The Last Midwife

by Sandra Dallas

  Davy looked sheepish, but Ben was defiant. “Them that does the cooking eats,” he said.

  Gracy was never quick to anger, but the answer infuriated her. Esther had been forced to lie with both of them. She had gone through the pain of childbirth—twice, once for each man. Instead of cherishing her, the men punished her. Those two were as twisted as timberline trees. She grabbed Ben’s plate and retorted, “Them as defiles a woman, don’t eat at all.”

  The men, too astonished to react, only watched as Gracy thrust Ben’s plate at Esther and ordered her to eat. The woman began to shovel the food into her mouth, gulping it down, while the men stared. Gracy waited until Esther was finished. Then saying, “You’re not fit to associate with hogs,” she picked up Davy’s dinner, lifted a lid on the cookstove, and flung the contents into the fire.

  Fifteen

  When Gracy went up the trail to her cabin, she saw her husband sitting in the dark, on the bench in front of the house, with his knife in his hand, the dog snoring beside him. Gracy would have taken Sandy with her, but the old dog wouldn’t have been able to keep up, so she’d left him behind. Now, the two of them waited for her, and just as the moon came up over Turnbull Mountain, Sandy’s tail thumped, and Daniel jumped up to greet her. “God, hell! There you are, old girl,” he said.

  “Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were worried about me,” she told him.

  He gave her a hug in the moonlight, right there where anybody might see, and she hugged him back. “Maybe I was, just a little,” he admitted.

  “No need. I was on a horse that didn’t move much faster than a turtle, and on horseback, I’d have seen any log Jonas Halleck’s men felled on the road.”

  Neither of them mentioned that there were other ways she could have been hurt.

  Daniel, embarrassed at his show of affection, turned brusque. “I got your dinner warming, probably burned up by now.”

  “Why, Danny,” she murmured, and it was clear he was pleased at her words, although he looked away, looked down at the dog and patted his head, picked up a stick and threw it for Sandy to fetch.

  Daniel took Gracy’s medicine bag, and impulsively, he grasped her hand, Gracy thinking, what foolishness is this?

  Later, at the supper table, Gracy told Daniel what had happened in Mayflower Gulch.

  “You are not a hater,” Daniel said.

  “No, I’m not, but the hate came over me today like almost nothing I ever felt.”

  Daniel nodded. She knew he had seen her react like that once before. But it had not been hate—anger perhaps, more likely sorrow so profound that it had bowed her over in grief.

  “I was so mad I couldn’t help myself. I never should have taken away those men’s dinner like I did. But I kept thinking they were not fit to knock at Esther Boyce’s door. Most likely, I made things worse for her.” Gracy paused. And then suddenly, her face lit up. “But I believe it was the first time Esther’s eyes sparkled since the babies were born. It served those boys good and right.”

  “You see,” Daniel said. “You did some good after all.”

  “Only for that moment. It’s not possible to help her for longer than that. Nobody can do any good for the poor woman. I never saw a thing so hopeless as that cabin. What’s to become of her? Where could she go? There’s aplenty of things folks in Swandyke might overlook, philandering being one of them and maybe even working at a parlor house. But a woman with two husbands? Even the whores would turn their backs on Esther.” Gracy thought that over. “Funny, if it’d been a man with two wives, folks would chuckle, say what a rare fellow he must be. But a woman?” Gracy shook her head. “I don’t know the answer for it.”

  “The one boy looks that much like Davy, does he?”

  “Hair the color of fire, brighter than any I ever saw, just like Davy’s. Hands like his, too, the way they curl and the thumbs stick out, and green eyes the color of a beaver pond. Oh, yes, it’s enough to be remarked on, Danny.” Gracy cut off a piece of the chop that Daniel had fried. Daniel was used to Gracy being away, used to fixing his own meals, because he never knew when she would return. But that morning as she left, Gracy had said she’d be back at dark, and so he’d readied the fire and put out the chops, boiled the potatoes, then kept the whole warming to await her return. If the supper had been there too long and was overcooked, Gracy didn’t notice.

