The Midwife (27 page)

In the harsh morning light, Meredith’s eyes look tired but calm. She steps closer, and the two of us
 
—our bodies outlined by the frame
 
—stand side by side. For the time being, our past is forgotten, and all we can focus on is the radiance of this young woman who has joined our disparate lives in love.

Meredith leans in. She cups the newborn’s head before smiling sadly and popping the handle to the suitcase. I hold the screen door open for her, and she rolls Amelia’s items over the threshold: a peculiar parallel of a horrific day that shall never be forgotten but now, at least, doesn’t hold the same amount of sting.

Dr. Thomas Fitzpatrick is the last to leave. He balances two stacked laundry baskets of clothing in his arms. Setting them on the porch, he hands me a check. “Meredith and I want to say thank you, Beth,” he says. “We owe . . . We owe you our daughter’s life.”

I open the check, and my mouth goes dry. “You’re welcome,” I say. “Thank you.”

Nodding, Thom gathers the laundry baskets and plods down the steps. He finishes loading everything and climbs behind the wheel. The sun glints off the windshield as he shifts Amelia’s car into reverse and Meredith follows in their rental car out the long, rutted lane. Holding Lydie’s child close, I then watch my daughter being taken away for the second time.

Opening the screen door, I slip into Hopen Haus. Looper is slanted against a ladder while rolling a paintbrush on the newly repaired ceiling that now mirrors the smoothness of the sheet protecting the hardwood floor. Flecks of white paint speckle his silvering hair, letting me imagine how he will look when we grow old together . . . side by side. Feeling my presence, Looper turns and smiles at the image of me holding the sleeping babe. Then he looks up at the ceiling and continues working, but I can hear
him hum. Smiling myself, I walk down the length of hall where
 
—at the end
 
—a mother waits for the return of her child.

And this time, I will let her hold him for as long as she wants.

This time, through the growth of that child and the children to come, a barren midwife’s soul can come to life again.

Staring through the driver’s-side window, I press the brake and let my car idle on the lane. The small boy in a straw hat and black pants folded up to skinny shins continues swatting two fat ponies with a bamboo shoot a head taller than he is. The ponies shake their bridles. They kick their miniature heels and toss their manes, and then meet like outlaws once they believe the tiresome boy is past.

But the boy eventually manages to grab the ponies’ bridles and lead them through the gate and down to the pond. The ponies snuffle the reeds and cattails at the pond’s edge before lowering their heads to the water and drinking their
fill. The boy takes off his hat and runs a hand through his wild red hair. Glancing behind him, he sees my car. His hat is in one hand and the bamboo shoot is in the other, the arc of it hanging over him like a fishing cane.

The curls and the fronds hide part of his face, but even from this distance, I can recognize him from the color of his hair alone. He’s my birth son, Thomas Looper, whom I haven’t seen since my college graduation five months ago.

Thomas’s eyes narrow as he studies my new car, and then he looks at me, seated in the driver’s seat. His freckled face brightens in this straight-across grin. “’Melia!” he cries. Jamming the straw hat on his head, he tosses the bamboo shoot and starts running. I jolt my car into park and sling open the door. I scramble across the dirt and rocks and awkwardly scale the split-rail fence.

“Thomas!” I call. “Look at you!”

He continues running to me
 
—his growing-boy arms pinwheeling
 
—and then we meet in the center of the sloping field. He latches to my waist and burrows there a moment. I hold him tight, feeling his heart beat against my stomach
 
—a distant echo from when I carried him.

“Does
Mamm
know you’re here?” he asks.

I take off his hat and ruffle his hair. “Not yet,” I murmur. “Should we surprise her?”

He looks up and smiles. “Yes!”

Dropping the hat back on top of his head, I take Thomas’s hand and help him over the split-rail fence to my car. “Can I drive?” he asks, as he asks every time I come.

“Of course.” I slide the seat back and Thomas plops on
my lap. Shifting into drive, I tap the gas and Thomas steers the wheel. In the windshield’s reflection, I watch him pinch his tongue between his teeth. His pale brows crease. The tires dig in and climb the lane. To our left, the Goods and the Martins have a clothesline snapped between their twin gray houses. From it, dresses and shirts deflate and then fill, deflate and then fill, like wind socks meant to trap the warm fall breeze. To my right, the orchard’s branches are bowed low with harvest. If I squint, I can see the bees landing on the Red Delicious apples already ornamenting the ground.

