The Midwife of Hope River

by Patricia Harman

  Bitsy kisses my hand, holds it to her cheek. I know what she’s saying: we are more than two roommates who share a house, more than two women who share a vocation, more than friends, and this makes me cry, one sob from that deep alone pocket under my heart.

  In the morning Bitsy gets up at dawn, as usual. Over tea and the homemade bread that Mrs. Miller pressed on us when we left Hazel Patch, we are silent about last night. I hold my pounding head in one hand, thinking about the blackberry wine, and Bitsy tells me that she still has Katherine’s ten-dollar bill and the Hazel Patch folks are paying for the funeral. We’ve come out richer, but there’s no joy. Mary Proudfoot is gone, Katherine is gone, and Thomas . . . we still don’t know where he is.

  When I trudge out to the barn with a headache the size of Lake Michigan, I’m surprised to find Moonlight licking a small miniature of herself. With the events of the last few days, her delivery was the last thing on my mind.

  “Bitsy!” I scream. Moonlight looks over at me and then turns back to her calf. “Bitsy!” I yell. “Bitsy!”

  My friend slips through the barn door and leans with me against the side of the wooden stall. It’s another female and she’s already nursing, butting her little black-and-white head into Moonlight’s udder.

  We name her Sunny.

  Bad News

  “Bitsy,” I ask. “Do you know much about calves and mother cows? I mean, are we supposed to start milking right away or wait until Moonlight’s supply is established? This is something I didn’t think of.” We are washing up the midday meal dishes, each of us in her own world.

  “You could ask Mr. Hester. Maybe he would have an old veterinary book you could borrow. Why don’t you ride Star over the mountain?” I take a big breath and let it out slowly. Maybe she just wants to get rid of me. Is she also hungover from the blackberry wine? Or is she just so weighted with grief that silence is the only dark place that soothes her?

  At the top of the ridge, where the sandstone cliffs drop off, I stop to wonder at the checkered hills, rectangles of emerald green, moss, and gold; pastures, woodlots, and fields of grain. It’s good to get away from the farm and the leaden weight of Bitsy’s sadness. Moving anywhere brings me back to my body. It doesn’t take away the grief, just puts it into perspective. Here and there black-and-white cattle, the same breed as Moonlight, graze, so small in the distance they look like toys. Far off, there’s the faint whistle of a train.

  Thirty years ago, this was virgin forest, thick with huge poplar and oak, maple and chestnut, spruce and fir, some over one hundred feet high. The industrialists scraped all that from the land with the coming of the railway. Now small farmers till the poor soil, eking a living out of the steep slopes and in the narrow hollows. Winding through the valley bottom in and out of the second-growth trees, the Hope River sparkles like beads of glass.

  As Star and I come down the hill, I spy Hester shoveling manure out of a wagon, looking like a real farmer in blue denim overalls.

  “Hi.” I slide off Star’s back and tie her to a tree. He glances over but doesn’t smile. Probably thinks I’m trouble on the way. “Moonlight had her calf last night.”

  “Everything okay?” He stabs his pitchfork into the earth and wipes his face with a red bandanna. “You should have come for me.”

  “I would have, but it happened in the middle of the night.” I don’t tell him that it happened in the middle of the night when Bitsy and I were half drunk and I forgot to go out to the barn and check on her. “The calf’s beautiful, black and white like Moonlight. A female! She’s eating and nursing, but I realized I never asked you if I should start milking her now or wait? Do you have anything I could read, maybe an old textbook?”

  “Let’s go in. I have something to show you.” He doesn’t answer my question, so I figure he’s going to give me a pamphlet or old text on animal husbandry.

  Inside the shadowy kitchen, I pump water while he washes up. For a change, the counters are clean and there are no dirty dishes in the porcelain sink. When Hester returns from upstairs, sweat free, his hair combed down, wearing a short-sleeved blue work shirt under his overalls, he hands me yesterday’s copy of the Liberty Times. I don’t have to wonder what he wants me to read; the headlines scream everything: COAL BARON FOUND STRANGLED IN HIS OWN HOME.

  “Shit!” I swear, then bite my tongue. I don’t usually use such foul language.

