The Midwife

by Jolina Petersheim

  Looper’s headlights pierce through the barn slats, illuminating the bats swooping after prey. His truck radio is playing “Hotel California.” His dogs must smell me because they begin to bark. My pulse quickens. After our altercation on the porch three hours ago, I am not sure how Looper is going to receive me—or if he is going to receive me at all. I tell myself that I am being foolish—a woman on the cusp of menopause acting as infatuated with Looper as sixteen-year-old Lydie Risser is with Alice’s eighteen-year-old son. And though Looper and I are far removed from the summer that both united and tore us apart, I cannot help remembering how it felt to be not just his carpooling friend who proofread his love letters but the girl he finally saw.

  The tinny rasp of metal upon metal boomerangs across the night as Looper wrenches bolts free and then tightens them again. I come around the corner of the barn. The dogs stop barking and amble over with wagging tails and eager grins. Peering around the worn brown hood of the Chevy, Looper smiles and points to the exposed engine.

  “A beaut, huh?” His casual manner puts me at ease. But I should have known; Looper’s never been the type to rehash old wrongs.

  I pick my way around scattered lug nuts and coated blue cords peeled down to shredded copper. Recalling the interior of his Firebird, I remember that Looper’s never been the cleanliest of men.

  “Wouldn’t know much about trucks,” I say, “seeing as I haven’t driven a car in the past eighteen years.”

  Looper tosses the wrench into a worn metal box and uses both hands to slam the truck hood. I step back as dust rises from the vehicle in a plume. “Forgot about you being Mennonite.” He grins, grime filling in the crow’s-feet framing his green-gold eyes. His nails are ragged and filled with dirt; his T-shirt, grease splattered and torn, revealing a patch of skin far paler than his arms. His hair is thinner. He even seems shorter, somehow—not like the six-foot-two, chiseled quarterback with the string of high school girls who were my archenemies and his pep team.

  “What happened to you, Looper?” I ask and then wince at my implication that who he has become is not enough.

  Looper bends to gather up the scattered tools and chucks them with a clang into the box. Snapping the lid, he hefts the toolbox onto his truck bed and looks at me. “You.”

  “What?”

  “You,” he repeats. “You happened to me.”

  “You mean, when I left?”

  Looper climbs up into the driver’s side of his truck. He uses the shoulder of his T-shirt to wipe his neck and hands. “The first time, when you left for college? Or the second time, when you left for good?”

  “I didn’t leave a second time, Looper. I just never came back home.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Wanting to sprint out of the barn, I walk on flat, dirty feet over to the buggy we should have sold two years ago when Hopen Haus auctioned off the horses we couldn’t afford to keep. But somehow the buggy has remained: a mannequin for a gossamer gown embroidered with spider sacs and dust. Picking up a horse brush rusting red on the barn floor, I swipe the seat of the buggy and climb inside.

  “So,” I ask, now that I can’t see him answer, “what did I do to turn you into a drifter who trades family for dogs?”

  “Hey,” says Looper. “Keep my dogs outta this.” But his words lilt with a smile.

  The Eagles sing the longest refrain. The dogs pant.

  Looper makes a noise in his throat that is half clearing, half groan. “Guess after you left,” he says, “I thought I’d just wait ’round for you to come back. But then years passed with me just waiting, and you never did come home. I got married, then divorced. No kids, just the dogs. Worked at Winningham’s for a while, and every couple months or so, your dad would come in there needing a trowel or a plumb line.”

  Stark images of my father, Oscar Winslow, puncture through my cache of suppressed memories and imprint themselves on my heart: wavy brown hair tumbling into eyes as deep as wells; broad shoulders and back, which his job as a stonemason have formed into an immovable boulder; large hands as hard and dry as the mortar he mixed. He used to dare my brother, Benny, and me to prick his scaly palms with sewing needles and swear—with tears in his eyes—that he couldn’t feel a thing.

