The Reluctant Midwife (12 page)

Mr. Hucknell mumbles something surly and plunks himself down, and Daniel turns back to our quilt, thinking the disturbance is over, but he's wrong. Loud enough for the whole crowd to hear, Hucknell curses, “Fucking
Doctor
Hester, the
veterinarian
, but that cow never was right after he treated her. Charged me ten dollars, the
quack
.”

Daniel whips back. “Excuse me. What did you say?”

A few more people rise to see what's happening, and some of the mothers lead their children away. There's a nasal laugh up front and a short, stocky man yells, “Fight!”

Here Patience gently pulls on Daniel's shirtsleeve. She's wearing her second-best dress, a navy blue shirtwaist with tiny white flowers, and in the dusk the white flowers look like stars.

“He killed out best stallion, Devil, too.” The nasal voice is louder.

“Those are the Bishop brothers,” Patience whispers and points into the crowd. “They'd love to start trouble.” A beer bottle flies and shatters on the courthouse steps and at the same time Hucknell jumps up and pushes Daniel and Daniel pushes him back.

Then all hell breaks loose.
Boom!
Hucknell hits the vet in the face with his fist as the first of the fireworks goes off at the fairground.
Boom!
A white trail of light shoots into the night as two men rush forward and knock Daniel down.
Boom!
The trail of light bursts into red, white, and blue flowers, illuminating the crowd.
Boom!
Another skyrocket goes up. Blum gets into the scuffle and shows his new strength when he grabs one of the Bishop brothers and throws him through the air.
Boom!

“Oh, shit!” Patience yells, heading into the melee, and I pull her back before she gets hurt.

“Somebody get the sheriff,” a woman screams.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

Then two more men rush forward, heading into the throng. The bigger of the two puts his size twelve boot in our potato salad while the small guy busts his head right into Blum's left kidney, a dangerous place, but the doctor swings around and traps the fellow in a headlock.

Boys on the courthouse steps are chanting, “Fight! Fight!” and by the rocket's red glare, bombs bursting in air, the melee gets wilder. It's as bad as a dogfight, and although originally it started with Mr. Hucknell and Daniel, all the men on the lawn are enjoying it.

Boom!
Gold and silver blossoms light up the sky.

Boom!
Red, white, and blue bits of burning confetti float down through the air.

Danny is crying.

Boom!
White turns into red.

Boom! Boom! Boom! BOOM!

Then in the distance a siren goes off. The sheriff, alerted to the disturbance, is coming this way.

“Hester!” Patience yells.

“Isaac!” I try, but the men pay no attention.

The siren gets closer, the rotating red and blue lights of the squad car adding to the fireworks as the crowd rapidly scatters.

“Later!” growls one of the men moving off. The vet kicks him in the butt and I swear Isaac laughs.

“I can't believe you did that!” Patience berates her husband in the backseat of the Pontiac as we drive toward home. I'm at the wheel with Blum at my side. “You could've been arrested and locked in jail or, worse yet, had to pay a big fine for disorderly conduct.”

Daniel grins his lopsided grin, and Patience, I notice in the rearview mirror, is smiling too.

“You think paying a fine would be worse than me behind bars?”

“Daddy was bad.”

“You're right, my little man. Dr. Blum and Daddy should have controlled themselves. We're lucky no one got hurt. But goddamn that Alfred Hucknell! I can't stand to see a man hit a woman, then he called me a quack! The final straw was when the Bishop brothers got into it!”

“I'll admit when that slob stepped in my potato salad, I saw red,” Patience adds.

“Boom!” says Dr. Blum, and shocks the pants off all of us.

Dark night and the wind slams into our little house from the west. I've been awake in bed for hours, my mind skittering from one worry to another. It's not like we're starving. We get tomatoes, carrots, new potatoes, and greens from the garden. Daniel brings us eggs and milk twice a week in exchange for Isaac's help with the vet work, and the fish have been a great addition to our diet, but we have so little cash money for kerosene, gasoline, sugar, cornmeal, and beans. I am really worried about what we will do this winter.