  I read the first paragraph aloud. “The body of William MacIntosh, owner of MacIntosh Consolidated Mines, was discovered by a neighbor, Mrs. Dyke of 140 High St., Liberty, around nine Friday morning, a rope around his neck . . .”

  I toss the newspaper on the table. “I can’t finish this.”

  Hester fills me in. “The reporter says MacIntosh was found in the dining room with a rope around his neck. There was a chair turned over, but it’s unclear if he took his own life or was murdered. There’s no note. The death is under investigation.”

  “Shit,” I say again, this time without cringing. “You think it was Thomas?”

  Hester shrugs. “The night before he died, remember, there was that complaint to the sheriff’s office that a black man was standing outside the MacIntosh home yelling for William to come out. And listen to this.” He straightens the paper and reads aloud for my benefit, “Sheriff Hardman is also investigating a related missing-person case. Mrs. Katherine MacIntosh and the couple’s young son were reported missing three days prior to her husband’s death. Readers with any knowledge of either event are instructed to call the sheriff’s office immediately. Withholding information in a capital murder case could be construed as collusion.”

  “Shit! Shit!” I don’t seem to be able to control my expletives. “What the hell do we do now? Bitsy and I have been to the Wildcat Mine twice, asked around, but no one’s seen Thomas, and it isn’t like him to go away like this. If he isn’t at Mary’s funeral service tomorrow, we’ll be really worried. Do you think he did it?”

  Daniel Hester goes to the sink and pours each of us a glass of cold water. “Drink this.”

  I’m pulling at the roots of my hair. “Could Thomas have killed William?” I ask again.

  “A man might lose control if he thought his mother was thrown down the stairs by her inebriated employer.”

  “But Thomas . . . he isn’t like that. I don’t think he is, anyway. And should we tell Hardman we know what happened to Katherine? She didn’t just disappear, she went home to her mother in Baltimore to escape her drunken husband. If we withhold, we could be in trouble.” My mind jumps from one thing to another like oil in a hot skillet.

  “Take a deep breath,” Hester orders. I try, but it’s more like a gulp of air. “We should wait,” he goes on, “until we talk to Thomas, get all the information, hear his story. In the military you get a feeling for men, which ones will go off like a loose cannon and which you can trust. If Thomas did kill MacIntosh, the asshole deserved it.”

  An hour later, I find Bitsy sitting on our front steps, stroking Emma’s head and staring into some sorrowful space two feet in front of her. I hand her the copy of the Liberty Times. Her reaction surprises me.

  “I’m glad!” Then slowly, as she reads the whole article, her brown face turns ashen.

  “They’ll think Thomas did it! He never would. He’s a Christian. He might mouth off some, but he’s told me before he doesn’t believe in an eye for an eye.” She reads the story for a second time, and I read over her shoulder.

  Dust to Dust

  “Here, let me fix you.” I tie Star to a fence and straighten Bitsy’s collar. I’m wearing my best dark dress, a navy blue flowered print, with my hair done up high. She wears her black one with white lace on the sleeves and collar and looks like a young Mrs. Potts. We both step out of our long pants and put on our good shoes, then dust off our faces with a cool rag Bitsy brought in a basket. I link my arm through hers to give her support, and we head for the front of the little white chapel.

  “Wow, look how many people!” I whisper. I’m surp
rised by the number of buggies and vehicles parked along the road and on the wide lawn next to the cemetery. There’s also a hearse with purple-fringed curtains and Sheriff Hardman’s black roadster with POLICE stenciled in white on the side.

  We enter through the double oak doors and are escorted by an usher in a dark mourning coat to the first pew, directly in front of the wooden casket. I’m relieved to see Thomas already sitting there, wearing a simple white shirt open at the throat. He rises and hugs his younger sister tight, rivulets of tears running down his strong face. Bitsy sobs too. We are all crying while Mildred Miller, the organist, plays “Nearer, My God, to Thee” without even looking at the sheet music.

