The Reluctant Midwife

by Patricia Harman

  It has been a week of funerals. On Saturday we went to Clarence Mitchell’s service at the Saved by Faith Baptist Church. I couldn’t stop crying. When I went up to Lucy Mitchell, instead of easing her grief, I bawled on her shoulder; it was that bad.

  Willa’s girls are staying with Mrs. Stenger, and she told me in private, “I’m too old for this. The littlest ones have nightmares and the older ones fight. I hate to think of them going to an orphanage, but they have no family and I have my own brood of five to care for.”

  I didn’t go to the Bowlin boy’s memorial service at Hazel Patch and neither did Dr. Blum, though Patience invited us to join them. I’d only run into the young man twice, when the pastor brought us wood and then again at Livia’s birth, and Blum didn’t know him at all.

  While the Hesters are at the Hazel Patch chapel, I walk out behind the barn to look at the graveyard where Blum has been digging the graves. There will be eight in all, each seven feet deep. Next to the empty holes, there are three little graves with tiny wood crosses.

  The first cross is for the premature baby that was left in a cardboard box at my Women and Infants’ Clinic, another lifetime ago, when I didn’t understand how such things could happen. Now I know. Life is cruel.

  The second is for the baby Patience lost before she moved to West Virginia, the one she delivered prematurely in the back of the horse-drawn ambulance in Chicago, when she was sixteen. (There are no remains in this tiny grave, but the midwife needed a place to remember.)

  The third cross is for the baby Patience made with Daniel during a thunderstorm and then birthed on the kitchen floor.

  All the victims of the fire who have no family plots will be buried in this place tomorrow. Captain Wolfe, Drake Trustler, the colored homeless man John Doe, Willa Hucknell, Alfred Hucknell, and the baby, but Patience has also convinced the Hazel Patch folks and the Bishop brothers that Beef and Nate Bowlin belong here too, with the other heroes of the Hope River Wildfire. When the midwife makes up her mind about something, she’s very convincing.

  Blum has started carving a sign, to be mounted on two cedar posts, that will read, HOPE MEMORIAL CEMETERY.

  May 9, 1935

  I am out digging the last grave behind the barn in the spring sunshine and all the time I’m thinking about my own grave, the one I jumped into the day Priscilla died. What was it that propelled me into that black tomb? What happened that made me turn my back on life? I’ll try to explain, though it may not make sense. The thing is, I was beyond sensibility.

  Looking back, the words of the circulating nurse in the operating theater come back to me through a dark tunnel. “You won’t be happy about this, Dr. Blum. They’re sending a patient up from the ER, a hot abdomen.”

  I was just finishing my third surgery of the day, a hernia repair, and was anxious to get home. Whether Priscilla would be there was the question.

  “Dr. Gross says the man is in critical condition,” the RN goes on. “You’re the only surgeon still in the hospital, so the case comes to you.”

  Pissed off, I changed, rescrubbed, and reentered the operating room, just as the anesthesiologist was putting the patient under. As the nurse gave report, I waited, scalpel in my gloved hands. I had done hundreds of appendectomies and a couple of dozen ruptures.

  “This is a patient in his late thirties, found in front of a downtown hotel with fever and chills, acute abdominal pain. Temp 104, pulse thready at 120, blood pressure 100/40 and dropping. The ER suspects a ruptured appendix or a twisted bowel. There’s no known next of kin, but the name on his business card in his wallet says John Teeleman, Eli Lilly.”

  I almost dropped my scalpel. John Teeleman, the man who had been screwing my wife?! Rage overcame me. My hands shook, sweat beaded out on my brow. Fortunately, everyone else in the operating theater was concentrating on getting the man’s blood pressure up and no one noticed.

  “Epinephrine,” the anesthesiologist ordered, and a nurse inserted the drug into the IV. “You’d better cut now, Blum,” he said to me.

  The rest of the surgery was a blur. My first look at the patient’s abdomen revealed a well-healed vertical scar from sternum to public bone, so he’d already had surgery sometime in the past.

