The Reluctant Midwife (3 page)

Last night, as soon as there was a break in the weather, I ran for the car and got some supplies. Then, after a cold supper that I'd packed before we left Perrysville, I put Dr. Blum to bed on the dusty sofa and I lay down with an old army blanket on a bare mattress upstairs.

Looking around, it's clear that Patience and her friend Bitsy have been gone for months, probably years. There's nothing in the kitchen cupboards, no pots or pans, only a few tiny mice droppings, and the house smells faintly of mold.

The wood cookstove is still here, as is the heater stove and an old metal lantern, but we have no dry wood to make a fire or kerosene for light. The midwife never did have a phone or electricity. As in most of rural America, the power and telephone lines haven't reached into the hollows or up the mountains, and now with the Great Depression, the farmers won't get them for years.

Luckily, I'd stowed a few candles in our emergency kit, and sometime after midnight, before I fell into a troubled sleep, I got out my nurse's notebook and tried to think about our situation. It wasn't good.

I lay here, now listening to rain slash the side of the house and thunder roll away over Spruce Mountain and wonder what could have happened to Patience and Bitsy. There were rumors that the KKK was out to get them, and that thought makes me sick.

Somewhere in the house, water leaks through the roof, a steady
drip, drip
. Twice I hear the doctor moan in his sleep, and once I think he's crying, but it stops.

This life of poverty is new for me; counting pennies, sleeping on a bare mattress without proper linens, not knowing what we will eat tomorrow or where we may go.

I was born into a life of ease in Brattleboro, Vermont, the
youngest child of Dr. Donald and Martha Farenthold, but my life wasn't trouble free. Father was a drunk and not a jolly one, though no one in town knew the shadow we lived under.

A respectable member of the community, Dr. Farenthold was sober at his medical office and the hospital, but as soon as he got home, he'd fall into his big chair, open a medical journal, and uncork the bottle. By nine he was plastered and we lived in fear that someone would need him in the night and we would be exposed.

In the early days, Mother tried to divert him with outings and family games, but he would get belligerent. Sometimes he'd even bash her around. To stay away from him, she volunteered for various charitable organizations, the Children's Home Society, the Red Cross, and the Lutheran Women's Club.

Then, when I was fourteen, Mama got uterine cancer. . . . Ironic, a doctor's wife dying of a treatable disease. She could have had a hysterectomy if they'd found it in time, but by then my parents were hardly speaking.

Our home, a big Victorian with a white picket fence around the lush lawn, not ten minutes from the Connecticut River, had been anything but peaceful, but after Mother died, it was a tomb.

For a few years, we had a maid and a cook, but eventually Father ran them off, and my brothers and I had to fend for ourselves. Darwin and William, nine and ten years my senior, who attended Amherst College just down the road, left for Harvard Medical School as soon as they could. That left Father and the house to me.

I was a pale child, bookish and withdrawn. In school, even if I knew the answer, I was hesitant to raise my hand. Though pretty enough in an old-fashioned way, I didn't date, didn't participate in sports or girls' clubs, just got all As and went home to try to keep Father from burning the house down or doing something else self-destructive.

As soon as I was seventeen, just like my brothers, I applied for college. Girls didn't go to university much in those days, but I argued that it would secure my future in case I never married.

“An attractive girl like you! You'll get hooked before you get your degree. It's a waste of my money,” Father whined, looking over his glass of amber liquid.

But I proved him wrong. I graduated from the University of Vermont with a teaching diploma in May of '14 and didn't marry for another six months. Luckily, Father was pleased with my choice, a young physician, Dr. David Myers, whom I'd met at a Chautauqua in Burlington.

Following our honeymoon in New York, father sobered up for a while. We moved into a new Sears Roebuck Craftsman house that he had built for us, and by September, David had set up a practice.

Everyone expected us to conceive right away, but we were having too much fun. We canoed the backwaters of the Connecticut River and danced in the ballroom of the Copley in Boston, but by late 1915 the party was over.

War in Europe was on everyone's mind, and David began talking about joining the medics. You'd think I'd object, but I actually encouraged him. I was young. What did I know of the horrors of combat? My brothers were already in Spain, and I would have joined too, only I was a girl.

Within the month, David contacted a second cousin in Winnipeg and signed with the Canadian Army. Many of the young men from Vermont and Maine were doing the same.

Our last night together, we walked the banks of the Connecticut, as the full moon rode the ripples, breaking into little shards of light. The June air smelled of honeysuckle and growing things. I was twenty-three. He was twenty-eight, and we had our whole life before us.

“You are so lovely,” David told me, pushing a shock of his thick black hair back from his forehead. “Always stay this way, so beautiful with moonlight on your face.”

I laughed. “I'll be old someday. Will you still love me?”

“Always, but you'll never be old. Not to me. I'll always see you like this.”

“Even when I have strands of gray in my hair and wrinkles around my eyes?”

“You'll never be like that.”

“If you say so.” I mocked him and did a little jig, my hands on my hips in the silver moonlight.

“Trust me on this. Look at you; you're too full of life.” He grabbed my hand and we ran along the grassy bank.

The next morning he left on the train for Montreal, so handsome in his new Canadian uniform, leaning out the window, waving. I never saw him smile like that again.

At dawn, a deafening blast rips open my dreams. Before I'm truly awake, I'm at the upstairs window of the little house with the blue door, staring down at a lean, leathered man wearing a black hat pulled down to his eyes, his firearm aimed at Dr. Blum, who is walking through the wet grass in his long underwear, straight at the gunman.

