but she was a big woman, and a heck of a lot stronger than I was.

“I could fix that storeroom off the kitchen for you, Clara. I could set up a bed in there. You’d be more comfortable.”

“Think so, Hank?” Real sarcastic.

She went up the stairs one creaky step at a time. From the landing she called down to me, “Better fire up the hot water. Feels like we’re going to need it soon.”

No point in going into details here, but my first trip upstairs she warned me if I tried to call a doctor she’d get up and pull the hall phone clear out of the wall. When she got to moaning and twisting the brass rungs of the bedstead, I couldn’t take any more of it. I started out of the room and said I’d come back soon.

“You better, Old Hank. I did fifteen years on account of you.”

You don’t take serious what people say to you at a time like that, but I sure felt it.

“I didn’t mean to say that ever. It’s this ornery little son of a bitch inside me trying to get out.”

I just nodded and went on, but I’d been standing there long enough to notice that fancy negligee draped over the chair like somebody invisible was sitting in it.

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!”

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.

“I’d just ask her about getting the baby baptized,” I said.

Isaiah quick-smiled at me. “She’ll never know, unless you’re the one to tell her — I was with Miss Mary when the call came from your parson’s wife. I persuaded Mary to come and help. I’d have come myself but Mary said she might become violent, seeing a man. But I’ve delivered a baby or two in my time.”

“That a fact?” I said. I knew now where Big Mary got the instruments she’d brought along. He’d softened me up a little, telling me. But why tell me, except he wanted me to tell Clara? I didn’t like him much better than the first time I’d laid eyes on him. “I’ll take you round and introduce you. Then you’re on your own.”

I gave Clara ten minutes at most to send this tent-Christian on his way. Two hours later, when I went in from my office, there he was in the lobby, rocking Jeremiah in his basket and mumbling, sing-song, something like, “You’re going to be a Christian boy.” Jeremiah was burbling with pleasure.

Clara was almost as perky as her son. “Hank, we’re going to have another christening. Remember the last one?”

I tried to remember if there’d been one in the last forty or so years.

“I don’t remember it either,” Clara made fun of me. “It was me, Old Hank, and you played the fiddle. You’re going to be the godfather, aren’t you, Hank?”

I knew I was too old to be anybody’s godfather for it to do him much good while he was growing up, but I didn’t like the way Jeremiah took to Reverend Teague. “I guess I can handle it,” I said.

After Teague was gone and she’d quieted Jeremiah down, I said to her, “You know Big Mary’s gone kind of sweet on him, don’t you?” I always took whatever news I could of the town up to her, and I might have had in mind to dampen her interest in him by mentioning Big Mary. But it was about as foolish a notion as I ever had. You could’ve said her smile was angelic if you didn’t know how much wickedness was in her. “We got a parson of our own in Webbtown,” I snapped. “It ain’t right trusting Jeremiah’s christening to an outsider.”

“Something I learned when I was away, Old Hank: It don’t matter who dishes it up, it’s what’s on the plate that counts.”

I left her to manage her own doggone inn and her own doggone baby, closed up my office, and went down to Tuttle’s. I hadn’t been there much lately. Prouty and Tom Kincaid were resting their elbows on the bar.

Tuttle drew me what used to be my usual, said it was on the house, hospitality to a stranger. It wasn’t as good as Maudie’s Own, but I sure liked drinking in their company. I took a long pull before I even said, “Thank you.” Then, like I had a chip on my shoulder, I said, “You know we got a baby up at the Red Lantern.”

“Congratulations, Hank, you old son of a gun,” Kincaid said.

Not much of a laugh from the other two. It ought to have come off funnier than it did. But then they’d have had to forget that it was in this very room they’d all chipped in to send Billy Baldwin up to proposition Clara: They were so doggone sure she was running a house and maybe coaxing doves from among their women. So now you know why no one was talking about Billy Baldwin. Maybe I was the only man to know how he died, but every married man in town had a hunch why.

