Ellen laid her infant in the cradle which Marthy Shuck loaned her. He was a serious creature, lying asleep nearly all the day, a good baby, Marthy said, and Ellen left him to his solemn goodness while she churned the milk and swept the floors and planted the late garden. Marthy Shuck had helped her with the birth of the child. It, the infant, was a joke to Jasper, for its littleness brought from him great roars of mirth and subdued oaths, pledges of a joyous paternity. ‘Dadburn his little hide! Come to your Pappy. God knows! Look at it! God knows!’

They named the child Henry John. Jasper laid all his savings in Ellen’s hand and told her to get the child everything he would need. He did not aim that his child should want some small thing and not have it, lawyer or no lawyer, for God knew he was a little thing, just look at him! Then Ellen said she would get Job Tucker to make a cradle, for Job could work in wood like a master hand, and they could send Marthy’s cradle back. She sang to the child in the quiet of the cabin, morning and afternoon, song after song, from the first she had heard Nellie sing to the new songs Marthy Shuck had. Or she would stop as she held the child in her arms, dropping the song half-sung, and look at his flesh, at his eyes, his hair, his motions, another being that he was, apart from her and beyond her reach, and what did he want in life?

What would Henry John want beyond what she wanted, and how could he want differently or more? She would try to lean down into his being and ask what did he want, to ask his soft neck and his crumpled legs, to ask his little round belly. She spent the money sparingly for the cradle, bargaining with Job Tucker until he lowered his price, saving the rest of the money for Jasper against the time of the trial. She tried to look beyond that time and to see them going about their ways, but every hour now pointed toward the week in October when the court would convene, and if Joe Phillips had signed to keep Jasper from having to lie in jail during the months before the trial, she had asked him to sign and he had done so after a day of thinking. If Jasper ran away the farmer would forfeit a thousand dollars, but Jasper would not run away without her, she thought, and it was she who had asked Phillips to sign. Sometimes she thought, turning about among the tasks in the cabin, that Jasper might think to run away as being the easiest course, or she would wonder if Jasper so thought, or she would look at him as he came in at the door with the stovewood in his arms, and the swift thought would arise. Then he would lean over the cradle and take Henry John, trundling out his great endearments, until the child knew him and beat his arms and legs in the air, quivering with delight because he was being taken. Henry would come, bringing Nellie, and then there would be a great noise in the cabin, for Henry would sing a loud song while he jolted Henry John in a chair, and Ellen would forget every other way but the way of that day and she would give them a basket filled with vegetables from her garden patch when they left or she would tell Nellie to keep the heifer but that she would take away her own little cow that Mr Al gave her when it brought milk again. She was happy to be able to give gifts.