The Midwife of Hope River

Mrs. Maddock reaches over the plate of cookies, now half gone, and rests her hand over mine. Her skin is so translucent you can see the blue veins.

I could tell her the other times I wanted to die. When my mama passed away . . . when I left Chicago on the run without a friend in the world . . . I could tell her about Blair Mountain, how I killed my best friend, my lover, my husband, but how could she understand, a sheltered person like Sarah Rose? The tears come then, just hanging there. I wipe my eyes and stand up to look out the screens toward the hills, but she scoots around the table in her wicker wheelchair and pulls me back.

“That’s okay,” she whispers, thinking I’m weeping for my baby. “It’s good to cry. I lost my little one too . . . when I had polio. The paralysis was moving up, and if it got to my chest I would stop breathing. The doctors thought there was no way I would make it. They talked Mr. Maddock into letting them do an emergency cesarean section, and he gave our little girl to my cousin who couldn’t get pregnant. No one imagined I would recover, and then, when I did, I couldn’t ask for the baby back.

“In a way, it doesn’t matter. Both my cousin and little Sue Ann passed away a few years later, during the Spanish flu epidemic. I never even got to hold her. I have a picture, though, when she was two, a tiny blond girl. I’ll show you sometime.” She holds out the plate of cookies again.

I shake my head no, but she insists, so I eat three. “Did you make these?”

She laughs. “Yes; just because my legs don’t work doesn’t mean my hands can’t. Didn’t you notice when you came through the kitchen that Mr. Maddock has made everything low so I can use my wheelchair? He made this screened room for me too, because I don’t get out much.”

I take in the view, the mowed meadow down to a brook, a pen filled with white sheep, the Hope River in the distance.

“So what do you do out here?” I look around for an embroidery hoop or maybe some knitting, but on the shelves is only an assortment of books and papers. “You like to read?”

“I do,” she says. “I write too.”

That interests me. “You write? I started a diary. It seems so much has happened in my life . . . like I’ve lived three or four lives, really.”

Sarah puts her elbow on the table and rests her chin in her hand. “Like what? Tell me one of your lives.” Her clear blue eyes wait, not leaving my face. “I like stories.”

Slow down, Patience, be careful. Some secrets you just need to keep to yourself.

Sarah waits while I stare at the ceiling. “Well . . . I grew up in a little town in Illinois,” I begin slowly. “My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a mate on a big freighter on Lake Michigan.”

I go on to describe my innocent childhood, as if it were a Louisa May Alcott story, to the point where my grandma dies of consumption, my father dies in a Lake Michigan shipwreck, and we find out he’s gambled away all our money. I stop my tale where I run away from the orphanage and get a job at the Majestic. It makes a good yarn, if I say so myself. “That’s lives one and two.”

Sarah hasn’t said anything except “How sad” and “That must have been horrible!” until I get to the part where I become a chorus girl.

“Oh!” she shouts, clapping her hands like a five-year-old girl. “I was in the chorus line too! At a dance hall in Charleston.” This is a new image of Mrs. Maddock!

She laughs. “I was in my twenties. My sister, a waitress, got me the job. My mother didn’t approve, of course, and neither did Mr. Maddock once we were engaged. That’s where I met him. He could really cut a rug at the time.

“In those days we were encouraged to be friendly with the patrons after our show, get them to buy drinks, though the real money was in the gambling.” As she talks, Mrs. Maddock gets prettier and prettier in the golden slanting light. The low sun drops behind the mountains, and the scattered clouds turn first orange, then pink, and finally lavender.

“Milton and I were so in love. We married, and I got pregnant right away. He’s never forgiven himself for giving away our child. But you see, he thought I would die from the polio. So many did. Widowed men didn’t take care of children in those days.” I reach for her hand, cool and soft.

She looks around the beautiful porch room. “During the war, because he worked in the chemical plant in Charleston, he was given a deferment, and then when my grandmother died and we inherited this farm, we moved back here. That was ten years ago. I was born in this very house, you know . . . with Granny Potts.”

“I remember. You came up to the front of the church at her service, one of her angels.” I smile, but she doesn’t smile back. She’s on another thought.

“Sometimes I think he protects me too much, Mr. Maddock. His love is like a cocoon, but I don’t argue. I have a good life.” We are still holding hands, and suddenly it’s too much for me.

“You know, I had better get back. I need to milk. Thank you for asking me to tea. Is there anything you want me to get you before I leave? Can I clear the table and wash up?”

“You’re as bad as he is! A fussy mother hen. I’m quite self-sufficient, so long as he brings the supplies.” She rolls herself into the kitchen, and I notice now that the doorways are a little wider than in my house and there’s a long pantry on one side. I run my hand over the smooth low maple counters and the low sink.

“Milton did all the woodwork himself,” she explains. “He’ll be home soon. He went into Delmont to the stock auction. Not to buy anything, just to listen and watch. The vet will be there too.” She says this as if she thinks I’d be interested, and I am, just a little.

39

Forgiveness

Hiking home up Wild Rose Road, I reflect on what I learned at our tea. Mrs. Maddock, who I thought was aloof and judgmental, is curious and graceful and gay. Mr. Maddock, who I thought was hard and unfeeling, is in fact passionately in love with his wife. The Patience I thought had to maintain her secrets . . . was today open and honest . . . up to a point.

I’ve had a difficult life, or I think I have, an orphan widowed twice before she was thirty, but how do you measure suffering? Sarah Maddock almost died of polio, lost the use of her legs, and had her baby given away. All four of Mrs. Potts’s children died of yellow fever within one week. Mrs. Kelly suffered the loss of her husband and their only child and then, after a ten-year relationship, lost Nora to another woman.