The Midwife of Hope River

When I pull open the double barn doors, the animals’ cries assault me. The chickens are squawking, and poor Moonlight moans in pain. I throw the fowl their grain and toss hay into the cow’s stall, then sit down on my three-legged stool and beg her forgiveness.

“I’m so sorry, girl,” I apologize. “I was at the MacIntosh house in town all night. I still can’t believe it! I was sure their baby was dead. I listened so long for a heartbeat . . . I even had Dr. Blum check. Katherine told me that for over two days there’d been no movement.

“Now I feel foolish, and by tomorrow every woman in Union County will know I’m inept. Even though Dr. Blum was there to confirm the stillbirth, I’m the one they’ll blame.”

As I rhythmically express the milk from the tense udders, I look around this warm space, the sunlight coming through the cracks high above me, the rough golden walls and the hand-hewn oak beams. There’s the smell of hay and sweet manure. Moonlight looks around, sympathy in her brown eyes. She accepts me just as I am, energetic or tired, inept or confident, in love with life or walled off in pain.

3

Summons

On the way back to the house, with my bucket of milk and six eggs in my pockets, I laugh as the wind sweeps the red and yellow leaves off the maples and oaks and scatters them across the blue sky. There was a time, after Mrs. Kelly died, that I didn’t notice such things, just kept my head down, plodding along, careful not to step in the puddles of my own tears.

It happened our second spring here, a sudden massive heart attack, Dr. Blum called it. One afternoon, coming in from the garden, I found my dear Sophie slumped on the sofa. On some dark nights, she’s sitting there still.

I ate little, lost weight, stopped washing my long hair. There was no more singing as I worked or dancing in the field on a sunny day. I’d come to a similar black place not long before, after Ruben died at Blair Mountain, but experiencing loss is not something you get used to. The more death one experiences, the more painful it is. For almost a year, I hovered on the edge of my own dark grave; then one afternoon I raised my head, sniffed the air, and recognized the changing light. It was spring again.

“Grief takes about a year,” Mrs. Kelly once told a young mother who had lost her son. “You have to get through each holiday, each new season. You will cry at Christmas and New Year’s and Mother’s Day and Thanksgiving. You will suffer with the first daffodil, the first falling red leaves, the first snow . . . Each occasion, each new season will rip your heart out; then, when there’s nothing left, you’ll get better.” She was right, and she knew from experience.

Sophie, like me, had suffered great loss: her sister from typhoid fever when she was little, her mother from stomach cancer, and, worst of all, her young husband and daughter in that big flood in Pennsylvania, the one in 1911 where a thousand people died when the pulp mill dam broke and flooded the whole town. My teacher, protector, and friend had lost everything, home and family, all in one day, and had been found, more dead than alive, a mile down the river, hanging on to a tree limb. For a while, she told me, she wished she had died. I know the feeling.

In the kitchen, I wash my hands again, wipe my glasses, then tenderly clean the brown eggs and gently place them in a woven basket. I strain the milk though cheesecloth and pour it in a clean gallon jar. Through the small window over the sink, the green hills tumble toward the valley where the Hope River twists, fuller now than in summer.

I am just getting ready to pour boiling water from the top of the woodstove into the washtub to rinse out some necessaries when I spy a small figure moving up the hill, a solitary fellow who leans forward on his burro as if in a hurry. He’s leading a second animal. At the first mailbox, the Johnsons’, a half mile away, he stops and looks at the name, then stops again at the second, the Maddocks’, and moves on up the mountain. I have a sinking feeling he is coming for me.

Carefully, I haul the jar of milk out to my springhouse, where cold water collects in a rock basin and stays cool all summer, and when I come back, I see a tall black man tying his two animals to a tree. He’s wearing a gray fedora and a gray canvas jacket that’s torn at the sleeve, maybe a miner looking for help. The companies used to have their own physicians, but most of them are gone now, the best of them anyway. Sanitation and health conditions are so poor in the mining camps that Dr. Blum refuses to go into them.

The man tips his dusty felt hat. “I’m Thomas Proudfoot, Mary Proudfoot’s son. Izzie Cabrini, one of the miners at King Coal, asked me to fetch you. His woman’s in trouble.” I know what the word “trouble” means.

“How long’s she been paining?”

“A day, maybe two.”

These cases worry me. I don’t know the Cabrinis and have never been to the King Hollow Coal Camp. I don’t know if the missus is too early or too late or what the situation is.

“Has she had babies before? Won’t the coal camp foreman drive her to the hospital in Torrington?”

Thomas shakes his head no.

“Doesn’t King Coal have a doctor?”

Thomas looks me right in the eye and shakes his head no again. I see by his look that he’s an intelligent man who believes this is wrong but knows enough to keep his mouth shut.

Coal Camp

It’s three miles on rocky dirt roads to King Coal, and we move right along, although burros are not much for hurrying. Three vehicles overtake us, and we have to get down into the ditch while they pass: a Pontiac roadster, a Ford Model T, and a John Deere tractor, moving just a little faster than we are.

I think of the Frontier Midwives in Hyden, Kentucky. I’ve been told the nurses ride horses into the hollows and over the mountains to attend the laboring mothers. Maybe I should get a horse! I brighten at the thought, but at once my hope dims. Money would be the problem. I don’t have more than a few dollars, and Mr. MacIntosh didn’t offer me anything except a ride home. Maybe they’re still in shock that their dead baby lives.

I cringe again, thinking of my mistake and how it will look to the community. Maybe people will just chalk it up as a miracle! The baby was dead, but it came back to life! Maybe they’ll say that I performed the miracle. Not likely.

At last we arrive at the mining village. The King Coal camp is a ramshackle community set up along King Lick. Though the camp has been here only five years, the water in the creek is already brown and the rocks have turned yellow from the mine’s acid runoff.