The Healer's Daughter

by Charlotte Hinger

  Bethany tried to appear calm, but her insides quaked. “We’ve got to get moving. I need to see what that man’s done to her, but I don’t know if your horse can stand up to carrying double, Cedric.”

  “He can. It’s only a mile further to go back through Nicodemus. We’ll leave this one and pick up two more horses.”

  “All right. I need to get my bag, and I’ll send one of the children for my mother. She’s the best person I know of to have around if there’s birthing trouble.”

  The horse’s breaths came in harsh bellows by the time they reached the town. Cedric took off at a run toward the livery stable, and Bethany went inside her dugout. She grabbed an old sack and stuffed all the clean towels and blankets she had on hand inside it.

  Not knowing what she would find, she went to the hanks of herbs hanging from the walls. She separated some, spread several small cotton squares on the table, and rolled the plants inside. She put them in her main medicine bag and ran outside.

  Cedric cantered toward her, holding the bridle reins of a second horse. She mounted without saying a word, and they dashed off toward his homestead.

  Bethany caught her breath at the odor when she walked inside. She heard the pitiful mewling sounds of a dying baby and took in the deathly sick smell of the frazzled-out mother. She went to the bed and lifted the hand of the delirious woman, who was so crazed with fever, she wasn’t aware Bethany had come into the room.

  Cedric had pulled a blanket up to her chin and tucked it around her, but Amity was trembling like she had been thrown into a snowbank. Bethany felt for her pulse. It was weak and erratic.

  She reached for the baby lying swaddled on top of the covers and opened the wee girl’s eyes. She gazed at the milky pupils. Her heart sank. Both mother and child were dying.

  She turned and led Cedric over to a chair next to the bed and forced him into the seat. She placed her hands on his shoulders and begged him to control his harsh sobs long enough to concentrate. “I want you to take this little girl-child to Nicodemus and tell LuAnne I said to find the Alstead woman. She’s just had a baby. I want her to start nursing this little one. We must try to save your little girl. My mother will be along shortly.”

  “I should be here,” he said between sobs. “In case something happens. I don’t want her to die alone.”

  Bethany squeezed his shoulder, knowing his dilemma and fearing that, in fact, that was just what was going to happen no matter what she did to prevent it.

  “I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry. I’m going to tell you straight off, it’s up to God. I’ll do my best, but she’s very sick and so is the baby.”

  “She thought she was doing the right thing. Hell of it is, Amity laid awake nights worrying about the best thing for the baby. She was plumb happy with you until folks started putting ideas in her head. Then she got to fretting. Wondering if she shouldn’t just stick to her own kind. Her own people, you know.”

  His tongue was thick with shame as though he couldn’t stand to say the words. “I just want you to know, I didn’t egg her on. I didn’t. But I didn’t stop her, neither.” His voice was so low, Bethany had to strain to hear him. “Didn’t stop her. Figured the women folks knew more about birthing. But I heard stories when I’d go to town. Doc’s whisky mean. And I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen him sober.”

  “So I’ve heard. You don’t have to explain. I know the stories that have been going around. But the baby. We’ve got to get milk for this baby right away. I don’t want her to get chilled, and I’m not sure she can stand the ride back to Nicodemus, but I can’t help her here. I don’t think we have a choice.”

  In her heart, she feared Amity would die while he was gone and Cedric would never get over it if she did. But she had to decide on the best course of action quickly, or there wouldn’t be any hope of saving either the mother or the child.

  “We’ll wrap the baby up against your chest so she won’t jar so much. This baby needs more care than I can give her while I’m tending to your wife. Now open your shirt.”

  Wordlessly, he complied while she reached into her bag, pulled out some white cotton cloth and began tearing it into strips. “You’re going to have to ford the Solomon,” she said, “and I don’t want to take a chance on you dropping this little one if you need both hands. This will help steady the poor little mite and keep her warm.”

