“What you going to do, Hiram?”
“We’re sending out a government surveyor tomorrow morning, and in two days’ time, we’re going to declare that Nicodemus is a genuine township.”
“God almighty. Bet I know some folks that are going to have a fit over there in Graham County.”
“It’s not officially Graham County yet, but you’re right about folks having a fit.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Bethany heard a man shout. She stepped outside. A white man rode up hollering for her before he even dismounted. “Miss Herbert, you’re needed fast over at the Beckers. Miz Becker is in a heap of trouble. Baby coming early.”
Her stomach plummeted. She had never met this woman. When someone came riding in this fast, in a state of agitation, it was always bad news. Better to prevent trouble than try to fix things when it was too late. Besides, she would simply never get over her fear of delivering white folks’ babies.
“I’m their neighbor, Mark Church.” His horse was soaked with sweat. “Got a horse you can ride?”
She shook her head. “But I can borrow one from our blacksmith. Go get it while I check my medicine bag. I’ll throw a little food into a tote.” She rushed inside and gathered her things. For a birthing call, she also included a bag of rags and pads of old quilts to protect beds. They were already prepared. After each visit, she soaked them in cold water, then boiled them clean.
Church trotted back holding the reins of the second horse. Although she still didn’t ride well, it was certainly faster than walking, and clearly Church’s horse wasn’t up to carrying double.
Inside the Beckers’ homestead, she swallowed hard when she saw the disarray, the filth. The bed appeared to be heaped with rags, but in fact they covered an exhausted woman. Anita Becker was beyond screams, beyond pain, reduced to whimpering. The odor of sour food permeated the room, and Bethany’s stomach recoiled.
There was no stove, just a cooking trench about ten feet outside the door. Another family taking a homestead. Unaware and unprepared. Anger welled up in her. She looked at the three tow-headed, undernourished children huddled in a corner, then whirled around and snapped at the woman’s husband.
“Get them out of here, all of them, right now. They don’t need to see their mother in such a state.”
No one questioned Bethany Herbert when she gave orders. Beyond color, beyond sex, was the authority of the physician, with unseen powers and shrouded in mystery. In the presence of the sick, white or black, she became simply the doctor, first and foremost.
As she shoved the family out the door, she spied an old washtub. She checked the rain barrel, then handed the tub to Amos Becker. “Go fetch some water. I need plenty. We’ll send the children to the creek with the buckets. It will give them something to do. First, though, it looks like they need food.”
She tried to keep her voice neutral. She didn’t know what had happened to this family, but she knew hunger when she saw it. She doled out biscuits, dried apples, and jerky to the children. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it would have to do. She solemnly handed Amos his share. “It’s all I have,” she said. “I would have brought more, but I just didn’t know.”
“Give it to my children, and I thank you kindly.” Amos swallowed convulsively.
“No,” she said, “you must eat, too, or you’re not going to have the strength to do the things I need you to do.”
Mark Church stood helplessly to one side, watching. When she walked over to thank him for coming after her, his eyes were troubled at the stark poverty all around him. An earnest man with thinning black hair, he spoke in a rush.
“Didn’t know these folks was so bad off or maybe I could of helped. Not doing so good myself. Trouble is, I just ain’t around much, so I didn’t know, ma’am, swear to God I would have helped. I found work loading buffalo bones on the railroad over at Buffalo Park. Came back to the homestead to make sure I didn’t need to run no squatters off my place. Gotta watch that, you know. Just chance the boy found me home when he came running over. These folks ain’t got no horse. Lucky for them I’d heard about you. Want me to stick around? I was just heading back to work when the boy came.”
Bethany shook her head. “No. Thank you. Don’t scold yourself. This was none of your doing. I’ll send the oldest boy back to Nicodemus on the horse I rode here. He can return it to Jim Black. I want him to fetch a woman who helps me from time to time. She can come in the wagon and bring food.”
“Guess I’ll be on my way, then.”
