The Midwife of Hope River (27 page)

The lady in green, I learn, is Mr. Hart's sister, Edna, who scrubs on her hands and knees without speaking. While she wrings out her rag in the galvanized bucket again and again, her tears drip into the crimson water. The short round woman, Charity Moon, is the wife of the neighbor who drove me to this hellhole.

The other women cry while they work, but not me. My sobs are tamped down like clay at the bottom of a fence post hole. I've thought this before. Life is too hard. You are born, and you die . . . that's the sum of it. In between you love someone or you don't, and if you are lucky you leave behind someone who loves you.

By the time we are done mopping up and sitting at the kitchen table with strong coffee in chipped cups, the sun is going down and Maynard comes back to the house with red eyes. He takes off his shirt at the sink and washes his face and his arms.

“Will there be a service?” I ask.

“Just something with neighbors and kin,” explains the aunt. “Kitty wouldn't have wanted a big to-do, and we can't afford to have her embalmed. We'll have the reverend bury her here, the fellow from Clover Bottom. You're welcome to come.”

“I'll try,” I say, knowing I probably won't.

“Thank you for coming.” Maynard turns to me. “I don't have money to pay you.”

“I know . . . it's okay. I'm sorry I couldn't do more.”

“The neighbor man, Moon, will drive you home.” He goes back out the screened door, and I watch as he crosses to the barn, then leaves with a shovel over his shoulder. Is he going back to the fields? No, he's starting Kitty's grave. He needs to bend and sweat and curse. Dig a hole. Where will Mr. Hart sleep tonight? I wonder. Will he lie down beside his dead wife, take the lifeless baby that's wrapped in a pink blanket and place it over his heart?

Edna, his sister, watches him too. “There's a family graveyard yonder, all our relations. This is Maynard's second wife. The first is already up there, died of pneumonia three years ago. He's not a bad man,” she explains. “He loved Kitty, just had too much pride to ask for charity care.”

Before I leave, I go back to the bedroom one last time to say good-bye to the dead woman, who lies now on a faded rose quilt in a white nightdress. The floorboards are still stained red and always will be.

34

Thunder

The ride home in the dark with Mr. Moon is cheerless. There's still no rain, and the air is so thick, I can taste it. Twice I think I hear thunder, and once I see lightning out of the corner of my eye, but neither of us speaks or makes note of it.

Clip-clopping along in the faint moonlight, the goldenrod and tall joe-pye weed in the roadside ditches look covered with frost, but it's only thick dust laid down by the buggies and Model Ts. As we turn up Salt Lick, I break the silence.

“Drop me at Daniel Hester's, the vet. You know where that is? Another mile up ahead. He'll drive me the rest of the way home.” I say this with sureness, but I'm only hoping. For all I know, Hester could be out casting the leg of a damaged hound or ministering to a sick mare.

Bitsy won't be home yet, if she comes in at all, and I can't go to sleep twisted around the nightmare of this terrible delivery. Mr. Moon follows my instructions and leaves me at the vet's mailbox, turning his cart around in the drive. We raise our hands in silent, sad salute.

 

On the wooden bridge, the soft trickle of the creek below startles me. Considering the drought, I'm surprised it's still running. From the barn, I hear metal grinding. Hester stands in the lantern light pedaling the grindstone, sharpening his garden tools. Suddenly I'm apprehensive. What am I doing here? What will I say?

“A woman died today because I didn't know how to save her”? “A mother and her baby died needlessly because her impoverished and prideful husband didn't call me earlier”? “The world is a terrible and tragic place, too hard, too hard for Patience Murphy”?

Thunder rolls over the mountains, and a breeze hisses through the dry willow leaves; then lighting flashes—for real this time. Though I should be grateful for any rain, it's not a good time. If it starts to storm, I can't change my mind and hike home over the mountain.

The vet pauses in his work, and his silhouette steps into the amber light pouring like honey out of the barn's double doors. “Hello!” he calls out, seeing my shadow advance across the yard. “Who's there?”

Tears are already running down my face, the first tears I've shed, now that the ordeal is over. I guess it's over. It suddenly occurs to me, with a cold feeling right in my middle, that I could be charged for the mother's and infant's deaths and lose my midwifery certificate.

“Patience, what's wrong?” Hester's wearing just his trousers and a white undershirt, the kind with no sleeves, and his arms shine with sweat. “Is it Moonlight? Is it Star? Is it Bitsy?” Even as the tears fall, this strikes me as typical, that he should ask about the animals first.

