by Judy Alter
The house was frame, one story but large and roomy, with an office in front and a room next to that that could be my infirmary. The back of the house, our living quarters, consisted of a parlor, kitchen and two bedrooms, one of which Em designated as the nursery. We moved some of the furniture from the soddie—the sofa and occasional table I had shipped from Omaha, seven long years ago, and the bedroom furniture, kitchen pots and pans and the like. But Em “surprised” me with a new parlor set, a lovely sofa and chair with ornate mahogany trim around the cut-velvet upholstery, and a mahogany table with a marble top and pineapple design in the base. Then there was a big rolltop desk for my office— “You really want me to look like a doctor, don’t you?” I teased—and a new bedroom set with a poster bed boasting pineapple designs on each of its posts and a burled pattern in the headboard, chest of drawers, nightstand and a chair to match, all again of dark, heavy mahogany.
“Em, it’s wonderful furniture. But can we afford it? I mean, where’s the money coming from? First the house, then all this furniture.”
He was beaming with pride in his surprise, but when I mentioned money, he turned cross. “Don’t worry about that, Mattie. Couldn’t you just for once like something without finding fault or worrying about the price?”
But worry I did. For a short while, I wondered if he had borrowed the money from his wealthy family or maybe they had given a belated wedding gift. We never had heard from them since the wedding, though Em assured me he had written, giving them all the details. He said that since they never even responded, our planned trip to St. Louis was canceled. I learned to keep his family a secret question in my mind.
I found out, of course, that Em had not received any bounty either from heaven or St. Louis. He had borrowed six thousand dollars, an appalling sum, I thought, from the bank.
“Em, how could you do that without asking me?”
His eyes flashed again. “Asking you?” He made his voice incredulous. “Why should I ask my wife if I can borrow money from the bank?”
I said the unforgivable, in anger. “Because it’s my money, and I’m the one with income to pay it back.”
“So that’s it. It’s your money. What happened to ‘our’? I thought we were in this together. Well, you can just take your money and keep it . . . and this house, too!” He slammed the door hard on his way out, so hard the etched-glass pane, ordered from Omaha, rattled, and I feared it would break.
An awful blank feeling filled the pit of my stomach, not like fear but more as though everything in my world had just turned blank and the future had been wiped out. Surely he couldn’t leave me with the house. After all, he was the one who wanted it, not me, and he wouldn’t dare walk away, leaving me with a big house and a huge debt. Would he? And where would he go, what would he do?
Another part of me still rebelled. I had been poor once, and Em knew that. He knew my absolute terror at the thought of being anywhere near poor again. I’d consented, only reluctantly, to using my money in the bank—our money, if you will, but money that I’d saved before we were married—to build the new house, because Em had assured me it wouldn’t take any time to replace it once I was established in an office in town and he made a paying proposition out of the claim. But to borrow beyond that?
I waited until long into the night, but Em didn’t come home, and I finally went to sleep. Sometime in the early morning, while it was still dark, he climbed into bed beside me, smelling of whisky. We made up, passionately, and I’ve always been sure that was when Nora was conceived. In anger.
Once I knew I was pregnant, I didn’t tell anyone, not even Em, for a while. It seemed like a grand secret to keep to myself, though I suppose that was silly. Em and I never mentioned that awful night again, and I had tried to come to grips with the idea of being in debt. Em seemed to be working hard, spending all his time at the claim and reporting gleefully that we had eight cows that should calve soon, the fields were plowed and so on. I was busier than I thought I’d be, with between five and ten patients a day and still having to make some calls in the country, so I rarely got out to the claim to inspect his work. Sometimes, though, he hitched up the buggy and took me out there for an afternoon drive, and I saw that he had accomplished a lot. He’d built a real barn instead of the annual one blown from a threshing machine, and he’d fenced the pasture away from the fields he had planted. The cows looked sleek and healthy, and it seemed as if the claim indeed might prosper, not that anyone ever made that much from a small farm like this one.
