by Anna North
“I accept Him,” I said.
The Mother raised an eyebrow.
“You’ll have Bible study with Sister Dolores,” she said. “In six months, if she thinks you’re ready, you can take your vows. Then you’ll be one of us.”
In the meantime, Sister Rose introduced me to Goldie, Holly, and Izzy. Sister Rose was a skinny girl with a gummy smile. She shared my room at the convent—two narrow beds, two chamber pots, a washbasin, and a crèche.
She was a natural with animals. The cows calmed visibly when they saw her, and when she touched their backs and cooed to them she was almost graceful. Holly, the Holstein, was the only one who let me near her. The others switched their tails or kicked or jerked their dugs out of my hands. But Holly was quiet, her eyes big and droopy, almost like she felt sorry for me, and Sister Rose showed me how to squeeze so I didn’t hurt her, so milk ran in a clean stream from her teat to the bucket.
Milking was a good time to cry. I was hardly ever alone at the convent; at matins and breakfast and Bible study and vespers and dinner, I was surrounded by sisters. But at milking time, Sister Rose was focused on Goldie or Izzy, and the wind blew across the meadow and shivered the barn windows and hid the sound of my cries.
I cried out of pure sorrow. I kept remembering the softness of Bee as a little baby, the way Janie and Jessamine filled the house in the mornings with their voices. I cried, too, out of anger. I had never done anything in my life as bad as what Ulla had done to me. I knew that Ulla had only been trying to save herself—her mother-in-law was meaner than Claudine, her husband weaker than my husband, and she had been considered a risky match because she had only one sister, who had a clubfoot and breathing troubles. For some families one miscarriage was enough to kick a new wife out, even if it happened during a sickness. But none of this made me want to forgive Ulla, who had been my best friend since we were smaller than Bee, who had slept in my bed whenever her mother’s rages became too much, who had cried at night as I stroked her hair.
When all the sorrow and anger were wrung out of me and I was almost hoarse from sobbing, then, like the thunder that follows lightning, came the fear. I knew Mama was right, that the families who had lost babies would want someone to pay, and I was afraid they would turn on my sisters in their grief. I had seen it before—when Lucy McGarry’s neighbors miscarried, suspicion fell on her whole family, even her littlest sister who was barely five years old. Some people said Lucy ran a coven out of her mama’s house. But when she was hanged the rumors dissipated, and her family went back to their lives—her sister eventually married the mayor’s nephew.
I knew Mama must have thought it all through. She must have believed she could keep herself and my sisters safe once I went away. Probably she decided her position in town was secure enough that she could weather whatever came—people could whisper about her for a while, but eventually they’d realize Dr. Carlisle didn’t know the first thing about birthing babies, and they’d be forced to come back to her. But what if, instead, the mayor decided to send for another midwife? I didn’t know, I realized, what had happened to the one before Mama. But if Fairchild could find her, then it stood to reason they could find someone else, if their fears for their future babies came to outweigh her record of healthy babies born.
And once I had been down this list of frightening thoughts, I always came to the worst of all—that Mama must have been down the list too. That she knew it was dangerous to send me away instead of letting the sheriff take me, and she did it anyway, balancing her safety and the safety of my sisters against my life. Deciding my life was worth risking all of theirs.
When I was finished crying there was always a time when I stared blankly up at Holly from my milking stool: her strong shoulder, her calm, contented eye, her pale pink udder already filling again with milk, the simple rightness and sufficiency of her. It was in this position that Sister Rose found me, and though I could have wiped my tears quickly and pretended nothing was wrong, I was tired of being so lonely and instead I let her see.
“Do you miss your family?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Don’t you?”
Sister Rose sat cross-legged on the barn floor. Our dresses were made for this, dark cloth to absorb dirt and spills for six days, until Sister Dolores and Sister Socorro washed them all in enormous steaming tubs on Saturdays and hung them up to dry in the washroom, drips pinging on the stone floor.
