I am the house doctor, and they will keep me here feeding me grits and eggs you could half sole shoes with. Either that or whatever it is gets well on its own or eats the son of a bitch’s whole head the rest of the way off, either of which ought to result in them turning me loose.

He could find sense in this, of a sort. There was logic here, the reasoning of a functioning mind. Anything was better than yesterday. Yesterday had been random, senseless, as uncontrollable as the spill of dice from a cup. He had known in his heart they had been riding him to his death, though why they had blindfolded him was just another piece he could not explain.

He doctored the man’s mouth three more days, keeping track of the passage of time by the trips the woman made bringing meals and by the difference in the sounds he heard, then on the fourth they came for him in the middle of the night.

It was cold and spitting snow, he could see its slow slant by the lantern light. They passed between the cribs of slavequarters, the trunks of enormous live oaks pale and transparent-looking in the rolling fog. They went toward a house built on an elevation and silhouetted black against the slightly paler sky so it looked depthless, a false front with rectangular knockouts through which dim yellow light flared.

A story-and-a-half log house with a dogtrot between two sections of rooms. He was led up a dark stairwell to an attic bedroom, ushered through the door. It was warm and comfortable in the room, the first time Mayfield had been warm in four days. An enormous fire crackled in the fireplace and fire logs were ricked in against a stone woodbox.

There was a brass bed in one corner of the room, on which a young girl lay partially covered with a blue sheet. Her long hair was the color of cornsilk. She seemed to be very young. She was watching Mayfield with wide blue eyes, a look congested with a mixture of fear and horror. Through the sheet he could see that she was grotesquely pregnant, and he divined at last the true reason for his presence, though not the methods that had ensured it. He set the bag down at the foot of the bed.

You men get out of here, he said, feeling better and more confident, at last in a situation he felt master of. A set of circumstances experience and training had made him familiar with.

The black man turned and went out and closed the door behind him. The white man said something. The malady that had affected him seemed to be dissipating. His face was not nearly as swollen, and Mayfield was able to understand a few words he told the black woman. Nonetheless the woman turned to him.

Old Marster say he ain’t trustin this gal to no nigger midwife. Says it’s a life for a life. He say tell you if she dies you die too.

The whiskered man said something else.

The heavyset black woman sat by the bedside, her face a gargoyle of sorrow, statuary carved with infinite care from black ebony. Mayfield turned the sheet back, and she fought him weakly so that he thought to himself, well, little lady, if you’d fought over the cover that hard nine months ago, me and you wouldn’t be doing it now. He uncurled the girl’s fingers from it, her eyes blank and then altering to a kind of bitter spitefulness. As if it was all his doing, as if she blamed him for planting the seed that he had been kidnapped and bounced blindfolded in a wagon a hard day’s ride to harvest. He watched her eyes, then abruptly a whine of pain assaulted her so that she clenched them tight, made a soft mewing sound like a cat. He shoved the gown up till it swaddled about her hips. Her water had broken and the bedclothes were stained a pale rose pink.

The man sat on the hearth, and with a hawkbilled knife he cut himself a childsized sliver of chewing tobacco and inserted it in his rosebud mouth, worried it about irritably as if it brought him small satisfaction.

When the birth happened, it happened without incident, almost anticlimactic, and Mayfield felt a curious sense of disappointment, as if he had been brought this far for nothing. It was a boy, beetred and squalling and wrinkled, a full head of sandy red hair.

Mayfield washed him with soap and water the old woman brought him, wrapped him in a clean muslin shift.