The delivery job is keeping us going, but just barely. There's got to be something else. I come full circle to the one place I haven't tried yet, the CCC camp.

I try to remember the name of the officer I met in Stenger's Pharmacy? Mr. Wolfe? No,
Captain
Wolfe. I was reluctant at first to go out to the camp, because of the distance and because it sounded like he wanted volunteers, but now it seems only sensible to at least see if I can get another paying job. Really, it isn't that far, just three or four miles past Mrs. Stone's place.

Across the hall, Blum snores lightly, the sound of a two-man saw cutting pine.

I picture his body, changed with the physical work. Poverty and
the mountain air must agree with him. . . . Some might even find him attractive.

The wind slams the house again. Then thunder and lightning shake the window glass. The storm must be close. I pull the sheet up under my chin, remembering Mr. Hucknell and the fight, picturing the bruises I observed on Willa's neck. I'm a public health nurse, for god's sake, or used to be! Shouldn't I go to Sheriff Hardman? Would he do anything?

I run my hands over my own neck, feeling bruises long gone. It stays with me still, like a lump of black coal. The shame of it. I never told anyone.

The year was 1918 and soldiers were beginning to straggle back from the war. First came my brother Darwin, who returned from Europe without a scratch, but was struck down by the Spanish flu and died at a naval base in Boston a few months later. Twenty-five million died from the epidemic worldwide;
twenty-five million in just a few years!

Then, before the grass even sprouted on Darwin's grave, my other brother, William, was killed in the Second Battle of the Marne. It broke Father's heart, the loss of his sons. He closed his practice, drank himself into oblivion, and passed of a stroke three months later.

I wore black, and it almost undid me, my whole family gone, but then David came home and I wore bright yellow. He was my family now and, like a daffodil, I wanted to make him happy.

We sold Father's house and moved back into our little place on High Street. We were young and in love, so I thought it would be fun, but David had changed. He wasn't the man who had left me. The first thing I noted was that he delegated all the decisions about our home to me.

“Sure, babe, whatever color you want. A red door, a green door. It doesn't matter.”

“Fine, buy a new coal heater. We can afford it. Whatever you think.”

He didn't shave, grew a thick, dark beard, refused to go out, and unless I purposely made a lot of noise in the kitchen, he didn't get up until noon. When I talked about restarting his medical practice his answer was always the same: “Couple of weeks. Couple of months, but not just yet. I need to rest.” He shook his head and I wondered if he still heard the sound of gunshots and grenades, tanks and wounded men screaming.

Gone was the laughter I remembered, the dancing, and the joy in all things beautiful in the Vermont countryside. Secretly I was hoping for a child, something to heal us, but my husband was withdrawn and didn't care to be intimate, a big change for him.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I'd ask as we lay on our backs in our bed in the dark, not touching.

“What?”

“The war. What you did. What you saw.”

“It's over now.” He would kiss me gently on the cheek, almost like a sister, but he never wanted to be touched himself, and he never tried to enter me. In the night, I would wake and see him at the window, staring out into the street, smoking a Lucky Strike, a sentry on guard.

After three months, I decided I should move ahead with the practice. If David could just get started seeing patients, I was sure it would take his mind off the war. In a bold move, I leased a three-room office a block off Main.

The summer before, wanting to contribute to the cause, I'd gone to Vassar for the wartime intensive-nursing course, but the conflict ended before I could enlist. Now, I reasoned, I could be David's nurse.

I signed the lease for the office in December, but by February nothing had happened. First, David needed to renew his medical
license. Then he had to reapply for privileges at the hospital. These were his excuses for inaction.

Finally, one evening in front of the fire, I decided to have it out. “What's going on?” I asked, confronting him.

David shifts in his chair and hides behind the
Brattleboro Reformer
. “I just need some time.”

“But I want to understand. I want to help. It's been five months, but you resist me at every turn.”