“I was married,” Sister Rose said. “He was nice when we were courting. He used to bring me flowers from his mama’s garden. But after we got married, I couldn’t stay pregnant. I miscarried three times in a year, so he kicked me out. And my daddy wouldn’t take me back. He knew he’d never find someone else to marry me. Luckily our priest was friends with the Mother Superior, and she took me in.”
Sister Rose smiled. “This is my family now.”
Every sister had a story like this. Sister Mary Grace’s husband divorced her after five childless years. Sister Dolores started sleeping with the neighbor boy when she was fifteen—when they were seventeen he told everyone in town that she was barren, and then nobody would marry her. Sister Clementine had been married two years with no pregnancy when a baby on her street was born with a hard black crust over its face and neck. The sheriff arrested her for putting a curse on the baby, but because she was just nineteen (and maybe also because she was pretty and sweet and claimed to pray to baby Jesus every day), he let her go to the convent instead of jail.
Sister Rose was right—these girls and women without families were a kind of family of their own. Sister Mary Grace took care of Sister Teresa, who couldn’t use her arms. Sister Socorro was like a daughter to Sister Dolores, who had taught her Latin and Greek and laundry. Sister Rose was not my sister, but in the mornings I let her brush and braid my long hair, like my sisters used to do.
In time I learned to milk Goldie, and even Izzy, who was trouble, and Sister Clementine taught me how to strain the curds out of hot milk to make cheese. Everyone was kind to me except the Mother Superior.
One day as we filed into the chapel for morning prayer, the Mother asked in her loud voice, “Trying to be stylish, Ada?”
I didn’t understand what she meant. I looked down at my dress, my heavy brown shoes.
“Sister Rose,” said the Mother, “after service, show Ada how to tie her headscarf properly.”
“She can be a little stern,” said Sister Rose later as she helped me knot the scarf at the back of my neck, under my hair. “But don’t worry. She’s like that with everyone.”
“She isn’t,” I said. “She loves you and Clementine.”
I’d seen the Mother whisper to Sister Rose as she gave her communion. At breakfast, I’d seen her scoop the applesauce from her own plate onto Sister Clementine’s.
“We’ve been here for years,” said Sister Rose. “It’ll be different for you when you take your vows.”
I wasn’t sure I believed her, but in the mornings I went to catechism and learned from Sister Dolores about the lives of Saint Hannah, Saint Monica, and of course Mother Mary herself. Sister Dolores made us memorize Burton and recite him aloud, and I felt like a child mouthing those familiar words: “and the orphaned infant she had suckled at her breast was Jesus Christ Himself, come to preach a new gospel to her.” But I allowed the stories to comfort me like everything I had ever learned by heart—the letters of the alphabet, the names of the medicinal herbs, the days of the week, the months of the year.
We also read a book by a pastor, the Reverend Alfred Byrd, called The Justice of the Blessed Infant on Earth. Reverend Byrd had been born in slavery on Mount Haven plantation in the state of Georgia in the United States of America, but by the time he was twelve none of those places existed anymore. The plantation lasted the longest—the old owner survived the Flu and hung on for years after the governor and the president died and the statehouse was turned into a hospital, then a morgue. But with his strong young sons dead and the town’s police force gone,
it was only a matter of time before the people he had enslaved rose up, burned down his huge empty house, and fled. Reverend Byrd and his parents settled in one of the Independent Towns near the Kansas River like many other former slaves. Land was everywhere—fields lay fallow and farmhouses empty for the taking, if you were willing to bury the bodies left inside. But the former slaves had no money for seed corn or cotton, horses or plows. Most of them—Reverend Byrd’s parents included—had to hire themselves out as farmhands to the remaining white farmers, and as they got poorer the white farmers got richer and began to cultivate the land the dead had left behind so that within a generation Kansas country looked like the old Southern states, except on paper the black people were free.