“No!” I yell, flying down the stairs, missing every other step and twisting my ankle at the bottom.

“No!” I yell again, slamming through the screen door, running toward the armed man to shield the doctor. “Don't shoot.”

The man lowers his double-barreled shotgun, and I see that it's
Mr. Maddock the neighbor from down the hill. I had met him once or twice when I made home visits to his paralyzed wife.

“Miss?”

“Don't shoot,” I call again. “It's me, Becky Myers, the home health nurse and . . .”

“Well, what are
you
doing here? I called out to that fellow twice that he was trespassing, but he didn't answer, just glared with those crazy blue eyes . . . then he started to come for me and I fired a warning shot into the air. There are hoboes all over these hills taking up residence anywhere they like, tearing up property, stealing and selling whatever's not nailed down.”

When I drag the doctor back to the porch and sit him down, I notice the front button of his union suit is undone. Maybe he was on the steps trying to relieve himself when Maddock showed up. (If it's true, this is a first and would show some progress.)

“This is the doctor. Doctor Blum. He's not himself,” I explain to Mr. Maddock. “It's a stroke . . . or some kind of brain attack.” (I'm making this up to keep it simple, and a stroke is something people in Union County might understand.)

“I brought Dr. Blum home, thinking the mountain air might do him some good, but when I got to Liberty, Mr. Linkous, his attorney, told me the bank sold his house.”

Here, Maddock enters the yard. When he cracks open his shotgun and removes the shells, I take a long, shaky breath. The sun is just rising over the mountains, golden through the still bare branches of the oak.

“I used most of the gas we have left to get to Patience's house, but no one's here. . . .”

Maddock steps closer, his eyes like black marbles inspecting Dr. Blum. “He's gone queer, all right. Used to be a sharp fellow. Stroke, you say . . .” He pushes his black hat back a little and squints. “I didn't hear you come up the road last night or I would have stopped you.”

“It was almost dark. Can we stay a few days? We won't harm anything. Just until I figure out what to do next?”

“I'll tell the missus to make you some biscuits.” I take this as a yes and am grateful.

“Have Patience and Bitsy been gone long? There's not much in the house. Nothing in the barn, and the lawn isn't mowed.”

“Moved out around the time you left. Whole damn country is moving like a bunch of ants hunting for food. I try to keep the weeds down when I have time.” He kicks at the grass and some pieces of the picket fence that used to surround the cottage.

“So who owns her house? Patience didn't just leave it, did she?”

“I imagine she and her husband still own it . . . or the Mountain Federal Bank.” He never looks at me when he talks, but he can't take his eyes off the doctor.

“Her husband?”

“The animal man. The vet.”

“You mean Dr. Hester? I didn't even know they were courting. Did they all leave together?”

“No.”

I have to squeeze for each tiny bit of information and it's slower than picking burrs off your socks.

“So where are they now?”

“Bitsy, the colored girl, and that colored fellow Bowlin went east to Philly, to be with her brother, Thomas Proudfoot, the one they thought killed a white man.”

“And Patience?”

“Why's he staring like that?” Maddock indicates the doctor.

I glance back at Blum, who sits gazing without expression at the same spot one foot from his face, a man sleeping with his blue eyes open.

“I don't know, Mr. Maddock. We don't know. It's like he's not home anymore.”

“Don't let him come down to my place. I don't want him around my Sarah. I'll shoot if I see him. He was right sharp the last time I saw him.” He says this last part again.

“I know. It's a tragedy. But Patience, where did
she
go?”

Maddock raises his chin toward the ridge covered in spruce that rises behind the barn.

I turn to look back.

“On the other side of Spruce Mountain.”

“On the other side of the mountain?”

“Yonder,” he says again. “The midwife and her baby.”

Driving back down Wild Rose Road and around Salt Lick, I am almost gay. “Well,” I say, turning to my companion, “things are looking up. Did you hear what Mr. Maddock said? Patience isn't gone; she just moved to the other side of the mountain. Oh, I hope they say we can live in her house for a while! It's not bad, really. I could fix it up. Then maybe I can get a job. Probably not nursing . . . But what will I do with you? I can't leave you alone.”

This had never occurred to me. “Oh, well, don't get the horse before the cart. First things first . . . We need shelter . . . then warmth and firewood . . . then food.” (I can't believe my life has been reduced to such basics.)

As we bounce down the dirt roads, still slick from last night's rain, I glance at the gas gauge. One-quarter full. We have just enough to get to Patience's house to ask for permission to live in her cottage and then get to town at some point for supplies.

As a physician's daughter and a physician's wife, then later as a
single professional woman, I have never been particularly frugal, never needed to be, but with no job and no income, I will have to start now.

I glance over to check on Blum, but he is staring out the passenger window, his face impassive, a little spit on his chin, and I reach over to wipe it off with my hanky. That's when I hit the rough place in the road and blow a tire!

“Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!” I curse, pounding on the steering wheel. With the economy busted, most states' coffers are as empty as a robin's nest in December and the roads have all gone to hell. I get out to look. I have never changed a tire in my life!

A jack is used, I think, to lift up the auto, and there's a spare in the back, but how do I get the flat tire off the wheel? “Oh, Blum! Why don't you pull yourself together and help me?”

The able-bodied Dr. Blum sits vacantly, gazing at the pussy willows just beginning to open along the road. He doesn't even know the Pontiac's stopped.

Irritated, I remove the gear and luggage from the trunk to get at the jack, his medical bag, two boxes of books, my art supplies, and his surgical instruments, though I don't know why I brought them.