David rises and stands over me, his fists balled. “You can't understand. You weren't there. You fucking weren't there! In one day twenty thousand soldiers were killed in battles around the world. It was a fucking horror movie.” He wads up the newspaper and slams out the door.

I never knew what would trigger the nightmares—a smell, a noise. David would throw off the covers screaming, horrified by some vision he saw. The first time I tried to wake him, he lashed out at me as if fighting a German soldier and belted me out of the bed. When I hit the floor, I thought I'd broken my arm, but it was just bruised. I was stunned, couldn't comprehend what had happened.

“Do you want a divorce?” I finally got up my nerve to ask one Sunday as we were walking to church. It seemed a safe time to broach the subject. Surely, he wouldn't explode in public. I was wrong.

“No, I don't want a
divorce
!” He stops on the sidewalk in front of the rectory. “I just want some peace and quiet and an end to your fucking nagging. Don't you get it? Men were killed right in
front of me. I dragged their bloody bodies out of the trenches, tried to save them as they suffered. Sometimes I wish I'd died with them!” He shoves me away and I stumble off the high sidewalk and fall into the street.

The worst part was that Mrs. Stopper, the pastor's wife, and her three daughters, dressed to the nines, were just coming down the rectory's front walk. They stopped with shocked faces, turned around, and hurried back inside.

Once home, David apologized, wept on his knees like a character from a novel, holding me around the waist, begging me to forgive him, and I would have, but the assaults got worse. A slap here, a punch there. He was always angry. If not at me, at the mailman for leaving someone else's mail in our box, or the stock boy at the grocer for omitting an item he wanted, or his old-maid aunt, his last living relative, who called to check on him once every few days.

Three weeks after the scene in the street, David had another dream and began to scream in the middle of the night.

“No! Stop! Stop!” By this time, I'd moved to the adjoining room, but afraid the neighbors would hear, I hurried to his bed to wake him. This was a mistake.

“No! You fucking Kraut!” Believing me to be an enemy soldier, my husband grabs me around the neck. I can't breathe, can't fight him off. I yank his thick beard, tear at his hands. We roll off the bed, crash to the floor, and the impact brings him around just before I pass out. Tears streaming down our faces, we lay there panting.

“This can't go on,” David groans. “One of these nights I'll kill you.” He crawls to the chest of drawers and pulls out a pistol wrapped in a pair of army underwear. “Here, you must sleep with this revolver under your pillow. If I come for you in the night, shoot me. . . . Don't threaten! Shoot me. Do you understand? If you plead with me, I won't stop.”

“David! I couldn't!”

“You have to. I'm out of control.” He sits back on the bed and starts pulling on his clothes, first his pants, then his shirt. Forgets the boxers.

“I'll take you to a veteran's hospital! They must have a unit for ex-officers with bad dreams and outbursts. I've read about it in the paper. Thousands, maybe millions of men who saw combat have readjustment problems. They call it shell shock.”

“Never! I worked in such loony bins during training. I'd be shipped to an overcrowded asylum with the rest of the whacked-out soldiers, labeled crazy, maybe even given hydrotherapy or insulin-shock treatments. You know what those places are like, men strapped in straitjackets, in padded rooms.” He's tying his boots, and as I reach for him, he pushes me away. “I'd rather die!”

A month later, he stole his gun back from under my pillow and put a bullet through his brain down by the Connecticut River, right where we had once danced in the moonlight. His prediction was right. He would never see me get wrinkled and old.

The sun, like a giant orange, is just coming over the mountains when I wake with a bladder so full I really have to get to the outhouse. I rise and go out into a cool morning with the promise of a beautiful day, but the rumble of a truck barreling up Wild Rose Road lifts me out my reverie.

Now who could this be? I look down at my worn housedress and bare feet, then back at the vehicle pulling up at the fence, a beat-up open hack driven by a wisp of a boy, not more than fourteen.

