The Midwife of Hope River

by Patricia Harman

  Though I was younger than my friend when I first got pregnant, I’ve been concerned about Bitsy . . . I clear my throat. It’s not like I’m Saint Patience, but this has to be said.

  “Bitsy, is Byrd Bowlin courting you proper? I don’t want you getting in trouble. Sometimes this happens when people are grieving. They feel alone and seek comfort. They can forget themselves.”

  “Miss Patience, how can you say that?”

  When she reverts to “Miss Patience,” I know she’s mad.

  “Byrd loves me and we’ve kissed, but it hasn’t gone further. The Reverend Miller’s wife gave me the same sort of talk . . . What kind of a person do you think I am? What kind of man would Bowlin be if he expected that?”

  “Well, you know, all those young girls, like Twyla and Harriet and her sister Sojourner, aren’t just tramps. Love has a way of undoing buttons. I just don’t want you getting in trouble.” I think of my own thunderstorm night. After the loss of my first baby, I was never able to get pregnant again, but being sterile has an advantage. No worries about getting knocked up. Not that (with the exception of Hester) there’s been any chance since Ruben died.

  “I wish everyone would just leave me alone!” Bitsy jerks up to get another bucket of beans, then bangs down in her chair in a huff. “After the quilting bee we’re going to his parents’ for dinner, and then he’ll bring me home in his father’s truck.”

  I’m tempted to say something like “Don’t come in late,” but I let it go. I’ve said my piece. Instead, I croon with a grin, “By the light of the silvery moon” and throw Mrs. Maddock’s invitation across the table at her. By the light—of the silvery moon—to my honey I’ll croon . . .

  Tuesday morning we cut hay from the back pasture with the rusty scythe I found in the barn and sharpened with a file until the blade was razor thin. I swing the wooden-handled implement like a peasant woman in a painting, and Bitsy rakes the long sweet grass into piles and then drags it in an old blanket to a fenced-in area behind the barn. The stack is as high as our heads, but we’ll need a lot more with a horse, cow, and calf to feed.

  At noon we quit and, behind the springhouse, strip down to our waists and scream as we pour buckets of cold water over each other. Then Bitsy puts on her second-best dress and rides her bicycle to Hazel Patch, and I put on my second-best dress and wander down the dusty road to Sarah Maddock’s for tea.

  I knock on the three-paneled oak door with a leaded glass window. I hadn’t noticed the ornate pattern before because the screen was across it, but the glass is edged with a delicate border of flowers and leaves. No one answers, so I knock again. There are lace curtains hanging, and I can’t see inside. I hope Mrs. Maddock didn’t forget about me.

  “Hello!” I yell. “Anyone home?”

  “Come in,” a woman answers from deep in the house.

  I turn the knob.

  “Patience?”

  The call seems to come from way in the back, so I pass through the living room and enter the empty kitchen. On the way, I admire the cast-iron Phoenix woodstove with the ornate silver-plated top, the carved oak fold-down desk, and the floor lamp with the fringed blue silk shade, but there’s no time to linger.

  “Here.”

  “Mrs. Maddock?”

  “On the back porch.”

  I’m expecting something like my own back porch, a small room where we keep buckets, our washtub, old rubber boots, winter coats, things that need fixing, and wet dogs, but I’m surprised to find a screened-in room that runs the length of the house with high-backed white wicker furniture and ferns in hanging baskets.

  A round pedestal table is set with white cups and plates bordered with tiny pink flowers and cutlery that looks like real silver. There’s also a silver tea set and a vase of deep purple asters. Mrs. Maddock rolls herself over in her wheelchair and takes my rough red hands in both of her thin, cool ivory ones.

  “Call me Sarah Rose, honey. I’m so glad you came. Is Bitsy here too?” The table, I notice, is set for three.

  “No, I’m sorry. I probably should have come down to tell you. She has a quilting bee at the church and then dinner with her beau. She’s courting.” I say this with a smile and a slight shrug.