  In between hymns I scan the chapel. Mrs. Potts is there, and a score of others I don’t recognize. Some of them must be from the A.M.E. Church in Liberty. There are only three other white people in the chapel, and I’m shocked to see Katherine MacIntosh, sitting with a man in his sixties, probably her father. She must have made it to Baltimore, stayed a few days, and come right back when she heard about William’s death. Daniel Hester is here too, sitting alone in the back pew.

  Since I’ve never been to a Negro funeral service, I don’t know what to expect, but other than the singing it’s the same as any other funeral I’ve ever been to, and there have been several, all for women, I realize . . . my grandmother, my mother, and then Mrs. Kelly.

  My father’s body was lost in Lake Michigan. Lawrence’s scorched body, after it was removed from the mangled train, was returned to his family in Iowa. Ruben, with the other unclaimed miners’ bodies, was buried near Blair Mountain. I’ve always thought I’d go see his grave someday, but it’s never happened. Probably because I’ve been afraid that if I went to southern West Virginia someone would recognize me, and also because I imagine I would see Ruben’s blood on the ground, a brown stain, all that’s left.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Reverend Miller intones. Today I cry for them all, Mary Proudfoot and those others, long dead. I do not cry for William MacIntosh, although maybe I should. Surely he was once a decent fellow. Katherine told me how carefully he had tended the roses, the azaleas, and the butterfly bushes in front of their home.

  When the service is over and their mother’s coffin is covered with earth, Thomas pulls Bitsy into the shade of a spreading black walnut tree and confers with her earnestly. Not wanting to intrude, I stroll over to speak to Katherine, Daniel Hester, and the other white man.

  “This is my uncle, Reverend Martin . . . Patience Murphy, my midwife,” Katherine introduces me. Her eyes are dull and dry, so I can’t tell how she taking her husband’s death. Does she believe it was suicide . . . or murder? Does she believe Thomas would have done it? Does she even care? I study her face, a mask I can’t read.

  No matter how difficult their relationship, William was her lover once, her friend. They made two babies together, and she knew his most intimate side. What she probably mourns is not the angry, violent, self-absorbed husband who felt himself a failure but the gentle man who loved flowers.

  “Are you okay?” I whisper to Katherine as Hester and Martin gaze over the fields and comment on the crops and the drought. I pull on the sleeve of her soft gray linen dress and lead her to a bench at the side of the church. “Are you okay? It must be hard. Such a shock about William.”

  Katherine looks down at her carefully manicured, ladylike white hands and twists a ring that I notice is not her wedding ring. She surprises me when she answers. “I’m not shocked. He was a good man once, years ago when we courted . . .” She shakes her head slowly. “But it wasn’t a happy marriage. You know that. He’d threatened suicide before, more than once . . . every time I tried to leave.

  “I’d only been back in Baltimore for a few hours before he started calling. He was drunk, begging me to return. Nothing had changed. ‘Come back,’ he blubbered over the phone . . . over and over. ‘You belong to me. I can’t live without you.’ It probably sounds terrible, but I’m not even sad . . . It’s like a great weight is lifted off me.” She looks me in the eye, waiting for a reaction, a woman compressed into steel.

  I return her gaze, my mouth pressed tight. “You had to leave. You had to leave him for the baby’s sake, and for your own. You can’t let a man manipulate you that way . . . There was an article in the newspaper calling William’s death suspicious. Did you see it?”

  She waves it away as if batting flies. “Oh, that!”

  “You don’t think there could have been foul play?”

  “Never. William had guns all over the house. He would have blasted any intruder.”

  When I glance up, Bitsy is sleepwalking across the churchyard. Far up the hill, behind the small chapel, moving through the green oak and maple, a white shirt disappears. Thomas, probably because of Sheriff Hardman’s presence, is taking the back way home.

  Katherine stands up and embraces Bitsy. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. So sorry. Your mother was a saint. If it weren’t for her, I might have been killed the night I left. There will never be anyone like her.”

  Bitsy blows her nose. You can tell she’s running out of tears. “Thank you, Katherine. You and the baby meant a lot to Ma. She always worried after you . . .”

