"I've got to get on back," the doctor was saying. "There's plenty of sickness this time of year, and folks will be calling for me. In winter I'm a popular man, you know. An old, tired, popular man! Ah, Jodie, I got called out at midnight last night, and I haven't seen my pillow since." They stopped at the yard gate. As the doctor unhooked the latch he turned and looked straight at Papa. "Jodie, I just hope the Good Lord will forgive me for times when I meddle in His affairs." "You don't meddle." "Sometimes, it's not what you do, Jodie. It's the way you say a thing, or don't, that changes matters. I'm telling you, this whole business worries me." "It's enough to turn anybody's hair." "Me and you might have made a mistake—mainly me. Maybe we should've reported Ward's whiskey still before we did. Maybe he wouldn't be dead today, if we had. Maybe it's a blessing he is dead. I don't know. When I think of that stillborn baby, I— Damn my tongue! Jodie, forget I mentioned a baby! My tongue slipped! I gave my word not to—" "I already knew about the baby—Nannie and me. And we're not aiming to talk it. 'Twouldn't help Wes's daughter, nor nobody." "That's the truth! Jodie, I don't know how you look at it, but as I see it, it's best now to let Ward's folks bury him and not stir up a ruckus over the technicalities of just how he died. Far as I'm concerned, it don't make a continental how the gun went off. It's not the how of death that's of any consequence. It's death. If there was ever anything any 'count in Ward Lawson—and there must've been at some time; nobody's worthless all their livelong life—it died a good while back. When, I don't know. But it wasn't Sunday at sundown when that lead ripped through his jugular vein!" Papa and the doctor walked on through the gate into the grove of trees in front of Miss Ophelia's house, where the dozen or more buggies and wagons and saddle horses were waiting. But Doctor Elton wasn't bobbing and bouncing along the way he usually walked. He was dragging his feet, and when he got to the side of his big black buggy, he had to catch one hand on the dashboard and the other on the armrest so he could pull himself up to the seat. Papa tugged at the bridle bit of one mare just enough to make her start backing the buggy a few feet. The doctor gave both mares a light touch with the whip, and they struck up a smooth trot. Turning halfway round, Doctor Elton lifted his hand to Papa. When I saw Papa was going toward the barn instead of coming back to the porch, I scooted down the bare, windy hall to the kitchen. More and more folks, most of them strangers, kept coming to the Lawson house. And it seemed that everything was going wrong and nobody knew what to do. I didn't know what to do either. Mama said for me just to be sweet and stay out of the way.