  Jeff wasn’t at home. Gracy yearned to see him but didn’t ask about him. She knew he had friends to see. Or he might have gone to the saloon, for he’d picked up the habit of drinking when he was away. He’d grown up during the time he’d spent in Nevada. Well, it was to be expected. Maybe leaving Swandyke had been a grown-up decision.

  Jeff had been more than sixteen when he left, almost a man then. No, Gracy, thought, he was already a man, although she hadn’t known it. They couldn’t have stopped him from leaving, because Jeff was stubborn. And where had he gotten that? Gracy smiled to herself at the answer. The boy was too much like his father. Their minds worked the same way. They were both determined. Like his father, Jeff was sturdy as a mule, his hands powerful, and he carried them as though they were a thinking part of him. When he assembled a piece of machinery or mended the broken wing of a bird, Jeff’s hands seemed to tremble, as if they and not his brain were in control.

  Maybe when this trouble over the Halleck baby was done with, maybe if Gracy were found not guilty, Jeff would go to the mining school down below, in Golden. Or he might just leave again. Gracy wished there were a way he could stay in Swandyke, but what was there here for him besides his parents? He would leave, but this time he would go with his mother’s blessing.

  Gracy tried her best to swallow the food Daniel had prepared, but she couldn’t eat when she was upset, and she was worried—about the trial, the Boyce woman, the Boyce babies, even Josie Halleck. She knew Daniel was concerned, too, because she’d seen the half-dozen whittling sticks he’d left outside beside the bench.

  Daniel looked at her across the table now. The kerosene light was soft on Gracy’s face. Her hair, most of it as gray as a winter sky, curled a little over her forehead, and up close, it smelled like wood smoke, left the scent of smoke and sage on her pillow in the morning. Daniel’d never cared that she wasn’t much to look at, she knew. He’d said there was something beyond pretty about his wife: the spirit that lit up her face, the way she carried herself with pride, the hands, gentle enough to coax a baby from a woman’s womb but strong enough to grip an axe or a plow handle—or his arms in bed at night. She was a something, hard-boned, tough in sinew, he’d told her, shivering at the way she held him. In all those years, he said, he’d never gotten over the wonder of her.

  Gracy glanced up and caught Daniel watching her. “What are you thinking, old man?” she asked.

  Daniel grinned at her. “I’m thinking I’m not such an old man yet.” He reached across the table with his gnarled hand and gripped Gracy’s arm. “Not too old at all.”

  Gracy’s face lit up. “You are a sight to come home to,” she said. Then she looked around and asked where Jeff was.

  “Over to Middle Swan, maybe getting drunk. I expect he won’t come home till morning.”

  “Is he home for good, do you think?”

  Daniel shrugged. “He hasn’t said.”

  “You haven’t talked to him about it?”

  Daniel shook his head. “What is there to say?”

  “Does he trust us?”

  “He loves us.”

  Gracy set down her fork, leaving most of her food untouched. “There is a difference,” she said, “between love and trust.”

  “I know that.”

  “He’ll get over it.”

  “You did, then?”

  Gracy nodded. “Of course I did. You know I did.”

  “But you didn’t forget?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve tried.”

  “I’m sorry, Gracy.”

  She rose and picked up the plates, then scraped her dinner into the slop bucket.
“It’s not worth talking about. I don’t recollect the Bible saying you had to do penance for the rest of your life.”

  Daniel got up from the table and went to the stove, pouring hot water into the dishpan. “You want to wash or dry?”

  “Wash.”

  “You know your Bible, all right, more than any person I ever knew, except maybe my mother. And she couldn’t read.”

  “Black Mary had it in her memory. It’s a good thing to know.”

  Gracy handed her husband the washed plates and then the forks. She added the fry pan to the dishpan and scrubbed it, setting it by the fire to dry. Daniel carried the basin to the door and threw the dishwater onto the garden. In that dry place, no water was wasted.

  “I believe I’ll spend some time with the Bible this evening,” she said, untying her apron and hanging it on a hook beside the stove.