So life was going smoothly, and I decided that the unfortunate evening was just an accident, one that wouldn’t be repeated. Land’s sakes, how we can fool ourselves when we want to!
Lucy Gelson brought up the subject of the baby one day when she’d ridden into town with Jed when he came for supplies. It was her first trip to see our new home and office, and I was glad for a chance to visit with her and, I guess, to show her that my marriage was fine.
“Mattie,” she said, holding her cup of tea and laughing at me, “aren’t you going to tell me about the baby?”
“Lucy Gelson, how did you know?” I guess in my exalted position as a doctor, I thought no one else knew much about the body at all, but I should have known better. Lucy had helped neighbors in childbirth many times as well as giving birth to those three boys of hers. She knew a thickening waist when she saw one.
“Have you told Em?”
“No, but he’ll be delighted. I guess if you noticed, I better tell him soon before he asks why I’m getting so fat.”
“Will you stop practicing?”
“Of course not, Lucy. Did you stop doing chores on the farm?”
She grinned and said simply, “I’m very happy for you. I hope everything goes just as you want it to. Boy or girl?”
“I suppose Em will want a boy, but I really don’t care.”
I knew Em would want the baby. He had always wanted children and talked about it, and he was almost jealous of the Gelsons for their three boys.
“I wish we had three like that,” he said one day after a visit to their farm, where the boys had taken him on a tour to show off all their treasures, such as an old surveyor’s stake they’d uncovered in the high grass, or a muzzle-loading gun, without a stock, that Jed had unearthed for them to play Indians. “Won’t be long,” Em told me, “before those boys will be a big help to Jed on this place. He’s a lucky man.”
Having children was not something I had ever thought about doing, but then I guess I had never thought about being married either. Some girls seem to prepare for motherhood all their lives, but not me. I wanted children simply because I wanted to make Em happy, and it was what he wanted. Of course, raising Nora turned out to be important to me. Afterward, I couldn’t imagine life without her and that experience, but that wasn’t the way I felt back in the days before her birth. Children were something I accepted as inevitable without either positive or negative feelings.
Em was delighted, as I predicted. He whooped and hollered around the kitchen, sweeping me off my feet into some sort of wild dance. “Em, you’ll make me dizzy!”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Here, Mattie, sit right down here.”
“No, no, I’m all right. I just don’t want to whirl about the kitchen so.” The wooden spoon in my hand was dripping onto the floor, and the oilcloth on the table had been pulled sideways by his burst of energy. I straightened it, listening to him ramble.
“Now, if it’s a boy . . . and I kind of suspect it will be—”
“You do? Why?” I was amused, watching him and seeing his eyes dance with that special happiness.
“Well, boys just come first, or at least they should. Anyway, I think we’ll name him, uh, David. Good solid name.”
“What about Emory?”
“No, no juniors around this house. David. Don’t you like that?”
“I don’t know. I have to think about it a while. We won’t need a name for several months, you know.”
“It doesn’t hurt to
be prepared. I mean, hadn’t you better start sewing for the baby?”
“Sewing? No self-respecting baby would wear anything I sewed. Lucy has some hand-me-downs, and I’ll ask Mrs. Short to make some gowns. I did hear about a quilting coming up, and I thought I’d see if the ladies would make me a quilt.” It wasn’t exactly taking unfair advantage to ask that. I had doctored all those ladies’ families, sometimes without pay and sometimes for a few eggs or an oil can full of wild berries or some other trifle. They would be glad to do something that I really needed.
“You really aren’t going to sew something yourself, just, well, I don’t know, so the baby will know you cared?”
I laughed and hurt his feelings. “Em, the baby will have to know some other way. I can’t sew well, and you know it. I gave it up after I tried years ago to sew something for Sara Dinsmore. I don’t have the patience for it.”
“Well, I thought you would want something to do while you wait for the baby.”
