The Midwife of Hope River

Becky is my friend now, and I know a little bit more about her. She’s a widow like me, and she’s not from the Midwest. I had the accent wrong. It’s Vermont, but she worked at Walter Reed during the war, then came to West Virginia to work in the mining camps during the typhoid epidemic of 1918. The Presbyterian Women’s Mission asked her to stay, and now she’s employed by the state Department of Health in Charleston.

It hadn’t been easy, she told me. This was on her second visit, and we were sitting out on the porch. Local doctors had objected to her presence at first, thinking she was practicing medicine. If you ask me, she probably knew more than they did, but she’d never say it. “You have to understand how to work within the system,” she warned. “Don’t overstep your bounds.”

Becky’s the one who told me about the Frontier Nursing Service in Hyden, Kentucky, and encouraged me to keep records of my births in this diary. Before that, I just wrote the date and baby’s name in the family’s Bible like Mrs. Kelly did.

Mrs. Myers asked why I didn’t go to the nursing service in Kentucky for more formal training. She’s a registered nurse with a degree from some fancy college up north, Yale, I think, and that’s where she heard about the school for midwives. She forgets that I’m not a nurse and have no money for travel or tuition. Anyway, who would take care of mothers like Delfina while I was gone? Not Dr. Blum. He charges twenty-five dollars if he comes to your home, thirty dollars if you go to his hospital. Twenty-five dollars would buy shoes for the whole Cabrini family for two years.

I pull my rocking chair over to the front window to admire my journal in better light. It’s a beautiful book and quite too expensive. When I saw the bouquet of tulips embossed on the brown leather cover, I had to have it.

Inside, in the top corner of each lined page is a small colored print of a poppy or rose, a toad or snail, some living thing. There’s a lock and a key that I keep on the cord with Mrs. Kelly’s gold watch. My life has been difficult, and the delicacy of the empty pages is what charmed me, like a friend I could talk to, some gentle, sensible woman . . .

Mr. Stenger, the balding pharmacist with one lazy eye, gave the journal to me in trade, as well as twenty dollars, for taking care of his seventy-three-year-old mother, Cora, when her foot went bad from sugar several months ago.

I stayed in her home in Delmont, bathing her, cleansing the open sores, using my comfrey and goldenseal poultices and some of the medicated powders from the pharmacy. More than anything, I cooked, did her household chores, and kept her foot elevated so it could heal.

That was before I inherited my cow from the Johnsons and had to be home every evening. When the bank foreclosed on their farm at the bottom of Wild Rose Road, they couldn’t take the cow with them to Wheeling. Besides, I’d delivered their son and they wanted to repay me.

I inherited this house and land too, from Mrs. Kelly, after she passed. Turned out she’d made an appointment to prepare her will with Mr. Linkous, the lawyer in Delmont, just three weeks before her demise. I found that out later from Mr. Johnson, who’d driven her into town in his truck. It made me wonder if she’d known she was dying . . . but she never let on. Dr. Blum explained that some vessels in Sophie’s heart had burst from hard farming work, that women weren’t meant for it, but I knew better. Her heart broke when her lover, Nora, left us. After that it was just a slow bleed.

I throw another log into the woodstove. Outside, a few snowflakes float down, gentle reminders that winter is coming. Somehow I must find money to buy wood. Coal would be nice, but it’s far too expensive. The bare trees shiver in the gray light and only a few groves of pines splash green higher up on the mountains. You can see the Hope River clearly now, but not the rocks and the rapids.

Treasured Child

Sometimes I get confused. Most of my life I’ve felt I was dreaming. Now and then I wake up, sometimes for months, sometimes for minutes. I’m a character in a play, and I can’t tell if I’m making it up or if a great puppeteer is making me dance.

I’ve played too many roles in too short a time; had too many names, lived in too many places. It helps me to go back to the beginning.

I was born Elizabeth Snyder on October 19, 1893, in Deerfield, a small town north of Chicago and a few miles inland from Lake Michigan. My mother was a teacher, the daughter of a prominent farmer who died before I was born, and we lived with my grandmother in a two-story white Victorian on Third Street.

My father was a seafaring man, a first mate on a lake freighter hauling wood and iron from Wisconsin to Ohio. His parents died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 in New Orleans, so I never knew them.

As a little girl, I attended the Congregational Church, where Mama played organ and Papa sang in the choir when his ship was in port. I was an avid reader and devoured every book I could find, as well as the Chicago Tribune that Papa brought from the city. I played the piano, loved to sing and dance, and fished with my pa in a canoe on the Des Plaines River, a treasured only child, but that didn’t last.

In the winter of 1902, my beloved grandma passed away from a lung condition and we buried her in the hard, cold ground. Not three years later, more tragedy followed. My father’s ship, the Appomattox, on its last run from Milwaukee, foundered in a November fog. The freighter, the longest wooden ship on the Great Lakes, carrying a load of iron ore from Lake Superior, grounded on a sandbar in the mist. Papa was the only crew member who died, swept overboard by a ten-foot wave.

When the representative from the shipping company brought the news, Mama looked at me and said, “At any minute your life can change. Remember this. Between one breath and another, the song can stop and everything can be different.”

Later I wondered, in my childish mind, if in actuality Papa had just jumped into a lifeboat and rowed away, faking his death to escape his debts. His body was never recovered.

In our first months of grief, things went from bad to worse. Mama was shocked to learn, from her solicitor, that we were destitute. The money my grandmother had left us was gone, gambled away by my father in high-stakes card games out on his freighter. Because of his debts, the Trust Company of Illinois foreclosed on our home and we moved to a rooming house in Deerfield. Those were hard times. It was Christmas, and I was twelve.

Fortunately, Mother was able to retain her teaching position, but our quarters were cramped and her pay was minimal. We sold our furniture, the piano, everything but our clothes, the family Bible, her hymnal, and a few favorite books. In the evenings, Mama did washing for the traveling men. I was taken out of school and sent to work with Mrs. Gross, the seamstress, on Westgate.