“Just comfort yourself with the thought that if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t be here at all.”
He smiled with relief.
“Thank you, and have a safe trip to Buffalo Park.”
Mark Church touched his hat and rode off.
Bethany walked back over to Amos Becker. “First off, I need to build a good fire out here. Then I need you to round up all the pots and tubs you have on the place. Then get going to the creek while I tend to your wife. Have your two youngest ones carry all they can.”
She gestured to the oldest boy to come over to Jim Black’s sturdy mustang. “What’s your name?”
“Edmund.”
“Do you know how to ride, son?”
“I have before,” he mumbled hesitantly.
“Wouldn’t matter if you didn’t, I guess, you’d have to go anyway. I can’t spare your father. Besides, old Blister here won’t give you any trouble.” She made him repeat back all the supplies she wanted LuAnne to bring. “Hurry now!” She helped him mount.
After seeing Edmund off, Bethany set water boiling. Then she went back inside. She shrank from the rancid odor coming from the feverish woman. She felt Mrs. Becker’s stomach, and her heart sank. The baby had already died inside. She would certainly lose the mother as well. Having something go wrong with a white woman’s birth and everyone blaming her for it was her worst fear.
She tried to think. Teddy and Jed were in Stockton. She had heard the town had a doctor, but even if she had a way of getting him, he wouldn’t be able to do anything, either.
Except take the blame, she thought bitterly. It would be a fine thing if someone else could take the blame.
There was only one person who stood a ghost of a chance of saving this woman’s life—Queen Bess. Only one person she knew of who could cut open a woman’s stomach. She hesitated. Could she trust her mother to do her best with a white lady?
She slipped outside.
“Mr. Becker, extra water can wait. We’ll get by on what your children bring back.” She drew a deep breath and hesitated. But there was no other way. “I want you to fetch my mother. She lives on a homestead fairly close by.” She gave him directions. “Tell her to come, right away, and bring everything she has in her medicine bag. Tell her to bring all her plants. Everything. Tell her to bring everything. She’ll know what I mean.”
“My Anita going to make it?”
She looked into his frightened blue eyes and decided to prepare him for the worst without mincing words. “The baby is dead, sir, and you will almost certainly lose your wife.”
“Then why are you sending for your mother when I could hold my wife’s hand and help her pass?”
“There’s a chance. A small, small chance, but there is one.”
Queen Bess looked at Anita Becker’s pale face, her bluish lips. She pressed her fingertips against the woman’s wrist and clucked at her feeble pulse.
“See what you brought on us all, daughter?” she said softly to Bethany. She turned and looked at Amos Becker, outside the open doorway. The children had just returned from the creek, and Amos was on his knees, one arm around each of them, as they sobbed onto his shoulder. “See what you done? We is going to be blamed for this. That man going to have our hides.”
“No one could have done anything for her,” said Bethany.
“White folks going to blame us anyway.”
“Momma?” Her mother’s face was as still as a death mask. “Momma? You know wh
at you have to try. You know you’re the only one who can do this. I know you’ve seen this done. Once on the Twin Rivers plantation and once on the White Forks. And other places, too. You told me so. No one else around here has had a chance to watch European doctors do this.”
“White doctors don’t know nothing about this. They think they do, but they don’t,” Queen Bess said scornfully. “Don’t know nothing at all. Our people been doing this forever. Your old grandmother Eugenie showed me this. She knew. But it most generally done to save the baby when the mother’s a lost cause. Usually don’t have to worry about the mother. This backwards. This hard.” Queen Bess’s face was grave. “Does this white gentleman know his baby is dead?”
“Yes, I told him that right away.”
“Just so they don’t think we killed it.” Queen Bess hovered over the bed. Bethany could see her lips move. She watched her mother’s hands flutter with strange movements. She had always known there were things her mother had not taught her. Her mother had promised to teach her, but the war had stopped her.