The bottom land’s being worked by a dozen or so members of the community, who began to return after the farmer Walt Hollis died and the land he purchased from them went up for sale again. Each time I come, more horses and buggies are clattering down Dry Hollow Road, more houses are being refurbished, and more parcels of land are being turned into self-sustaining farms. I can see acres of Rox Orange sorghum, which Dry Hollow Community is becoming known for, ready to be reaped and cooked.

One line of men
 
—with heavy beards and forearms
 
—slices through the base of the cleaned sorghum cane with scythes that glint with continual, synchronized motion. Behind them, another line gathers and lays the cane bottom first, so the pieces won’t jam up the mill. The women gather the cane into sheaves of five, and then tote them like wheat over to the horse-drawn mill that is a few yards from the cooker. The mill’s lifted off the ground by a stout
wooden base. The year I came to Hopen Haus on fall break and participated in Sorghum Day, Rhoda explained that the base is inspected before and after each squeezing, as the weight of the mill is immense and must withstand the force of the turning log, propelled by the horse that drives the connected pole around the mill.

“Let’s go!” Thomas begs, pulling on the steering wheel. Sorghum Day does not hold the same excitement for Thomas as it does for me.

Laughing, I touch the gas, and we make our way to the top of the hill. I place my arms around Thomas’s and guide him to a stop in front of the hitching post, next to two horses and buggies. Parking, Thomas and I get out. I almost lock the doors before remembering where I am. Smiling, I toss my keys on the seat and close the door. The horse with the blaze turns her head at the noise and twitches her silken tail, but she can’t see me because of her blinders. I swat flies away and scratch her neck. I haven’t been around farm animals since the summer after my junior year when Rhoda encouraged me to come and stay at Hopen Haus.

It was the summer I delayed an internship so I could spend time with my birth son, whom Rhoda and Looper had just officially adopted. It is bittersweet, recalling that time when love, for me, meant not holding on to someone but letting him go until I could find out who I was. And though I’ve since healed from the aftermath surrounding my unique beginning, I know allowing the Loopers to adopt Thomas was the right decision . . . for all of us.

Breathing deep, I take Thomas’s hand and walk toward the front door of Hopen Haus. It is as if I’m on the set of a film I’ve already viewed. Even my movements mimic those I’ve already made
 
—making me feel like I live in the skin of the girl who came here, to Dry Hollow, five years ago, and maybe every girl who has or will ever come. I’m amazed at the work Looper has put into the property. Two new brick chimneys jut from the tin roof. Below the ten windows, painted flower boxes spill yellow Mirabelle blooms. A shower of hummingbirds zigzags through the air. They are fighting over the glass feeders brimming nectar that hang near the replaced woodwork trimming the house. A treated split-rail fence hems in the grounds.

Still holding Thomas’s hand, I climb Hopen Haus’s steps and knock on the screen door. I rock on the sockets of my hips, wondering if I’ve made a mistake. I have no real plan for being here. I certainly don’t want to join the church or take up the Mennonites’ Plain lifestyle. I just know that Hopen Haus needs a new midwife since Charlotte’s passing last year, and I can apprentice under Rhoda until I finish my nursing degree in Nashville. I’m just about to knock again when the door opens. A dark-haired woman with a strapless white apron tacked to a dark dress stands in a square of light beamed in from the window beside the door. Her eyes infused with kindness, she looks me over and smiles. “Hello, my
meedel
,” she says.

“Hello, Rhoda.”

The midwife steps out onto the porch and pulls the screen door behind her. Without a word, she wraps her
arms around me
 
—her starched apron crackling against my chest like parchment
 
—and pats my back. I lean on her tall frame. I’m sure our embrace looks strange to anyone watching. But I don’t care. Five months have passed since I’ve seen my birth mother, and I hope this hug can make up for lost time.

“Now,” Rhoda says. She releases me but keeps holding my shoulders. With one hand, she touches my cheek. “You need somewhere to stay?”