“A patient died today. Kitty Hart,” I whisper. “It was bad. Bad. Blood all over, even coming out her nose, and then she seized up and died.” I know I must sound incoherent. He takes me in his arms, and the smell of him almost overwhelms me: earth, pine, vanilla.

“Come in. Come in.” He leads me into the barn and makes me sit on a wooden bench.

“Here.” From his back pocket he pulls out a silver flask. I'm not much of a drinker, but I take a big swig, almost choke, and then whip my head back and forth to shake out the fire. It's strong stuff and not nearly as pleasant as a rum toddy or blackberry wine.

Hester smiles at my reaction, but the smile drops away. Outside, the thunder rumbles closer and the branches of the weeping willows sweep back and forth.

“Maynard Hart's place?” he asks. “Broken-down farm over by Burnt Town?”

I nod, taking a big breath, trying to get my emotions under control. He holds out the flat silver container again. This time the liquid goes down easier, just burns at the back of my throat.

“I'd never met him or his wife before,” I explain. “A young woman, Kitty. The neighbor, a Mr. Moon, came riding fast up Wild Rose Road. Bitsy had just left for the mining camp, and I was alone.” I start to cry again, leaning over, holding my face in my hands, and he sits down beside me. Thunder again and then lighting. Wind slams the side of the sturdy wooden building.

 

Remembering the terrible scene, I cry and cry, as if my tears could float Kitty Hart out of her deathbed, up and away down to the Hope River, where she'd be found alive lying in the damp grass nursing her newborn. Hester pats my back as though I'm a baby, humming a little tune under his breath, but I can't stop blubbering and the sobs get louder, more out of control. He puts his arm around me again. It's a cloudburst of emotion. I'm crying again not just for Kitty and her baby but for myself and
my
baby, for Lawrence and Ruben and my mother and Mrs. Kelly and all the times I've been alone and afraid with no one to help me.

“So you arrived . . . ?” Hester asks, trying to get me to talk about what happened . . . anything to quiet the weeping. “I went there once to stitch up a mare. Beautiful horse. Got her leg tangled in some barbed wire. So you arrived and then?”

I reach for the flask and swallow two more mouthfuls, then take a big breath. “It was the worst thing I've ever seen. When we pulled into the yard, two women were hollering from the dogtrot porch. ‘Hurry! Hurry!' all hysterical. I ran into the bedroom, and there was blood all over the floor. All over the bed. A young lady lay there almost unconscious and hemorrhaging with the baby still trapped in the birth canal, a premature baby with dark hair, wedged sideways.” I describe how I got the baby out but it was stillborn and about the continuous bleeding that I couldn't stop. I tell how Mr. Hart refused to go to the colored doctor and how the seizures came and then Kitty died.

The vet frowns, trying to picture the events, takes a swig from the silver flask, then hands it back to me. “I don't know much about women, but cows get seizures related to milk fever when they lack the ability to quickly move calcium into their milk and end up depleting their own blood levels. And there's a condition in cats and dogs called disseminated intravascular coagulation that's related to the depletion of clotting factors. Basically they use up all their platelets and protein and start hemorrhaging from everywhere . . . There's also eclampsia. Maybe that was it.”

He may be attempting to comfort me by providing clinical information, and at some other time I might be attentive, but right now I'm overcome, not interested in a possible explanation. I put my hand to his mouth to silence him, and he takes it and kisses my palm, a strange gesture—an agreement, perhaps, that he should shut up. The rains have started for real now, first a pitter-patter, then a hiss.

“You have blood on your face.” He touches my cheek. “And your neck . . . here . . . and your dress.” He takes his bandanna, steps over to the door to wet the cloth in the downpour, and wipes my face, then my neck. He's so close I can smell his sweet breath, and I close my eyes and turn my cheek to feel his hand better.

Lightning flashes, then thunder a few seconds later, so close and so loud that it shakes the barn walls. He unbuttons the two top buttons of my dress and I let him, my heart pounding so hard that I think if it wasn't for the sound of the now-continuous claps and booms, he might hear it. When we stand, the moonshine has affected me more than I realize, and I almost fall into him.

The rain roars on the tin roof now, roars all around us, and we step to the barn door to watch the sheet lightning. He holds out his bandanna to wet it again and wipes my hands and nails, still grimy with blood, then leads me out into the downpour, where we stand with our arms around each other. My face against his wet undershirt, his face looking into the sky, flashing white, then yellow, then white again, we sway like dancers in an all-night dance marathon.

Hester unbuttons a few more buttons and then washes my neck almost down to my nipples. Shivering, I watch his fingers work. He kneels in the mud and wipes my legs, then wipes me between my legs, over and over with his soft bandanna, washes me like a baby, and I begin to cry again. No one has bathed me since my mother died. I have bathed others, patients in labor, newborn babies, old people who were ill, even just today I washed a dead woman, but no one has washed me.

