Well well, he said, kneeling, you a mouthy chap if ye are a poor’n. He poked a finger at it as one might a tomato or a melon. Little woodsy colt ain’t ye? Looks like somebody meant for ye to stay in the woods.
He folded the towel about it and picked it up and holding it against the bib of his overalls with one arm began his way down the creek again.
When he reached the bridge and the road he had not been gone two hours. The child blinked mindlessly at the high sun. The tinker entered the woods on the other side of the road where he had hidden the cart and searched among his goods until he came up with some cheap gingham in which to wrap the child. It drooped into sleep against his thin chest, its face mauve and wrinkled as though beset already with some anguish or worry. He placed it between some sacks in the floor of the cart and regarded it.
Well, he said, you alive if ye ain’t kickin. He stooped and took up the tongues of the cart and set off through the woods, into the road, the wending trackless corridor down which echoed the clatter of his wagon and the endless tympanic collision of his wares.
He did not stop when he reached the store. He turned left onto the state road, going north now, moving with the same tireless pace. The child had not cried and he had not looked at it. Late in the afternoon he stopped to eat and it did cry, a thin and labored squall as he bent above it, his mouth slow and ruminative, chewing, dry cornbread collecting in his beard and sifting down upon the child. Tell em about it, he said.
When the sun had gone he went on in darkness, the child quiet again as if motion were specific against anything that ailed it. The moon came up and grew small and the road before him went white as salt. He jangled on through an iceblue light in his amulet of sound.
Before midnight he entered a town. Past a mill where a wheel rumbled drunkenly under its race and water fell with a windy slash. Past stores and shops, dark clustered houses, heralded and attended by the outcry of dogs down the empty streets and on again into the patched farmland. Another mile and he came to a wagon drive and a house a short way from the road that sat likewise in darkness. He pulled up before the door and lowered the cart to the ground. Halloo there, he called.
He waited. After a while light appeared very faint and yellow among the weather-riven slats and a woman’s voice said: Who’s out there?
Me, said the tinker.
Come in, she said, swinging open the door and standing there in a rough shift with a tallow candle in one hand.
He stamped his boots ceremonially once each on the sill and entered. Howdy, he said.
Late hours for a old man ain’t it? she said.
It’s late hours for a young one. I need me a nurse woman.
I’ve never questioned that.
No … here, don’t shut the door. It’s for this here youngern.
What youngern.
One I got in the cart. Bring that candle here.
She followed him out suspiciously and peered past his shoulder down into the cart where the child lay sleeping.
Looky here, he said.
They Lord God.
Here, let me fetch him out.
You take this candle, she said. I’ll fetch him out.
It came awake with a thin yowl. She gathered it up and they went into the house and stretched it out on the crude board table, hovering above it nervously. Lord, she said, it ain’t but just borned.
I know it, he said.
Where all did it come from?
I found it in the woods, he said. It’d been thowed away and I found it.
This poor thing needs fed.
I know it, he said. Is they ary nurse about here?
She was biting the backs of her knuckles. Mrs Laird, she said. She’s just got her a new chap.
You reckon she’ll take it?
She ain’t got nary choice. Here, he needs better wrapped. Mind him a minute while I get some things and we’ll go.
Where does she live at?
Just up the road. You mind him a minute.
Setting forth in the faint moonlight, the tinker now at her elbow and her carrying the child wrapped completely from sight, they appeared furtive, clandestine, stepping softly and soft their voices over the sandy road in shadows so foreshortened they seemed sprung and frenzied with a violence in which their creators moved with dreamy disconcern.
IT DID NOT rain again. He looked for it to, dark and starless as it was, coming down a road he could not see and through a wood kept by nothing he could hear. When he entered the glade a small hot moon came dishing up from the overcast to see him home. There was no light in the cabin. He stood for a moment with the rack of his chestbones rising and falling.
She was sleeping. When he emerged from the cabin again he was carrying the axe. He crossed the glade to the spring path and entered the woods. In a grove of blackhaws he stopped and looked about him and then sank the axe into the earth. He passed his shirtcuff across his forehead and took up the axe again and began to hack at the ground with crazed industry.