Delph only glanced through the remainder of the long letter. She saw some mention of timber lands from her father and a bank account from her mother, both to be given her when she was twenty-one, or at John's discretion if she married before that age. John had thought it over, and from all the talk he'd heard of Marsh, decided he was at least an honest man, maybe a bit on the stingy side. Delph must keep her property in her own name, but John advised her to have Marsh see to the timber. A good bit of it was right for cutting, and could be sold for a pretty penny.
Delph flung the letters aside, seized the bell by her bed, and rang it so violently that Mrs. Elliot, Vinie, and Myrtle, the cook, all came on the run. "I want somebody to telephone Perce's for Marsh," she said. When she had convinced them that she had not had a forewarning of death, that she was not out of her head, that the evening was early and the Higginbottoms would not have gone to bed, Mrs. Elliot went to call Marsh. She came back and listened with surprised, horror-stricken eyes when Delph told her what she meant to do.
"Emma Creekmoore might be a good healthy, well-meaning black woman, but she knew nothing of sanitation. She mightwhy she might even let her children touch the baby ormaybe he would even have to sleep in the same bed with the last Creekmoreor with Emma. She might even give him a meat skin to suck as she gave her own babies." Mrs. Elliot's voice failed her, her eyes filled with tears, and when Delph's only answer to her objections was set lips and defiant eyes, she left the room.
Marsh came not long after. When Delph told him what she meant to do, surprise and consternation so held him by the tongue that he could do little but stand, clasping and unclasping the foot-board of her bed. He struggled against her with his eyes, seeing nothing more than certain death for his son if Delph's dictates were obeyed. He tried a last argumentative, "DelphI don't know much about babiesbut from all I've read, why."
"An' what have you read?"
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"Nothin' much but government bulletins.I sent for all I could get last fall before."
Delph dropped back to her pillows with a shrieking, sobbing wail. "Youyou mean you'd try to raise our baby on a bulletin like alike your pigs. It's not a baby to you, but just somethin' you'd like to see growlike corn."
Marsh swore an oath he'd picked up in Mexico addressed to the Virgin Mary, belatedly remembered that it was a black one even for the oil fields, and after one glance at Delph's outraged eyes he fled from the room. He rushed for comfort to Mrs. Elliot and the baby, but things were little better there. Mrs. Elliot cried into a lace handkerchief and wished Mr. Elliot were home. Delph seemed to have much respect for him. He could maybe talk some sense into her head.
The baby lay and cried its troubled, tremulous cry. Vinie came coated and hatted with a traveling bag in her hand. "Miz Elliot, I gathered up its things. Delph'ull have her way or dietakin' it to a place like Creekmore's," and Vinie looked beaten and woebegone with her black eyes dull and robbed of their usual laughter.
Mrs. Elliot nodded and sobbed over the baby. "You'd better go with Marsh. You carry its things and a light so he won't fall."
Marsh shifted uneasily from one foot to the other and fingered the broken arrow he carried in his pocket. "Th' weather's mighty cold an' misty to take a baby out in," he said after a time.
Mrs. Elliot sighed and wiped her eyes, and he continued, "Couldn't we wait a day or soI meantill I talked to Dorie or a doctor orsomethin'?"
No one answered him, and he tried again with a brightening of his eyes. "Maybe Sober an' Emma won't want th' baby. They've got six a their own."
"And only four rooms," Mrs. Elliot sobbed and looked ready to collapse.
He waited, and when no one offered encouragement he understood what they were thinking. It was Delph's baby and she was to have her say. He picked up the basket, waited while Mrs. Elliot pulled a blanket over the baby's face, and then went out the back way. On the porch steps he heard Vinie walking behind him, and saw the shine of her flashlight on the brick walk. "I'd rather go by
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myself," he said. "You wait an' bring his things out laterif he needs 'em."
He walked on with Vinie's tongue like a senseless clatter in his head. He'd better let her go with him. He'd need a light, and he ought to take the upper road across the pastures. It would not be so muddy as the one across the bottoms. But he went on and left Vinie calling by the gate.
The child gradually hushed its crying, and they walked on together down the hill and by the house and into the barn hall. He stopped there and set his load on the ground. The silence of the basket troubled him. He lighted the lantern he kept in the barn, and hunkered on his heels and pulled the blanket back a little way, and looked at his child. Caesar came sniffing at the basket, and the child opened his gray eyes, wider than Marsh had ever seen them, and lay looking at the dog and the man and the shadowy spaces of the barn with a faint curiosity, untouched by fear. Maude whinnied in her stall, and somewhere pigs grunted and squealed softly in their sleep. And the child listened to the sounds, and was quiet with his eyes wide with wonder. "You like a barn, you little devil," Marsh whispered, and waited a moment or so before covering the basket. He blew out the lantern then and they walked on across the muddy corn fields.
Marsh walked more and more slowly as he neared the Creekmore place. When he came to the foot bridge that crossed the creek to Sober's steep farm with its narrow strip of bottom land, he stopped and uncovered the basket a bit, but it was too dark to see.
