The Midwife (12 page)

I was excited to hear this news. Nonetheless, I cannot say that, at this point, I truly understood the motivations of my heart. I just knew that I wanted my daughter to be born into the safety of a
familye
. Though I’d become an orphan by choice, I wanted my child never to suffer from the loneliness that I’d felt growing up. My proving period
 
—a requirement before entering the Mennonite church
 
—lasted until the week before my daughter was born, which was pretty lenient, considering that proving times can take up to three years.

The Hopen Haus girls and I would finish taking turns bathing our awkward, beautiful bodies in the vintage claw-foot tub that had been deemed too worldly, so its gilded feet had been hacked off and replaced with halved cinder blocks. Then we brushed each other’s hair, which clung to our skulls in long, damp skeins that pregnancy hormones
had made thick and sleek. I watched the rest of them trundle off to bed with the languid strides and hooded eyes of adult children who rested in the fact that
 
—for the time being, at least
 
—they were cared for and loved.

Night after night, I would then pad downstairs in my braided hair and full-length gown I’d ordered from Lehman’s catalog. I would find Fannie Graber in the living room, rocking in a cane-backed chair so close to the open woodstove, I feared an ember would pop and she would get burned. Her arthritic fingers would be clutching a treat: a burlap bag of
schnitzappels
left over from a pie or two fragrant mugs of meadow tea, whose steam curled toward the rafters like smoke. She would pass me half of whatever she had, and the two of us would savor the rare quiet, interrupted solely by the crackling logs or the brays of the donkeys corralled in the barn.

I looked forward to those evenings more than anything all day. In Fannie’s presence, I was no longer cognizant of my faults, but confident and reassured. I felt much like I had felt when Thomas Fitzpatrick asked me to bear his child. My mother’s abandonment had skewed my perception to the point where I equated the interest and attention with love, and I would have done anything
 
—said anything
 
—to ensure that it continued. I am not saying that Thomas Fitzpatrick abused this power. Nor did Fannie.

She did not make me memorize passages from tattered books whose titles I could not pronounce. She did not make me repent of everything I had ever done before I could spotlessly join the church, and fearing our intimacy
would wane if she knew the truth, I did not tell her. Instead, with the soft smile and faraway eyes of a wizened storyteller, she told me about the Mennonite church’s beliefs and practices, which had originated when Dutch Mennonite leaders met in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, on April 21, 1632.

The Dordrecht Confession of Faith
stressed belief in Christ, the saved status of children, the importance of proclaiming God’s Word and “making disciples” (one of the reasons, Fannie confided, that she and Elmer had founded Hopen Haus), baptism of believers, absolute love, nonresistance rather than retaliation as one’s personal response to injustice and maltreatment, and the church as a nonhierarchical community.

Sometimes Fannie’s eyes would close even as her mouth continued speaking, and then her head would bob until her
kapp
strings draped her gently rising and falling chest. I often looked over and saw, by the firelight, the smile lines crinkling the skin around Fannie’s closed eyes; the coarse gray hair unraveling around her temples; the knots on the old, veined hands that had ushered so many children into the world without losing a single one.

I was in awe of this woman, and of her servant’s heart, which went above and beyond to reach out to me
 
—a wayward orphan who had found a family where no one was her kin. In that moment, even more than my desire to escape my past, I knew that I would have happily given up my
Englischer
world just to step into that hallowed realm of Fannie Graber’s love.

Despite the idyllic nature of our community, even back then it was evident just how shorthanded the midwives were. Fannie and her younger sister, Charlotte
 
—who wasn’t young at all, and so revealed just how old Fannie was
 
—and Sadie Gingrich took care of two dozen women, who’d all give birth within the next thirty-three weeks. Because of this, we were often brought into the examining room in pairs. We were taught how to measure our womb’s growth and to watch our ankles and faces for signs of water retention, and encouraged to eat whole foods and exercise daily so our bodies would be prepared for labor
 
—the most arduous task of our lives.

Although I did learn more about holistic remedies for prenatal and postpartum care
 
—blessed thistle herb, raspberry leaf tea, evening primrose oil
 
—this was my second child. What I had not learned in my first year of graduate school, I had learned from my previous birth.

Thus, my clipped answers to Fannie’s questions during class revealed both my medical background and my mounting boredom.

