The Midwife (15 page)

“The chickens don’t like me.”

“Don’t like you?” He laughs. “You just need the right touch.”

Without hesitating, Uriah reaches under the hen that pecked me and takes out two smooth brown eggs, as easy as a fox. He passes them to me and moves down to the next hen. His hand reaches in and out so fast, the hen doesn’t even know he’s been there until she resettles her feathers over the nest and feels that her eggs are gone. He continues passing eggs to me, which I tuck into the cloth-lined basket.

“You build this?” I gesture toward the chicken coop.

Uriah nods.

The cubicles are painted white and stuffed with fresh straw; the outside is black. I wonder if I should, like, comment on it somehow, but I don’t know the terms. So I settle for a solid knock against the wood and say, “You want to be an architect or something?”

This time Uriah doesn’t even try to hide his smile. But then his eyes drift away from mine. “Our school only went to eighth grade.”

Without thinking, I reach out and place a hand on his back. “I’m sorry,” I say, removing my hand. I can feel the tips of my fingertips growing warm along with my ears. “It must be hard for you here.”

Uriah says, “It’s not so bad now.” Then he turns so quickly I have no time to even blink or breathe. Taking the basket of eggs from me, he sets it on the ground and brings that hand up to touch the layers of my hair, which are
frizzing like crazy from the heat. I look up. His head leans down toward mine. My eyes close. Then they spring wide as I remember Prairie-girl.

“What’re you doing!” I hold my hand up like a traffic director. “What about Lydie?”

The current between us snaps to nothing. Uriah goes over to the bin. Using a scoop, he refills the chicken feeder with cracked corn. The leftovers sift over the ground in flakes. Sticking the scoop back in the bin, Uriah clangs the lid on top. A dark flush creeps up from the neck of his shirt. He rests his arm on the side of the chicken coop and looks at me without saying anything. A vein pulses on Uriah’s high forehead, with its stripe of white skin where his ugly straw hat blocks the sun. “I’ve never touched Lydie,” he says. “Not like that. I just feel responsible for her, I guess.”

I roll my eyes. “Responsible? But you never touched her. Right.”

“I don’t feel responsible for her pregnancy, Amelia.” And I can tell he’s ticked. “I feel responsible because I could have
saved
her.”

With this, Uriah Rippentoe pushes past me. I hear his footsteps as he leaves the barn, slamming the doors behind him. Hay drifts from the loft and spins through the air like those helicopter leaves Grandma Sarah and I used to collect at the park when I was a kid. Staring up at them in the semidarkness, I remember how we’d take the leaves and helicopters home, shave red, orange, and brown crayon over them, and iron everything between two pieces of the
parchment paper Grandma Sarah kept in the pantry for baking. It was one of my favorite projects in the fall until I realized it wasn’t cool to do craft time with my nanny.

Catching one of the pieces of hay, I hold it against my chest, which is suddenly tight with this frustration that I can’t even understand. Maybe it’s because I know a summer fling with Uriah would sidetrack me enough that I wouldn’t have to feel much of anything at all. But now that he’s gone
 
—and angry with me on top of it
 
—I have no buffers left to stand between me and my own pain.

I wait until I can hear Uriah calling for the goats down at the pond. Then I slowly sink to the ground beside my basket piled with brown eggs, hold my face in my hands, and
 
—for one of the first times in over a year
 
—let myself cry over the loss of Grandma Sarah, who was more like a mother to me than my own mom.

Fannie was asleep in the cane-backed chair before the fire; her thin chest rose and fell, her chin sank beneath her top lip, and her prayer
kapp
sloped forward. At noon, Fannie and I had driven her buggy up into the mountains to deliver Mary Hoover’s tenth child. Though Mary’s delivery was as fast as we’d expected, the mother had started hemorrhaging afterward. Fannie knew just what to do to save the mother’s life, including climbing up onto the feather-tick
bed and kneading Mary’s abdomen with arthritic fingers until the afterbirth had been safely expelled.