  “Those were the days!” When Mrs. Maddock laughs, it’s like silver bells tinkling. I sit down in the closest chair. I’m not used to the ritual of formal tea and am unsure what comes next. Is this high tea, like I’ve read about, the kind they have in England, almost a meal—or low tea? Looks like high tea to me, but what would I know? My women friends in Pittsburgh drank black coffee in mugs around a kitchen table where we talked world politics.

  The wheelchair-bound woman pours me a cup and hands me a tiny embossed silver pitcher. “Cream?” Then she lifts a glass cover off a rose-glass plate and reveals white sugar cookies with white frosting. In another bowl are canned peaches.

  “This is quite a spread. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. I feel I should have worn white gloves and a bonnet.”

  “I’ll be honest too. I haven’t had anyone to tea for fifteen years. Not since I got infantile paralysis. I was twenty-four.”

  I glance at her legs and then at her face. If she was twenty-four fifteen years ago, she’s close to my age now.

  Sarah Rose

  “Polio?”

  “It was 1916, and I was pregnant and so happy and at first we didn’t know what it was. I just had a fever, a bad headache, and stiffness of the back and neck. I thought I had some kind of flu, but I soon lost the strength in both legs and couldn’t even get to the commode. That’s when we called in the doctor and they took me to the hospital.”

  “The polio epidemic was awful, wasn’t it?” I respond, not knowing what else to say. “I heard seven thousand people died in 1916 in the U.S. alone. You were lucky you made it.”

  “I guess.” She runs her hands down her withered thighs. “Four times that many people were left paralyzed. At the time, I wanted to die.”

  “I’ve felt that way too.”

  She looks at me with interest. “When was that? When you felt you wanted to die?” she asks gently.

  That’s why I don’t socialize. There are so many things I don’t want to divulge; it’s like trying to dance with your legs tied together. Sarah Rose is still waiting. I’ll tell just a little . . .

  “I was pregnant and engaged to be married when I was sixteen and my fiancé, my lover, was killed in a train wreck. Seven days later I hemorrhaged and lost our baby. I almost died too. That’s when . . .” I take a big breath. “. . . That’s when I wished I would die.”

  Mrs. Maddock reaches over the plate of cookies, now half gone, and rests her hand over mine. Her skin is so translucent you can see the blue veins.

  I could tell her the other times I wanted to die. When my mama passed away . . . when I left Chicago on the run without a friend in the world . . . I could tell her about Blair Mountain, how I killed my best friend, my lover, my husband, but how could she understand, a sheltered person like Sarah Rose? The tears come then, just hanging there. I wipe my eyes and stand up to look out the screens toward the hills, but she scoots around the table in her wicker wheelchair and pulls me back.

  “That’s okay,” she whispers, thinking I’m weeping for my baby. “It’s good to cry. I lost my little one too . . . when I had polio. The paralysis was moving up, and if it got to my chest I would stop breathing. The doctors thought there was no way I would make it. They talked Mr. Maddock into letting them do an emergency cesarean section, and he gave our little girl to my cousin who couldn’t get pregnant. No one imagined I would recover, and then, when I did, I couldn’t ask for the baby back.

  “In a way, it doesn’t matter. Both my cousin and little Sue Ann passed away a few years later, during the Spanish flu epidemic. I never even got to hold her. I have a picture, though, when she was two, a tiny blond girl. I’ll show you sometime.” She holds out the plate of cookies again.

  I shake my head no, but she insists, so I eat thre
e. “Did you make these?”

  She laughs. “Yes; just because my legs don’t work doesn’t mean my hands can’t. Didn’t you notice when you came through the kitchen that Mr. Maddock has made everything low so I can use my wheelchair? He made this screened room for me too, because I don’t get out much.”

  I take in the view, the mowed meadow down to a brook, a pen filled with white sheep, the Hope River in the distance.

  “So what do you do out here?” I look around for an embroidery hoop or maybe some knitting, but on the shelves is only an assortment of books and papers. “You like to read?”

  “I do,” she says. “I write too.”

  That interests me. “You write? I started a diary. It seems so much has happened in my life . . . like I’ve lived three or four lives, really.”

  Sarah puts her elbow on the table and rests her chin in her hand. “Like what? Tell me one of your lives.” Her clear blue eyes wait, not leaving my face. “I like stories.”

