The Midwife of Hope River

The vet in the Great War saw pain and horror I can’t even imagine. Bitsy lost her mom and then Thomas, who’s gone into hiding. Life, it seems to me, is all about loss, just a series of losses. I kick a stone and kick it again.

I was not just a widow the second time; with Ruben, I widowed myself . . . I lash out at the stone a third time and end up twisting my ankle and falling into the ditch. When I pull myself up, my leg hurts badly but not as badly as my heart.

Sometimes I’ve felt I was dreaming; this evening I’m awake and would like to crawl into dreams again. The first star rests on the top of the mountain. A whippoorwill sings. The bare trees are black against the lavender sky. It’s funny how beauty rides the back of pain . . .

It starts with a few tears, then comes the flood again, muddy water raging over rock, hard sobs, and hiccups. Fearing Mr. Maddock will come home and see me sitting in the ditch crying my eyes out, I crawl over his rail fence and limp through the pasture until I come to a creek. Here, in the woods, I fall backward into the dry grass, arms at my sides, a shell of myself. Behind my tear-filled eyes, a flickering black-and-white picture show begins.

“I have to go, Lizbeth!” Ruben barked, pacing around the living room we shared with Mrs. Kelly and Nora. “There’s trouble in the West Virginia coalfields, and John Lewis wants me and a few of the others to go down there and settle things down. It’s for the workers. It’s what I do, you know that!” (Lewis, Ruben’s old friend, was now the president of the UMWA, the United Mine Workers of America.)

This was in 1921, a week or two after Sheriff Sid Hatfield, who’d stood up for the Matewan miners and their families, was murdered along with his good friend Ed Chambers. They’d traveled to McDowell County to stand trial for charges of dynamiting a coal tipple, but were executed in front of their wives by a group of Baldwin-Felts agents standing at the top of the courthouse stairs. Hatfield was killed instantly, and Chambers was slaughtered with a shot to the back of his head.

Word spread from mountaintop to dark hollow that Hatfield, the miners’ hero, had been murdered in cold blood, and armed union men were already congregating along the Little Coal River, talking about revenge, about marching on Mingo County to free other radicals, end martial law, and organize the nonunionized miners. The plan didn’t make sense, but that’s the way of a mob. Nothing has to make sense.

“Please, Ruben. I have a bad feeling about this! Don’t go!” I pleaded. Mrs. Kelly was in the kitchen with Nora, trying not to listen. “West Virginia is so violent, all you have to do is sneeze to be beaten and tossed in the tank!” But Ruben could never say no to John Lewis.

Then Nora got involved and said the three of us could go with Ruben, make an adventure of it. Mrs. Kelly had no mothers due for two weeks, so we all began to collect medical supplies and food for the camps. The next day, I went down to Union Station for train tickets.

It’s the dog days of August, muggy and hot, when our little Pittsburgh coalition climbs out of the passenger coach in Marmet, a village on the banks of the Kanawha River. Right away we can see there’s big trouble. Close to ten thousand miners have already gathered, and the men are armed with rifles and revolvers. I’ve never been in such a crowd and the mood of the men is ugly.

Ruben and the other men from our coalition rush off to try to talk to the leaders, but no one will listen. Urging them on is Bill Blizzard, the fiery southern West Virginia organizer. He pushes Ruben aside. Deep in the crowd, our friend Mother Jones stands on a dynamite box, but her back is turned and she doesn’t see us.

“Tell your husbands and fathers . . . tell them there’s no need for bloodshed!” she cries, seeing how things are going and where they may end. “Bring them to their senses!” The women, mothers and sisters, daughters and lovers, try, but it’s no good; the union men’s anger has already been ignited. They begin marching like soldiers, wearing red bandannas around their necks, toward Logan and Mingo, the last of the nonunionized counties. They’re going for the mine owners, the bosses, anyone who opposes them. They don’t give a damn!

Like an army of ants the mass moves south, thirteen thousand of them now, some say, over mountains and through valleys, high on their own rage and moonshine. We should have just gone home when Ruben saw how it was, but he still thinks he can do some good. For one brief moment my husband and I hold each other. He wears a red bandanna, like all the others, and I kiss it for luck. “Love you,” I say with my hand on his cheek. He picks me up laughing and swings me around; then Nora, Mrs. Kelly, and I lose track of him and travel along with the medics.

It’s on the third day, at the edge of Logan County, that all hell breaks loose. The coal company forces, wearing white armbands, have built fortified positions at the top of Blair Mountain; their weapons, machine guns and carbines, point straight downhill. Within minutes we’re surrounded by men in hand-to-hand combat, guns going off and the smell of liquid courage on half the fellows’ breath.

Through the crowd I catch sight of two men down on my lover. One has his hands around Ruben’s throat.

It wasn’t a bullet that killed my husband. The truth is much worse. I held the murder weapon, a rifle still wet with blood, that I’d lifted from a dead miner’s hands. One slashing blow, from the butt of the gun, used as a club and meant for the man straddling Ruben’s chest with his hands around Ruben’s neck, crushed my lover’s skull. Rage is contagious, and I meant to kill someone, just not my husband.

Ruben’s brown eyes go wide and snap shut as his life’s blood flows out of him, down around his red bandanna, onto the ground, and I collapse as if the blow had hit me.

“Lizbeth!” Nora yells and whips into action. She crawls forward, dodging bullets, grabs the rifle, and throws it like a red-hot poker; it skitters on the road among the men’s feet, and she drags me, screaming, back into the crowd.

Within hours we were hidden in the back of a Baptist preacher’s wagon, heading north toward Pittsburgh. Two hundred men died that day. Some say three hundred. I never saw Ruben again, and no one else knows what really happened but Mrs. Kelly, who’s under the ground, and Nora, four thousand miles away.

I untie my shoes and sink my feet into the cold creek water. For years I have carried that rusted tin box of guilt with me. Even if I trusted someone and explained that it had been an accident, who would I tell? If they’d never been in a riot or on a battlefield, experienced the chaos, the fear, and the guilt, how would they understand?