  I know I made a small incision over McCurry’s Point and opened the fascia. I remember opening the peritoneum and being surprised when I encountered massive adhesions, probably the result of an old war wound. The appendix had already burst and purulent fluid was everywhere. It must have been as I was cutting through the scar tissue that I nicked the abdominal aorta. I couldn’t be sure because the visual field was compromised with a waterfall of blood.

  “Suction!” I ordered, though the scrub nurse was already sucking.

  The anesthesiologist tried to start a second IV line.

  I opened the abdominal incision wider, searching for the bleeder.

  The nurses tilted the table to shunt what was left of the Eli Lilly rep’s life fluid back into his heart.

  I fought for John Teeleman’s life, as his blood drained red on the operating room floor.

  “Thanks, Dr. Adams,” I shook hands with the anesthesiologist when it was all over.

  “You tried, Isaac,” the circulating nurse said, giving me a one-armed hug.

  But did I? To this day, I don’t know. Sworn to protect life. Did I try hard enough or did I intentionally kill the patient with that slip of the knife, execute John Teeleman, the man who was fucking my wife?

  Sunday Dinner

  “These are some apple fritters, Isaac!” Daniel exclaims.

  “More, please!” says Danny, agreeing with him. “More, with apple butter!”

  There’s a cool wind outside and we’re sitting in the kitchen around the table in the little house with the blue door. Tomorrow is the burial in the new graveyard, and Dr. Blum cooked the meal.

  “You’re going to put me to shame, man,” Daniel goes on. “All I can make is fried eggs and bacon.”

  “Isaac has been feeding me very well. Somehow I just don’t feel like cooking.”

  The doctor doesn’t say anything, but he smiles, and I realize how, despite the anger I had toward him about my journal, my feelings have softened. Maybe the fire melted my heart. With that thought, the tears come again and I have to leave the table.

  Patience follows me out behind the barn where the graves are ready for the ceremony.

  “Are you okay, Becky?” Patience asks when I wipe my eyes.

  “I guess. I just can’t stop crying. It wasn’t like I was in love with Captain Wolfe, but we were close friends and maybe I could have loved him. And Drake Trustler, he was so brave and such a good spirit. I can’t believe he’s gone. The others I didn’t know well, but still it’s so sad.

  “You should have seen the boys the day the of the blaze, Patience. The Forest Army went off in their trucks, singing as if the fire were a Sunday School picnic. I’m not kidding. They were singing Hi-de-hi-ho, never knowing the hell they would face. They were just kids really. I keep hearing their voices. Hi-de-hi-ho. Hi-de-hi-he.”

  The midwife doesn’t say anything, just puts her arm around me as we stare into the empty holes, seven feet deep and seven feet long.

  “But you know what really gets me? Willa. I cry for her and I cry for the baby and I cry for Alfred, the wife beater, who loved his little children so much he would walk through fire to save them.”

  May 10, 1935

  The day John Teeleman died, I left the operating suite like a man in a trance and was surprised when Priscilla ran up to me in the ER waiting room.

  “How is he?” She grabbed at my coat sleeve.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t play dumb! John Teeleman, my lover.”

  “How did you know?”

  “When I went to the Inn to meet him, the bellman told me they brought him to Martha Washington Hospital. How is he?” she asks again and pulls at my lapels, her face so close I can smell the fear.

  “He didn’t make it.” (I don’t mean
to sound cold, but I’m just so exhausted it comes out that way.) “Bled out during surgery.”

  “No!” Priscilla pounds on my chest, hits me over and over as she screams in front of everyone in the waiting room. “No! You killed him, you son of a bitch! You killed him on purpose!”

  “It wasn’t like that, Pris,” I try to explain. “There were adhesions. Massive infection. He was already critical. We couldn’t stop the bleeding. . . .” But she rages on, not caring who hears.

  “You killed him!” Every eye in the waiting room is on us, so I pull her roughly outside.

  “You killed him. My only chance at happiness! You fucking waste of a man!” That’s when I slap her. It’s not like I meant to or even thought about it before my hand moved, but my palm makes a red mark on her cheek.

  “Pris!” I yell, but it’s too late, she’s already running across the parking lot, careening carelessly, blinded by tears.

