The Reluctant Midwife (16 page)

“Private Linus Boggs,” he introduces the man. I sit down at a small desk in the corner.

“Welcome, Linus. I'm Nurse Rebecca Myers. What seems to be the problem?” The pale, blond twenty-year-old hides under his bushy white eyebrows, his oversized jaw clenched tight.

“It's his pecker, miss.” Boodean doesn't have to consult his clipboard.

I nod toward the door to indicate that I need some privacy with
the patient and he should leave, but my new medic doesn't get it. “It's crotch rot, is what he tells me. Needs some salve or something.”

I take a big breath. “Ordinarily, Boodean, I'd like a private moment with the patients so they can explain their problem to me, then you can come in when I do the exam, but now that you've already offered your diagnosis . . .”

“It's not my diagnosis, ma'am. It's just what he told me. Right, Linus?”

The patient's face is by this time mottled red and I see tears in his eyes. “Mr. Boggs? Can you describe your symptoms to me? When did you first notice the problem?”

Linus turns to Boodean as if to say, “Is this horrible woman really going to make me explain all this?” My assistant looks at the ceiling.

The private clears his throat. “The problem came on last week, ma'am, but it's getting worse.”

“Itching? Burning when you void?” I realize by his blank expression he doesn't understand the word
void
. “Does it burn when you pee . . . piss?”

“Nah, miss. Nothing like that! That's the clap, VD. This is more like an itch. I thought maybe it was crotch rot or crotch critters.” (Lordy, I was expecting health problems like chicken pox, earaches, and infected wounds, not venereal disease and crotch critters. Maybe people in town were right and this isn't the place for me!)

“Well, Private, I'll need to examine you, either way. Can you lie down on the cot and unbutton your work pants. This won't take a minute.”

I turn and begin to scrutinize the old blue, brown, and clear bottles of liquids in the cupboard behind me while the young man gets undressed. There's Cocaine Tooth Ache Drops, Hamlin's Wizard
Oil Liniment, and Estonia Seed Oil.
Estonia Seed Oil? Now what could that be for?

“Ready.” That's Boodean. When I turn around, I find Linus lying on his back, pants pulled down, face turned to the wall . . . and the biggest penis I have ever seen pointing right up at the ceiling. Boodean takes a chair in the corner and looks down at the floor.

It's not that I've never seen an erection. I've been married, had a few lovers while at school, and I worked at Walter Reed, but this is enormous!

I take a deep breath, pull on my red rubber gloves, and approach my patient, looking first at his protuberance and then at his testicles and groin with my magnifying glass, the Sherlock Holmes of penises. It doesn't take long to figure it out. There are no creepy crawlies, just a bright red irritated rash on his testicles and inner thighs, so bad he looks like he's been scalded and I'm actually happy, because now I know what's wrong.

“It's nothing bad, Linus, just a simple skin fungus. Luckily, I bought a jar of Blue Itch Cream at the pharmacy and there's a can of Gold Bond Medicated powder in the closet.

“You'll need to keep the area clean and dry and I'm going to give you some of the powder. Use it two times a day, sparingly. I have a jar of the salve too, but it's all I have for the whole camp, so we have to keep it in the clinic.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Linus mutters, buttoning his work uniform khakis. “I'm greatly relieved.”

“I apologize for having to examine you. I know it was embarrassing.”

“Truly sorry you had to.”

I laugh. “As a CCC camp nurse with all male patients, I imagine I'll have to do things like that from time to time. It's just part of the job.” For the first time the patient actually looks at me and I see that he has a full set of teeth and a nice smile.

“Come to the clinic next Friday so I can see how you're doing. If you're not better, come sooner. The physician from Camp Laurel will be here on Thursday, if you'd rather see him.”

“No, that's fine, ma'am. The worst is over. No woman's ever stared at my pecker except my mom and that was ten years ago.”

The rest of the morning is less eventful. Boodean and I see cuts and burns, coughs and bellyaches, but nothing serious and no malingerers, as far as I can tell.

