No thanks. Thanks but no thanks.

At that point Doc Wynkoop grasped the baby firmly by the ears and head, rotating the body forty-five degrees, and drew it forth. Drew me forth, protesting mightily—no need here for a whack on the rump—and tied off the cord, knotting the umbilicus in a knot that’s held to this very day. He swabbed away the silvery caul, that shining suit of lights, like the garb of a traveler from outer space, smeared the tender parts with unguent oil, and laid the child on his mother’s breast. She took him to suck at once, silencing for a time the howls of indignation. She named the boy Henry.

From The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel (1988)

The doctor passed the afterbirth to Joe, who probably fed it to the hogs. Grandmother Gatlin arrived soon afterward, a little late. Joe passed a five-dollar bill to the doctor and the promise to deliver, within a week, five bushel of potatoes and a home-cured ham.

Doc Wynkoop climbed into his black Model A Ford and drove down the rutted red-dog road through night and falling curtains of snow toward the highway and the town of Shawnee, ten miles south. We had no doctor in Stump Creek. Not since the death of Doctor Jim fifty years before—and Doctor Jim was an Indian, a shaman Shawnee medicine man, not an M.D.

Henry Holyoak Lightcap was the second child. My brother William, about two years older, complained loudly from his crib in the adjoining room, beneath the sloping ceiling of the east roof, under the impression that he’d been temporarily forgotten. Correct.

Winter nights. In frozen February the child lay snug in his mother’s arms. Outside, beyond frost-covered windows, the ice-shagged pines stood under the Appalachian moon, mute with suffering. Frost glittered on crusty waves of snow that covered the pasture, the frozen brook, the stubble of the cornfields. The moonlight tinted the snow with the pale blue tones of skim milk. Through the stillness came the sound of an old oak cracking in the woods, branch split by freezing sap. Then came the wail of the iron locomotive on the C&O line, burning coal as it chugged up grade toward Trimble’s crossing a mile away, pulling fifty-five gondola cars of bituminous coal to the coke ovens of Morgantown and Wheeling and Pittsburgh.

Desolation of the iron cry—Song of the Old 97—loneliness of the silent hills, silvered furl of black smoke and white steam rising toward the moon.

The moon shone down on rigid ice floes in Crooked Creek, on Stump Creek, Rocky Glen and Cherry Run, on the nameless streamlet that drained the wooded hillsides of Lightcap Hollow. The moonlight glanced and glinted on the ice-filled ruts of the road, lay on the granite and sandstone monuments of the Jefferson Church graveyard where tiny American flags hung stiff in the gelid air above brass stars bearing the initials GAR—Grand Army of the Republic. The winter moon was so bright, so clear, you could read the names on the stone, the names of our buried neighbors: Ginter, Gatlin, Hinton, Hankerson, Fetterman, Finley, Rayne, Risheberger, Holyoak, Mears, Lightcap, Clymer, Trumbull, Trimble, Stuart, Stewart, Stitler, Prothrow, Groft, Bennett, Duncan, Dalton…to name but the oldtimers, kinsmen and neighbors, enemies and strangers.