“I'm Chester Mink. Mrs. Wade says come quick. It's a disaster,” he hollers, then adds as an afterthought, “ma'am.”

I figure there must be some mistake. He's probably looking for the midwife. “You have the wrong house. Patience Murphy doesn't live here anymore. She's Mrs. Hester now, the vet's wife, and they live on the other side of Spruce Mountain.”

“I know that,” he responds, looking frustrated. “I been there once already and no one's home. Mrs. Wade said to fetch
you
. She says come quick!”

My first reaction is to make an excuse. I'm not used to these urgent demands. It may be okay for Patience and Daniel to rush, rush, rush, but I have enough to cope with just getting through the
day. I haven't even had a cup of tea, and what will I do with Dr. Blum?

“Please, ma'am! It's an
emergency
.” He jumps out of the vehicle and comes up to the porch, a thin awkward lad wearing denims that are too short, and his eyes are big in his very white face. I glance at my wristwatch. It's seven fifteen.

Thirty minutes later, we cross the bridge over the Hope and speed down Main. Chester hasn't said a word and is concentrating so hard on just keeping the old truck on the road that I dare not ask any questions. Dr. Blum just bounces up and down, loosely rocking between the driver and me, holding my leather nurse's bag.

We turn at Sycamore, and pull up in front of an immaculate two-story brick home right behind the Saved by Faith Baptist Church. As I hop out of the truck carrying my medical bag and run toward the house, I hear crying—“Eiiiiiiiiiii! Eiiiiiiiiii!”—long screams and raised voices.
There must have been a terrible accident
.

I don't have long to find out. Mrs. Wade, Lilly Bittman's mother, hurries out the front door.

“Miss Becky, thank God. Come in! Come in! Dr. Blum with you? That's fine. Chester, sit with him out here on the porch. No, walk him around town. Just make yourself scarce. . . . Come in. Come in,” she repeats, dragging me up the steps and down a long hall to the door of a bedroom. Before I enter, I take hold of her fleshy arm. “What's happened? The screams are horrible! Chester didn't tell me anything, didn't say a word.”

“You've seen babies born, right?”

My heart does a flip-flop and I immediately feel rather faint. “You tried to find Patience?”

“Yes. Yes. Chester already called at her house, but Mr. Hester said she's down in Oneida attending a woman in labor and she's been there two days. He said to get you. You're like a midwife, aren't you? Almost a midwife?”

“My experience is limited.”

“Well, that fine, dear. We just need
someone
. It's Peaches Goody,” the woman continues. “She's only twelve. Says she didn't know she was pregnant, then her water broke in church and there was blood all over the place. I almost believe her, that she didn't know she was pregnant, though it sounds incredible.”

A hundred questions flood my mind:
Who's the father? How big is the baby? How big is the girl? What's the presenting part? Is the baby likely to be full term? How long has she been in labor?
I'd like to run right home, but that isn't possible, so I take a big breath and open the bedroom door.

What I expect to see is a young woman thrashing around on the bed, but instead find two older women hovering in front of a huge oak wardrobe, one tall and thin, one short and round, neither pregnant. They turn toward me with big eyes.

“Oh, thank the Lord, you've come, Miss Becky!” says the tall one, whom I now recognize as the teacher, Marion Archer. Her hair is pinned back from her face and it's a lot grayer than when I saw her five years ago.

“Thank the Lord!” echoes the other, Mrs. Goody, the round one, the Saved by Faith preacher's wife.

“Eiiiiiiiiiii! Eiiiiiiiiii!” The wails come again, the sound of a wild animal caught in a trap, and I locate the source, the freestanding closet.

Before I even put down my bag, the round lady addresses the
young woman hiding inside. “Honey babe. Peaches? Honey, please come out now. Do it for Mama.
Please
. The midwife is here. She'll help you.”

I'd like to clarify the situation, tell them again that I'm a registered nurse, not a midwife or a physician, but it doesn't seem the right time, so instead I pull Mrs. Goody across the room. She's dressed in a tasteful plum calf-length Sunday dress.