Finally the dinner bell rings. There's the smell of homemade bread drifting across the compound and just as Boodean and I are getting ready to go to the cookhouse there's a knock at the infirmary door.

A young man in a CCC uniform, with the motor pool insignia on the arm, walks in.

“Ma'am?” he says, standing at attention. “I'm Drake Trustler from the motor pool.”

I recognize the low voice immediately.
Gravel in a stream bed
. Who does he think he's kidding?

“Nurse, I'm Drake Trustler from the motor pool and I've hurt my shoulder. Wanted to see about getting some Bayers.”

Drake Trustler, my eye! It's Nick Rioli, Mrs. Bonazzo's driver. Baby-faced Nick with the kind eyes, the wide chest, and the gravelly voice. How dumb does he think I am? It's been months since I've seen him, but I don't forget.

“Boodean, you want to go on to the mess hall and get us some food? Get me some of everything, even dessert.”

“You sure, Nurse Myers? I don't mind missing a meal now and then.”

“You don't understand,
I
mind missing a meal! Now shoo.” The medic backs out the door. “Get lots of everything!” I yell after him.

“So what's the scoop?” I challenge my patient. “You call yourself Drake Trustler now? Don't try any funny business with me, Nick. Here sit on this stool. Did you really hurt your arm?”

“Sort of. I wanted to talk to you before you saw me somewhere in the camp and called me Nick. I'm not Nick anymore. I broke with the Bazzano bunch. It was never for me. The only way I could ditch them was to disappear.”

“So you just walked away?”

“Exactly. Once I got the missus and the children to White Sulfur Springs, I started planning my escape. You can't just quit the mob like it's a regular job; the mob is everywhere. We spent a few weeks at the Greenbrier and then went on to Roanoke, where she has family. The first night we were there, I left the keys in the Packard, loaded up a rucksack, and hit the road. It broke me to leave Joey, but I couldn't take him with me. Mrs. Bozzano would have hunted me down and had me killed like a dog.

“I didn't know where to go, but I caught the first ride that came along. Thought I might head to California, but everyone and his brother is trying to get there.

“I couldn't go north or south. There are mobsters all along the East Coast, and in the Midwest the thugs have taken over Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago. I decided the mountains of West Virginia would be a good place to hide and started hitching this way.” He paces the floor while I open my package from Stenger's and look for the Bayer.

“The third night out, I was camped behind a billboard outside of Hagerstown and I heard singing. It was coming from a truck full of CCC recruits broken down in the ditch.

“Fan belt was snapped. They'd fixed it, but the dummy that was driving had flooded the engine. Most of the fellows, a couple
dozen, were pretty well liquored up, including the driver, so I got in and took over. Before he passed out, he told me they were headed for Union County. . . .

“Next morning, at dawn, when they all woke, cold and sick, the sergeant saw me behind the wheel and concluded I was one of the boys and a teetotaler. I introduced myself as Drake Trustler from Ohio. He was a kid I once knew in Meigs County who drowned when he was ten.

“Everything went fine until we got to the camp and they couldn't find Drake Trustler's paperwork. Mrs. Ross gave the driver hell for losing it and fixed me up somehow. I used my grandma's address in Ohio as my home. You have to have some sort of residence and kin to send your twenty-five dollars to or you can't be part of the CCC. Too bad for the fellows without family. This is a good place, plenty to eat, and work to do that matters. I've been here for three months now and I'm second in command of the motor pool.”

He tells me his story while I make him a sling, get out two aspirin, and pour some Sloan's Liniment into a small vial.

“I'm sorry about Joey,” I say when I'm done. “But I'm glad you got free of them. My friends told me later who the Bazzanos were. The mother didn't seem so bad.”

“She's not ruthless like the rest of them, but she thinks she's entitled to whatever she wants. Johnny Bazzano spoiled her.”

“Will Anthony and Frankie still try to find you?”

There are footsteps on the porch and I can smell the food before the door opens.