  “Watch the ice, Doc,” Jackson, the colored maintenance man cautions as he lights a cigarette on the hospital loading dock. I don’t answer, but throw my black bag on the seat of my Pontiac and follow Pris’s little roadster out to Locust. By the time I make the turn, she’s a half mile ahead of me, disappearing fast.

  Thirty minutes later, I cross the iron bridge over the James, pass through Perrysville, and pull into the drive of our brick home. I’m thinking I’ll beg her forgiveness, but her car isn’t there. It’s already on the bottom of the James River.

  An accident they called it, but I thought differently and have never doubted she drove over the bank on purpose.

  How long does it take a person to forgive himself? Two lives lost because of my stupidity. Maybe you will say I’m too hard on myself, but I was a hard man in those days, and I set my own punishment: death for a double murder . . . and for a coward who doesn’t have the courage to kill himself, death while alive, madness.

  45

  Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

  The turnout for the burials is more than we expected and I’m glad the four of us spent some time last evening constructing makeshift benches to seat the next of kin and older folk. There were horse-drawn carts and vehicles parked all over the yard.

  The little Hucknell girls find Dr. Blum and cling to him, insisting he sit up front on the benches. Only the eldest, Sally, cries, and Isaac puts his arm around her and holds her close.

  One by one, the coffins are lowered into the graves by the CCC men. There are eight freshly dug holes and nine dead, because we planned to bury the baby with his father, Alfred Hucknell.

  Boodean is here and Starvation MarFarland, and Snake and Loonie Tinkshell and a few of the others, even Rusty on his crutches because, as he told me, even though he lost his foot, he wanted to thank Dr. Blum for saving his life. The new superintendent seems a little lost, but Lou Cross takes care of everything.

  “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.” Reverend Miller says a few words about death and heroes and reads the Scripture. I picture the ashes left from the wildfire sifting across the land, acres and acres of drifting gray ashes. The service closes as Mrs. Miller, wearing a long purple gown and a strand of pearls like Eleanor Roosevelt, sings a hymn and we all join in on the chorus. “Will the circle be unbroken? By and by, Lord, by and by? There’s a better home awaiting. In the sky, Lord, in the sky.”

  Afterward, everyone gathers at the homemade tables for potato salad and baked beans, apple pie and cold milk and coffee. The Hazel Patch faithful are present and Mrs. Miller comes over and gives me a hug. The Bishop brothers and Cora are here. From across the crowd Cora winks at me and points to her belly. She’s wearing a new blue dress and her hair is done up on her head, like a proper lady. The CCC guys sit by themselves, all in uniform, until the Reverend and Sheriff Hardman go over and join them.

  As everyone gets in their auto or carts to leave, Blum, Hester, and Maddock walk out across the fields toward the creek and I think how good it is to see Isaac acting like a regular man, a man who has friends. Even before his collapse, when he was a functioning physician, I don’t think he had friends. Come to think of it, neither did I, not many anyway, and not close.

  From where I stand toward the back of the cemetery, I can look down Spruce Mountain toward the Hope River. We are on the green side, and I see, on the other, blackened forests and fields all the way to the west.

  The golden forsythia bush next to the barn rings like a churchbell.

  Flowers

  “No one brought any flowers for the graves!” Patience says after everyone is gone and the four of us are taking down the homemade benches and tables. “Let’s go get some. Come on!” She is pulling my hand. “Here,” she says to Daniel taking her baby out of the sling and handing her over. “You take the kids. We have to find flowers!”

  It’s almost dusk. I’m dead tired and would just like to lie down, but I do what she says. In the field by the barn we find daisies and mustard and phlox. We pick and pick until we have enough for all the graves.

  “Isaac is carving the sign for the cemetery. What do you want it to say?” I ask as we turn back.

  Patience doesn’t hesitate. She must have had it all planned.

  HOPE MEMORIAL CEMETERY

  DEDICATED TO THE HEROES OF

  THE HOPE RIVER WILDFIRE OF 1935

  “WE ARE ALL STRONGER THAN WE THINK.”

