Lantry's impatience with Willy Jacklin began two years later when Piety's boy was born. It was as though in that moment the man's slow usefulness was ended. He infuriated Lantry on the day of the birth. Piety had mistaken her time. When, alone in the house with his wife, a heavy agony overtook her, Willy's mind was unable to accept the fact of her travail, since by the calendar it was not yet due. The woman paced the floor of the cabin, her small swollen figure teetering grotesquely. The man stood bewildered in the doorway, watching her knife-struck progressions.
He asked, "What you figger ails you, Py-tee?"
"Must be I'm took, Willy. I ain't never been with nary woman when she was took. I'll see kin I walk the pains off."
The man twisted his hands together, his black forelock shaggy between his eyes.
"Be it better?"
"Nary a mite."
Beads of sweat stood out on her temples.
"What you figger I'd best do, Py-tee?"
She must use her last breath, she thought, to order him to come or go.
"Go call Pa."
He went to the landing where Lantry was repairing a boat, calling him from the ledge as he came towards him. Lantry made out the words, "Py-tee's ailin'," and began to run up the bluff with long reaching strides. He was at the cabin ahead of Willy.
"Honey, what's it like?"
She gripped his sleeve and described the hot pain that swelled to the unbearable, held its crest, like a kettle about to boil over, and then in time receded.
"You're took, Py-tee. It were that-a-way with your Ma." He said over his shoulder, "She's took, Willy." He felt her hands. They were numb and cold. "You best lay down and git you warm. Hit don't do to git all froze up, like." He settled her on her bed and covered her with the white spread. "You kin quilt with the counterpane 'til time to git you undressed."
He came to the door. Willy stood as he had left him. Lantry roared at him.
"Great God, feller, don't stand there a-battin' your eyes at me! Git to Doc Lorimer! Don't make no difference what he's doin', carry him back here!"
Willy hesitated.
"Take the mule and wagon?"
"Oh, my God—hit'd take you all the day! Fetch him in the rowboat!"
Willy turned away. He had had time to reach the edge of the hickory ledge. Lantry saw him coming back towards the cabin. Willy called from the rear gate.
"Is the oar-locks in the boat?"
Lantry's blood surged into his head and pushed against his temples. His face was violent, the color of old beef. His red beard glowed, the streaks of silver like tongues of white-hot flame. His eyes were on fire. He ran to the farm-bell lashed to an eight-foot post and tolled it wildly. It would bring Zeke and Martha from their half-mile and two miles away. Martha would help Piety while he was gone.
He passed Willy at the gate in a rush. He was like a red bull ploughing furiously across time and space. Willy heard him in a few moments, clanking the chain of the rowboat, rattling the oar-locks. The oars dipped noisily into the shallow water by the river-bank. Then, an instant later, the deep whisper of the river current engulfed all sound.
Lantry was gasping for breath when he landed Lorimer at the foot of the bluff. He hurried him to the cabin, where the woman laboured with a child too brawny for her spare loins. Willy crouched unhappily on his haunches in the yard, flipping a knife into the sand. Martha moved quietly back and forth with hot towels. Lantry went into the bedroom.
"Is it bad, honey?"
"Hit's bad."
The turtle-like lids of her eyes were blue with pain. Lantry could not endure to look at her. He moistened his lips.
"You afeered, Py-tee?"
The small head moved a little on the pillow.
"I ain't afeered."
"Kin you stand it?"
"What don't kill you, I figger you kin stand."
He left the room precipitously. Martha's square frame passed him. Her eyes narrowed.
"You never had nary doctor for Ma in the child-bed," she said with a rare bitterness. "You made nary visit to me two years ago when my Cleve come, 'til he were a day-two old. Now the way you carries on—"
He said hoarsely, "She's so scrawny and so leetle."
The woman's voice softened.
"I know, Pa. Hit's perfectly piteeful."
The sun set, dropping behind the ledge. The full moon rose over the scrub.
Martha said, "Hit'll be a boy, comin' on the full moon."
Lorimer said, "I'll be dogged if I see how you women-folks figure the moon when it comes to birthin' young uns. Don't none of you go that high to get one."
Piety pressed her lips together, so that a sharp cry slipped out only now and then against her will. Moonlight filled the cabin. The boy was born. Martha wrapped the new Jacklin in old soft muslin. Lorimer joined Zeke and Willy in the kitchen. They ate cold rations and drank cold coffee; stretched and laughed and chatted. The job was done and they talked of other things. Birth and death were unimportant, being only a beginning and an end.
Lantry did not appear in the kitchen. Lorimer, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, passed through the main room on his way again to Piety. He found Lantry half-conscious on his bed.
When he had eased the man, he said, "Shame to you, Lantry. Tryin' to get two treatments for the price of one. I've got the notion to charge you double."
Zeke said, "He like to rowed the guts outen him, I reckon, the time he made a-fetchin' you."
"Yes," Martha said shortly, "and railin' out at pore Willy didn't he'p him none, neither. Willy says he like to went crazy when he come askin' him was the oar-locks to the boat."
Willy offered mildly, "'Peared to me like 'twere savin' time to come ask, 'stead o' gittin' there and findin' 'em back to the house."
Lantry smiled weakly, rubbing the sore battleground of his breast.
"I had no right to take on so, son. Hit jest put me in a blaze to see you standin' still."
Lorimer said, "Another of them pets'll finish you."
Lantry did not see Piety's baby until after sun-up the next morning. Then he was able, holding to Willy's shoulder, to walk slowly into the bedroom, breathing as though his breath were of spun glass. Piety lay still exhausted, her closed lids white over her eyes. The child slept beside her. Above the wrinkled face the silky birth-hair was the red-brown of Lantry's. The man slipped one cautious finger into the diminutive fist. The woman opened her eyes. She smiled a little.
She said faintly, "Reckon us kin make a livin' for him?"
"Shore kin. Ten-twelve yare, anyways, and then if we've done raised him right, he kin make it for us."
His deep laugh shook the bed.
"What you fixin' to name him, Py-tee?"
Willy shuffled his feet near the head of the bed.
"I studied some on namin' him 'Lantry,'" she said. "Kin call him 'Lant.'"
"Lantry Jacklin," he said slowly.
Piety spoke politely to her husband.
"That suit you, Willy?"
He twisted his black forelock.
"Hit's as good a name as ary other, I reckon."
"Hi-yuh, you leetle ol' Lant." Lantry stroked the baby's stomach. "Got you red hair like your grand-daddy, you booger."
A heat flowed through his body, through the woman, to the child. It was as though it belonged to him and not to Willy.
He said slowly, "Kin make him a livin' all right, Py-tee, if nothin' don't interfere. You got the say so fur, and then you got no say at all."