When I unbutton the rest of my dress and step out of it, there's nothing underneath. No brassiere, no corset, just my drawers. I'd changed out of my work clothes in such a hurry when Mr. Moon came for me that I hadn't bothered with the other things. I'm shocked at myself but don't pull away. I'm a woman in a dream removing her silver armor. Hester doesn't seem surprised by my lack of modesty and tosses the shift into the dry barn.

Again and again thunder fills the air like boulders colliding across the mountains. The vet just continues to hold me, naked, while the holy water washes us clean.

 

River

Morning. Blinding sun through a dusty windowpane in a room that at first I don't recognize. I'm lying naked in a four-poster bed like the one at the MacIntoshes' home, but the room is nowhere near as fancy. My eyes roam the white plaster walls with high windows framed in wide dark oak molding, the bare wood floors. There are paintings of horses in gold and black frames, landscapes with hunting horses and workhorses and racehorses and a photo of a young soldier standing with his horses. I know this place now. This is where, weeks ago, I bandaged the vet's leg and brought him soup while he healed from his fistfight with the Bishop brothers.

I run my hand over the twisted sheets and the empty space where Hester had slept. I guess he slept. Sometime in the night we left the hayloft and ran through the mud, into the house, and up the stairs; then, before dawn, the telephone rang and he left me. I heard his car start up and move away down Salt Lick, but I was too undone to care. It was the alcohol, I remind myself, that brought me to this man, not exactly a stranger, not exactly a friend.

I run my hands over my body and, finding myself still the same person, dress quickly, ignoring Kitty's old blood on my damp dress, which I find laid out neatly over the back of a chair. It's too soon to tell how the events of last night will change my relationship with Hester . . . or if they will. I pull on my shoes and realize with a wave of guilt that unless Bitsy came home, our animals were out in the rain all night.

At the crest, I look down toward the Hope River and am surprised to see the valley looking no different after the storm. The dust has been washed off the tired plants, but even hours of hard rain can't turn the grass green. Nothing has been altered, except inside me. I am laid open.

 

When I get to the house, I am surprised to see smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney; Bitsy is home. The doors to the barn are open, and I can hear her singing to Moonlight while she milks.
“Oh, sister, let's go down. Let's go down. Don't you want to go down? Oh, sister, let's go down. Down to the river to pray . . .”
It's the first time she's sung since her mother died.

“Morning,” she says as she strides into the house ten minutes later, swinging a pail full of warm white liquid. I've only had time to brush the straw out of my hair. She eyes the birth satchel as I replace our supplies.

“You were up all night at a birth? I'm sorry, I should have been with you. Who delivered? Everything go okay?”

“No . . . no, it didn't go well.” I sit down at the table. “It was Kitty Hart. Someone we never met. She died. Her baby died too.”

Shocked at my words, Bitsy drops her bucket into the sink, and the milk splashes over the side. She plunks down in the chair next to me, puts her hand on my arm. “Oh, Patience, baby. I'm so sorry. I should have been there. I should have been there to help you . . .” She waits for me to explain, but I'm too exhausted to even talk.

“I have to change.” I indicate my bloodstained dress.

“Can I heat water? Bring in the tub?”

“No, I'll go to the river. I'll tell you about the birth later.”

This surprises me. Why do I want to go to the river?

 

When Star and I arrive on the banks of the Hope River, now rushing brown from the great storm, I'm greatly relieved to see no trailers or tents. The vet has already washed the blood off my skin; it's my soul that needs cleansing. I pull off my dress and bloomers
. “Oh, sister,”
I remember Bitsy's song,
“Let's go down. Down to the river to pray.”

I step into the water, deliciously cold, float on my back, and stare up at the white scarves of clouds. I haven't prayed in so long. Who would I pray to?

 

August 14, 1930. Full moon already waning.

(It's been three days. I couldn't write about this before.) Stillborn baby girl born to Maynard and Kitty Hart of Burnt Town. Arrived at the home after mother was in labor for three or four days and had been pushing for four hours. Baby was a month early and wedged in the birth canal with its head turned sideways. After I got there, birth was accomplished in less than ten minutes, but it was too late for the baby. Mother was swollen and began to have seizures. Bitsy and I looked this up later in DeLee's text; it's called eclampsia. There was nothing I knew how to do, no herbs or anything. Sometimes women live through these fits, but Kitty had already lost so much blood I believe her heart stopped.