“What's going on?” I inquire. “Why is she hiding?”

The lady gives a long sigh. “It's Peaches, my twelve-year-old, just a sixth grader and apparently in the family way. . . . I swear we had no idea. She's a little chubby like me, and as far as I knew, hadn't even started her monthlies yet. If she did, she didn't tell me.”

Mrs. Goody wipes her tearstained red face. “I don't know how this happened. She was outside running and playing kick the can with the other girls until a few weeks ago. Then this morning, right at the beginning of my husband's Sunday sermon, her baby bag burst and water and blood spilled all over the place.”

“We rushed her out of the church and over here,” Mrs. Wade interjects importantly, “because I've attended several home deliveries, and the pastor was having after-church tea at their house.” (I'm hardly listening, still trying to picture an overweight pregnant child playing kick the can.)

“So why is she hiding?”

“She's in pain. I don't think she even knows where babies come from . . . and she's afraid.”

“Can't you force her to come out?”

“No. She's got a wire hanger hooked to something inside that's holding the doors closed. I thought of getting her father to come tear the closet apart, but before we do that, can you try? Maybe she'll listen to you.”

A preacher's daughter, wouldn't you know it!
And the poor child now pregnant
. Apparently she'd at least ovulated one time or she
wouldn't be in this state. The Reverend Goody, tall and balding, with eyes so dark they seem almost black, is familiar to me. He's of the fire-and-brimstone variety, and Peaches must be terrified of what he'll have to say about her pregnancy.

Blum was called to his church once, when a rattlesnake bit a visiting faith healer named Sampson Lick. He would have died for sure if Dr. Blum hadn't pulled the poison out with his mouth; then the two of us took turns nursing the man all night. Even after he almost met his maker, we heard Mr. Lick went back to serpent handling. Dr. Blum was pissed as hell.

“Eiiiiiiii. Eiiiiiiii.” The trapped animal cries again. When she stops, the house is so still you could probably hear a spider weaving its web.

I take a long breath to fortify myself. This is not what I thought I was here for. I pictured a medical emergency, a sick baby, a man with a broken arm, or maybe a case of pneumonia. “Okay,” I say. “I'll give it a try. Can you ladies step out of the room? You could call the midwife again.”

“Maybe we should remain,” says Mrs. Wade.

“No, I'd really rather try by myself.” The women look miffed, but they do what I say, and now it's just me and the screamer.

“Peaches,” I whisper, sitting on the floor, next to the wardrobe. “Peaches. This is Becky Myers. I'm a nurse, a doctor's nurse.” I don't know why I say
doctor's nurse
. Maybe I think it sounds more official.

“They called me to see if I could help. Are you in terrible pain?”

A muffled “yes
”
comes from inside the cabinet.

“If you open the door, I can try to figure out what's wrong. Are you bleeding?”

Very quietly, she says, “There's water or pee still coming out of me, but it's dark in here, I can't see. Also, my back hurts so bad. I don't mean to scream, but it's killing me. I think I might die. I don't want to die.”

“Honey. Honey. You are
not
going to die. You are going to have a baby.”

There's no answer for a minute, then, “I can't have a baby. I'm a girl, not a mommy.”

I change tactics. If I can only get her to come out, maybe I can help her. For all I know the infant's head may be crowning and she's sitting on it.

“Are you hungry, Peaches?”

“A little . . . when I'm not paining. Oh, no! Here comes another one. My back! My back! Eiiiiiiii!” Her howl this time is even louder than before. Then she sobs, a blubbering little kid, really.

Finally, she lets up. “What would you like to eat?” I continue. “A glass of milk? A sandwich?”

“Could I have cake?”
Typical kid!

“I'll see. You start unlocking yourself and I'll be right back. You can call me Nurse Becky.”

When I open the door into the hall, I find Mrs. Wade, Mrs. Goody, and the Archer woman hovering there, wringing their hands.

