Bittersweet Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #5): A Novel (23 page)

Grandma Jurgenson, Bliss’s midwife, had little confidence in doctors. “Him and his pills!” she castigated. “Thinks they’ll cure everything, and they cure nothing!”

Creaky and old as she was, Grandma Jurgenson never turned a deaf ear to a plea for help. Not only was she midwife and doctor to the area but undertaker as well. And for Marfa and George she had laid out and prepared three babies for burial.

Still, called a fourth time, and though it was in the middle of the night and though she was eighty years of age, Grandma Jurgenson rose from her bed, dressed herself, picked up her bag of potions and medicines, and climbed creakily into the buggy with George.

“We’ll stop and tell Ellie,” George said, chirruping to the horse, whirling the buggy out of the yard and down the road. “Marfa wants her there.”

Grandma Jurgenson was agreeable. She knew her days were numbered and that someone in the community would need to take on the job, a job that had fallen to her because of desperate need. She had found no way to back out ever since she had sewed up the first bull-gored farmer.

And who better to take over for her than Ellie Bonney? Hadn’t Ellie, since childhood, mended every broken bird, splinted every dog that limped, soothed every tearful child, fed every wayward cat, and rescued every baby bird that tumbled from its nest?

“I’ll drive myself over,” Ellie told George when he came to the door. “I’ll need a few minutes to get myself together and hitch up the horse.”

Before she left the house, she put her head into her father’s room, making an explanation and reminding him that there was a pot of beans bubbling in the oven overnight.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” she said. “After all, it’s not a first baby.... It could come easily and quickly.”

Not so. Marfa struggled the rest of the night, struggled all day, struggled until the dawning of a new morning.

Though Grandma tried to shoo the worried George out, as was right and proper, he never left his wife’s side. Fortunately there were enough young Polcheks around to take care of the chores, for those were far from George’s mind.

Grandma knew all the tricks of her trade—the breathing, the pulling, the pushing. And still they were not enough. That was when Ellie, new as she was to childbirth, stepped in with her bottle of laudanum. She would not, could not, bear to see her friend suffer.

“It isn’t right!” she insisted. “And surely it isn’t good for her. She’s worn out. Why not let her get some rest between pains? Why not lessen the pain if we can?”

Grandma Jurgenson raised her eyebrows. “It’s natural,” she objected. “Pain’s natural. Women understand that they bear their offspring with pain; it’s supposed to be that way, has been ever since Eve ate the apple.”

Having respect for her elders, if not Grandma Jurgenson herself in this particular matter, Ellie bit her lip and refrained from an impatient “Oh, bosh!”

Aware of her inexperience, Ellie was careful about overriding the older woman’s hard-learned expertise. But in her heart of hearts she considered herself a modern woman, beyond the old wives’ tales of former years, eager for any advances in medicine or health care.

Grandma, fond of both Ellie and Marfa and more than a little uneasy about another disastrous birthing experience for Marfa, shrugged and subsided.

And, the old lady had to admit, Marfa’s thrashing and struggling calmed considerably after Ellie doled out the precious soother, a “stupefier,” the tincture of opium available to one and all—without oversight or restraint, as often as wanted, as much as was wanted—by an obliging catalog.

Although it may have slowed the process, it certainly made it easier. Ellie soothed her friend’s fears, smoothed her forehead, rubbed her limbs—anything and everything she thought might
be encouraging or helpful. And eventually nature, though grudgingly, took care of the rest.

At dawn the miracle took place—a new life was thrust, screaming and kicking, into the world. A living, breathing human being—not here one moment, here the next moment. Irrevocably here, for sixty years, give or take a few, whether good or bad, whether happy or miserable, whether loved or despised; to count for something or to count for nothing; to live a life of service or selfishness. And eventually—to reproduce in the endless cycle that was called generations.

As for now, little George Bonney Polchek was greatly desired, greatly loved, greatly blessed. Whatever he would or would not become, he started well, not something everyone can count on.

Exhausted, wan, and weak, Marfa resisted the curtain of sleep and medication that lured her to rest and held her son, cradling him on her breast, baptizing him with her tears.

And thanking God. Thanking him for the fulfillment of her Scripture.

And Ellie, almost equally weary, turned homeward. But with empty arms, empty heart.

Rest was not to be hers. Not then nor for days to come. Tears were hers in abundance.

B
irdie was astonished on the occasion of her first goose plucking.

Knowing only that her bed was wonderfully soft and comfortable, warm and cozy, she hardly understood the reason for it, and the procedure not at all. Feathers were feathers, weren’t they?

It was to be her first summer in Bliss. Waking with no school duties to look forward to, no children awaiting her instruction, Birdie had sighed luxuriously, turned over, and gone back to sleep. Rising leisurely, she found Lydia hard at work, going from one task to another like a machine. And with no end in sight. Barely was one task completed when another called. Besides the regular tasks of the well-ordered week: washing, ironing, mending, churning, cleaning, baking; and the normal routine of the day: breakfast and dish-washing, dinner and dish-washing, supper and dish-washing, and the regular chores sandwiched in between, there were the extras that could be done only during good weather and “before the snow flies.” Extras such as berry picking, canning, whitewashing, curtains taken down and washed, stretched,
and rehung, quilts washed and dried and put away for another cold season.

And bed ticks refreshed or replaced.

Ticking, a tightly woven material almost as heavy as canvas, and almost always striped, was purchased by the bolt. Cut to the size of the mattress, it was stitched to form a bag of sorts, ready to be filled and sewn shut. There was no mystery about the ticking.