We returned to Hopen Haus before bedtime. Charlotte took newborn Hope from me
 
—she had spent the majority of Mary’s labor asleep in a wrap against my chest
 
—and told us that Alice Rippentoe’s quickening had started less than an hour ago. But we knew her first labor could last long past dawn. The fact that Sadie Gingrich had been in Lancaster visiting family for two weeks
 
—therefore handing even more responsibility off to Fannie
 
—made me determined not to disturb Fannie’s much-needed rest. Once Charlotte offered to watch Hope, I told her I would try to deliver Alice’s child on my own.

Eight hours later, in the birthing room, I stared at Alice’s file, illuminated by two kerosene lamps suspended from hooks embedded in the beam dissecting the ten-foot ceiling. Alice’s complication-free prenatal appointments were documented by Charlotte’s looping cursive and Fannie’s precise script. There were no issues that might portend a difficult delivery. So what was stalling Alice’s labor? Alice stayed quiet except for panicked breathing through her contractions. I had witnessed women screaming and spitting before true labor had even begun, so I had to admire her silence.

I could see fear in the flush of Alice’s cheeks and the watery gleam in her wide green eyes as she suddenly breathed, “Something’s wrong; something’s wrong,” like a chant.

I did not say it, but I was fearful as well. I glanced at
the watch I kept hidden under the elbow-length sleeve of my cape dress, as we were not supposed to wear jewelry. It was now 6:35 a.m. Alice had been in labor for over eleven hours, and there had been little to no progress. Fannie believed that letting nature take its course
 
—with our guidance, in case something went wrong, as it had with Mary Hoover
 
—was the best application of midwifery. I admired Fannie’s standard of minimal interference, yet it was essential that Alice give birth before seven o’clock tonight. We had a twenty-four hour window from the time her water broke before mother and baby were at great risk for infection.

I would soon have to notify Fannie of Alice Rippentoe’s failure to progress. With our labor window cut in half and nothing left to lose, I tried an experiment. After a careful examination, I smiled encouragingly. “You’re almost to six,” I said. “Over halfway there.”

At this point, the hours of withstanding contractions with nothing to show for them were chipping away at Alice’s strength. She needed something
 
—even a lie
 
—to buoy her up.

Alice blinked back tears. “I
am
?”

I nodded and helped her off the table. “Now let’s put you to work.”

The damp terror left Alice’s eyes and determination took its place. I knotted a sheet to the bedpost, twined the fabric around Alice’s hips, and pulled and pulled on my knotted end, like a strange game of tug-of-war. The “double hip squeeze” maneuver usually requires two
midwives. But the bedpost
 
—for the most part
 
—served as the other arm. Alice sighed and closed her eyes. I felt such satisfaction, knowing this had relieved the pressure on her lower back.

Alice’s breathing grew harder as her contractions increased.

I held her hand as she breathed through each one. Another contraction bore down before the previous one had abated. She groaned and whittled her nails into the sides of the lacquered wood.

My heart pounded with each of the guttural sounds Alice made. I wanted to run and get Fannie; I wanted to tell Charlotte to leave Hope for a moment and come.
Come quick!
But there was no longer time. Suddenly, Alice’s bellow reverberated through the small room, and her child was born.

I suctioned the crying baby’s nose with the bulb syringe and cradled him close. Tears filled my eyes as those almond-shaped eyes opened and looked around the room. He was breathing perfectly, his color was golden, but
 
—just like my daughter
 
—he did not utter one more cry. His dark irises seemed to deflect every ray of sun spilling through the curtains. He stretched his tiny fingers toward it, as if to cradle the cosmic star in his palm.

“Uriah,” Alice whispered. “I’ll call him Uriah
 
—‘God is light.’”

Blinking free of my stupor, I helped Alice gingerly sit down on the bed. Her teeth were chattering. I placed her son in her arms and went over to the cupboard to get
another quilt. I wrapped the heavy, wedding-ring pattern around her shoulders. She reached out and clasped my hand.

“Thank you,” she said, “for bringing my son into the world.”

I nodded but continued looking out the window, where the sun had fully tipped over the mountains and poured its rays across the valley. In the wash of Alice’s child’s birth, I had felt more cleansed than at my own baptism. Yet before the amniotic fluid had dried on my palms, my heart clenched with jealousy. Turning, I watched them together. Alice’s face was still bright with exertion. The rim of her blond hair was darkened with sweat. Her lips were red and swollen from so many hours of biting through the pain of fruitless contractions.