Then Queen Bess felt Mrs. Becker’s hard stomach and laid the palm of her hand on her dry, scalding hot forehead. The woman would die soon. She was long past being able to deliver, although Queen Bess had brought drugs to start that process.
Bethany went out to the cooking trench and lifted off a cast iron pot of hot water. She carried it inside, and Queen Bess poured a little into a pan. She fished a bar of lye soap and a tin of beef tallow out of her drawstring bag. She washed her long slim hands with the soap. She immersed the little tin in the hot water to melt the tallow, then dropped a cloth into the still steaming pan.
She carried the tin over to the bedside and lifted Mrs. Becker’s gown. She rubbed the tallow on the woman and on her own hand and gingerly eased it inside Anita’s vagina until she felt the baby’s buttocks.
The baby was breech. Breech and dead. It couldn’t be worse. No wonder the woman had been in labor practically forever. If Bess tried to pull it out and pieces of putrefying flesh stayed inside, this woman was doomed. Worse, she was in a white man’s house with a daughter too naïve to see where it would all lead.
She rose and went outside to talk to Mr. Becker. He sat on an old stump, head lowered, staring at the ground. Beyond was a scrawny old milk cow grazing on a straggly patch of buffalo grass. There were no horses, no geese, no ducks. A garden, mostly dead in the hot sun. She sighed heavily. Hope didn’t live there no more. Just dead things.
Becker’s daughter and his youngest son sat on the ground. They leaned against the stump, their pale faces tragedy-tight.
“Sir, you know the baby’s dead, and the chances of saving your wife aren’t good?”
Red-eyed, he could only nod at her.
“There’s only one chance I know of,” she said doggedly. “Only a slim chance, and it probably won’t work. I need to know if you want me to go ahead.”
“Will she die if you don’t?”
“That’s the only thing I know for sure. She will most surely die if I don’t, and probably will if I do.”
“What is it you want to do?”
“I need to cut her open and get that baby out of there. Right now. It ain’t been dead long. But she fading fast. We ain’t got much time.”
“Don’t want my woman to go to her grave sliced up.”
Queen Bess nodded. “I understand. Can’t say how it would go anyway.”
She started back into the house, then turned at his sudden, bitter howl. “Go ahead, damn it, if that’s the only chance we’ve got.”
She looked at him carefully, worried at the abruptness with which he had changed his mind. If he came charging in during the operation, it would be disastrous. She wanted him gone and his children with him.
“Mr. Becker, I need you to go back to my place. They is chickens roaming. Bring me three. Three’s plenty.”
By the time he returned, it would all be over. Then she would send the family and Bethany on back to Nicodemus.
“Be a while before I start. You have plenty of time. Take the children to help you catch them chickens.” Her gaze faltered for an instant at the bald lie, as she intended to operate immediately.
She watched them leave, went inside, and drew a sharp razor from her medical bag.
“Have you ever done this all by yourself before, Momma?” asked Bethany.
“Twice,” said Queen Bess. “Twice.”
“Did it work?”
“No. Mothers died both times. But those times when I helped old Doctor Herbert, I watched and remembered. That’s how I learned all the white doctor’s ways. I handed him his tools when he needed them. Got so he counted on me to do right. I watched how he carried on when he did other kinds of cutting.”
Queen Bess pressed her fingertips against Anita Becker’s neck, paused, nodded, and walked over to the counter where she had left her bag.
“What I remember the most was how he cleaned and cleaned everything. He said most doctors didn’t believe in it, but he did. He was a right smart old gentleman. He said he’d read those letters those generals sent back to England when they fought that war that made the white folks free. Said Redcoats claimed we was dying like flies ’cause we so filthy. Said they didn’t get so much disease ’cause they clean folks. They change sheets, change shirts. Wash they hands all the time.”
She found a pan, put the razor in it, went outside to the cooking trench, removed a pot from the tripod straddling the low fire, and covered the razor with boiling water. “I knows the same thing ’cause I watch what happens. What happens is what is.