He stopped again at the front yard gate and looked at the small poor house on the hill side, looming dimly out of the heavy gloom. The flood had gone three feet above the floor. He had the sudden fear that the place was maybe not yet driednot a fit house for a weakly baby. Caesar began a cursing and a calling of Sober's three hounds vile sounding names, and they were answering in kind. While Marsh stood, trying to think up a way of calling that he, Marsh Gregory, had brought him his baby on Delph's orders without so much as a by-your-leave, and he hoped Emma would refuse it so that he could take it back to where it belonged, Sober asked Caesar what did he, Mr. Gregory's dog mean, coming to bother his hounds.
"I'm with him," Marsh called, and a moment later Sober came running in his shoes and a voluminous night shirt that made Caesar bark the harder.
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''Miz Gregory, is she worse?'' Sober began, but when the baby cried he, after a moment of listening, began a loud calling of Emma.
Marsh went with him to the kitchen door, for someone slept in every room but the kitchen. Sober lighted the lamp, and told Marsh to put the basket on the table. Emma came soon with unlaced shoes and a dress pulled hastily over her nightgown. She looked angry and sullen, throwing black accusative glances at Sober who stood laying a stick of wood on the half dead coal in the stove. "Since th' day that youngen come I've asked that man ever' day to go tell 'em to let me nuss an' raise it till it's weanedan' what does he do but do nothin'.Law, honey don't you cry. Yo starvin' days are over." The last remark was addressed to the basket, not to Sober.
Marsh stood with his hat in his hand, feeling still that some talk or explanation was necessary. He watched Emma, cautiously from the corners of his eyesthe way she went pawing into the basket and pulled the baby out with what seemed to him precious little concern for its delicacy. She cradled it carelessly on one big black arm and went prodding its belly, its back, its head and its toes, and seemed in no wise alarmed by the outraged howls. "It's plenty strong or it would ah died 'fore nowstarved like it is," she said with a pleasant smile that made her fat black cheeks seem fatter still.
She studied Marsh critically as she seated herself in a straight backed chair and began a mighty thumping back and forth that made her fat body dance and quiver. "Mistah Gregory," she said after a thump or so, "you might as well go along. He an'what's his name?"
"It'sit's."
The front legs of the chair came down with a violent bang"Mistah Gregory, yo'awl don't mean you've not named yo youngena month old. Lawd G
od but that's what ails it."
Marsh swallowed, and looked to Sober for comfort, but Sober's eyes were troubled. "Yo ought to allus name a baby, Mistah Gregory'fore it's three days old. Didn't you know that?"
Marsh shook his head.
"Yo'll have to name him now," Emma said in tones that invited no contradiction. She smiled down at the red-brown curly head on the pillow, "He's got a funny little burry head," she said.
Marsh glanced wildly about the room, as if he might possibly pick a name from the air. "Yo name's Marshall, ah reckin, Mistah Gregory. That's fine soundin'," Emma suggested.
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"He ought to have Miz Gregory's nameCostellothat's th' way white folks used to do in th' old days," Sober said.
"Delph's been right sick, an' we've never thought much on namin' him," Marsh said, "but well." He stopped and stood twisting his hat. Thanking Sober for saving Delph's life when there was not another man in the neighborhood who could have done it was a thing he had never tried. It seemed foolish to smear a great thing like that up with words. "Butwellyou saved Delph an' it.''
"Him, not it," Emma interrupted with an especially violent thump of the chair.
"You saved him from th' floodsoso I thought I'd kind a like to call him after youSober."
Sober fell against the wall in a fit of embarrassed laughter. "Lawdy, here Ah've been namin' youngens after white men but this is th' first 'un Ah've ever had named after me."
Emma shifted the baby to her right arm, looked at him while she said in a loud solemn voice, "Well, Sober Marshall Costello Gregory, you've got a name. But me, Ah think Ah'll call you Burr-Head." She glanced at Marsh. "You might as well go, Mistah Gregory, you look tired," she suggested as if to be rid of him.
He walked slowly toward the door, but stopped with his hand on the knob. "Vinie or mewe'll bring itshis things down tomorrow an'." He cleared his throat and tried to give his words proper emphasis and some tone of authority which he did not feel. "Mrs. Elliot has some books on babies you maybe ought to read."
Emma's yowling, derisive laughter cut short his little speech. He heard a chorus of soft giggles from the back of the room and looked up to see some four or five of the younger Creekmores peeping at him around the door. He looked at them and the black heads above the white night gowns disappeared, but he felt that they were laughing at him still. He tried a stern glance on Emma, and though she lowered her eyes her shoulders continued to shake with laughter. He wondered that a thing as little as his baby could change a family so. Last fall and winter when Emma came to wash for Delph it was always, "Yas suh, Mistah Gregory," or "What evah you say, Miz Gregory." Now she sat and laughed at him.
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She stopped suddenly and smiled down at the baby and then at him. "Mistah Gregory, would you go givin' Sober there a book on how to raise watahmelons?"