  Slow down, Patience, be careful. Some secrets you just need to keep to yourself.

  Sarah waits while I stare at the ceiling. “Well . . . I grew up in a little town in Illinois,” I begin slowly. “My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a mate on a big freighter on Lake Michigan.”

  I go on to describe my innocent childhood, as if it were a Louisa May Alcott story, to the point where my grandma dies of consumption, my father dies in a Lake Michigan shipwreck, and we find out he’s gambled away all our money. I stop my tale where I run away from the orphanage and get a job at the Majestic. It makes a good yarn, if I say so myself. “That’s lives one and two.”

  Sarah hasn’t said anything except “How sad” and “That must have been horrible!” until I get to the part where I become a chorus girl.

  “Oh!” she shouts, clapping her hands like a five-year-old girl. “I was in the chorus line too! At a dance hall in Charleston.” This is a new image of Mrs. Maddock!

  She laughs. “I was in my twenties. My sister, a waitress, got me the job. My mother didn’t approve, of course, and neither did Mr. Maddock once we were engaged. That’s where I met him. He could really cut a rug at the time.

  “In those days we were encouraged to be friendly with the patrons after our show, get them to buy drinks, though the real money was in the gambling.” As she talks, Mrs. Maddock gets prettier and prettier in the golden slanting light. The low sun drops behind the mountains, and the scattered clouds turn first orange, then pink, and finally lavender.

  “Milton and I were so in love. We married, and I got pregnant right away. He’s never forgiven himself for giving away our child. But you see, he thought I would die from the polio. So many did. Widowed men didn’t take care of children in those days.” I reach for her hand, cool and soft.

  She looks around the beautiful porch room. “During the war, because he worked in the chemical plant in Charleston, he was given a deferment, and then when my grandmother died and we inherited this farm, we moved back here. That was ten years ago. I was born in this very house, you know . . . with Granny Potts.”

  “I remember. You came up to the front of the church at her service, one of her angels.” I smile, but she doesn’t smile back. She’s on another thought.

  “Sometimes I think he protects me too much, Mr. Maddock. His love is like a cocoon, but I don’t argue. I have a good life.” We are still holding hands, and suddenly it’s too much for me.

  “You know, I had better get back. I need to milk. Thank you for asking me to tea. Is there anything you want me to get you before I leave? Can I clear the table and wash up?”

  “You’re as bad as he is! A fussy mother hen. I’m quite self-sufficient, so long as he brings the supplies.” She rolls herself into the kitchen, and I notice now that the doorways are a little wider than in my house and there’s a long pantry on one side. I run my hand over the smooth low maple counters and the low sink.

  “Milton did all the woodwork himself,” she explains. “He’ll be home soon. He went into Delmont to the stock auction. Not to buy anything, just to listen and watch. The vet will be there too.” She says this as if she thinks I’d be interested, and I am, just a little.

  39

  Forgiveness

  Hiking home up Wild Rose Road, I reflect on what I learned at our tea. Mrs. Maddock, who I thought was aloof and judgmental, is curious and graceful and gay. Mr. Maddock, who I thought was hard and unfeeling, is in fact passionately in love with his wife. The Patience I thought had to maintain her secrets . . . was today open and honest . . . up to a point.

  I’ve had a difficult life, or I think I have, an orphan widowed twice before she was thirty, but how do you measure suffering? Sarah Maddock almost died of polio, lost the use of her legs, and had her baby given away. All four of Mrs. Potts’s children died of yellow fever within one week. Mrs. Kelly suffered the loss of her husband and their only child and then, after a ten-year relationship, lost Nora to another woman.

  The vet in the Great War saw pain and horror I can’t even imagine. Bitsy lost her mom and then Thomas, who’s gone into hiding. Life, it seems to me, is all about loss, just a series of losses. I kick a stone and kick it again.

  I was not just a widow the second time; with Ruben, I widowed myself . . . I lash out at the stone a third time and end up twisting my ankle and falling into the ditch. When I pull myself up, my leg hurts badly but not as badly as my heart.