One morning at breakfast, Charlotte told me I was exempt from that afternoon’s class and that my next prenatal appointment would be scheduled alone. Maybe it was the awkward silence as Fannie examined me, or the weight of secrets that I could no longer shoulder along with the increasing weight of my womb. But just as I had once confided in Thom, I threw caution to the wind and told
Fannie the truth. I told her no specifics, only that I had kidnapped the very child I was about to birth. She
 
—whose rheumy eyes had seen just about everything and could imagine the rest
 
—did not falter. She just nodded, snapped off one glove that clung to the swollen knuckles of her right hand, and reached across the table to help me sit up.

“Beth,” she said, “Hopen Haus has its name for a reason. It was founded so that you and others like you can find hope to begin again.” She paused. “Now if you’d taken a child off the street, it would be another matter entirely. But the fact that the child’s inside your womb makes me think an intelligent girl like you must’ve had a reason to run.”

“They didn’t want her,” I whispered. “They decided they didn’t want her anymore, and I . . .” I touched the stunning sphere housing my unseen baby, who was already in the transverse position in preparation to descend. Tears dripped on the sheet spooled around the lower half of my body, as in horror I imagined what could have been done. “And you see, I wanted her so badly . . .”

Fannie went over to the standing basin she called a
weschbohl
. She scrubbed her hands and forearms with a nail brush lathered with the harsh lye soap we used on our clothes. Looking over her shoulder, she smiled, though her eyes remained opaque. “For the sake of yourself and the child,” she said, “you can’t live in fear. . . .You must let yourself live.”

After this conversation, I was excused from laundry duty and asked to assist Fannie in standard checkups. I
tried to explain that a majority of my learning had been acquired through bioethics classes and not through firsthand experience, but she did not seem concerned. She did not seem concerned about anything, really. And I would have doubted Fannie’s ability to manage Hopen Haus if I hadn’t seen, beneath her dimpled smile and kind blue eyes, a woman who
 
—like some New Testament miracle
 
—could feed a houseful of pregnant women with venison and a few loaves of bread.

I’m on my way to the springhouse for ham and cheese when that guy named Wilbur Byler comes charging out of the springhouse, his head down and gorilla hands balled at his sides. For some reason I freak out and hide behind a tree. I peek around it like a little kid and watch Wilbur dart across the yard faster than you’d think he could, judging by his appearance, which isn’t helped at all by his grungy, bad-fitting clothes. He’s almost to the fence that goes around Hopen Haus when he stops and turns, looking around the yard. Apparently not seeing anything worth his time, Wilbur opens the gate and jerks the bill of his baseball cap low over his eyes.

I keep standing there, barely breathing, and don’t even know why I feel so scared. Soon I hear Wilbur’s diesel passenger van start up, and I step out from behind the tree and
push on the springhouse door. Wilbur didn’t latch it, and it creaks as it opens, reminding me of every horror movie I’ve ever seen. And there have been a bunch. It’s hard to see through the gloominess, since there are only two tiny windows, and they’re covered with wooden blinds. My sweat turns cold and I start shivering. Is my body scrambling to keep up with the temperature change, or is there something creepy in here that I can’t see?

Mold, sucking up the muddy water pooling on the dirt floor, runs along the bottom half of the white stone walls. Huge hams and slabs of mystery meat are hooked to the rafters holding up the roof. Big wooden barrels with lids store apples with labels like
Golden Delicious
,
Red Delicious
,
McIntosh
, and
Granny Smith
. Next to the apple barrels are tightly sealed ceramic crocks that hold rounds of cheese wrapped in wax paper. Shiny metal pitchers filled with buttermilk are dulled with cold. Another crock holds the goat cheese that Uriah pasteurizes on the stove all the time. I can’t even stand to sniff the stuff without barfing.

Never a fan of the dark, I use the crock closest to the entrance to prop open the springhouse door. I walk back inside and stare up at the ceiling. The hams are still out of reach, even when I stand on my tippy toes. Somehow, when Lydie told me to “fetch the ham and cheese,” I’d imagined my world back home: this gigantic, stainless-steel refrigerator with a deli section of sandwich stuff kept under plastic. Not this eerie cave where anything might be hiding.

I go over to the nearest apple barrel, thinking of using it like a step stool so I can pull down the ham. Taking
hold of the top, I begin to drag it. From behind the barrel, someone stands up. I scream bloody murder and scramble backward.

“Be quiet!” Uriah yells.

I gasp, hands on knees as I catch my breath. Then I yell back, “You’re the one yelling! What’s going on, Uriah? What just happened with you and Wilbur?”

He shrugs. “I was supposed to go on a drive with him and help him load furniture, and . . . now I’m not.”

“You go driving with him often?”

“Sometimes,” he says. “If Wilbur needs help loading a piece of furniture that the Mennonites sell to the
Englisch
.”