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Mrs. Potts moving carefully across the lawn with her cane. “There’s a reception at the Millers’,” she announces. Her eyes sweep the whole group but end with me. I take a deep breath, knowing I should be supportive of Bitsy, but I’m exhausted and just want to go home. Bitsy lets me off easy.

  “It’s okay. Byrd Bowlin says he’ll drive me home. You should probably check on Moonlight and the calf.”

  “I’m sorry, we have to go too.” That’s the Reverend Martin.

  Hester offers to drive me, but I have Star, so I give Bitsy and Katherine a hug.

  “Will we see you before you leave again for Baltimore?” I ask Katherine.

  “I’ll try,” she says, “but I need to make arrangements about what’s left of the estate, then get William back to Baltimore on the train for his funeral next Thursday. He has family coming down from Boston.” I hug her again, holding on tight, trying to give her some strength. Then I turn toward the back of the church for my mount.

  At the fork of Horse Shoe Run, I cringe when I spy the sheriff’s car waiting at the intersection.

  “Where’s Bitsy and her brother?” the gruff fellow demands.

  “Stayed for the reception at the preacher’s house.” I tell a white lie, knowing Thomas is halfway over the mountain, slipping through the spruce trees like the shadow of a gray fox.

  “By the way, I talked to Mrs. MacIntosh before the funeral. Why didn’t you report that she’d gone back to Baltimore after a domestic dispute?” Hardman gives me the squint eye.

  “We were scared. We didn’t want William to try to find Katherine. We were scared.”

  July 30, 1930. Nearly full moon sailing through fast-moving clouds.

  Birth of Daniel Withers, 6 pounds, 14 ounces, seventh child of Edith and Manley Withers of Hog Hollow. Bitsy and I delivered the baby together, my hands over hers. The Witherses are another family associated with Hazel Patch Baptist Chapel. Mrs. Potts was feeling poorly and didn’t come.

  Present, besides Bitsy and me, were the two oldest girls, Ida and Judith, 10 and 12. Bitsy showed them how to cut the baby’s cord. Edith declared, when she put the baby to breast, that the afterbirth pains were worse than the actual labor, but I told her they were good because they’d keep her from bleeding. We were paid $2.00 and one home-cured ham. Seeing a new life come into the world after Mary’s death did both Bitsy and me good.

  33

  Drought

  Flat gray clouds press down like iron, and I scan the sky each morning for a change in the weather. The air is full of wetness, but it won’t come down.

  This morning Bitsy and I began to water the limp corn and beans by hand. The root crops, potatoes and carrots, are deep enough to find their own moisture. The tomatoes, Bitsy as
sures me, are more heat resistant. Back and forth we go, carrying two buckets each from the spring to the garden, giving a quart jar of liquid to each drooping plant.

  “It’s a drop in the bucket,” I joke with my friend, but she doesn’t laugh.

  Bitsy sets down her pail and arches her back, her eyes closed. “No rain today.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “No breeze. The wind will come before the rain.”

  “I think the rain god might just send down a flood to mock all this work we’re doing,” I make light. My companion shakes her head and goes back to her watering. Maybe my reference to a rain god offended her. Since her mother’s funeral, she’s been reading the Bible daily. Twice as I passed her bedroom door I saw her praying on her knees.

  A few hundred buckets later, our arms aching, our backs groaning, Bitsy looks up at the late-afternoon sun just burning through the haze. “I think I’ll take Star for a ride.” A frown flashes between my eyes, but I keep my thoughts to myself. Over to the Wildcat again. Is she checking on Thomas or going to see her sweetheart, Byrd Bowlin?

  Thirty minutes later, I’m dragging my aching body up the porch steps with my basket of green beans when I catch the sound of a horse and buggy barreling up the lane. The dust is so thick I can’t see who’s coming. There goes my bath in the cool creek water! I’m so sweaty, I can hardly stand myself.

  “Need you in Black Springs!” the young driver yells before he even pulls back on the reins.

  “What’s up?”

  “Mr. Hart says come quick, his woman’s bleeding.”

  “I don’t know Mrs. Hart. Is she having a child?”

  “She’s carrying, if that’s what you mean. It’s still in there.”

  “Okay,” I mutter, “I’ll be right with you.”