"Well seein' as how I learned most a what I know from him, it wouldn't be exactly sensible," Marsh said.
"Well it's all th' same with me an' youngens," Emma said, and he left her slapping her knee in another fit of laughter.
He had no heart to return to Elliot's or to Perce's. The evening was early yet. Perce and Lizzie most likely sat in wait for him to learn how Delph and the baby fared. He wished he could see Dorie and learn what she thought of the business, but outside of her he didn't think he could face another woman that evening. He stopped at the barn and made the rounds with the lantern, and when Caesar, instead of going down the land and up the hill, trotted toward the house, Marsh followed him, and spent the night on one of the feather beds that Juber had brought.
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19
March came with mighty trumpeting winds, a great blowsy, strong-armed woman who scoured the earth with rain and wind and sun. The sycamore limbs grew gray again, and on the hill pasture the grass and unfolding clover leaves were green and lush and tender. Clouds raced all day long in a high blue windy sky, and at night the wind sang and whistled through the little cedar trees on the river hill.
Marsh, batching now at home, would listen to the wind and smile, think of Delph, able to be up and about, and of Burr-Head, getting bigger and so mean his hide wouldn't hold him, so Emma said with pride. That child was always up to something; one day he hit her own Sammy right in the nose, and another day he grabbed Louvinie's crackled meat skin and sucked it a bit before Louvinie had the heart to take it away from him. Though it happened regularly twice a week, it was always a great occasion when Emma brought Burr-Head to see Delph, and after the first visit Delph was more like herself than she had been for weeks.
That afternoon when Marsh walked down the hill, he stopped a time in the road above the yard, and looked at his place. He liked to look at his house, especially the great chimney that he and Sober had built from gray, unpolished limestone quarried from his land. He liked to build in stone, and now when he looked at the chimney and thought of Delph and Burr-Head, an old dream stirred and filled his head. He could not remember the beginnings of the dream, no more than he could recall the sights and things heard about that had shaped it through the years. Sometimes, if the dream came while he
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was alone, not too busy and with a bit of pencil handy, he would draw lines and squares; study them, erasing here, adding a mark there, lost in the figure until he remembered that it was all a foolishness that tricked a man into wasting his time. But whenever down the river hill he saw the good, strong, granite-like limestone and then the chimney he had made, thoughts of a whole house built of gray stone would come into his mind.
He would have it on a hill, up in the pasture, say, near the grove of little walnut trees where he and Delph had used to watch the sun go down. Sometimes he thought he would like to talk to Delph of such things, but somehow he never did. Through the spring she was too taken up with thought for Burr-Head to give more than half an ear to anything he told her of the farm.
Many times when he came away from her he felt a loneliness and a troubled wordless foreboding of something worse than loneliness; he wished she would seem more eager to come home, would go against Mrs. Elliot's determination that she stay until the weather was warm and settled. Still, he had little time for tortured probings into Delph's mind. Nights found him tired and ready for sleep; the days were filled with work and plans and something else that he had scarcely ever hadthe interest and good will of a neighborhood.
He found less speculation in the eyes that watched him now. More men greeted him in Hawthorne Town and by the road, and the county seat merchants offered him credit, while High Pockets Armstrong and other hill men whom he scarcely knew would stop him in the street to ask after his family, for the whole country had heard of Sober Marshall Costello Gregory. The piece that Katy wrote for the Westover Bugle on Sober's rescue of Delph not only made the front page in the county paper, but was mentioned in a Lexington paper as well, and so great was Katy's delight that she played hookey from school for a week, and spent the time in helping the neighbor women straighten the Gregory house.
While Marsh lived alone on the lower farm many a farmer from both sides of the river came down to see how he was making out, and give a hand or lend advice on this or that. He planned a tobacco cropnothing large, no more than a couple of acres at mostand seasoned tobacco farmers from all over the county offered advice on the buying and setting of plants, fertilizer, the cheapest and best
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tobacco sticks, and what sprays to use. He listened to long arguments over high late topping and one suckering versus low early topping and suckering three or four times, and learned from Wiley Davis, a hill farmer from east of Town, that the best way to make tobacco seed sprout in a hurryin case a man got behind in his plantingwas to leave it for a few days under a setting hen.
However, the prospect of his first try at tobacco was tame compared to another venture into which he was led, more by community opinion and suggestion, than his own efforts, though he was by no means backwards in the business. Dorie's bull Solomo
n had long been a source of worry to Dorie's children, the neighbors, and Angus. Solomon's disposition had grown worse with age until even Angus scarcely dared approach him without a pitch fork, and though he wore a ring in his nose, getting a lead rope through it was no easy matter. Poke Easy, almost every time he was home, had hinted to Marsh that he wished a good neighboring farmer would buy Solomon. One of these days somebody would come in and find Dorie gored to death for she wouldn't listen to reasonno more than would Katy. If Angus were not about, and somebody came with a cow to be bred, either Dorie or Katy would grab up a pitch fork and go after Solomon.
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