  The Good Book lay on the seat of her chair, and Gracy went over and picked it up. But Daniel took it out of her hands. “Later,” he said, drawing her toward the bed. “Maybe later.” Gracy smiled at him, thinking, hips. He still has those hips.

  * * *

  Dreams woke Gracy, and the memory of them would not let her go back to sleep. She went outside and brushed aside the wood shavings Daniel had left on the bench and sat down in the moonlight. How many babies had died? she wondered. How many women since that first one in Arkansas so many years before?

  She thought of that young mother now, although she couldn’t remember her name. Gracy hadn’t been delivering babies for more than a year or two when a man came to the door asking for Granny Nabby. “You go,” Nabby had said. “She’s had half a dozen already with nary a problem.” Nabby’s legs were swollen, and Gracy knew it would pain the old woman to stand beside a childbirth bed. So she had picked up the medicine bag and gone through the night with the man.

  The cabin stood in a field of purple asters, and Gracy had begged him to stop for just a minute so she could pick a bouquet. His wife would have something pretty to look at during her pain, she’d explained.

  When Gracy arrived, she found the woman still in the early stages of labor. So between the pains, the two women talked.

  “I am wishing for a girl this time,” the woman said. “I love my boys, but boys grow up and cleave to their wives. A girl is a daughter forevermore, no matter where she goes or how many young’uns she has. I crave a daughter because all the others are boys.” Gracy glanced over at a second bed, where a gaggle of little boys was sleeping in a pile, like puppies.

  “You’d teach her to cook. And to sew, too,” Gracy said, sitting on a chair beside the bed. She had examined the woman and knew the baby wouldn’t come just then.

  “And quilt. We’d sit on the porch of an evening with our pieces, stitching them together.”

  “It’s as pretty a picture as there is,” Gracy said, thinking one day she would have a daughter who’d sit on the porch with her and stitch in the late day when the hills turned blue in the fading light. “What will you name her?”

  “Mary. I’ll call her Mary. I had that name in mind since before the first boy was born. My husband says he knows it will be a girl, says I carry it different-like.”

  Hours later, the woman did indeed deliver a girl, and she and Gracy shared the joy. “Your boys have a sister,” Gracy announced, as she held the newborn up for the mother to see. The woman’s happiness stayed with Gracy for a week, warmed her until the father came by Nabby’s cabin and said in a voice worn from sadness, “She’s dead.”

  “No,” Gracy said, sharing the man’s grief. “She was such a sweet thing, your Mary,” she said.

  “’Twasn’t Mary. My woman died. She got a fever and near about burned up from it. I buried her in the meadow this morning.”

  The man didn’t blame Gracy. Childbirth was dangerous. Men knew that as well as women. But Gracy blamed herself. She should have told the man to send for her if the woman did poorly. She’d never lost a mother and couldn’t help but wonder if she’d done something wrong, left a piece of the placenta in the womb, for instance.

  Gracy grieved for weeks, until Nabby explained to her that death was part of the cycle of life. You couldn’t have birth without death, Nabby told her. You couldn’t experience the happiness of delivering a perfect child without taking on the sorrow of losing a mother or a baby. That sorrow would always remain with Gracy, Nabby warned. The sorrows would build up until sometimes the weight of them was almost too much. Gracy would have to learn to bury them deep in her mind, to think instead of the mothers and babies who lived.

  And for the most part, Gracy had done that. But not always. That very night the overwhelming grief had returned in her dream of the woman so many years before. She carried the memory of that dead mother and all the others like a sore. And now she had added Esther’s plight to that grief.

  She looked out over her garden in the moonlight. She’d planted daisies and hollyhocks and all the other flowers to bring her peace. But she’d never planted a purple aster.

  * * *

  “I woke up, and you weren’t there,” Daniel said, standing in the doorway. “I waited for you to come back to bed.”

  Gracy smiled to think how he must have moved over to her side of the bed to keep it warm for her. But after a time, he would have worried when she didn’t return, so he’d gotten up.

  “I thought you might be reading your Bible,” he said.

  Gracy shook her head. She had left the Bible inside.

  “You want your shawl?” Daniel asked, because the air was chilly and Gracy wore only her nightdress.