  Back at the gravesites, we kneel again and spread out our flowers, a blanket of color to cover the dead, white, yellow, and pink. Patience surprises me when she makes the sign of the cross. “Mrs. Kelly,” she shrugs as if that explains it. “She was Catholic.”

  I think about that . . . how little parts of those we love are alive in us, even when the beloved is gone.

  “What happens to them?” I ask. “Drake and Beef? The captain and Nate Bowlin? The Hucknells? Are they just flesh and bones to molder under the earth or is there something more?”

  “More,” the midwife says firmly.

  “You sound so sure.”

  “Look around you,” she says pointing down into the valley where the Hope reflects the sunset, a ribbon of red, and I’m crying again, but this time for the joy of it.

  46

  The Itch

  Today was my first day back at work and though the sun was shining and I was happy to be returning, the drive there depressed me. On both sides of the road, as I approached White Rock, there was nothing but blackened forests and fields, and then around a bend there was the camp, an island of green that stood like a testimonial to the men who fought to save the trees.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you!” Boodean exclaims as I walk into headquarters. Mrs. Ross greets me with a cup of coffee and two new starched nurse uniforms and that gift lifts my spirits some. “The nurse from Virginia treated the lads okay, but wouldn’t let me do a damn thing. Said I wasn’t a real medic.” You can see her words hurt him.

  I make a list of supplies we need from Stenger’s Pharmacy and then we get busy with three patients one after another, a case of poison ivy, a boil the size of a half dollar that I let Boodean lance, and finally, just before lunch, a new man who worries me, Joe Morgan, who’d just transferred in from a CCC camp in Pennsylvania.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong, ma’am,” the very tall, thin corpsman tells me. “I’m thirsty all the time. I even have to get up at night to drink and I can feel my heart pounding. Not only that, I’m losing weight, no matter how much I put down my gullet.”

  I suspect he has diabetes, but when Dr. Blum comes he will decide.

  Finally it’s chow time. When Boodean and I enter the mess hall, tears spring to my eyes. These young men, the Forest Army, many from the poorest and most disadvantaged homes, are my knights in shining armor.

  Snake, the boy who almost chopped off his own leg, strolls over to our table, with only a slight limp. “The trees finally came,” he tells Boodean. “Morning, Miss Becky. We’re going to start planting this afternoon.”

  “Trees?” I ask.

  “Yeah, the new super ordere
d a boxcar of jack pine and some wild grass seed to prevent erosion on the hillsides. It’s one of the missions of the CCC camps, reforestation, and boy do we have a lot of reforestation to do!” You can tell he likes the way the new word sounds.

  “Do you want to go with them?” I ask Boodean. “Sounds like fun.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  In the afternoon clinic, I see some of the corpsmen injured in the fire, per the routine of the substitute nurse, and at the end of the day, Rusty hops in supported on his one foot and two crutches.

  “Howdy, Miss Becky. Nice to see you back,” he greets me cheerfully.

  “My mother and father in Indiana sent you a note. He hands me an already opened envelope and I pull out a five-and-dime greeting card with a hummingbird on the front. Inside it says simply, “Thank you. Our sun is our hope. You saved him.” Son is spelled wrong, but it doesn’t matter, I know that Rusty is their shining sun and it brings tears to my eyes.

  “Aren’t you going home, Rusty? I’m sure you could. They would give you medical discharge. I can fill out the papers if you want.”

  “No, I’m happy here. I get three squares a day, medical care, and my ma gets her check. It means a lot to them back in Indianapolis.

  “Major Langford, the new camp superintendent, gave me a sit-down job in the woodshop, learning to make furniture. I can do it all on a low bench so I don’t have to stand, and he’s looking for someone in Pittsburgh who can make me an artificial foot. My only problem is the itch.”

  Here I raise my eyebrows. Another case of the crotch itch?

  “Where exactly does it itch?” I ask, thinking this will be awkward if I have to examine his privates with Boodean off planting trees.

  The young man looks confused. “My foot, of course. My left foot. The one the doc took off!”

  “Oh.” I start to giggle and I can’t stop. “It’s called phantom pain when a limb is removed, but I guess you have phantom itch!” Now Rusty is laughing too.