  She gently picked up the baby girl, then laid her against the man’s chest and wrapped the strips around them both, taking care to turn the tiny head to one side. Then she secured the wee bundle with another wide strip. She buttoned his shirt back up, leaving a gap at the collar.

  She watched as Cedric swung into the saddle, holding one arm protectively in front of his precious burden. “Tell LuAnne to bring a couple of chickens, so she can start some soup.”

  He turned awkwardly and gave a little wave to let her know he’d heard, then he kicked his horse into an easy lope and started off across the prairie.

  She looked at Amity, closed her eyes in dismay, and steadied herself. She immediately set water boiling and laid aside fresh cloths. She walked over to the bed, then peeled back the blanket from the woman’s pain-racked body.

  When she saw the damage, her mind quit as if it had been encased in ice. There was blood everywhere. At first she thought the afterbirth had not been completely expelled. Stunned, her hand flew toward her throat as though she could still her pulse.

  One glance between the woman’s legs and the open wound told the whole story. Doc Osborne knew nothing. Nothing at all. Amity was a small woman. He had tried to cut an opening big enough. He clearly had either merely heard about this procedure, or didn’t know how to sew her back up, or had been too drunk to try.

  Then Bethany stared at the gashes on Amity’s arms, the bloody crescent of a cup lip. He’d bled her. The bloody butcher had tried to fix this adorable woman by bleeding her. And he didn’t know how to do that, either.

  Then he had run off.

  She shook with rage. Another woman the victim of a dirty, ignorant doctor who’d had his hands God knew where before he stuck them inside poor Amity.

  She could not for the life of her think of anything to do. It was as though everything she had ever learned from her mother had vanished. None of her herbs would do a whit of good.

  Nevertheless, she picked up a bucket of water sitting beside the stove and poured some into a large kettle. She stoked the fire. She untied her little cloth bundles and spread them out on the wobbly cottonwood table in the center of the room and grabbed three tin cups off a shelf to steep some herbs.

  She tossed some dandelion stems into one, and echinacea leaves in another, then hesitated. Nothing would help or even give Amity relief. After she cleansed her, she would apply a compress of usnea lichen, which was the most powerful medicine for wounds she had in her arsenal.

  She choked back a hopeless sob, then set her mouth in a grim line. She didn’t even have laudanum for Amity’s pain.

  She set aside a cup for valerian leaves, to help the poor woman get some rest. But knowing her baby had lived would do her the most good. And the fate of the baby was in God’s hands, and the women of Nicodemus.

  There was a smoke house out back. With any luck, there would be some meat to boil for a strengthening broth. Reluctant to leave Amity’s side, she decided to wait until LuAnne or her mother arrived.

  When the largest kettle was boiling, she threw in a good supply of Kinnikinnick leaves and waited until the water was dark. Then she pulled the pan off to cool, dipped a rag in the mixture, and began to bathe Amity. It would be better if she could manage a sitz bath to reduce the pain and swelling of the woman’s swollen, pus-encrusted vulva, but it would be too difficult without help.

  She crooned as she worked, and the wounded woman’s eyes fluttered open for a moment.

  “Good. Good. I need you awake for a few minutes. I have some things I want you to drink.”

  “I’m sick. So terribly sick. And my baby? My baby?”
>
  “Hush, you’re going to be just fine.”

  “My baby?”

  “She’s in good hands. The very best of hands. It’s a little girl. You’re too weak to care for her right now. We’ve got to take care of you first, so I’ve sent her back to Nicodemus. Can’t think of any people that know more about taking care of little babies than they do.”

  Amity Berlin closed her eyes. Her lids were blue veined, and there were dark, feverish circles on her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “Sorry I let that filthy old man near me. Sorry I believed all the lies about you.”

  “Hush. Don’t waste your strength. I need to you to swallow some things for me, some teas. Just stay with me. Stay awake long enough for me to get some teas down you. Hear now? You’ve got to stay awake long enough for me to fetch them.”