As the halo of light spread to ensconce them both, I saw how she held her child. I saw how she cradled him close, not needing to be aware of time, since no one was waiting in the wings. She would not have to stop suckling him or swaddling him or nuzzling his fragrant skin to sign papers that would let the child who was bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh be taken away.

Tears slipped down Alice’s cheeks, dampening the faint curls covering Uriah’s head. He rested peacefully against her breast. Watching them, my own breast ached with longing. For a moment, just one, I yearned to snatch that beautiful boy-child from her arms and claim him as mine
 
—just so Alice would know what it felt like to lose someone so dear to you as effortlessly as pearls slipping off a broken string.

I withdrew from Alice Rippentoe at that moment. Like her intuitive response to labor, my recoiling from the pain she and Uriah evoked felt like the only way to survive. I am not sure it would have been easier if she had given birth to a girl. But I know that her giving birth to a boy only increased the vividness of my own loss.

As I clamped off the umbilical cord and severed it with the sanitized scissors, I found it ironic that
I
was the one to separate this mother from her child, when I had suffered from that separation one way or another since I was twelve years old.

When I knew from my blocked throat that my soul was a wellspring about to be wrung dry, I awoke Charlotte in my bedroom and asked her to finish checking Alice and the baby.

I then ran to the linen closet and shut the door. In the darkness, sobbing, I buried my face in the folded stacks of towels. I breathed in the icy fresh scent and forced the image of my own newborn son away. Though my soul rejoiced in the presence of my eight-week-old daughter
 
—a rosy-cheeked cherub tucked in the Moses basket beside my bed, a gift
 
—she could never fill the hole he had left behind.

As another baby boy was born into the world, my grief was birthed anew.

Lowering my face into the wrap, I kissed Hope’s forehead and hugged her warm body against my chest. Right there
 
—standing in the kitchen, stark sun streaming through spotless windows, donated apples gleaming crimson in the wooden bowl
 
—I vowed I would never wish for my son when I had my daughter right here. Not the way I had wished for my son when I helped birth Alice Rippentoe’s child last night.

The kitchen door leading to the back porch swung open before I had even finished the thought. An arctic gust caught it and smacked the door against the clapboard siding, again and again, until I thought the door would slam shut in slivers. Wind swooped into the kitchen, rattling
the copper pots hanging overhead, making them clang like chimes. I clutched Hope, hoping to shield her from the draft. She remained asleep in the wrap, yet I shivered with equal parts premonition and cold.

“Please close the door,” I called. “We’re not heating the outside.”

It was not one of our Hopen Haus girls who entered, but the driver, Wilbur Byler. Stomping mud from his boots, he came into the kitchen. “Sorry,” he said. Wilbur blew hard on his hands. “The door got away from me.”

I nodded, picked up the knife, and continued paring apples in quick, clean strokes. The juice ran down my chilled fingers. The countertop was festooned with teardrop-shaped seeds and long tendrils of skin. My actions were relaxed. But deliberately so. Between my shoulder blades, tension sunk like an ax. I could never shake the unease I felt whenever Wilbur Byler came around. I had no reason to doubt his character; everyone in Dry Hollow trusted Wilbur without question, granting him access to their finances, their families, their homes. In my six months at Hopen Haus, he had not singled me out or asked one question. However, the covert way he watched me made me wonder if he knew more than he let on.

“Is there hot water in there?” Wilbur pointed to the cast-iron pot on the stove. “I’d like some coffee ’fore I hit the road.”

“No. But I can make some.”

Wilbur shook his head. “You’ve got your hands full. I’ll do it.”

I gritted my teeth, eager to have him leave, but continued peeling. I heard Wilbur lift the heavy cast-iron cover over the burner and wedge pieces of kindling down into the box. Still, I felt his eyes scanning my back, as if willing me to turn. My hands shook as the blade separated fruit from skin. The paring knife slipped and gouged the pad of my left palm, just below the thumb. I cried out. Startled, Hope began to cry as well. Blood welled in the cut and dripped down my hand, plopping onto the fresh, off-white fruit.