  Gracy looked up at Daniel, dressed in his long underwear, and shook her head. “Aren’t we a pair, out here in our night clothes. Anybody seeing us would think we were daft.”

  He stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders. “You came out here to think, did you?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “You never can’t sleep, Gracy. You still worried about the Boyce woman?”

  “Her and all the others.” Daniel knew how the grief came on her sometimes, and she didn’t want to talk about it, so she asked, “What if they find me guilty? What if they send me away?”

  Daniel tightened his grip on his wife.

  “What if they lock me up in jail, lock me up so’s I could never see you and Jeff again. What then, Danny?”

  “They wouldn’t do that.”

  “But they could. People I thought were my friends have turned against me. Women,” she said, her voice a sad cry. She shivered and Daniel lifted her up, feeling the bones in her back. Gracy was never a fleshy woman, and she had lost weight in the last weeks. “Come to bed, old girl,” he said gently, leading her back into the house.

  Gracy patted his arm. “Not so old,” she said, repeating his words of earlier that evening.

  Daniel smiled. “We’re still good together,” he said.

  Gracy smiled back, but the relief she had felt earlier in the night when they’d clutched each other in bed was gone. Her troubles had returned.

  * * *

  In the morning, Gracy sat outside again, this time with a soda biscuit in her hand, Daniel beside her on the bench, his knife stripping the bark from a stick. He was almost finished when they heard someone on the trail, and the old dog got up and wagged his tail. Some watchdog, Gracy thought. Was there anybody Sandy didn’t like?

  At first, she believed that Jeff had returned. So pushing the slivers of bark from the bench, she stood up, brushing the crumbs off her apron. But instead, John Miller came into the clearing.

  “You’re working hard, I see,” John said, clapping Daniel on the back.

  “There’s aplenty of sticks out there that needs their bark stripped off, and I intend to do my duty,” Daniel replied.

  “A man’s life ain’t easy with work like that to be done—sticks to whittle, coffee to drink, sun to be sat in.” John stood beside Daniel and was silent then.

  “Did you come for a reason or just to rile me?” Daniel asked.
/>   “A reason,” John said. “I got the word this morning that the judge will be up here on Friday. He’s set Gracy’s trial for that morning.”

  “So soon?” Gracy asked.

  John nodded. “Maybe it’s best to get it over with.”

  “Maybe. Lift that cloud from our heads,” Daniel said, smiling at Gracy, trying to put the best face on it.

  But she didn’t smile back. “We’ll know in a week, Danny,” she said. A week and she’d be free, Gracy thought. Or she’d be gone from him, perhaps forever.

  Sixteen

  The courtroom reminded Gracy of the country fairs she’d attended as a girl in Arkansas—festive and noisy and filled with commotion. She had thought things couldn’t be worse than at the hearing, but they were. Now, just six weeks after the Halleck baby was killed, it seemed to Gracy as if people had come to a celebration instead of a trial, as if her own life were not at stake. The room was packed as tight as nails in a keg, with miners and mill workers, clerks and draymen and bums with nothing better to do than listen to Coy Chaney and Jonas Halleck and Little Dickie Erickson accuse Gracy of murdering a baby. The watchers lounged in the chairs, scratching and spitting, sometimes aiming their tobacco juice at the spittoons, sometimes not. A few of the men were dressed in suits. Gracy didn’t know them. They were law clerks up from Denver come to witness the trial, Gracy’s lawyer, Ted Coombs, explained to her. And newspaper reporters. Ted nodded at one man and whispered to Gracy that he was from the Rocky Mountain News, the major paper in the state.

  “What’s he doing here?” Gracy asked.

  Ted took a deep breath and let it out. “This is big news, Gracy, a woman being charged with murder, and the murder of a baby at that. And the baby is the son of a prominent mining man. You and I, we’re aware of what kind of man he is, but outsiders regard him highly, and so do a fair number in Swandyke. We’re lucky the New York newspapers didn’t send somebody to cover the trial.” He glanced around at men in suits and paper collars, bowler hats hanging from the knobs on their chair backs, and added, “Maybe they did.”