Before I can answer, Thomas wiggles in the spot between our conjoined bodies, holding us together, keeping us from pulling apart. “Look!” he crows. “We make a circle!”

Yes,
I think, smiling at the midwife, whose eyes are bottomless wells of love.
A circle by birth and blood.

I have always heard that the most heartfelt novels are those drawn from personal experience. My daughter was twelve weeks old when I began writing
The Midwife
. Staring at her perfect, delicate fingers wrapped around one of my own, I struggled with the need to protect her in our fallen world. I believed that overcoming fear with faith
 
—by placing my trust in my daughter’s Creator rather than in my abilities as her mother
 
—was the real-life experience that I would have to learn, and therefore apply to my main character, Rhoda Mummau, as well.

Little did I know that, fifteen months later, my own faith would be tested as one of my worst fears came true: I miscarried a child. But I do not care for that term,
miscarried
. I was more than just a carrier, a means to an end. For those ten weeks of my too-short pregnancy, I became a mother of two. My firstborn, toddler-age daughter . . . and, I believe, a boy
 
—my son. I imagined tall, bookend children with their father’s straight-across grin and sparkling hazel
eyes. Instead, on a black, drizzling night, my husband and I found ourselves burying our secondborn next to a cedar-rail fence.

The days after were hard
 
—and yet, even in death, life goes on: laundry needed folding, diapers needed changing, tomatoes needed gathering from the garden before the incoming frost. I took long walks with my daughter and spread petals from the rosebush across my son’s grave. After a harvest celebration, I kissed my infant nephew’s cheek good-bye, and then continued cleaning up the detritus of our evening meal when suddenly I had to go lie down, realizing that kissing my nephew was the closest to kissing my son that I would ever come on earth.

My publisher kindly granted an extension on my editing deadline for
The Midwife
. But writing, for me, has often been more of a catharsis than a job. Therefore, in the mornings, I peeled back the covers, went out to the living room, and turned on the computer. As I stared through the French doors at the ember sun rising over the valley, I could suddenly see the midwife Rhoda’s loss through another grieving mother’s eyes. I wept with her as I reread scenes that my own fingers had typed, but that now felt like something God had devised as he portended my loss and knew that this story would bring healing to my own soul.

One week after we lost our baby, I was standing in church when the worship team began reading passages from the Bible. A few recited promises that I had long ago memorized at the urging of my parents or my teachers.
And then one man started reading from Lamentations, a book I had read but that had never spoken to me before: “I remember my affliction and my wandering; the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.’” (Lamentations 3:19-24,
NIV
)

Hearing those words, I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of the sun slanting through the kaleidoscope of stained-glass windows. Tears began streaming down my face, unchecked. It may sound strange, but I knew those verses weren’t only meant for me, but for the midwife Rhoda, as well, who feels as real to me as anyone I have ever known. Then I realized that those verses weren’t only meant for us grieving mothers; they were also meant for my readers who have suffered loss. And haven’t we
all
suffered loss, in one form or another?

And so I pray that the midwife’s story will remind you
 
—even in your darkest nights and most broken places
 
—that whenever you call to mind the Lord’s great love, you will find healing and hope.

Rachel

My face burns with the heat of a hundred stares. No one is looking down at Amos King’s handmade casket because they are all too busy looking at me. Even Tobias cannot hide his disgust when he reaches out a hand, and then realizes he has not extended it to his angelic wife, who was too weak to come, but to her fallen twin. Drawing the proffered hand back, Tobias buffs the knuckles against his jacket as if to clean them and slips his hand beneath the Bible. All the while his black eyes remain fixed on me until Eli emits a whimper that awakens the new bishop to consciousness. Clearing his throat, Tobias resumes reading from the German Bible: “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .’”

I cannot help but listen to such a well-chosen verse,
despite the person reading it. I feel I am walking through the valley of death even as this new life, my child, yawns against my ribs. Slipping a hand beneath Eli’s diapered bottom, I jiggle him so that his ribbon mouth slackens into a smile. I then glance across the earthen hole and up into Judah King’s staring, honey-colored eyes. His are softer than his elder brother Tobias’s: there is no judgment in them, only the slightest veiling of confusion not thick enough to hide the pain of his unrequited love, a love I have been denying since childhood.