“You cut yourself?” Wilbur called over the din of Hope’s sobbing.

I nodded and tried to calm my daughter with my uninjured hand.

The heavy stove lid clanked into place. The kitchen floor absorbed Wilbur’s heavy tread as he crossed the kitchen toward me. “Here,” he said. “Wrap this around it.” He held out a tea towel. I bound it around the wound and curled my fingers into a fist.

I thanked him and shifted from side to side, trying to rock Hope back to sleep. But she would not be soothed. Her face reddened. Her desperate cries seemed to ricochet across every metal surface in the kitchen. My chest heaved against her heaving chest. I knew Hope was not only reacting to being awoken from her nap, but also from the nerves wracking my body.

Wilbur held out his arms. “Let me take her,” he said.

“No.”
The word was a growl, as emphatic as a curse. My heart pounded. Blood throbbed in my hand. I looked
down and saw red blooming through the floral tea towel, as bright as a poppy. I pressed Hope’s head harder to my breast. She cried and thrashed, trying to escape the person who was trying to keep her safe.

Wilbur stepped back. “You okay?”

I looked up. His square hands were raised in a defensive gesture, as if he feared I was going to attack him with the knife. But this gesture did not hold my attention as much as the connotation undergirding his words.

Let him think I’m crazy,
I thought.
That’ll make him leave us alone.

I did not nod or break eye contact, daring him to look away first. “Not sure,” I said.

The sun glinted off the blade I had just picked up. Hands shaking, I lowered the knife. My eyes burned with a primal protectiveness unlike anything I had ever known. “You’d better not hang around here too long, Wilbur, or somebody might get hurt.”

Two days before Farmer’s Market Saturday, Fannie Graber claimed that I was the best choice for overseeing Dry Hollow’s booth: I spoke perfect English for the paying customers, plus she had taught me enough snippets of Pennsylvania Dutch to have me be considered genuine Old Order Mennonite. When pressed, Fannie also revealed that she thought Wilbur still harbored a crush for me that would work itself out if the two of us were given enough alone time. She was even more interested in providing
Hope with a
dawdy
than she was in providing me with a husband. It did not seem to matter that I was not attracted to Wilbur in the least, or that my knife-wielding incident a month and a half ago had left him in no hurry to interact with me. But for Fannie Graber, I would do anything.

Consequently, Farmer’s Market Saturday arrived and there I was, sitting in Wilbur’s idling truck as panic flared inside my chest, making it difficult to breathe. I glanced beyond the fingerprints marring the passenger’s-side window. Crowds were flocking toward the pavilion that some men from Dry Hollow Community had been hired to build. I could see similarities between it and our own dwellings in the pavilion’s stout, rough-hewn cedar beams and corrugated tin roof. On the last Saturday before Christmas, the farmer’s market reopened, and vendors from across the county gathered to sell their wares with more intensity than normal, as the money must hold them over through the sluggish winter months.

Even from inside the cab, I could see many of the booths were set up with displays of earth-toned pottery, beaded jewelry, wool purses and hats dyed in a kaleidoscope of color, glass-bottled lotions, and baked goods tastefully packed in white paper boxes stacked on overlapping red and green tablecloths. But none of the vendors were Mennonite or Amish.

Business ventures were never openly discussed in Dry Hollow Community because Bishop Yoder believed that money
 
—and anything associated with it
 
—was the root of all evil. Yet that morning, as Fannie handed me a lunch,
she said that my
kapp
and cape dress and the bits of Pennsylvania Dutch vocabulary I had learned were crucial for sales.
Englischers
believed they were getting a better product if it came from a Plain community, where morality supposedly held the “Gentle People” to a higher standard than the rest. And sales were necessary, far more than even Fannie Graber let on. Hopen Haus relied on food and funds hoarded over spring and summer when Dry Hollow better resembled the Promised Land. But Fannie said they were sometimes scraping the bottom of the barrel before the next harvest season came around
 
—which was why, having gone through our own orchard’s supply, we were baking with donated apples.