“You won't tell, will you?” Drake Trustler whispers.

As I'm bumping home along Salt Lick, after my fourth day at White Rock, I see a strange sight and pull over on the edge of the road.

“Wait here,” I tell Blum. “It's Daniel Hester. He looks upset. I'll see if I can help him.” Blum stares ahead, as if he's not heard me, stares at the squished katydid on the windshield. “Sit. Stay,” I command just because he irritates me.

“Daniel! What's wrong? Have you lost something?” The man is stalking back and forth along the road, staring down at the dirt and pulling his hair. Can I help?” I yell from the back of the auto. “Daniel?” When he finally looks over, I can see he's been crying.
What the hell?

“Daniel!”

“I've killed her.” He stops for a moment and then starts pacing again, up and down the shallow, dry ditch.

“Who? What? A cow? A horse?”

I know bad things happen in medicine. Dr. Blum has lost patients, and veterinarians must lose patients too, but what terrible mishap could have brought the man to this state?

“Daniel, I insist you sit down. You're upset, but whatever has happened cannot be that bad.” I use my nurse voice, the voice I
would use if I were still on the wards and had to deal with a soldier having a breakdown, but he doesn't respond, and when I reach out to touch him, he pulls away. “Daniel? Daniel, what's wrong? Is it someone's dog?”

“It's Patience. She's pregnant.”

“I didn't know. She didn't tell me, but surely this is not all that bad.” The vet's hysteria surprises me. I thought he was a level-headed man.

“She doesn't like to tell anyone because she's lost babies before, but now she's bleeding. This is the way it always happens to her . . . except for little Danny.

“I took her into Torrington this morning and Dr. Seymour, the specialist, said she's going to lose the baby. He told us it's inevitable and recommends an abortion before she hemorrhages, but Patience refuses. She's lost two babies like this before, one when she was sixteen, then another, our first together, the year you left Union County. Little Danny is the only one who's survived.

“The placenta is separating, that's what Seymour says, but Patience won't give up. She had all but stopped bleeding a few days ago, but now it's started again.”

“How far along is she?”

“The physician thinks twenty weeks, but her cycle's irregular. He's just going by her uterine size. That means four long months in bed. That's
if
the bleeding slows down. As strong as Patience is, she's not immortal. I should never have gotten her pregnant, and l should never have . . .” Here he starts the pacing back and forth again, as if he were chased by demons.

I am so shocked that I don't even notice Dr. Blum get out of the car. He doesn't rush over, just moves in his slow, measured pace as if sleepwalking, then sits on the ground. When Daniel marches past him Blum sticks out his foot.

“What the hell!” The vet falls in the doctor's arms and sits up again, but at least he's stopped the interminable tromping.

“Oh, God. Oh, God,” Daniel moans, shaking his head.

My stomach goes cold. To lose Patience, to lose the Midwife of Hope River! It's unthinkable. I sit down in the grass with the two men and try to imagine what Dr. Blum would advise.

Bed rest, of course. If the placenta is only separating along the edge and Patience doesn't move around for the next fourteen to sixteen weeks, the baby and mother might survive, but if it breaks loose completely both mother and baby will die.

Daniel now rocks back and forth, his arms around his legs. The doc sits next to him like a tree stump. In the tall reeds, a small brown bird with an orange beak and very wise black eyes watches us.

“Where's Patience now?” I ask.

“At home in bed. Little Danny was napping.”

I pull myself together. “Let's go to your house. Let's go see Patience. You can't stay with her every minute, but we have to work out a plan. For all we know she could be hemorrhaging . . . or out splitting wood, either one.” Hester looks at me wildly and I bite my tongue.

A few minutes later, we bump across the wooden bridge that spans the creek and into the drive. At the open door to the kitchen, Daniel raises his hand. “I'll go up first. Maybe she's sleeping.”

“Honey? Patience?” he calls softly.

There's no answer.

“Patience?” he calls again louder and I hear his footsteps upstairs, clunking around, moving from room to room, opening and closing doors, getting more frantic. Then he stops.