  Every few years, the manual labor would pinch his wedding band around his finger like a vise, and Benny or I would be enlisted to smear his fingers with Crisco to try and work the ring free. But as soon we did, our father would go to Crescent Jewelers in La Crosse and replace it with a new one. Otherwise, he never took the ring off—even though his high-powered equipment could have snagged that dull gold band and stripped his finger right down to the bone.

  I ask, steeling myself for the worst, “How is he?”

  “Fine,” says Looper. I close my eyes in relief. “I mean, he can’t get ’round as fast as he used to. But he’s still as ornery as they come. Goes into the American Café for his paper and coffee every morning, and then heads out to the job site to work like a man half his age.”

  “And Benny? Married? Kids?”

  “Two,” Looper says. “Kids, that is. Only one wife.”

  I smile. My only sibling, my brother, shall forevermore be Benny—the twelve-year-old with a farmer’s tan, buckteeth, and tousled brown hair sticking out from beneath a baseball cap, which is exactly how he looked when I left him. I cannot picture him capable of becoming the parent I have always wanted to be and yet—having birthed two children—could never attain.

  Is it because he was too young to remember our mother’s abandonment, while I am still living in the ruins of her devastation?

  Swallowing hard, I ask, “Has anybody heard from my mom?” The title of the woman who birthed me, but who stopped being my mother the day she drove out that dusty farm lane, tastes like corroded metal on my tongue. The barrier between us will not allow me to read Looper’s eyes. However, in the answering silence, I know that this time my mother has not just been located, but that something has happened. And that all hope of reconciliation is truly gone. How could I have believed that the energy sustaining my thirty-year-old anger would have kept my mother alive? How can I now mourn her passing when, for years, I ached for her return so much that I wished for some kind of absolution, even if that meant her death?

  “When?” The word scrapes up my throat.

  “A little over a year ago . . . around Christmas,” Looper replies, as if afraid to hurt me. He should know that—like my father’s calloused hand—I cannot feel the hot needle of his revelation poking into my flesh. I do not let myself feel anything. I can’t let myself feel anything, just as I can’t let anyone in. Tightening my jaw, I remind myself that there’s no need to mourn my mother’s passing because my mother became dead to me when she left. The alternative—believing she had simply chosen to stay away—was too heartrending to bear.

  “Ya know, Beth, your mom never gave up on finding you,” Looper adds. For comfort, I suppose. And I wonder if he’s lying. “She wanted me to tell you that. She made me promise that I’d always keep looking, that I would find you for her—though even before she died, she kept thinking you’d come walking right in to say your good-byes.”

  “She’s the one who walked out first,” I snap, the pain flaring from that old desertion as from a phantom limb. “And she sure didn’t say good-bye then!”

  Looper doesn’t respond. The barn is silent except for the radio and his panting dogs.

  Staring sullenly at the opposite side of the buggy, I envision the framed picture my father used to keep on the nightstand next to his alarm clock and watch. It captured my mother in a time when she was not my mother, Mrs. Winslow, but a high school student named Sarah Graybill. In the picture, as older pictures always go, my mother looked far more accomplished than I had felt at eighteen. She wore a floral blouse with a sweetheart neckline and a glinting silver cross. Her brown hair was stiff and smooth like fondant icing. Her wine-colored lipstick contrasted perfectly with her pearly white teeth.

  I had ta
lked to that picture on the morning of my first period; on the day Mrs. Looper took me to get my first training bra at Sears; on the afternoon I saw Ernest Looper, who was in tenth grade with me, kiss Chelsea Robbins before saying, “Get in here, kid,” and driving me home from school. When I was the same age as my mother in the picture, I had stood before it dressed in my prom gown with the uneven hem that I had stitched myself. I had asked the picture if I was pretty. My mother had just stared at me in silence. She was so beautiful and perfect, I felt that I could never measure up. Was this the reason she had left? Not knowing the answer, I then stretched myself across my parents’ bed—that my mother was not there to make—and cried.

  “Were Dad and Benny with her when she . . . passed?” I whisper.