  Sometimes I’ve felt I was dreaming; this evening I’m awake and would like to crawl into dreams again. The first star rests on the top of the mountain. A whippoorwill sings. The bare trees are black against the lavender sky. It’s funny how beauty rides the back of pain . . .

  It starts with a few tears, then comes the flood again, muddy water raging over rock, hard sobs, and hiccups. Fearing Mr. Maddock will come home and see me sitting in the ditch crying my eyes out, I crawl over his rail fence and limp through the pasture until I come to a creek. Here, in the woods, I fall backward into the dry grass, arms at my sides, a shell of myself. Behind my tear-filled eyes, a flickering black-and-white picture show begins.

  “I have to go, Lizbeth!” Ruben barked, pacing around the living room we shared with Mrs. Kelly and Nora. “There’s trouble in the West Virginia coalfields, and John Lewis wants me and a few of the others to go down there and settle things down. It’s for the workers. It’s what I do, you know that!” (Lewis, Ruben’s old friend, was now the president of the UMWA, the United Mine Workers of America.)

  This was in 1921, a week or two after Sheriff Sid Hatfield, who’d stood up for the Matewan miners and their families, was murdered along with his good friend Ed Chambers. They’d traveled to McDowell County to stand trial for charges of dynamiting a coal tipple, but were executed in front of their wives by a group of Baldwin-Felts agents standing at the top of the courthouse stairs. Hatfield was killed instantly, and Chambers was slaughtered with a shot to the back of his head.

  Word spread from mountaintop to dark hollow that Hatfield, the miners’ hero, had been murdered in cold blood, and armed union men were already congregating along the Little Coal River, talking about revenge, about marching on Mingo County to free other radicals, end martial law, and organize the nonunionized miners. The plan didn’t make sense, but that’s the way of a mob. Nothing has to make sense.

  “Please, Ruben. I have a bad feeling about this! Don’t go!” I pleaded. Mrs. Kelly was in the kitchen with Nora, trying not to listen. “West Virginia is so violent, all you have to do is sneeze to be beaten and tossed in the tank!” But Ruben could never say no to John Lewis.

  Then Nora got involved and said the three of us could go with Ruben, make an adventure of it. Mrs. Kelly had no mothers due for two weeks, so we all began to collect medical supplies and food for the camps. The next day, I went down to Union Station for train tickets.

  It’s the dog days of August, muggy and hot, when our little Pittsburgh coalition climbs out of the passenger coach in Marmet, a village on the banks of the Kanawha
River. Right away we can see there’s big trouble. Close to ten thousand miners have already gathered, and the men are armed with rifles and revolvers. I’ve never been in such a crowd and the mood of the men is ugly.

  Ruben and the other men from our coalition rush off to try to talk to the leaders, but no one will listen. Urging them on is Bill Blizzard, the fiery southern West Virginia organizer. He pushes Ruben aside. Deep in the crowd, our friend Mother Jones stands on a dynamite box, but her back is turned and she doesn’t see us.

  “Tell your husbands and fathers . . . tell them there’s no need for bloodshed!” she cries, seeing how things are going and where they may end. “Bring them to their senses!” The women, mothers and sisters, daughters and lovers, try, but it’s no good; the union men’s anger has already been ignited. They begin marching like soldiers, wearing red bandannas around their necks, toward Logan and Mingo, the last of the nonunionized counties. They’re going for the mine owners, the bosses, anyone who opposes them. They don’t give a damn!

  Like an army of ants the mass moves south, thirteen thousand of them now, some say, over mountains and through valleys, high on their own rage and moonshine. We should have just gone home when Ruben saw how it was, but he still thinks he can do some good. For one brief moment my husband and I hold each other. He wears a red bandanna, like all the others, and I kiss it for luck. “Love you,” I say with my hand on his cheek. He picks me up laughing and swings me around; then Nora, Mrs. Kelly, and I lose track of him and travel along with the medics.

  It’s on the third day, at the edge of Logan County, that all hell breaks loose. The coal company forces, wearing white armbands, have built fortified positions at the top of Blair Mountain; their weapons, machine guns and carbines, point straight downhill. Within minutes we’re surrounded by men in hand-to-hand combat, guns going off and the smell of liquid courage on half the fellows’ breath.