“Daniel!” I rush up, imagining he's discovered the worst, his pregnant wife in a pool of blood, her drained body with the dead baby still in her, but when I get to their bedroom there's no blood on the sheets and no Patience either.

“Well, where the hell is she?” Daniel growls. “While, I'm mourning her possible demise and the devastating loss of another baby, she's outside picking posies?”

“Calm down, Daniel. You're distraught. Maybe she just went to the outhouse.”

“No, look, the potty is right there. I brought it up before I left.” A blue-and-white chamber pot, with a white lid, sits in the corner.

Dr. Blum now stands with us, looking out the window. I push in front of him to see what he's staring at and discover Patience Murphy lying on the green lawn below, her arms outstretched like a cross. Little Danny sits at her side playing with his red metal tractor.

“Oh my God!” Daniel rushes down the stairs.

“Slow down, Daniel. Get yourself under control,” I yell, running after him. “She's alive and moving. I just saw her roll over. There's no blood on her dress.”

I grab his shirt as he bolts toward the door and pull him back. “Take a few deep breaths. Don't make Patience more upset. Just go out there and sit at her side. We're going to talk. It may not be hopeless.”

The man wipes his eyes and runs his hands through his ragged hair. He returns to the kitchen, pumps water in a tin pan, washes his face, and then steps out in the sun.

“Patience, honey. I've been looking for you. Whatcha doing out here?”

“Lying down like you told me.” The midwife's shoulder-length brown hair is fanned out in the grass and she adjusts her wire-rimmed glasses.

I follow with Blum and we sit in a circle in the grass around her.

“I meant lying down in bed. I thought you would lie down
in bed.”

“It feels better out here,” Patience says in a quiet voice. “I like to be in the sun and the wind, with the smell of growing things and the feel of the earth under my body. I think it might heal me.”

Here I raise my eyebrows. Patience seems an intelligent woman, but she's so naïve. Surely, she doesn't imagine a placenta that's separating can knit back together just from sunshine and the touch of the sweet earth, yet I see peace in her face.

I decide to head things off, before Daniel starts to get hysterical again. Moving in close, I check Patience's pulse. It's rapid but not thready, indicating she's holding her own. Her skin is warm and dry. Respirations twenty-four. No acute distress.

“How much blood is there?” I ask. She pulls a blue cloth from under her skirt without embarrassment, and though it's covered with blood, I know, from my days as Dr. Blum's surgical assistant, it's only about a quarter cup.

“How are you feeling? Any pain? Any contractions? Are you light-headed when you stand?

“No pain yet. No contractions. Just the bleeding.” She sounds so matter-of-fact, but looking into her eyes, I see the fear. If you've already lost two babies, you know the pain, the everlasting pain.

“Is there any hope, Becky?” Daniel asks, his eyes wide and sad.

“There's always hope,” I answer, sounding more positive than I am. I look at Patience and continue. “This bleeding and your previous OB history make the prognosis for the pregnancy poor, but we
should try to save it. It will be hard and you'll need to stay in bed for as long as it takes.”

“It's probably due in March, the month of heavy, wet snow, one of the worst times for getting over the mountains and into Torrington,” Daniel observes.

“But there's no way I can stay in bed that long!” Patience moans. “Who will deliver the babies? I have five women due in the next four months, and how can I take care of Danny? You have to work, Daniel. We live from hand to mouth just like everyone else. If you don't go on house calls, we can't eat . . . and then there are the payments for electricity, the telephone and the mortgage. . . .” She raises both hands, signaling her despair.

“We can't eat?” asks little Danny, looking over at us. The child didn't appear to be listening, just playing with his little red tractor, but he got
that
part.

“No, honey,” Daniel reassures him. “We will always eat. We have food in the root cellar. Don't worry. Mommy and I will take care of you.”

“Is there a woman you could get to move in with you?” I ask.

Patience frowns. “I can't imagine who. . . . We can't afford help.”