Dropping my gaze, I recall how my braided pigtails would fly out behind me as I sprinted barefoot down the grassy hill toward ten-year-old Judah. I remember how he would scream,
“Springa! Springa!”
and instead of being caught by Leah or Eugene or whoever was doing the chasing, I would run right toward the safety of base and the safety of him. Afterward, the two of us would slink away from our unfinished chores and go sit in the milking barn with our sweat-soaked backs against the coolness of the storage tanks. Judah would pass milk to me from a jelly jar and I would take a sip, read a page of the Hardy Boys or the Boxcar Children, and then pass his contraband book and jelly jar back.

Because of those afternoons, Judah taught me how to speak, write, and read English far better and far earlier than our Old Order Mennonite teachers ever could have. As our playmates were busy speaking Pennsylvania Dutch, Judah and I had our own secret language, and sheathed in its safety, he would often confide how desperately he wanted
to leave this world for the larger one beyond it. A world he had explored only through the books he would purchase at Root’s Market when his father wasn’t looking and read until the pages were sticky with the sweat of a thousand secret turnings.

Summer was slipping into fall by the time my
mamm
, Helen, discovered our hiding spot. Judah and I had just returned from making mud pies along the banks of the Kings’ cow pond when she stepped out of the fierce sun into the barn’s shaded doorway and found us sitting, once again, beside the milking tanks with the fifth book in the Boxcar Children series draped over our laps. Each of us was so covered in grime that the jelly jar from which we drank our milk was marred with a lipstick kiss of mud. But we were pristine up to the elbows, because Judah feared we would damage his book’s precious pages if we did not redd up before reading them.

That afternoon, all my
mamm
had to do was stand in the doorway of the barn with one hand on her hip and wag the nubby index finger of her other hand (nubby since it had gotten caught in the corn grinder when she was a child), and I leaped to my feet with my face aflame.

For hours and hours afterward, my stomach churned. I thought that when
Dawdy
got home from the New Holland horse sales he would take me out to the barn and whip me. But he didn’t.

To this day, I’m not even sure
Mamm
told him she’d caught Judah and me sitting very close together as we read from our
Englischer
books. I think she kept our meeting
spot a secret because she did not want to root out the basis of our newly sprouted friendship, which she hoped would one day turn into fully grown love. Since my
mamm
was as private as a woman in such a small community could be, I never knew these were her thoughts until nine years later when I wrote to tell her I was with child.

She arrived, haggard and alone, two days after receiving my letter. When she disembarked from the van that had brought her on the twelve-hour journey from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, she walked with me into Leah and Tobias’s white farmhouse, up the stairs into my bedroom, and asked in hurried Pennsylvania Dutch, “Is Judah the
vadder
?”

Shocked, I just looked at her a moment, then shook my head.

She took me by the shoulders and squeezed them until they ached. “If not him, who?”

“I cannot say.”

“What do you mean, you cannot say? Rachel, I am your
mudder
. You can trust me,
jah
?”

“Some things go beyond trust,” I whispered.

My
mamm
’s blue eyes narrowed as they bored into mine. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. Although I was nineteen, I felt like I was a child all over again, like she still held the power to know when I had done something wrong and who I had done it with.

At last, she released me and dabbed her tears with the index nub of her left hand. “You’re going to have a long row to hoe,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“You’ll have to do it alone. Your
dawdy
won’t
let you come back . . . not like this.”

“I know that, too.”

“Did you tell Leah?”

Again, I shook my head.

My
mamm
pressed her hand against the melon of my stomach as if checking its ripeness. “She’ll find out soon enough.” She sighed. “What
are you? Three months, four?”

“Three months.” I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“Hide it for two more. ’Til Leah and the baby are stronger. In the meantime, you’ll have to find a place of your own. Tobias won’t
let you stay here.”

“But where will I go? Who will take me in?” Even in my despondent state, I hated the panic that had crept into my voice.

My
mamm
must have hated it as well. Her nostrils flared as she snapped, “You should’ve thought of this before, Rachel! You have sinned in haste. Now you must repent at leisure!”