I think of Lydie’s question about how it felt to be
Englisch
and ask, “You like it here?”

Tucking the tail of his shirt into his pants, Uriah leans against an apple barrel. “Did you know there used to be two hundred and fifty people living on this farm?” he asks, and I shake my head. “Back then,” he says, “I didn’t have to work so hard. This place wasn’t so run-down. It was really
 
—I don’t know
 
—nice.” Uriah cocks his head at me. “What about you?”

I look past him, out through the open doorway, to the light. Suddenly not liking how the tables have turned, I say, “I’m just here to
 
—to find out some things before I make a decision.”

Uriah takes off his straw hat again and plucks at the strands. “What kind of decision?”

I cup a hand over my stomach. Closing my eyes, my pulse thumps in my ears. I remember that awful night,
during supper, when I told my parents about my pregnancy, and my mom told me she could fix it
 
—like this baby was just another one of my mistakes.

I say, swallowing hard, “I left because I wasn’t sure I wanted to
 
—keep an appointment.”

Uriah says, “And you’re here to see if you do?”

I nod. My eyes sting.

“What if you don’t find what you’re looking for?”

I look over at the spring in the dirt floor, bubbling up from some unseen place. What courage those pioneers must have had, to settle here trusting that the spring would never run dry. “Guess if I don’t get my answer,” I say, “then that will be an answer in itself.” I walk out of the springhouse. Despite last week’s rain, dust swirls around my feet.

The September morning I was baptized into the Old Order Mennonite church, fog swaddled the valley below Hopen Haus like cotton bunting. The trees had turned since the premature frost. Their branches now resembled paintbrushes whose tassels had been dipped in pots of yellow, red, and gold. I had asked to be baptized in the wash-out creek running down the mountain behind Jonah and Miriam Fisher’s
haus
. Submersion seemed more definite than standard sprinkling, and I hoped that when Bishop Yoder drew me out of the water, the part of my spirit that had dried up after my mother’s departure would be replenished and whole.

I walked through the woods, flanked by the rest of the
community, on a pathway that had been made by wild turkeys scratching the decaying foliage with their claws. I looked down and touched the fabric of the cape dress Fannie had stitched in hours she did not have to spare. Tears blurred my steps. It was the first cape dress I’d worn that had not been passed down from other women in the Dry Hollow Community. This, and the delicate
kapp
that I would don after my baptism, were the first articles of clothing someone had made for me with their own two hands.

During the past twenty-two weeks, ensconced in Fannie Graber’s unconditional love, I learned that I had been trying to patch my mother’s absence with things and with people who were never meant to fill me up. Ernest Looper had let me down by not keeping in touch when I purposely walked out of his life, humiliation curling my shoulders and my stomach concealing our unborn son. Although I never should have pursued Thomas Fitzpatrick’s affections, he had let me down by agreeing that destroying his child was the best possible choice, therefore toppling off a pedestal I should have never placed him on. I had tried to fill my mother’s void by gathering proof of my intelligence: being valedictorian of my high school class
 
—granted, we only had a hundred students
 
—pursuing a master’s degree right after my bachelor’s, and planning on acquiring a PhD right after that. And yet it had all failed me. Every single person and thing.

I knew better than to place Fannie Graber in a limelight whose malignant power was as transmuting as a black hole. However, plodding toward the creek, I did pray to the Savior Fannie Graber spoke of so intimately. I prayed that
he would forgive my sins and wash me in the water, making me clean, so that the donning of my new name, Rhoda Mummau, and
kapp
would not be the only alterations. That the submersion would be a sign that I was leaving the bitterness toward my mother behind and could now be the kind of mother for which I’d always longed.

I stepped closer to the creek. Swollen from the previous night’s rain, the water rose over its embankment, the chocolate froth polishing the tips of the community’s shoes. The men, women, and children harmonized a cappella hymns led by Abner Zook, whose baritone was as commanding as his brow. Fannie and I approached the creek edge hand in hand. The sodden ground was surely placing her back in jeopardy; it had just begun to heal since the last time it gave out. But I knew Fannie wanted to lead me down to the water so that, through her uneven stance and arthritic hand, I could find the strength to stand on my own two feet.

Bishop Yoder, who was already in the creek, assisted Fannie as she minced down the muddy embankment. Her nostrils pinched and lips whitened as the water lapped up to her breastbone. The water was direct mountain runoff and therefore colder than it would have been cradled for hours against the earth. Bishop Yoder did not offer me his hand, but waded back toward the center of the creek and waited for me to follow.