“Can Peaches have something to eat? Cake? She'd like cake. You don't have any cake around, do you, Mrs. Wade?”

“Yes, yes. I have a red velvet cake I made for Sunday supper. Can she eat in labor?”

“Well, Dr. Blum would say no. She may throw up later. But knowing Patience, the midwife, she'd probably say yes. I'm just trying to get Peaches to come out of the closet. She really doesn't understand what's going on. She thinks she's going to die.”

Peaches's mother starts to cry again and mumbles over and over, “My poor baby. My poor baby.”

“I'm going back. . . . Tap twice on the door when the cake is ready, but please don't come in. I'll tell you when it's time.”

I enter as Peaches starts her howl again, only this time it's not quite as frantic.

“Cake on the way,” I announce cheerfully. She cuts the cry short.

“What kind?”

“Red velvet chocolate cake, Mrs. Wade's specialty. How are you coming with the lock?” I'm surprised when the door cracks open.

“You really think I'm having a baby?”

“Well, yes. I think so. It does hurt some, especially when it's your first one, but it doesn't hurt so bad if you understand what's happening.”

“But I'm just a sixth grader. How could a baby get in me? Can you make the pains stop?”

“Well, maybe . . . if I could examine you. I'll see.”

I truly have no idea what I can offer in terms of pain relief. Luckily, just then there's a tap at the door. “That's the cake. There's a towel on the bed. Sit on it and we can eat while we talk.” I'm surprised when, without any more coaxing, I see one pale freckled leg appear at the closet opening, then another.

Mrs. Wade opens the door and pushes in a fancy silver tray with the cake and two glasses of cold milk. She looks at me with big eyes, silently asking how things are going, but I say nothing and close the door again.

When I turn, a short, plump girl with large breasts, a body that
looks sixteen, and a baby face is sitting on a green towel on the edge of the bed. She's wearing her Sunday dress, a sailor-type middy with a long skirt, but the skirt is all rumpled, blood streaked, and wet. Poor kid, I think.

“Yummy!” she says, reaching out for her plate. I sit down next to her and pick up my glass of milk. There must be something I can do for her pain. Dr. Blum always gave the mothers morphine, but that's not going to happen.

I again try to imagine what Patience would do, but realize I know little of her methods except the breathing when the head is crowning . . . and the use of oil.

“Oh, no! Here comes the pain again!” Peaches cries. “Are you sure I'm not going to die?” She begins to shake her hands in front of her as if they've both gone to sleep. “Oh. Oh. Oh. Eiiiii!” I reach over and touch her belly, which is round and hard under about two inches of fat.

“Peaches, feel your belly. See how hard it is? That's your baby trying to come out.”

“Don't say that, Nurse Becky! There can't be a baby!”

For the next ten minutes, interrupted by contractions, I try to explain the female reproductive system.

“But how did a baby get in there?” the girl asks.
Good question
.

“A man or an older boy has to get his penis inside or near a girl's privates. Then he puts in some seeds and the baby grows.”

Peaches looks horrified. “It was only a dare. Don't tell my mama!”

“Did you do that with a boy, honey? It's okay. I won't tell her if you don't want me to.”

“One time last fall, a long time ago, we were playing hide-and-seek in the dark, and my friend Molly's cousin from Beckley dared me to let his privates touch my privates. He didn't put his snake inside, but he rubbed it on me and afterward I was wet. I hit him in the face because I thought he'd peed on me.”
Now we are getting to the heart of it
.

Another contraction but at least she's not screaming.

“Mama will hate me. She will be so mad. There have been other girls in the church that had babies, but they were in high school. I'm just a kid. You think it was the boy and his seed? Not Jesus?”

“I think it was the boy, yes.”

“Miss Becky. I don't feel so good. I'm going to puke.”

I grab a pillow to catch the vomit and protect the flowered carpet.

“Oh, no! Now I have to pooh!”

I go very still. We have nothing ready for the birth! And again I haven't even listened to the fetal heartbeat.