  “Yeah. They were there,” he says. “Your dad actually let her come home, no questions asked. It was real touching to watch how things got healed between your parents, especially in the end. That’s when Ben flew in with his wife—and kids. It was hard for him to see your mom like that. But I could tell he was glad he came.”

  Only now do I cry. My father and brother got the moment of closure for which my barren soul has always longed. Yet what would I have said to my mother, if given the chance? Would I have screamed at her? Sobbed on her lap like a child? Would I have lied and told her that I forgave her, just to let her rest in peace? No, I realize; I would have told the truth.

  “I think it’s best I wasn’t there,” I murmur.

  Wiping tears from my face, I step out of the buggy and see Looper put a folded envelope back into his pocket. Looking up, his eyes bore into mine with anger and compassion and every word he seems to think but does not say: How much has changed since I’ve been gone. How hypocritical it is for me to judge my mother, when at twenty-three, I disappeared without a word just as she left us all those years ago.

  But when I fled Boston with the Fitzpatricks’ child in my womb, my mother’s memory was the reason I could not return home. So I instead entered a strange land called Dry Hollow, knowing full well that I was hurting Ernest Looper and knifing open my father’s old wounds while trying to avoid confronting and healing my own. I did this knowing I was leaving my little brother behind. Yet I told myself he would rather cling to a phantom mother, anyway, than to the flesh-and-blood sister who for five years before her own child’s conception had raised him as her son.

  4

  Exhaustion escapes through the sieve of my lips. I pull Terese’s door so as not to awaken Luca. Passing through the dining room on my way to the kitchen, I see a radius of light cast by an oil lamp. Alice is seated at the table, hunkered over her own meal. From the way she pokes at the venison roast on her plate, I sense that she is not eating.

  She has been waiting here for me.

  I ask, “How are you, Alice?”

  She says, “We’ve received a donation.”

  “From whom?” Between monitoring Terese’s blood pressure and worrying over Star’s nicotine addiction, I have almost forgotten about the Channel 2 News story and the subsequent changes taking place.

  Alice swallows a bite of food and grimaces. I decide to bypass my stop at the kitchen and eat some of the tuna packs I hoard in my bedroom instead. “A crisis pregnancy clinic in Cookeville,” she says. “They saw the news story.”

  I grit my teeth and then release my jaw in a sardonic smile. “I’m sure they did.”

  “Don’t you even want to know what it is?” asks Alice. Not even she can modulate the frustration in her tone.

  “Somehow I get the feeling that you’re going to tell me.”

  Alice narrows her eyes. She takes a sip of water before saying, “It’s an ultrasound machine. An older model, of course. But they said it’s ours for the taking.” She pauses. “I thought Wilbur could pick it up?”

  My heart is a hard fist knocking inside my chest. “So far we’ve managed just fine without ultrasound machines.”

  “Fine?” Alice points a finger out through the doorway. Her gesture is ambiguous, but I know she means Terese and Luca’s room. The only private quarters in Hopen Haus besides Uriah’s attic, which Looper is occupying until Uriah returns, and the three of five upstairs bedrooms occupied by us midwives. Alice says, “I wouldn’t say that Terese is ‘just fine.’”

  “An ultrasound machine couldn’t prevent preeclampsia.”

  “No. An ultrasound machine couldn’t. But if we were better equipped, we could be giving Terese steroid shots in case of preterm labor and monitoring her platelet count and liver funct—”

  “It wouldn’t matter if we were given every piece of modern equipment in the world; we’d have no electricity to run it!”

  “Yes, it would matter! These girls need more than what we’re offering them. But you just want to keep hiding behind Mennonite ways, when they’re not even yours to hide behind!”

  “Enough!”

  Alice drops into the seat as if my words grabbed her shoulders and shoved her down. The plate rattles; the water lists in the Mason jar. I was so blindsided by anger, I didn’t even know until that abrupt movement that she had stood up.

  I straighten my slumped back, humiliated by my roiling fury whose unseen source never dries up. I look down into Alice’s eyes, which shine with intimidation.