Watching the people now milling beneath the pavilion, I understood to what extent the community had sheltered me, how they had offered me refuge when I had nowhere else to turn. Though I was grateful to them, I was slowly realizing that the Dry Hollow Community was no utopia as the
Englischers
thought. I was baptized into the Mennonite church, but despite my cape dress and
kapp
, I was still perceived as
Englisch
as when I’d come. I was
still
a woman with a daughter and no husband: a toxic blend the Dry Hollow families did not want encroaching upon their well-ordered lives. Nonetheless, in seven months I had never stepped across the border of the property. I suppose it felt like hallowed ground upon which no ill-intentioned footsteps could trod. But looking out at that crowd, I felt vulnerable
 
—my exposure to the public reawakening my fear of getting caught.

I looked over at Hope, nestled in the car seat beside me with her cheeks round and bright against the trailing strings of her knit hat. Then I looked over at Wilbur. He smiled and stroked the top of her hand. I had to ball my fingers into fists to keep from striking him away. Hope was not frightened, though. She just looked at Wilbur with those large hazel eyes framed with light lashes that seemed to see through a person’s mask and still love what was beneath. Cooing, Hope held on to one of his proffered fingers.

“Such a sweet-natured thing,” Wilbur said.

The bumper-to-bumper traffic bottlenecked around the square started to flow again. Wilbur shifted out of neutral and drove a few feet, parking his truck in the slanted white lines outside the Scottsburough Emporium. Wilbur got out. Sound poured into the vehicle, like a submerged porthole undone. My hands shook as I unfastened the straps of Hope’s car seat.

The passenger door creaked open. “Here,” Wilbur said, “I’ll take her.”

I’ll take her.
The simple sentence ripped through my ears, but I reminded myself of Wilbur’s and my last altercation and the type of attention-seizing behavior that I did not want to repeat. “All right.” My acknowledgement was barely audible, but I could clearly hear my fear. I held Hope out, and Wilbur took her from me. Settling her against his shoulder, he patted her back with the heel of his hand. She pushed off his chest and tried to look up. Laughing, Wilbur took his hat off and hooked it over the hat already on her head. Hope wobbled from side to side,
knowing something was different but not knowing what or how to take the hat off.

I slid off the bench seat and reclaimed my daughter, wrapping my coat lapels around her body and pressing her to my chest. Since Wilbur could not get the truck any closer to our booth, he stayed behind to unload the boxes. I felt insecure, knowing that I would be parting the masses all by myself, and was then amazed that the man I felt threatened by was also someone who
 
—when faced with countless strangers
 
—brought me comfort.

Keeping my head down, I wove among
Englischers
for the first time since Hope’s birth. The air was crisp, but sweat dripped down the small of my back. I felt, rather than saw, the stares of the people as they realized a Plain woman was in their midst. My entire life, I had been overlooked. But now that I craved anonymity, the
kapp
and cape dress
 
—the very articles intended to keep me from view
 
—seemed to propel me into everyone’s sight.

I pulled the lapels of my coat tighter until they obscured Hope’s face. She arched her back and cried out, struggling to break the hold of my arms. Again, I knew she was sensing my tension; I had to relax. Breathing deep, I smelled popcorn and funnel cakes and recalled unspooling cotton candy on the Ferris wheel at the La Crosse County Fair with Looper when we were children.

In the street, children laughed and ran pell-mell through the crowd. Silver helium balloons floated high above them, tied with ribbon to their small wrists
 
—airborne buoys that let the parents know where they were. Centered under a
doorway, a volunteer rang a bell for the Salvation Army bucket. Cameras flashed. Vendors hawked wares. Car horns honked as vehicles struggled to find parking spaces where there were none left.

After seven months without even the electrical buzz of power lines to dispel the quiet, this cacophony made me want to clap my hands over my ears. I pondered afresh Fannie’s motivations for requiring me to oversee Dry Hollow’s booth. Surely she knew there were women in the community far more capable than I. Although I had never told her the fears I battled, she could probably deduce from my avoidance of Wilbur and refusal to leave the community that my past haunted me still. I stood motionless, the din swirling around me, and recalled what Fannie had said when I told her why I’d taken Hope and run: “For the sake of yourself and the child, you can’t live in fear. . . . You must let yourself live.”

My courage renewed, I locked my gaze on the pavilion and parted the crowd.