by Anna North
Afterward, when I asked what Susan was going to do, Mama explained that despite what we’d been taught in school, there was a way to end a pregnancy, but it was dangerous, because anyone who did it or had it done could go to jail, or worse. And so when someone wanted to do it, it usually meant something very, very bad had happened to her.
“What happened to Susan?” I asked.
Mama said she didn’t know yet, but for the next three days I saw her whispering with her friends from town, Mrs. Olsen and Mrs. White and Mrs. Barrow, and when Susan came back from Oxford, Mama helped her meet a man who was a miner, and that man married her and took her out to silver country with him, and she never came back to Fairchild as long as I lived there. And whenever people said what a shame it was that the Mills didn’t get to see their only daughter anymore, Mama’s eyes went ice-cold.
“I know what your book is about,” I told Sister Tom. She was reshelving the biographies of the saints. Sister Clementine always got them out of order.
“And?”
I wasn’t sure if I should be afraid of Sister Tom. It was possible she was trying to trap me somehow, get me in trouble with the Mother. My position at Holy Child was still uncertain—before I took my vows, I knew the Mother could simply kick me out if she wanted to, and then I’d have nowhere to go. So I gave what I thought was the safest answer I could.
“Does the Mother know?” I asked.
Sister Tom just smiled—not a cruel smile, but not one I could understand.
“You’d be surprised what the Mother knows,” she said.
That didn’t do me much good.
“I don’t want to get sent away,” I said.
She motioned for me to sit. It was almost time for vespers. The library was empty except for us and the light in the windows was low. A few strands of Sister Tom’s hair had escaped from her headscarf. They were the color of wheat.
“Do you know why I came here?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“I was learning from my mama, just like you,” she said. “But my mama was the opposite of yours. Girls and women came to her when they were in trouble, and she gave them abortions.”
I nodded like I wasn’t surprised, but I was. I had thought everyone at the convent was barren, like me. And when I imagined Saphronia, the woman Susan had gone to in Oxford, I had imagined an old witch like in the picture book I used to scare Janie and Jessamine on October nights, with long fingernails and snaggleteeth. But of course an abortionist could be a woman like Mama, could have a child of her own.
“The sheriff made me watch when they hanged my mama,” Sister Thomas said. “All the girls in town had to watch. My mama was an example of what happens when you leave the path of baby Jesus and Mother Mary.”
Her voice was so cold it chilled my blood, so bitter I could taste it.
“But the sheriff gave me a choice,” she said. “The convent or the jail. He didn’t care which one I chose. Either way, no man would ever marry me, I would have no child. I would never go among ordinary people as long as I lived.”
Sister Tom smiled then. “This is jail,” she said. “You don’t have to worry anymore. You’re already here.”
I could’ve refused, of course. I could’ve told Sister Tom to find someone else, and spent my free hours with Sister Rose, working my way through An Unmarried Woman’s Book of Daily Prayers. But I was curious—I wanted to know what the woman in Oxford knew that was so secret and dangerous Mama couldn’t even talk about it. And so I began my criminal career there in the house of God, with a leaky pen instead of a pistol and books instead of silver for my reward.
In Sister Tom’s book I read about a woman in Rapid City who was courted by a man she did not want to marry, who forced himself on her and made her pregnant; she drank black root and miscarried at thirteen weeks, and went on to have two healthy boys with another man. I read about a woman sick with sugar-in-the-blood, whose midwife said a baby would surely kill her; she took a mix of tansy oil and clarified butter, and she miscarried, and she lived. I read about a woman whose father made her pregnant, and I understood why Susan Mill had looked at Mama the way she had, and why she had gone away.
I read, too, about a woman who drank lye to end her pregnancy and died. I read about a woman who drank turpentine to end her pregnancy and died. I read about a woman who could find no one to help her, though she went to three different towns and inquired with seven midwives, an herbalist, and even a dentist, and so she tried to end her pregnancy herself with a knitting needle, and hemorrhaged, and died. I had not thought I could ever feel lucky again, but sitting safe in the storeroom as I read about how that woman bled all day long and into the night, I did.
When I had copied a full book, Sister Tom traded it to the bookseller who drove his wagon up and down the road between Denver and Chicago for On the Causes and Treatment of Female Disorders, by Father Boniface Malvey, who was a priest and a doctor. Sister Tom let me cut the pages myself; my heart was in my throat as I opened the cover.
But quickly Father Malvey began to disappoint me. He said the proper cure for uterine fibroids was to drink a solution of one part water and one part bacon grease, which I knew was no cure for anything. He said going outside on a full moon night could cause a pregnant woman to give birth early, which even the old wives in Fairchild knew was just a silly superstition. And when it came to barrenness, he listed the following possible causes: frigid or irresponsible mother, wearing boys’ clothes at a young age, too many spicy or bitter foods, idleness, and excessive focus on unwomanly pursuits like bookkeeping.
“I knew of a girl who, because her father was a ne’er-do-well and a drinker, was forced to keep all the records for her family’s farm,” Father Malvey wrote. “She was unable to conceive a child until her father was prevailed upon to assume his responsibilities, whereupon she fell pregnant and was soon the happy mother of twins.”