It was the feather procedure that boggled the mind of Birdie Wharton. Never again would she snuggle into a feather bed without a keen awareness of the human-and-goose cooperation it took to assure comfort and warmth; never again would she complain of the odd feather or two that managed to protrude from the ticking, to prickle and annoy.

She had never given a thought as to where and how the tick got its contents. Perhaps she had supposed the feathers were garnered every time a bird was killed, collecting slowly until enough had been saved for a tick.

While Birdie watched, Lydia produced a strange contraption she called the “goose bonnet.” It was a small wickerlike cage that fit over the head and bill of a goose, and its function was to keep the goose from pinching its handler while it was being plucked. Plucking—obviously a procedure a goose resented, though it was not injured. Or so Lydia maintained.

The feather-gleaning was done when the birds were molting, losing their feathers naturally. Plucking at this time was fairly easy and wouldn’t harm the bird. Or so Lydia claimed.

Getting custody of the bird itself was the hardest part, and here Birdie, after watching Lydia’s fruitless efforts, offered to help.

First the geese were herded into a pen; then, one by one, they were cornered and subdued though they put up a battle, honking madly, wings flapping, necks craning, bills slashing. One almost had to get astride the broad back, Birdie discovered grimly, and clasp the silly creature with one’s knees in order to clap the bonnet on it. Finally, holding the resentful creature in a tight grip, it was hefted off the ground—no small task in itself—and presented to Lydia for the plucking.

“Don’t worry about them,” Lydia said, noting Birdie’s strained face as the birds struggled in her clutch. “I think they must appreciate help in getting the feathers off. You’ll notice I don’t nearly take all of them, just the ones that come off readily.”

But Birdie was not convinced, and she watched sympathetically during the picking and plucking and then as the outraged bird was released to waddle its bulky and somewhat denuded body away, hastening back to its cronies, complaining loudly of its treatment and perhaps apologizing for its disheveled appearance.

“This part,” Lydia said, cradling a goose and pointing out a certain area, “is called the rump, and it’s covered with the best of all—fluff. That’s what it’s called—fluff. This on the keel,” she pointed out a portion of low breast, “is good, too.”

“Fluff? Keel? I never knew geese had anything but a bill and a breast. Oh, and webbed feet, of course.”

“This is the nostril... the bean... the dewlap... the shank... the pinion coverts and the wing coverts—”

“Coverts?” Birdie asked, transfixed by the anatomy lesson.

“Means hidden, or sheltered.” Lydia didn’t know much about book learning, but she certainly knew her geese. With her hands occupied as they were, she blew upward, dislodging a feather that had settled on her nose.

A windless day had been chosen for the job; even so, feathers spread everywhere, stubbornly resistant, it seemed, to going into the sack. The choice soft and downy feathers, for pillows, were kept separate.

“They still have to be washed and dried,” Lydia explained, pink of face and rather tense of mouth from her exertions.

Washing feathers? The very thought was more than a bewildered Birdie could comprehend at the moment.

And so she was relieved when Lydia, weary and wearing a festoon of goose down on her shoulders and in her hair, suggested a cup of tea.

Brushing themselves off, scrubbing the grime and oil from their hands, the two women sought the kitchen gladly and the kettle simmering there.

“Sit down,” Birdie said, aware that Lydia, older by far, had done most of the work. Lydia sank into a chair, flexing her fingers, painful and swollen but not allowed to interfere greatly with the tasks that had to be done.

“I declare,” Birdie said, getting out the teapot and swishing warm water into it, “I’ll never think of a goose as just a good meal again. And I suppose I’ll never see it as fully feathered and decently covered again. Somewhere in the back of my mind will be the picture of it scuttling off in high dudgeon, its backside bared ignominiously of its fluff, barnyard dignity lost forever.”

“That’s life, I guess,” Lydia said thoughtfully. “It starts out so beautifully. Babies, of all kinds, are so adorable, so full of promise, human babies the same as animal babies. Now take that new Polchek baby—Bonney, I think they call him—”

“For Ellie.”

“Yes, for her friend Ellie Bonney. No baby could be more wanted, more prized. No child will be more loved, I suppose. And yet, with the best the parents can give, with the best the world—Bliss’s world, at least—has to offer, it could turn out to be a rascal, a ne’er-do-well. On the other hand, the potential for good is there, too. Just think—one day Thomas Alva Edison was just a helpless baby. Who knew, just looking at him, that he would invent the marvelous talking machine—”

“Telephone. In Greek it means a voice from afar.” Birdie didn’t know much about geese, but she did know her Greek.

“—and people could throw their voices miles and miles.” Lydia lived for the day when she could talk to her small grandson, her dead daughter’s child, on the prairie three hundred miles to the south. Three hundred miles that might as well have been three thousand, so seldom did she see him and so few and far-between were letters, particularly in winter.

“Edison had no schooling, you know,” Lydia continued, “and he became a trainboy—that’s what the article said, trainboy—on the
Grand Trunk
when he was twelve. From there he went on to great things, and he’s still turning out those inventions—a boon to mankind. On the other hand, there was Louis Riel.”

Still fresh in the memories of Northwest homesteaders was the insurrection of the Saskatchewan half-breeds under Riel, the uprising of the Indians in their own area under Beardy and One-Arrow, the attack on Fort Carlton and the battle at Duck Lake, causing great excitement all across Canada... the massacre at Frog Lake, the looting, the burning. Remembering, Lydia shuddered, though she had been far away in the east at the time.