“The visiting preacher came by today, looking to do a baptism,” I said. “And I guess there’s going to be one. I put in a word with her for Pastor Barnes, but the evangelist got to her first. Don’t know what’s wrong with Barnes. Isn’t it his job to gather in the lambs?”

“He’s about to retire, Hank,” the barkeep said. “That’s what we were talking about when you walked in.”

“He’s getting kind of old,” Prouty said.

“I know what’s old and what isn’t,” I said. “When’s this going to happen?”

“Soon as we get a replacement. He’s going East. Him and Faith’s got a son out there and grandchildren they’ve never even seen.”

“And this Isaiah Teague — what kind of a name is that anyway? — he’s first in line. Is that what’s happening?”

“Big Mary’s been working on it,” Tuttle said.

“Tell me something I couldn’t guess. Is she running the church now too? Ain’t the bank enough for her?”

“Take it easy,” Tuttle said. “You’ll get your say when the time comes.”

“Looks to me the time’s already past.” I was getting myself madder all the time. “Prouty, you know what’s going on with the church. Is this all her doing?”

“She petitioned the Convention, him being a different kind of Baptist. They’re going to meet on it first of the year.”

“Hold on one damn minute,” I said. “I’ve supported the Webbtown church for over sixty years. What’s this petition you’re talking about? Who all signed it? I thought we were a congregation, not a Holy Roman Empire.”

Finally Prouty admitted, “Mrs. Prouty signed for both of us, signed it Mr. and Mrs.”

“And you let her do it?”

“Well, she didn’t exactly ask me. You’ve not been around much lately, Hank. There’s some who like him. They think he’s a good man.”

“And a good man’s hard to find,” I said, sour.

“ ’Specially when he’s still alive,” Prouty said, and pushed over his glass to Tuttle for a refill.

I went straight home from Tuttle’s instead of going back to the inn and relieving Clara. I was spending a lot more time at the Red Lantern than I was in my own house. I could write down a phone number in the dust on my hall table. I knew there was a lot of bluster in what I had said at Tuttle’s. My edgy feeling about the situation had to do with how Clara felt about Big Mary, and me telling her how Big Mary felt about Teague. Even so, when I went up the next day and she asked what was doing at Tuttle’s — she knew by instinct that’s where I went — I had to tell her about Pastor Barnes quitting and Teague lining up for the job. She’d have found out anyway.

You could have heard her cackle all the way to the interstate. “Queen Mary! Rattling the gates of heaven, ain’t that right, Hank?”

I hadn’t even mentioned the petition business. I didn’t say anything. I watched Jeremiah pee straight up in the air.

“Ain’t he a devil?” Clara said, busting with pride. “I hate to put a dappy on him.”

Sure enough, the following Sunday, Reverend Barnes announced he was going to retire in early spring. Retirement isn’t something we go in for voluntary in the Hills, but he was trembly again and Faith said at coffee hour, they wanted to spend time with the grandchildren while they were still children. Nobody asked what they were going to live on — or off — but everybody wondered. I wasn’t at church myself. I’m not regular, but I’m dependable when they need me. And when I heard that Parson had invited his friend, Reverend Isaiah Teague, to preach the next Sunday, I made up my mind to be there.

Reverend Teague preached as though he wanted to make us feel good about ourselves, and I must say that hit me just right. He told us about the Campbellite roots of our denomination and the pioneer spirit that brought them west and settled this evangelical Christian group in the Ragapoo Hills. We’d almost forgotten that. And I could see what he’d meant with that “Are you a Christian?” introduction. There was a time that’s what we were called, just plain “Christians.” I felt foolish for what I’d said back to him about being one when I needed to be.

“I don’t mind listening to sinners,” he said at one point in the sermon. “That’s what I’m here for. But like Jesus himself, sometimes I’d like to hear about these transgressions over a good meal. And by transgressions, I don’t mean fibs and nickel-and-dime meannesses. I want something I can get my teeth into before the devil gets there ahead of me.”