This exchange between my
mamm
and me took place eight months ago, but I still haven’t found a place to stay. Although the Mennonites do not practice the shunning enforced by the Amish
Ordnung
, anyone who has joined the Old Order Mennonite church as I had and then falls outside its moral guidelines without repentance is still treated with the abhorrence of a leper. Therefore, once the swelling in my belly was obvious to all, the Copper Creek Community, who’d welcomed me with such open arms when I moved down to care for my bedridden sister, began to retreat until
I knew my child and I would be facing our uncertain future alone. Tobias, more easily swayed by the community than he lets on, surely would have cast me and my bastard child out onto the street if it weren’t for his wife. Night after night I would overhear my sister in their bedroom next to mine, begging Tobias, like Esther beseeching the king, to forgive my sins and allow me to remain sheltered beneath their roof
 
—at least until after my baby was born.

“Tobias, please,” Leah would entreat in her soft, high-pitched voice, “if you don’t want to do it for Rachel, then do it for
me
!”

Twisting in the quilts, I would burrow my head beneath the pillow and imagine my sister’s face as she begged her husband: it would be as white as the cotton sheet on which I lay, her cheeks and temples hollowed at first by chronic morning sickness, then later
 
—after Jonathan’s excruciating birth
 
—by the emergency C-section that forced her back into the prison bed from which she’d just been released.

Although I knew everything external about my twin, for in that way she and I were one and the same, lying there as Tobias and Leah argued, I could not understand the internal differences between us. She was selfless to her core
 
—a trait I once took merciless advantage of. She would always take the drumstick of the chicken and give me the breast; she would always sleep on the outside of the bed despite feeling more secure against the wall; she would always let me wear her new dresses until a majority of the straight pins tacking them together had gone missing and they had frayed at the seams.

Then, the ultimate test: at eighteen Leah married Tobias King. Not out of love, as I would have required of a potential marriage, but out of duty. His wife had passed away five months after the birth of their daughter Sarah, and Tobias needed a
mudder
to care for the newborn along with her three siblings. Years ago, my family’s home had neighbored the Kings’. I suppose when Tobias realized he needed a wife to replace the one he’d lost, he recalled my docile, sweet-spoken twin and wrote, asking if she would be willing to marry a man twelve years her senior and move away to a place that might as well have been a foreign land.

I often wonder if Leah said yes to widower Tobias King because her selfless nature would not allow her to say no. Whenever she imagined saying no and instead waiting for a union with someone she might actually love, she would probably envision those four motherless children down in Tennessee with the Kings’ dark complexion and angular build, and her tender heart would swell with compassion and the determination to marry a complete stranger. I think, at least in the back of her mind, Leah also knew that an opportunity to escape our yellow house on Hilltop Road might not present itself again. I had never wanted for admirers, so I did not fear this fate, but then I had never trembled at the sight of a man other than my father, either. As far back as I can recall, Leah surely did, and I remember how I had to peel her hands from my forearms as the wedding day’s festivities drew to a close, and
Mamm
and I finished preparing her for her and Tobias’s final unifying ceremony.

“
Ach
, Rachel,” she stammered, dark-blue eyes flooded with tears. “I
 
—I can’t.”

“You goose,” I replied, “
sure
you can! No one’s died from their wedding night so far, and if all these children are a sign, I’d say most even like it!”

It was a joy to watch my sister’s wan cheeks burn with embarrassment, and that night I suppose they burned with something entirely new. Two months later she wrote to say that she was with child
 
—Tobias King’s child
 
—but there were some complications, and would I mind terribly much to move down until the baby’s birth?

Now Tobias finishes reading from the Psalms, closes the heavy Bible, and bows his head. The community follows suit. For five whole minutes not a word is spoken, but each of us is supposed to remain in a state of silent prayer. I want to pray, but I find even the combined vocabulary of the English and Pennsylvania Dutch languages insufficient for the turbulent emotions I feel. Instead, I just close my eyes and listen to the wind brushing its fingertips through the autumnal tresses of the trees, to the trilling melody of snow geese migrating south, to the horses stomping in the churchyard, eager to be freed from their cumbersome buggies and returned to the comfort of the stall.