Reverend Byrd wrote that white people who cheated black people and treated them like slaves had forgotten the lessons of Jesus. “When a child is born to a black household,” he wrote, “all the townsfolk, black and white, assemble to receive the blessing. And yet the same white townsfolk who gather to kiss the child’s feet forget that black men, too, are blessed by baby Jesus.”
In Fairchild there were no huge farms like in Texas, and the few black people in town were tradesmen and small farmers like white people. But it was true that all the black families lived on the far side of the river, in a part of town called Coralton where the land was marshy and worse for farming.
I had thought little of this fact when I still lived at home, but now, removed from the unspoken laws that governed that place, I could see them more clearly: how the children of Benjamin Rockford, the cooper, did not attend our school though they were of age to do so; how Rockford himself ran his cooperage out of a shed adjoining his family’s home rather than a store on Main Street; how I saw his wife at the dry-goods store and the butcher’s and the baker’s but never having tea at Ulla’s house or Susie’s house or, for that matter, at ours.
And it was true, too, that when a baby was born in Coralton, the white families gathered just as they did for a birth in Fairchild proper, though across the river the houses were smaller, so that people often had to stand out on the front steps, waiting their turn to receive the baby’s blessing.
On Saturdays Sister Dolores was busy with the laundry, so instead of catechism I had free time in the library. Technically I was supposed to study theology—Burton or Viletti or The Diary of Eleanora Funt, which was about a lady who decided baby Jesus spoke to her and went around telling everyone, mostly important mayors and priests. But the library had thousands of books, more than I’d ever seen in one place. It had herbals better than Mama’s, almanacs better than the ones in the headmaster’s office at the school back home, and histories of the colonies, the United States, the Flu years of the 1830s, the fall of the governments, and the founding of the Independent Towns west of the Mississippi. My favorites, though, were the natural science books, with their beautiful and complicated etchings of the insides of people and animals. I saw a slice of kidney, a cross section of an eye; I saw the four valves and four chambers of the heart; I saw the twenty-seven tiny interlocking bones of the hand. I saw, too, the penis cut open to reveal the spongy flesh inside, and all the tiny tubes of the testicles. I saw a woman splayed as I’d seen countless times, but with each fold and furrow frozen by the draughtsman’s pen, so I could confirm with a hand mirror what I had suspected: that on the outside at least I was like any other woman. And I saw a woman’s insides—the stretchy purse of the womb, with and without a child inside it, the tubes with their frilly fingers, the ovaries like little stones.
But no book explained the why of it. Even Burton, who had an explanation for everything, was silent on the question of why some women could have children and some could not. He spoke of “those whose bodies reject the blessing of a child,” but said also that Jesus personally loved and cared for every single descendant of the Flu survivors. If Jesus loved us, why would He let our bodies reject His blessing? I knew that Mrs. Spencer’s explanation would involve the evil workings of witches against Christ’s design, but hadn’t He sent the Flu to cleanse the world of evil? Why did he leave witches behind? It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in baby Jesus—I prayed like anyone, I always had, when I was afraid or grateful or in pain. The year Mama was sick I had prayed every day. It was only that I found the lessons of baby Jesus insufficient to explain the world.
One book in the library did claim to explain the origins of barrenness and other conditions. It was by one Dr. Edward Lively, whose name I’d heard before—some of the town ladies had a pamphlet he’d written on exercise and mental hygiene. This book, however, was called On the Heritability of Maladies, and initially, I found it interesting. Dr. Lively posited that barrenness, clubfoot, and many other ailments were passed down from grandmother to mother to child in the blood. “When a woman is barren,” Lively wrote, “we commonly find an aunt or close cousin who was barren as well, suggesting a kind of familial contagion.”
This made me worry for my sisters, and I hoped nobody back in Fairchild happened upon Lively’s book. In later sections, however, Lively made claims I knew were untrue, like that babies born to one black parent and one white one were frequently feeble and sickly due to “incompatible bloodlines.” As proof, the doctor offered a series of etchings of deformed sheep and goats, whose ailments he claimed were caused by crossing noncomplementary breeds.