  I say, contrite, “I’ll speak with Wilbur about it. You said the ultrasound machine’s in Cookeville?”

  She nods.

  “That’s on the way to Split Rock Community. Perhaps he can pick it up on a produce run.”

  “So—we’re going to get electricity?” Alice doesn’t look at me, but picks at the venison roast.

  “I never said that.”

  She stands again, this time to take her plate to the kitchen. The antagonist in me cannot keep from saying to her retreating back, “I noticed Uriah’s been spending too much time with Lydie Risser. When he comes home, I’d appreciate if you’d speak to him about it.”

  Alice stops walking but does not turn. “He’s almost eighteen, Rhoda. I don’t have that kind of say over him anymore.”

  “Then perhaps he should move out from beneath this roof.”

  Alice clutches the swinging door that leads into the kitchen. She looks back at me and sighs, “Is this really about Uriah?”

  “I don’t know.” I scan Alice’s face, trying to shift the attention away from me so I can conceal the jealousy I have always felt about her close relationship with her son. “Is there something else you’d like to talk about?”

  Alice shakes her head. Kapp strings swat her softly in the face. She passes through the door. I watch the darkness of the kitchen swallow her whole before I turn and make my defeated way up the stairs. I yearn to open my heart to Alice and to Looper, and to this sheaf of hurting girls tucked in bunk beds beneath this roof. But I can’t. My eyes have tainted love until my mind views it as synonymous with pain. From the day my mother left until the day my second child was taken, I have used anger and inhibition to ward off anybody who might try to love me—just to find out that I am wanting, and then leave.

  Beth, 1996

  Pressure stretched across my abdomen in a thin, taut band. When it snapped, I knew this was not Braxton Hicks or merely my round abdominal muscles trying to accommodate the expansion of my womb but a tidal-wave contraction threatening to pull me under. Letting the bowl float down into the water, I wiped the suds on the towel folded over the spigot. Straightening my back, I breathed out through my mouth, trying not to panic. I walked over to the chairs circled around the kitchen table, dragged one across the linoleum, and sat down.

  I was only at seventeen weeks. I had just started to feel the tiny fluttering kicks of the baby. Besides the bimonthly checkups, I rarely allowed myself to think about this new life cradled inside my womb. For ten minutes, I remained seated on the chair. I watched the clock embedded in the stove, as I had taken my watch off to do the breakfast dishes. When another contraction struck at eight fifteen, I folded my curved stomach over my legs and touched my forehead to my knees in
desperate supplication. I cried out for my roommate, Jillian, although I knew she was gone. I cried out for our neighbors—for anyone—but the small apartment just echoed with my own high-pitched keen of fear.

  Sweating and nauseous, I stumbled into the living room with the beige walls and forest-green curtains that, in the ten years since the renovation, the sun had leeched to a dingy moss. I dug past the jumble of textbooks and paperback novels stacked under the coffee table and pulled my wallet out of my purse. I searched through the card section for the slip of paper Thom had given to me the day we heard the baby’s heartbeat. Another band of pressure pulled across my abdomen. I returned to the kitchen and sat on the pine chair again. But then I stood—rocking back and forth, side to side—gouging my nails into the back of the chair and swearing beneath my breath as if afraid someone could overhear.

  Hunching over, I staggered toward the TV stand and dialed the numbers on the old rotary telephone. It rang three times before he picked up. “Thom,” I said. The m of his name was drawn out as another contraction hit.

  A clipped female voice said, “This is not Thom. This is Meredith. Who is this?”

  I turned my head and pressed my mouth into my shoulder, exhaling the pain through my nostrils. Meredith’s voice rose as she said, “Hello? Who is this?”

  I was too concentrated to answer her. When the wave passed, I said, “Meredith, it’s Beth. I think I’m having preterm contractions.”

  “Why don’t you call the fertility clinic?”

  “It’s Saturday. They’re closed.”

  For a moment, I thought I heard her sigh. “Right,” she said. “Tell me what you need. Thom’s not here; he’s out of town.”