“Can’t hurt nothing,” she muttered as she carried the pot back inside. “Might do some good. Want you to scrub off that table yonder with hot water.”
Anita Becker moaned.
“That woman a bleeder, ain’t nothing I can do,” Queen Bess said. “But we going to try. Now help me get her on that table. We going to swaddle down her arms and legs to where she can’t kick or go to thrashing. Just hope she pass out.”
The two women lifted her out of the bed. Bethany wrapped a long bandage around her chest and arms, under the table and back around to secure her torso. Then she did the same thing to her legs.
Queen Bess looked at her daughter for an instant. Bethany looked like a frightened deer ready to bound away.
“I is going to start.”
“I wish to a merciful God we had some laudanum.”
“Well, we don’t, child. She’s been hurting so bad so long now, this ain’t gonna make much difference to her. That’s a blessing.”
Queen Bess took a deep breath and softly pressed the side of the razor against the distended skin, tentatively, reluctant to take the irrevocable step. She lifted the instrument and studied it dispassionately, with cold, wary eyes, knowing if she failed they both were doomed.
“When I is finished, there’s some parts of her won’t be good no more. Going to rid her of them, too.”
She turned back to Anita Becker and began.
Some time later, she laid the dead baby boy beside its mother, who was alive and breathing shallowly.
“Child, I want you to take that big old butcher knife laying on that shelf. Go stick it in that fire outside. Heat it up real good. Wrap your hand so you don’t burn yourself.”
She took the knife from Bethany when Bethany came back inside. She glanced at her daughter’s terrified eyes as she carefully inserted the knife inside the woman’s body and pressed the blade against the incisions she had made to extract the uterus.
Only afterwards, when she had made the last few delicate stitches to close the original cut on the stomach, did Queen Bess’s hands begin to shake. Trembling, she lowered herself into the wobbly rocking chair.
“I don’t want those poor children to see that baby,” said Bethany. “Or any of the rest of this, either.”
She wrapped the baby in a bundle of cloth and carried him to a bare spot beside the cabin. She found an old rusty shovel with a splintered handle propped up besid
e the rain barrel. She began digging.
If the family wanted a ceremony later, she would dig the tiny infant back out of the ground and help them with a funeral. In the meantime, the little boy child would soon start smelling. She dug a separate hole for the afterbirth and the remainder of Anita Becker’s womanhood.
When she went back inside, Queen Bess was hovering over her patient. “She going to be hurting something fierce when she wakes up,” she said. “We’ve got to keep her husband and those dirty little children out of this house and keep her clean. Don’t want her agitated at all. Don’t want no one around her but me.”
“LuAnne will be back soon, bringing food and the boy.”
“Going to set her to scrubbing as best she can without making no noise ’til the father gets back with the chickens, then I going to send them all away. LuAnne and you, too. I don’t want anyone around,” said Queen Bess. “I don’t want anyone upsetting her even with their thoughts.”
“Me neither, Momma.”
“No point. I has tended many a sickbed. Y’all go on back to Nicodemus. We have a wait, a long one, ’til she gets her strength back. If she lives. Her little ones and that sickly man can get some sleep and some decent food.”
“He won’t want to leave her.”
“I is going to make him go back to Nicodemus. I is going to tell him she needs the rest, and that’s the truth. She weak. We just lucky she passed out.”
“Here they come,” said Bethany.
Amos Becker came walking across the prairie with his two children, each of them carrying a chicken.
Queen Bess stood in the doorway, smiling broadly. He looked at her face and stopped, frozen in place for a moment. Then, dropping the chicken, he gave a whoop of joy and ran toward the house.
“Hush,” Queen Bess said sternly. “Hush up, now. She still sleeping. She mighty fearful sick, but she alive. You go see for yourself. Just a look. The children can look. It’ll keep them from pestering. When LuAnne Brown gets here with the things I need, I want you to all go back to Nicodemus in the wagon. Want you to stay there for five days. Then you can come back home.”
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