“I don’t think Father Malvey knows what he’s talking about,” I told Sister Tom.
“The bookseller told me he’s the best there is,” said Sister Tom. “The medical school in Chicago just bought five copies.”
“What luck for the bookseller,” I said, “and for Father Malvey.”
Sister Tom gave me a half-smile.
“I think I need something by a master midwife,” I said. “Someone who’s delivered babies.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Sister Tom. “But if the bookseller has to hunt it down, it’ll cost extra.”
It took me three weeks to copy enough books to earn Mrs. Alice Schaeffer’s Handbook of Feminine Complaints, and another six for the bookseller to bring it to me on his way back from Denver. Spring turned to summer at Holy Child. On Sundays we had services outside in the meadow so we could see the fertility of the earth, and afterward the Mother let us gather geraniums and black-eyed Susans and put them in pitchers and drinking glasses all around the dining room, and that small brightness made us giddy with joy, giggling into our nighttime tea at jokes that would have been nonsense to my friends back home, about Sister Martha’s clumsy catechism, the time she guessed that Saint Ignatius was the patron saint of weasels. All the while my mind moved along two tracks. I came to feel at peace in the convent; I no longer woke each morning expecting to see my sister still asleep in the next bed, and I no longer cried when I milked the cows. I looked forward to taking my vows in September and changing my gray shift for a black robe. But I felt a lack in my head and heart, which I understood that Sister Clementine and some of the other devout sisters filled with baby Jesus, but which no story could fill for me, especially not one in which I could play no part, I who could neither carry a child nor, locked away in the convent, even do what my mama had trained me to do and help bring children into the world. Instead I thought about what I might learn from Mrs. Schaeffer.
Of course a part of me thought maybe Mrs. Schaeffer had a cure for barrenness. I imagined gathering herbs and barks from the woods near Holy Child and steeping them in alcohol lik
e Mama used to when she needed something the herbalist didn’t have. But how would I know a cure had worked? I would have to find a man again and be with him at the right time for several months, and if nothing happened I wouldn’t know if the problem was the tincture or him or me. And even if I was cured, if I conceived and bore a child, would I want to return to my old life? Would I go back to Fairchild with my baby on my hip, triumphant? I could imagine just how my mother would look if I brought a grandchild home to her—the shock and confusion that would play across her face before she let delight break through. It made my chest hurt to think of it. But when the surprise wore off, when the sheriff and Ulla had asked for my forgiveness and my husband had begged me to take him back (probably I would refuse him, though some nights I wavered in my certainty on this point), and I was living a comfortable life as a wife and mother, I did not think I would be satisfied.
I wanted to understand what barrenness was—how a child was conceived inside a woman and what it was, inside or out, that got in the way. Then I could feel the quiet that only comes with knowing what you need to know. And I could teach other people what I knew. I remembered what Mama had said, that you couldn’t just take away something people believed in. You had to give them something in its place.
I knew I liked Mrs. Schaeffer as soon as I read her section on miscarriage. “Some say a woman can cause a miscarriage by going to bed with a man who is not her husband,” she wrote. “This is nonsense. It matters not at all to the baby whom his mother takes to bed, though it may matter a great deal to her.”
From Mrs. Schaeffer I learned that severe cramps could be caused by the blood-rich tissue of the womb growing elsewhere in the body, and that ground flaxseeds added to cereal or coffee could help if taken regularly. I learned that a woman who has cancer of the breast should not eat flaxseeds or soybeans or alfalfa sprouts, and that the best treatment was to remove both breasts at once, not simply to remove the lump the way Dr. Carlisle back in Fairchild had done for Mrs. MacLeish, who died the following summer. I learned that if a woman’s labor does not progress, and she or her baby is in danger, then it is possible to cut open the womb with a very sharp knife, lift the baby out, and sew the mother back up, and that Mrs. Schaeffer had performed seventeen such surgeries successfully in the course of her career. When I got to the section on barrenness, my heart began to race.
“Failure to conceive a child is more common than most people believe,” she wrote.
I myself have seen more than a dozen women with this condition. Many people believe it has supernatural causes, which explains why so many childless women have been imprisoned or hanged for witchcraft, even today when the populace fancies itself educated and modern. I believe the complaint has many causes, all of them natural. Girls who are undernourished routinely lose their monthlies and thus cannot carry children; proper diet will nearly always remedy the problem. Other cases are more complicated. At our surgery in Pagosa Springs we once saw a woman of twenty-one who had been unable to conceive a child after five years of marriage. Though healthy and well-nourished, she had never begun her monthlies, and examination showed unusual formation of the vagina. We have also seen five women who seemed to have no physical complaints themselves, but whose husbands had suffered from mumps or rheumatic fever in boyhood. Three of these women went on to have children by other men, suggesting that fevers in early life may cause a kind of barrenness in men. Unfortunately it has been difficult to test this theory since no man has yet made himself available to us for examination.
In most cases of failure to conceive, however, we have found nothing unusual either in the woman’s medical history or in that of her husband. We are continuing to study this complaint and hope to include our discoveries in future handbooks. We invite any woman or man who has failed to conceive a child after a period of one year or more to visit our surgery for examination.