  Quickly, Bethany rose and carried the wash-pan to the table. She grabbed the first steeped cup of willow bark and echinacea and whirled back to the bed. “Now don’t you quit on me. You’ve got to fight, and I need you to drink this. Right now. Drink every bit of this.”

  Bethany watched the fluttery little contractions of Amity’s throat as she swallowed the tea. She kept talking, talking. “A sweet baby girl,” she crooned. “Sweet little baby. You’ve got a sweet little baby girl to think about.”

  She started at a noise outside, but kept her eyes on her patient and didn’t look up when she heard the door opening. Didn’t turn her head until Amity swallowed the last drop. Didn’t need to turn around, because when her mother was present it was like the air was charged with an unseen force. Bethany could have been blind, unconscious, paralyzed, or in a coma and still know the minute her mother walked into a room.

  Queen Bess did not speak. She was too professional to say anything that would frighten the patient. She slowly walked up to the bedside. She trembled, and her hands tucked beneath her apron started to shake. Her nostrils were distended from the tension of trying to control her face.

  She reached for Bethany’s shoulder and gestured at the door. Bethany wrapped the blankets around the woman, sealing in the warmth from the tea. She glanced at her mother, and the two women went outside.

  “She won’t live,” said Bess.

  “She must.”

  “She won’t, and we will be blamed.”

  “But it was that incompetent fool who did this to her. You know that. As many good births as we’ve had around here, everyone should know that. This is not my fault.”

  “Folks is going to be plumb tickled to believe the worse,” Queen Bess said.

  “But why? When did this start? People around here were wishing us the best just a short time ago. Everyone in the country has been watching Nicodemus.”

  “It worse now because everyone watching us,” Queen Bess said. “I didn’t come here to be watched. Didn’t ask to be watched. Bunch of Northern free-born strutters set us all up to be watched. Running people for office. Stepping too high.”

  “We can’t just let Amity die,” Bethany said.

  “There’s nothing we can do to stop it,” Queen Bess said. “Nothing at all.”

  They went inside. Bethany looked at Amity’s colorless face and eased her head up on the pillow. Queen Bess propped her up, and they tried to get the woman to sip a little tea steeped with witch hazel.

  “If we could just get her fever down a little, maybe we could get her to swallow.”

  But the liquid slowly trickled out of Amity’s mouth, and they laid her back down; before the hour was up, she died.

  Bethany looked at Queen Bess. The two women were paralyzed with fear. Bethany closed her eyes.

  Her mother had come into the Berlins’ house like a pillar of fire, and Bethany had drawn back from the heat of her black, raging heart. The blue-black coal-fire heat of a race wronged.

  Now that heat was replaced with pure fear. Her mother’s face was the ashen-gray ghost color of haunts in the night. Dull dry as a scurrying spider. The dead cinder color of a people terrified and hounded.

  “Momma?” said Bethany. Her voice trembled, and she reached for the old woman’s hand. “Momma?”

  Queen Bess turned away.

  “See what you done, child? I tried to tell you. See what you done?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The women of Nicodemus waited as Cedric Berlin rode up to the schoolhouse. They had heard about Bethany’s hasty trip to the man’s homestead. Knew it meant trouble.

  Cedric dismounted, and LuAnne saw the tiny lump of the swaddled head sticking out of his partially buttoned rough shirt. She ran to him and unwrapped the strips securing the infant.

  She froze. The tiny, lifeless body was already turning cold. She gently removed the little baby girl from Cedric’s warm chest and pressed the wee, rigid bundle against her bosom. She turned to the women with a small, helpless shake of her head. She prayed for courage. She swallowed and turned back to the stranger, this white man. Not one of their own.

  “Mr. Berlin, sir, this little baby girl is dead.”

  One of the women began keening. The ancient sound wafted across the prairie.

  “Lord have mercy,” Patricia Towaday whispered. “He rode all that way with a dead baby.”

  Cedric Berlin said nothing.