“Something to do! I have more than enough to do right now, thank you, what with seeing patients and keeping up with this house and my records and studying some when I get a chance.” I knew we were in trouble as I said it.
“You’re not going to keep up your practice now.” It was meant to sound like a question, but I knew Em didn’t mean it that way. He wanted it to be an order, and he somehow got caught between the two inflections in tone.
“Yes I am.” My own tone was defiant. I loved Em, and I wanted to do almost anything to make him happy, but I guess even then, as pliable as I was with him, I couldn’t do something that went against my whole being. I couldn’t quit practicing medicine. And if I did, who would mend the broken arm when Lucy’s middle boy fell off the range cow he tried to ride, or who would deliver Amy Snellson’s baby or tend to this one or that when they got cholera? Of course I would keep on practicing.
“I don’t think it’s right. You should put the baby’s welfare first,” he said righteously.
“Oh, for land’s sake, Em. Prairie women do chores right up until the day of the birth. They work harder, physically, than I ever thought about doing. It’s good for them. What’s bad is sitting on a soft cushion all day doing nothing. I’ll try to cut down on house calls when the time is closer,” I promised.
“Well, shall we take you to Omaha to Dr. Dinsmore? I mean, who will deliver the baby? You can’t do it yourself.” He was getting excited again, his disapproval forgotten momentarily.
“I think Lucy can help me. She’s delivered many babies before, and between us we can do it. I don’t want to go to Omaha and have to stay forever waiting, then wait until the baby and I are strong enough to come back. Em, it’ll all work out. Just don’t worry.”
He looked at me fiercely. “I don’t think you realize, Mattie, how much I want the baby. I don’t want you to do anything to keep me from having it.”
I felt like a brood mare.
We settled into the waiting phase of my pregnancy. I grew gradually thicker about the middle but was still able to wear my traditional plain skirts and blouses, and with an apron, most people couldn’t tell I was expecting. I kept it from my patients and went on with my daily routine.
Sara answered the letter I’d sent to Omaha with the news and proclaimed herself delighted to be an aunt-to-be. Now eighteen, she was a young lady and had finished her schooling in Omaha.
“Father is relieved, I think, that I show no interest in medicine,” she wrote. “Perhaps seeing you go through school was enough for him. I do have to decide on what to do, as no attractive young men have come along, and Father will not tolerate my sitting around waiting to get married. Would you like a nursemaid for the baby when it comes? I believe I could be quite good at it.”
She went on to say that her father was busy at the medical school and seemed to be enjoying his work, but she felt he was still lonely. Occasionally he had a fellow physician in for a brandy and conversation, but he had had no regular female companionship since I’d left.
“Sometimes,” she continued, “he talks about you and mentions how much we both miss you. We both hope you are very happy.”
Dr. Dinsmore had never recently written to me, though I took that as hurt pride rather than anger, because I thought he truly cared about me. Perhaps his silence was more embarrassment than anything else. But I wondered what he would say about my life now. Oh, I knew he’d be proud of my medical practice, because I did a good job, just as he’d taught me, and my patients fared well. But Em? How would the two of them react to each other?
As for Sara, I began to mull over the idea in my mind. I would want someone to care for the baby and give it all the constant attention that I wouldn’t be able to. Why not Sara? Probably it was time for her to get out of her father’s house, and since I had raised her when she was little and needed love, it would be only fitting if she raised my child. I decided to mention it to Em. The baby would probably come in late April, and perhaps Sara would come out for the summer to see how it went.
“Where would we put her?” Em asked. “We only have two bedrooms.”
“She can sleep with the baby,” I replied.
“I don’t know. I don’t like the thought of someone else taking care of our baby. You should do it.”
“Em, let’s not go into that again. I have a medical practice. Do you want to give up your ranching and farming and take care of the baby?”
“It’s not man’s work,” he said petulantly. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Well, neither can I.”
“I’m not sure I want someone in the house all the time, someone who’s not family.”