I dropped the book on Sister Tom’s desk.
“Where is Pagosa Springs?” I asked.
“Out west, in the mountains near Ute country,” she said. “Why?”
I sat in the chair in front of her. I looked behind me before I spoke. I knew the sisters gossiped, because I knew who smoked cigarettes and who kept a secret stash of communion wine. But I didn’t know anyone who wanted what I wanted.
“Could the bookseller take me there?” I asked. “I’d pay him. I’d copy as many books as he wanted.”
Sister Tom smiled, but shook her head.
“There’s not enough money in the world to make that worth his while,” she said. “What if someone finds out where you came from? Everybody knows why girls go to convents, Ada. That’s why they don’t usually come out.”
“So there’s no way,” I said.
“I didn’t say that,” she said. “The bookseller can’t help you. I can’t help you. But the Mother might help you, if she wants to.”
Just that week the Mother had scolded me for bringing in the milk in two small buckets instead of one large one.
“You’re always trying to be different,” she’d said. “Now Sister Mary Grace has more buckets to wash.”
“I don’t think the Mother wants to help me,” I told Sister Tom.
She just shrugged. “You don’t know until you ask.”
The Mother’s cell looked like the one I shared with Sister Rose: the bed in the corner, neatly made; the crèche above it carved from rough wood, Mary and Joseph little more than curved shapes around the infant Jesus; a small window looking out on the cow pasture. The only difference was the desk where now she sat, the hard chair in front of it for me, and, on the wall opposite the crèche, a painting of Saint Joan of Arc in her armor, kneeling in prayer. This was unusual; some of the older sisters had devotional paintings on their walls, but generally they showed Saint Monica or someone else from the list of mother-saints I’d had to memorize in catechism. The only reason I even recognized Saint Joan was because of Mrs. Covell back home in Fairchild. Her people were Quebecois traders, and she taught us about Saint Joan who died for her God when she was almost as young as us. Later I heard that some parents complained, and Janie and Jessamine never learned about Saint Joan.
“That’s a beautiful painting,” I said to the Mother.
“Saint Joan wasn’t beautiful,” she said. “What do you want, Ada? I know you wouldn’t visit me just to talk.”
All my time in the convent I had done nothing but obey. I had read the Bible and learned dozens of verses by heart, including Proverbs 31, even though I could not become a wife of noble character or any other character. Every day I got up before sunrise to milk the cows; at matins, lauds, and vespers I bowed my head in prayer. I kept my cell neat and my shift spotless. I wanted to tell the Mother I was sure it was a sin to hate someone for no reason.
Instead I said, “I’ve been doing some studying.”
She raised her eyebrows. “So I hear.”
“I’ve been reading a book by a master midwife who’s been researching my condition,” I went on. “The thing is, she lives in Pagosa Springs.”
“And?”
I forced myself to look her right in the eye.
“I’d like to go there, Mother,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
“I want to find out why I’m barren,” I said.
“You mean you want to find a cure,” she said.
“No,” I said. “At least, not for me. I just want to understand.”
“That’s very noble,” she said. “Have you considered that it might be a better use of the talents baby Jesus gave you to understand the scriptures instead?”
“Mother,” I said, “I saw a woman hanged for being barren. If I’d stayed at my family’s house, I would’ve been hanged. Imagine if people understood barrenness, even a little. Think how many women could live.”
The Mother took her glasses off. Her eyes were smaller without them; her face looked older and softer. She rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“When I entered the sisterhood,” she said,
“I was going to start a school. The sisters were going to be the teachers, so boys and girls would learn reading and writing and catechism from barren women. I thought if we became schoolteachers, the children would learn not to fear us, and then when they were grown and became sheriffs and mayors and mothers, more of us would be safe.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
The Mother raised an eyebrow.
“Do you see any children here?”
It was hard to imagine—girls laughing in the silent halls, boys playing sheriffs and outlaws in the meadow. Holy Child a part of the world, not hidden away from it.
“Three boys and four girls came to study with us,” she said. “They were all from poor farming families far out in high country. Most of them had never been to school. One girl was thirteen and didn’t know how to read.
“Three months we taught them, from the end of the harvest until the snow came. Even in that time they learned so much, they were hungry for it. That girl could read the twenty-third psalm.
“One day early in the new year the sheriff came up from Laramie with three deputies. We were in the middle of catechism. It was just three of us then: me, Sister Dolores, and Sister Carmen—you never knew her. They put us in handcuffs in front of the children. They said we were not women, we were witches sent by the Devil to corrupt their minds. I saw how quickly the children believed them. As they led us away that thirteen-year-old girl spit in my face.”
The Mother in handcuffs—I could barely imagine it.
“Did you go to jail?” I asked.
“We were there five years,” she said. “Sister Carmen got tuberculosis and died there. After that they let me and Sister Dolores go. When we came back to Holy Child someone had smeared shit all over the walls. It took us days to clean it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure I do.”
“Knowledge can be very valuable,” she said, “but only if people want it. If they don’t, it can be worse than useless.”