  His arms dangled helplessly; his shoulders slumped as he stared at the ground. He glanced at the cold infant in LuAnne’s arms, gave his hat a savage tug, climbed back on his exhausted horse, and pounded off toward his homestead.

  Jim Black raced to the corral and jumped on his horse without bothering to saddle up. He rode after Berlin, clutching the reins of a spare mount. “Wait,” he called. “Wait up.”

  Berlin slowed, then stopped as Jim rode up.

  “Your horse is half dead.” Jim’s stomach tightened. He wished he hadn’t said dead. Wished some other word had come to mind. “This one’s fresh. Use it. I’ll take yours back to the livery stable, and some of our folks will come over to your place to help you.”

  Berlin nodded, dismounted, climbed on the fresh horse, viciously raked his spurs against its side, and lunged across the prairie.

  Bethany and Queen Bess heard him ride up just as they were closing Amity Berlin’s eyes for the last time. They looked at one another helplessly as Cedric stumbled over the threshold.

  The news of Amity’s death spread at once throughout the white community.

  “The black women cursed her. Killed her.” The news spread like wildfire. “All their kind has just been waiting for us. Hoping to kill little white children while they’re sleeping in their beds.”

  “A great tragedy has befallen this community,” crowed Estelle Sinclair in the Wade City Chronicle. It was a great pity, she thought, that they had cried wolf once before when they now had hard facts to back up something so similar to what she had made up. It diluted it somehow.

  A young mother and her adorable baby girl were killed through the incompetence and carelessness of ignorant and unskilled women who were called to minister to Mrs. Cedric Berlin after childbirth. The Berlins foolishly chose not to rely wholly on the judgment of our own fine white physician, Dr. Winthrop Osborne. Dr. Osborne has assured us that he had delivered a fine healthy baby to Mrs. Berlin the day before and both were in excellent shape when he left her bedside.

  We can only speculate at this point, what would cause Mr. and Mrs. Berlin to turn their backs on their own kind and trust the most personal and holy of all medical events to primitive women who practice the dark arts. This needless tragedy could have been avoided.

  “Not true, not true,” Bethany whispered as she read the paper. “God in heaven. We do not practice the dark arts. We are not primitive. We do not set out to kill people.”

  There wasn’t a soul in Nicodemus who didn’t hear about the editorial. A pall settled over the community. Even the children stayed inside until their mothers chased them out; they sullenly started games they never finished.

  On a cloudy night, a week after the article was printed, Jed went in search of Bet
hany. She had turned her classes over to Earnest Jones and A. T. Kulp and whomever they could round up each day, saying she had to tend to things.

  No one had seen her step outside her dugout in broad daylight since the Berlin tragedy. But after sunset, nearly every evening now, she wandered up to the school. Jed was acutely aware of her movements, the clothes she wore, her smile, her quick wit. Before the deaths, for the past month, Bethany had started wearing her hair down. One night she had even dashed under the jump rope and sang out the chants, much to the giddy delight of the older girls.

  She changed back after losing Amity and the baby. Changed back like a ghost had crept inside her. She pulled her hair into a tight bun again, and she no longer eagerly set off across the prairie alone with her herb basket.

  Jed found Bethany sitting by the window in the pale, white light, gazing at the moon. She turned when he came in, but her face was too shadow-dappled for him to see any expression.

  “I came to see if there’s anything I can do,” he said.

  “Nothing you can do and nothing you can say.” Her voice was flat, devoid of any emotion. “Momma tried to tell me. Now they’re gonna starve us out, or burn us out, or just flat kill us outright. Serves me right for stepping out of my place. For thinking we could be something we’re never gonna be. There’s just no place on God’s green earth where we can live.”

  He crossed the room and gripped her by the shoulders. He forced her chin up and made her look at him. “Listen to me, Bethany; there’s something you’ve got to understand. You’ve believed that if you do the right thing, say the right thing, white folks are going to notice how smart you are. Well, they’re not. Most of them are always going to have it in back of their minds that you’re a dumb nigger. You can’t change that.”