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.

I did better than I thought I would collecting a retirement purse for Reverend Barnes, and we decided to give it to him early so him and Faith would know what they could count on. Easter was coming mid April that year and we decided that was when we’d hold the party for them. Nobody was pushing things except maybe Big Mary. Most of us, even me by that time, didn’t see why Convention had to make a theological issue of it, if that’s what was happening. After all, Pastor had preached ecumenism to us and it could be stretched to fit. But Isaiah himself was for due process, as he put it to me, the lawyer.

It was Clara, squinting into the early dark, noticed Big Mary going by most nights when the snow was cleared, driving up past Lookout Point. If I was behind the bar, Clara’d call out — whether I had a customer or not — “There she goes!” An hour or two later, Mary’d come down again. Clara was clocking her. I wasn’t. She figured Mary was taking him up a warm supper and looking for a little cuddling. I thought it’d be easier to cuddle with a giraffe, but I didn’t say so.

Spring always comes if you believe in it. The cardinal’s song was almost musical, the willow trees were getting yellower, and Isaiah Teague took to dropping by the inn late of an evening — well after Big Mary had come down from whatever she’d gone up for. We included customers if there were any, me fiddling and the reverend singing out the words of hymns we’d heard since childhood. Now and then I’d lapse into country, and once Clara picked up her skirts and skipped into a solo performance of the Virginia Reel. I remembered how she first got into trouble dancing wild with Reuben. The switch Maudie took to drive him out with was still in a corner of the bar. Sometimes Isaiah would tell us what it was like preaching and singing gospel and when he got carried away with the message, dancing for God. He showed us a step or two and you could tell he’d been a real prancer in his youth. Clara made bold to ask him right out if he didn’t have a wife and kids somewhere. He gave her that quick smile I’d almost forgotten and said, “Don’t you have a husband somewhere?”

Mind, all this congeniality didn’t go on for very long. The days were getting longer and I thought it a miracle Big Mary hadn’t walked in on us. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know how she’d’ve taken to it. She was a blood relative of Reuben White, and he was a live one. Alive, that is. I had a little legal business I could only put my mind to after Jeremiah was laid down for the night, and I must’ve missed the stories Isaiah told of preaching on the open road, stories that went to work on Clara’s imagination. She asked me once if I’d ever known of any women evangelists, and I told her what I could remember hearing about Aimee Semple McPherson. She was even before my time.

I don’t like to say it had anything to do with April Fool’s Day, but on the first Sunday in April, Pastor announced he had a letter to read us from Convention. I was in church because of a meeting afterwards of the retirement committee. There was a rumble of satisfaction at the dispensation they granted us to hire the Reverend Isaiah Teague. Isaiah sat up there alongside Pastor, stiff and straight, and kept that come-and-go smile under control, though I could see a twitch getting loose now and then. What Pastor didn’t read out was the Convention’s consideration that Reverend Teague expected to marry soon. The word got out almost as soon as if he’d read it. I guess we all knew who we thought leaked it, but we didn’t say so. We just congratulated Isaiah on coming through and thanked Mary Toomey for getting the petition to Convention in the first place. But it set me to wondering what else Pastor had kept from us over the years. I was thinking of how late he was called that night to Billy Baldwin’s and how he kind of groped his way through Billy’s funeral. And then I thought of how natural he took to the idea of retiring. If it was me, I thought — after all those years of ministering — I’d’ve straightened my back, spit in the wind, and stayed till they carried me out. It was as though he had something on his conscience he’d not been able to hand over to the Lord. It made me feel guilty, and then when I thought how much money people had come up with for the retirement gift, I was pretty sure a lot of Webbtown folk felt the same way I did.

I dreaded telling Clara the news, thinking how it meant an end to those cosy evening visits from Isaiah. We’d never talked to one another about why he came. We’d made fun of Big Mary’s courtship — I guess you’d call it that — never believing for a minute — I know I didn’t — that she’d win.