“How about a girl from Hazel Patch or Liberty? You could provide room and board.”

Out of the blue, Dr. Blum breaks his silence. “Isaac and Becky.” We all turn with mouths open, shocked at the sound of his voice, as if a rock spoke or a tree.

“Us?”

“Oh, would you?” Patience pleads. “Could you come stay here? Just help us get through the fall and winter?”

Patience goes on as if “Isaac and Becky” were a normal suggestion from a normal individual. “We have the extra room downstairs and we have Moonlight, our cow, and a few chickens, plenty of milk and eggs and vegetables. We could all live together.”

It sounds like it's almost decided, but I inwardly cringe.
There's no way I am going to share a room with Dr. Blum!

“Please . . .” Patience pleads.

“It could work out well.” That's Daniel, more muted.

“A commune, like Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist who advocated intentional communities in the twenties!” the midwife exclaims. She has told me a little about her radical days but I don't even know who Peter Kropotkin is.

Daniel rolls his eyes. “Don't get carried away, hon,” he cautions, knowing his wife's idealistic tendencies.

I finally come out with my strongest objection. “I'm sorry. It isn't possible. Dr. Blum and I . . . We can't share a room.”

There's dead silence and I notice that Isaac has wandered away past the outhouse, where he has stopped at the rail fence.

“Well then, he could bunk with Danny,” decides Daniel. “We could bring one of the iron beds over from the house on Wild Rose. It's a big room at the top of the stairs.”

Patience is looking at Hester. Hester is looking at me. I am looking at Danny. Better Dr. Blum with the little boy than Nurse Becky, I think. It's bad enough that I'm with Isaac almost every day, all day. I have to have some privacy, at least at night.

Across the yard the doctor leans his forearms on the cedar rail and stares out across the fields toward Spruce Mountain, where a few yellowing oak stand out against the green spruce.

“Please . . .” Patience asks again.

How can I say no? There's a life at stake. Maybe two
.

It's a hot night and tomorrow we move from the house with the blue door that I've come to love to the Hesters' farm. I toss and turn, thinking about Blum and how he has been uttering a word
or phrase now and then, wondering if eventually he will talk, but fearing he will never be normal. Finally, I tiptoe downstairs in my nightdress to get some air.

No moon yet. There's the Big Dipper, Orion's Belt, and the Seven Sisters. Those are the only constellations I know in an infinite universe with stars that go on forever. The wind in the big oak rattles dry leaves, and I forget about the chiggers and lie down in the grass.

I have always been humbled when I look up at the heavens. We think our problems are so big, but the universe is so much bigger and everyone on this planet has problems; it's part of being alive.

A few minutes later, I hear the creak of the screen door and watch as Dr. Blum, wearing only his long johns, steps out of the house. Maybe he's come out to pee . . . but no, he's sleepwalking and I'm only thirty feet away.

They tell you in nursing school, never wake a sleepwalker. The patient can get violent if disturbed. (David Myers, my late husband, would be a case in point. When I woke him, he nearly killed me.)

Like a ghost, the doctor shuffles right toward me, his head tilted back, looking up at the sky. Is he conscious enough to wonder about the stars, like I do? When he's only a few feet away, I shrink into the ground, pretending to be a log, afraid he will step on me, but somehow he senses my presence. The ghost plunks down next to me, but if Dr. Blum knows I am here he shows no sign.

I'm wondering what I should do, lie still or try to creep away, when he reaches both arms straight up toward the sky and opens his hands, like he's harvesting stars, plucking them from the black night. Stranger yet, he cups the stars and washes his face with them. Three times he splashes the starlight on his face and runs his
hands through his hair. Then he takes a deep breath and, still in his sleep, holds the stars out to me. “Yours,” he says.

We lie in the dark for a long time, maybe hours, until a sliver of moon rises over the mountains. Finally, Isaac begins to snore and I make my move. I tiptoe inside, retrieve the green quilt and come back to sit on the steps in the dark, a sentry guarding a man, who seems dead . . . but may only be hiding.