I had seen Mama deliver two babies in Coralton with a black mother and a white father, and both were strong and healthy infants. Moreover, I knew that having two white parents was no protection against feebleness or deformity, since many children born to white families in Fairchild did not survive their first year. The more I read, the more Lively’s book reminded me of the superstitions of some of the town ladies, who claimed that simply sharing a meal with a black person could give a white person the flu. I tucked On the Heritability of Maladies away on a back shelf, next to a book on the benefits of oat flour.
“Can we get more science books?” I asked Sister Thomas, the librarian.
She was in her forties, with a face that changed from ugly to pretty in different lights. Sister Rose didn’t know why she had come to Holy Child, but had heard she was brought in handcuffs, by a sheriff.
“I built this library myself,” Sister Tom told me. “It has every book the medical students in Chicago use, and more. What else do you want?”
“I need to know what causes different diseases,” I said.
“Rawley’s Handbook of Flu Transmission should be over by the window, under the death records. He’s got one for rheumatic fever too.”
“Not those kinds,” I said. “I want to know what causes barrenness.”
Sister Tom rested her elbows on her desk.
“The bookseller can get us the latest tracts on problems with the reproductive system,” she said. “But they cost money.”
Mama had given me twenty golden eagles when I left, but the wagon driver had taken all of it. The fee, he’d said.
“I don’t have any money,” I told Sister Tom.
“That’s okay,” she said. “You can work for it.”
The library had a basement storeroom I’d never seen before, cooled by the earth around it, the small window at ground level looking out on grass and dandelion heads. Wooden boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, full of records dating back to the convent’s founding and books too rare and fragile to keep on display. In the center was a desk, lit brightly by a phosphorus lantern, with an inkwell and a sheaf of papers and a hand-bound book lying open to the middle.
“The big monasteries like Saint Joseph’s,” she said, “they have printing presses. But when I want to make books, I have to copy them out by hand. Then the bookseller buys them from me, or we do a trade.”
I shut the book to look at the cover: On the Regulation of the Monthlies.
“My mama taught me about this,” I said. “She was—she’s a midwife.”
“Good,” said Sister Tom. “Then you should find this interesting.”
After that I spent
all my free time in the storeroom, copying the book onto a stack of loose-leaf paper so thin I had to be careful not to tear it with the pen. It was three days before I realized what I was copying.
The book started innocently enough, with a chapter on cramps and irregularity. At first it made me angry to read about women whose biggest problem was a little pain a few days out of the month, but copying down the names of familiar herbs soothed me. The second chapter was about remedies for hot flashes and melancholy during menopause. But the third one was called “Remedies for a Late Period,” and I didn’t have to read long before I knew what I was looking at.
I was twelve when Susan Mill came to see Mama. I’d seen scared girls before—girls with sores between their legs, pregnant girls bleeding, girls with black eyes and bruises on their arms. But Susan—funny Susan, usually chatty, just that year old enough to court—she scared me. She looked like a ghost in our house, walking so softly her feet made no sound, her eyes focused on nothing.
“I’m a month late,” she said. “Can you help me bring down my period?”
I didn’t know what she meant then but Mama did. She said, “Are you sure, Susan? If it’s money you need—”
“I don’t need money,” Susan said.
“If it’s a married man, it’s all right, you know. His wife might be mad, but now that you’re pregnant, everyone will support you. He’ll have to take you into his house, if that’s what you want. You have the power now.”
Then Susan gave Mama a look I’ll never forget, a look of total contempt.
“If you can’t help me, Mrs. Magnusson,” she said, “just say so.”
I expected Mama to get mad—she never liked people mouthing off to her—but instead she just nodded once and said, “Remember this, because I’m not going to write it down.”
Then she explained how to get to a hairdresser’s in Oxford, and told Susan to ask for a woman named Saphronia there, and to bring fifty golden eagles, which was five times what Mama got paid for a birth.