“She’s family to me. Believe me, Em, it will work out. And besides, it’s kind of what you do for people. She needs a change right now, and her family took me in when it was very important to me. In a way, I’m repaying not just what they did for me, but the world in general. Do unto others . . .”
In the end, Em gave in but he wasn’t happy about it, and I had no idea he was storing all those small unhappinesses, like a squirrel storing nuts against the winter. For him, winter would be many years away, yet it would come with a sudden eruption that left me devastated.
In some ways, doctoring was easier in winter than in summer. We were less likely to have a lot of cholera, maybe because people were closed into their houses and saw each other less, maybe because Nebraska’s hard freezes quieted the bacteria that caused the disease. But there was still pneumonia and croup for babies and childbirth and frostbite. Today, if people get frostbite, we accuse them of carelessness. But back then, frostbite was sort of an occupational hazard. Someone had to go outside to check the animals, see that the horses and cattle had plenty of hay and straw, and hogs had a lot of straw bedding to wallow around in and plenty of swill. And even during a blizzard, cows give milk and hens lay eggs. Someone also had to gather cow chips for the fire and to dig away the blown snow from the doorway of the house. You couldn’t decide to come inside just because you were cold. And so there was a lot of frostbite, or chilblains as we called it then.
The oldest Gelson boy, Jake, got a case of it on his feet that year. Lucy packed him up in the wagon and drove him seven miles across the snow-covered prairie to bring him to me. It was like heading your horses off across a trackless white ocean, but like the rest of us, Lucy knew precisely where she was going, snow or not, and she knew she wanted me to see that boy.
Jake was twelve and not very talkative, the way boys often are. “Shoveling snow,” he muttered when I asked him how he got his feet so cold.
“Those new boots didn’t wear at all this year,” Lucy said. “Got holes in them already, and winter isn’t half-over. I’ve a mind to speak to Mr. Whittaker about it.”
“Why were you shoveling snow?” I asked. “We haven’t had a good blow in days.”
He looked down. “No, but Ma decided I should shovel it out where it, well, collected over the cellar. She wanted some preserves.”
“It’s all my fault. Wante
d a little something special, and now look what I’ve done.” Lucy looked as guilty as she must have felt.
“His feet are going to be fine, Lucy. Just sore for some days. Keep them good and warm, and either get him some new boots or line those old ones better with cardboard.” In truth, Jake Gelson probably never got full circulation back in those toes the rest of his life, but he was fortunate enough to avoid gangrene.
Amy Snellson’s first baby was born that winter, almost in the midst of a blizzard, and Em was angry that I had to go. Fortunately, the Snellsons lived in town, so I didn’t run the risk of getting lost on the prairie. In some of our blizzards, you could get lost between the house and the barn—people really froze to death that close to home, because the snow disoriented them—but this snow wasn’t that hard, and by peering carefully through the isinglass in my buggy, I found my way to the Snellsons’.
“The baby’s early,” Amy said in a tiny voice. She was a frail thing herself, very blond and thin and young. She and William Snellson had been sweethearts for several years, and it was kind of a town celebration when they married. William was now clerking at Whittaker’s, doing just what Em had done, and declared he wouldn’t go back to the farm, because he didn’t want Amy to work that hard. Fortunately, he didn’t declare this out loud to many people but me, so he didn’t offend all those good folk who did live on the prairie and did indeed work hard. That included his folks, and hers, too, for both families lived in the area, though Amy’s were nearly twenty miles from Benteen.
This particular evening in early December, William hunched over the table in their parlor while I was with Amy. The minute I came out, he was on top of me.
“Well, Dr. Armstrong? Well?”
“I don’t know, William. The baby’s early from what Amy tells me, awful early, and we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Amy Snellson was in labor almost twenty-four hours. I sat by her bed almost the whole time, except for a couple of brief spells when William stayed with her and I could catch a nap. But William was too scared himself to be of any comfort to the poor girl, and I mostly had to shoo him out of the room.