A flock of crows cawed, dissonant with the community’s lilting hymns. The water made my nerves tingle. The material of my dress swirled behind me and then sank as I walked deeper into the creek, resisting the urge to gasp
from shock. Sound seemed heightened; colors appeared sharper. My daughter shifted languidly in my womb, as if the water had awakened her senses too. Fannie took my hand. Her fingers clutched for mine, seeking their warmth.

The singing ceased as abruptly as it had started. The silence somehow made me feel exposed, almost ridiculous for demanding that I be submerged in a cold, wash-out creek when we could have sprinkled my lowered head in shelter and in warmth. I glanced up to see the three deacons standing on the creek bank, their arms folded. They wore black pants and black coats with the collars pulled up around their ears. Some of the women
 
—Esther Glick, Anna Miller, and Ruth Erb
 
—wore black bonnets with the regulatory pleated two-inch brims. This helped to conceal their eyes. But their lips appeared so dour, I wondered if they would truly welcome me into their cloistered community with a dip in water and a few well-placed words.

Fannie squeezed my hand. I squeezed back and smiled, although my features trembled with fear. I shifted my gaze from the community rimming the bank to Bishop Yoder, who had begun to speak in Pennsylvania Dutch. At first, Fannie tried to interpret for him, but I shook my head, letting her know it was all right to stop. I wanted to immerse myself in the words of another language, in the customs of this antiquated world, where I prayed all of my troubles and sins could truly be forgotten, giving my daughter and me hope to begin again.

Bishop Yoder finished speaking. Water sloshed around him as he moved toward me. Fannie touched my forearm
and then stepped back, trying to find her footing amid the slippery rocks. The bishop put his arm around my back and motioned for me to cover my nose. I did and looked to the sky, watching the crows’ black bodies cyclone upward.

“Auf deinen Glauben den du bekennt hast vor Gott and viele Zeugen wirst du getauft im Namen des Vaters, des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes, Amen,”
Bishop Yoder said.

Then he dipped me backward. The movement was as graceful as a dancer’s, although Bishop Yoder had never danced and, other than that starlit waltz with Ernest Looper, neither had I. The cold crested over my head, blocking all insecurity and sound. I felt my baby ripple inside my womb. It was difficult to tell where the torrent buffeting my body ended and her movements began. When the bishop brought me to the surface, warmth flowed out of my loins, starkly contrasting with the frigid creek. I was too diverted to recognize it at the time, but the moment I was brought gasping from water to air like a woman reborn was the moment that my bag of waters broke. It was the first step in ushering my daughter into the world. It was the first step that would lead to her being taken from me, just as I had taken her from her parents.

I come in from the springhouse, where I’ve been talking with Uriah, and look around to see if Lydie’s still in the
kitchen. But Lydie’s not in the kitchen, nor in the dining room. I go up to our bedroom and find my roommate sitting on the bottom bunk. She’s writing so hard and fast, the pencil pokes through the paper on her lap, tearing the letter.

“What’re you doing?” I ask.

Lydie jumps and uses her elbow to block the page. A blush covers her face like a stain. “Just let me finish,” she says, “and I’ll help you.”

Is she writing to Uriah? The idea bothers me more than I’d like to admit. If Uriah and Lydie had showed up at my high school last August, I know I would’ve thought they’d just walked out of the twilight zone. But somehow here, nothing’s really the same. My closest friend is a sixteen-year-old girl who still wears her hair in pigtails. The boy who holds my attention is one who I’d normally never give a second look.

Testing Lydie, I point to the window, watching her out of the corner of my eye. “Guess who I just saw out in the springhouse?” Of course she doesn’t play along, just keeps looking down at her lap, so I say, “Uriah. He was talking to Wilbur Byler.”

The pencil slips from Lydie’s fingers and rolls across the wood floor. The two circles of pink drain from her cheeks. “Were you able to . . . understand?”

Picking up the pencil, I sit next to Lydie and duck my head so my hair won’t tangle on the springs beneath the top bunk. “No. But Uriah seemed pretty shaken up.”

Lydie looks down again but doesn’t say a peep. Then she
crumples the page and hurls the letter onto the quilt on her bed. “I’m going downstairs,” she says, smoothing out her dress.

After Lydie leaves, I last about two seconds before my nosiness gets the best of me, which is pretty two-faced, considering my mom’s snooping through my diary to find out the things I’d never tell her is part of what drove us apart. I lean back and grab the letter my roommate’s thrown. I glance down at the scribbled sentences. But even with a class in introductory German, I can’t figure out a word. I know this is why Lydie didn’t keep hiding the letter when she saw that I’d come in our room, or why she didn’t mind leaving it out in the open when she went downstairs. But the name on the letter is easy enough to understand, even without knowing their foreign tongue. It’s a name that’s beginning to make my spine tingle:
Uriah.

