Byron!”
He didn’t pause, didn’t answer.
Dawn was increasing.
He walked rapidly along the empty street, beneath the spaced and failing street lamps about which bugs still whirled and blundered.
But day was growing; when he reached the square the façade of its eastern side was in sharp relief against the sky.
He was thinking rapidly.
He had made no arrangement with a doctor.
Now as he walked he was cursing himself in all the mixed terror and rage of any actual young father for what he now believed to have been crass and criminal negligence.
Yet it was not exactly the solicitude of an incipient father.
There was something else behind it, which he was not to recognise until later.
It was as though there lurked in his mind, still obscured by the need for haste, something which was about to spring full clawed upon him.
But what he was thinking was,
‘I got to decide quick.
He delivered that nigger baby all right, they said.
But this is different.
I ought to done it last week, seen ahead about a doctor instead of waiting, having to explain now, at the last minute, hunt from house to house until I find one that will come, that will believe the lies that I will have to tell.
I be dog if it don’t look like a man that has done as much lying lately as I have could tell a lie now that anybody would believe, man or woman.
But it don’t look like I can.
I reckon it just ain’t in me to tell a good lie and do it well.’
He walked rapidly, his footsteps hollow and lonely in the empty street; already his decision was made, without his even being aware of it.
To him there was nothing either of paradox or of comedy about it.
It had entered his mind too quickly and was too firmly established there when he became aware of it; his feet were already obeying it.
They were taking him to the home of the same doctor who had arrived too late at the delivery of the negro child at which Hightower had officiated with his razor and his book.
The doctor arrived too late this time, also.
Byron had to wait for him to dress.
He was an oldish man now, and fussy, and somewhat disgruntled at having been wakened at this hour.
Then he had to hunt for the switch key to his car, which he kept in a small metal strong box, the key to which in turn he could not find at once.
Neither would he allow Byron to break the lock.
So when they reached the cabin at last the east was primrosecolor and there was already a hint of the swift sun of summer.
And again the two men, both older now, met at the door of a one-room cabin, the professional having lost again to the amateur, for as he entered the door, the doctor heard the infant cry.
The doctor blinked at the minister, fretfully.
“Well, doctor,” he said, “I wish Byron had told me he had already called you in.
I’d still be in bed.” He thrust past the minister, entering. “You seem to have had better luck this time than you did the last time we consulted.
Only you look about like you need a doctor yourself.
Or maybe it’s a cup of coffee you need.” Hightower said something, but the doctor had gone on, without stopping to listen.
He entered the room, where a young woman whom he had never seen before lay wan and spent on a narrow army cot, and an old woman in a purple dress whom he had also never seen before, held the child upon her lap.
There was an old man asleep on a second cot in the shadow.
When the doctor noticed him, he said to himself that the man looked like he was dead, so profoundly and peacefully did he sleep.
But the doctor did not notice the old man at once.
He went to the old woman who held the child. “Well, well,” he said. “Byron must have been excited.
He never told me the whole family would be on hand, grandpa and grandma too.” The woman looked up at him.
He thought,
‘She looks about as much alive as he does, for all she is sitting up.
Don’t look like she has got enough gumption to know she is even a parent, let alone a grandparent.’
“Yes,” the woman said.
She looked up at him, crouching over the child.
Then he saw that her face was not stupid, vacuous.
He saw that at the same time it was both peaceful and terrible, as though the peace and the terror had both died long ago and come to live again at the same time.
But he remarked mainly her attitude at once like a rock and like a crouching beast.
She jerked her head at the man; for the first time the doctor looked full at him where he lay sleeping upon the other cot.