“Won’t make any difference,” Clara said. “He ain’t going to abandon us, Hank. We’ll just be his hermitage and she won’t ever know.”

“Clara, this ain’t New York City or Paris, France.” Where I’d been once after the war. The very idea of him coming up to us, a married man, made me feel guilty, even though there was nothing sinful in those visits. That I knew about anyway.

“I know what it’s like to be in prison, Hank. That’s what Maudie wanted to marry me into — and what I had fifteen years of when the only green I ever saw was when I stood on the toilet and looked out the window. He’s a wild bird, Hank. Big Mary’s crazy if she thinks she can keep him in a cage.”

I felt the same. I didn’t know what was coming, and I didn’t want to know.

Isaiah was to preach the morning of the retirement party. He invited Clara to attend, even threatened to come and get her himself if she didn’t come with me. I was of two minds, at least two minds, knowing how unpredictable Clara was, but thinking it’d be as good a time as any to introduce Jeremiah to the congregation, since he was already a Christian boy. When Clara said they’d be there, I went up to Ragapoo City and bought him a nice outfit out of my own pocket. Clara let me. She had money since the state bought a section of McCracken land, but she was saving every penny now for Jeremiah. I was nervous helping get him dressed on Sunday morning, even more when Clara came down wearing a dress I hadn’t seen for over fifteen years. It was black and fit her snug and just the way she wore it at her trial; she had a red handkerchief at her throat.

The ones in church ahead of us fell silent when we were ushered down near the sanctuary, Clara holding Jeremiah out in front of her like he was a little king. I don’t remember much about myself, except that I was wearing my good suit.

When Isaiah stepped up to the pulpit, he was carrying a bundle of letters. He made a little bow toward Pastor, who sat in his usual place aside so the pulpit didn’t block him from the congregation’s view, and said he had in hand the tributes of a grateful parish, which he’d present to Pastor by and by. I guess he said how grateful he was to all of us for promising to call him, and I know he did mention Mary Toomey by name. She was on the other side of the aisle from us. I saw heads turning her way, but I didn’t look and Clara didn’t look, I don’t think even at Jeremiah, just straight at Isaiah.

Then he told us what brought him to Webbtown.

He’d been preaching in a town he’d never heard of in the mountains to the south, and a woman stood up and told him of her terrible pain — she’d lost a son to murder and his name was Reuben White. Isaiah told us how he was able to help her and her family heal a wound festering a whole generation. They didn’t expect any peace in this world unless they got revenge. That’s what they lived for. I think this is what he said: “With God’s help I persuaded her family, one by one, to bring their anger to Jesus, and their suffering, and let go of their bitterness.” And I know he said this: “Shall I tell you the Lord’s message to me? He told me there was healing to be done in the town they moved away from, a whole town that needed healing but needed first to tell its sins and sorrow.” He preached for maybe an hour, straight out of the Bible, things we’d never heard just that way before. Even Jeremiah seemed to listen. Clara seemed dead alive, if you know what I mean, frozen.

But he wound up thanking us again and saying he was going to preach this coming week at River Junction, starting a new tour. “I thought I had the makings of a pastor,” he said, “but I’m only an evangelist trying to make straight the way of the Lord.”

The party went on, but neither Clara nor Big Mary stayed for it. It turned out to be a pretty good welcome to Parson Barnes, asking him and Faith to unpack.

I went back after taking Clara and Jeremiah home. The only thing Clara said that I remember, “I ain’t going up to River Junction.” She kept saying it now and then for the next day or so.

Finally I said, “Well, maybe River Junction will come down to you.”

“Better not,” she said, and then brightened up. “It won’t be coming down to Big Mary, will it?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t like that “Better not.”

Then as I was going home that night, and I hadn’t been home much lately — home was getting to be where Jeremiah was and maybe needing me — as I was going out the door she called me back. “I want you to take Pa’s shotgun with you, Hank. And you’d better hide it somewhere good in case I ever ask for it back.”