Narrowing my eyes, I mash the letter up again and pitch it back onto the bed. I’m annoyed with myself and with my roommate, who must have a real flirtatious streak beneath her sweet
Little House on the Prairie
costume. Suddenly, everything makes sense: that time at breakfast when Uriah reached across the table to touch the top of Lydie’s hand; how Lydie cries herself to sleep almost every night; the way Uriah stalks around here like he’s carrying the world on his shoulders.

I can picture Lydie downstairs in the kitchen, her big eyes
 
—almost cowlike, now that I think about it
 
—and spaghetti wrists as she chops up a vegetable to go with supper. Without the tranquilizer of Uriah’s attention and Lydie’s
friendship (for I’m starting to wonder if she ever wanted to be my friend), I find that my numbness wears off and I just feel . . . sad.

It’s always been like this: whenever I keep myself busy
 
—flitting from project to project or from boy to boy with no time to think
 
—I can forget about my mom’s ongoing disappointment, along with this hole in my heart that no amount of attention from the opposite sex can fill. But when life slows down like it has now . . . well, all of the pain surrounding my mom’s frustration floats to the surface. Even so, my loneliness makes me miss her so much that I’d rather face her anger than remain here in Hopen Haus, where I have no one but a baby in my belly to remind me of the trust that’s been lost in me and, if I keep this baby against my mom’s wishes, I will never get back again.

I had been Fannie’s assistant for two weeks when she asked if I would help her sister Charlotte if any labors took place after sundown. Charlotte was the Hopen Haus dorm
mudder
, since Charlotte was single and both Sadie and Fannie had husbands and families to go home and tend to every night. When a boarder drew close to delivery, it was necessary for Charlotte to have an assistant until another boarder could ride over to Fannie’s and bring her back. Fannie and Elmer’s house was only a mile from Hopen Haus, as the
crow flies, but the switchbacks on the potholed road and steep incline made the distance seem farther. At times, a girl would be in labor, and there would be no way of contacting Fannie. Unlike most Old Order Mennonite communities, no one in Dry Hollow even had a telephone installed in their barn. They had to rely on farmer Walt Hollis’s phone line if there was an emergency.

Seeing the need, I agreed to Fannie’s request and became Charlotte’s stand-in midwife, though I would soon need her birthing assistance myself. Those first few times, my heart would race as I changed sheets on the bed in the birthing room
 
—which is the examining room now
 
—or stuffed the firebox with split wood and set a pot of water on the stove to boil, sure that before Fannie’s arrival, a baby would be born. But Fannie somehow always made it in time.

The Sabbath evening I went into labor, Charlotte confided in me that we were supposed to try to give Fannie the night off. Fannie’s arthritis was swollen from standing in the frigid creek during my baptism earlier that day, which made me feel guilty for wanting the unprecedented immersion. But at that moment, when Charlotte and I were speaking, I did not realize I was already in active labor. I had not yet correlated the breaking of my waters with the warm flood when I was brought to the surface of the creek. I knew my uterus was contracting, yet I assumed it was Braxton Hicks because my contractions were not increasing in frequency or duration, and I could talk through each one without pausing for breath.

My son’s delivery had taken twenty-four hours. I had such excruciating back labor that Deborah Brubaker had been forced to hold my shoulders and press her knee into the small of my back, or else I would writhe and howl in pain. Unbeknownst to me, this time I slept through some of my harder contractions. It was morning but still pitch dark when I awoke and realized I was truly in labor. At my gasp, my roommate Hannah sat up, one hand supporting her womb. Her ruffled bangs and the bent collar of her pajama top were outlined by the moonlight splintering through the curtains.

“You okay?” she asked.

I nodded and told her to go back to sleep. Labor was quickly losing its excitement for all of us because we were starting to feel like watched pots the midwives were waiting to see boil. A Hopen Haus girl was giving birth every other week, and the sounds from the birthing room kept many of us awake through the night as we clutched our stomachs and imagined ourselves going through that exact same pain. But even as I reassured Hannah, my voice shook.

Aware that I couldn’t hide my labor for long, I went out into the hallway. My pace slowed as another contraction hit me. I leaned against the wall and panted through my mouth, my breath stolen by fear of the unknown as much as the pain.

Pulling my nightgown taut, I stared down at my stomach. Though the rest of my body had stayed thin, my abdomen had distended to a size I could not have imagined possible had I not seen it before with my son.