They yearned for an Oliver, of course, but in the event he did not materialize, it would be a rather satisfactory compromise to substitute a “t” for the “r” which they would have preferred.
So they called him Oliver and added October to that, as a tribute to the month in which he was born.
The Baxter residence, a two-story frame building, stood at the top of a tree-covered knoll on the edge of the town, overlooking an extensive swamp in the center of which lay a reed-encircled pond where at certain seasons of the year migratory wild ducks and geese disported themselves in perfect security, for so treacherous was the vast morass guarding this little body of water that even the most daring and foolhardy of hunters feared to cross it. These evil acres bore the name of Death Swamp. They belonged to Oliver Baxter. He bought the whole tract, four hundred acres or more, for twenty-five dollars, and with a droll sense of humor described it as his back yard.
The wild October gale had been blowing all day long, a bleak legacy of the blizzard that swept over the land during the night. There were high, white drifts in sheltered nooks and corners; a fine, sleety snow cut mercilessly through the air, beating against window panes like sweeps of bird shot, scuttling through reluctantly opened doors, swirling in restless fury across porches, all to the tune of a shrill wind that came whistling out of the north. In an upstairs corner room, warmed by a big, carefully tended sheet-iron stove, young Oliver first saw the light of day. No finer “young-un” had ever been born, according to Mrs. Serepta Grimes, and Serepta was an authority on babies. It was she who took command of Oliver, his mother and his father, the house itself, and all that therein was. She was there hours ahead of Dr. Robinson, and she was still there hours after his departure. Throughout the town of Rumley, Serepta was known as a “blessing and a comfort.” Her word was law. Fond mothers and frightened fathers submitted to her gentle but arbitrary regulations without a murmur of protest. Joe Sikes claimed—and no one disputed him—that you couldn’t come into or go out of the world properly without being assisted by Serepta Grimes. She was that kind of a woman.
She saw to it that all the cracks around the window frames were securely stuffed with paper to keep the wind from coming in; she kept Oliver’s beaddled father from darting into the room every time he heard the baby cry; she gave peremptory directions to neighbor-women who came in to see what they could do; she kept the fire going, the kitchen running, and, by virtue of her own vast experience and authority, she kept the doctor in his place. Perhaps a hundred times during the day she had patiently answered “Yes” to the senior Oliver’s tremulous question: “Is she going to pull through, Serepty?”
In this cozy little room and in the presence of the doctor and Serepta Grimes, young Oliver was weighed by his father. For this purpose, a brand-new, perfectly balanced meat-scales, selected from stock, was brought up from the hardware store by Mr. Sikes, who, while being denied the privilege of witnessing the ceremony, subsequently was able to collect fifty cents from another bosom friend of the family, Mr. Silas Link, undertaker and upholsterer. The infant weighed nine and a quarter pounds, Joseph winning his wager by a scant quarter of a pound. The two worthies also had made another bet as to the sex of the infant, Mr. Sikes giving odds of two to one that it would be a boy. Up to seven o’clock in the evening, fully twelve hours after the baby was born, neither Mr. Sikes nor Mr. Link had the slightest idea who had won the bet, for, try as they would, there seemed to be absolutely no way of getting any authentic information from upstairs, owing to the speechless condition of Oliver senior and the drastic reticence of Serepta Grimes.
And so, as the story of Oliver October really begins at seven o’clock in the evening, regardless of all that may have transpired in the preceding twelve hours of his life, we will open the narrative with Mr. Joseph Sikes hovering in solitary gloom over the base-burner in the sitting-room to the right of the small vestibule hall whose door opened upon the snow-covered, wind-swept front porch. For the better part of an hour he had been sitting there, listening with tense, apprehensive ears to the brisk footsteps in the room overhead. The sitting-room was cold, for Joseph had neglected to close the front door tightly on entering the house and the wind had blown it ajar, permitting quite an accumulation of snow to carpet the hall. He had purposely left the sitting-room door open in order to hear the better what was going on at the top of the stairs. His attention was called to this almost criminal act some fifteen or twenty minutes after its commission by the sound of a man’s voice in the upper hall. It was an agitated voice and it was raised considerably in the effort to make itself heard by some one on the other side of a closed, intervening door.
“Say, Serepty, I—I think the front door is open,” the voice was saying. Joseph wasn’t sure, but he thought it belonged to Oliver Baxter. At any rate, the speaker was in the upper hall. After a moment it continued. “Like as not Mary and the baby will ketch cold and die if—”
A door squeaked upstairs and then came the voice of Serepta Grimes.
“My goodness! Of course, it’s open. Haven’t you got sense enough to go down and shut it? Who left it open anyway? You?”