The Last Midwife: A Novel

by Sandra Dallas

  “And?”

  “As you’d expect, everybody’s talking about you. You got to know they would be.”

  Gracy nodded. She had barely touched her dinner. “What are they saying?”

  “Well, most people think the world of you, honey, but like you said, there are some…”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “I am!” Daniel said the words with a little too much emphasis. Then he glanced at Gracy’s plate and asked, “You going to finish that? I’ll eat it if you don’t. No sense it going to waste.”

  Gracy handed him the plate.

  “The worst of them is Coy Chaney. He says you ought to be run out of town.”

  “If they don’t hang me.” Gracy looked glum.

  “Now, nobody’s talking about that.”

  “I don’t know why not. That’s what you do with murderers.” Gracy was by nature cheerful, had awakened cheerful to the bright sunlight and the soothing blue of the room, but the conversation had turned her glum.

  “Nobody thinks you’re a murderer. At the most, it was an accident.”

  Gracy jerked up her head. “Do you believe that?”

  “No, of course not,” Daniel said quickly. “But maybe you ought to think about saying that, to get it over quick. Wouldn’t make no difference. People understand accidents.”

  “I’d never admit to that,” Gracy said. “Nobody’d ever come to me again. There’s women out there that would die if I didn’t tend them.” She considered that a moment, wondering what they’d do if she quit them. Wondering, too, if she’d have a choice about quitting.

  Three

  It was what God had intended her for, Gracy believed, this borning of babies, this creation of life. She saw God’s face in every one of those children she delivered. A baby’s first cry was the sound of angels’ songs. No matter how long and difficult the labor, no matter how the mother moaned from the pain and the tearing, praying and cursing, Gracy knew joy at the sight of the baby’s body pushing into the world, felt exhilaration as she caught the tiny living creature and held the soft, wet flesh in her hands a moment longer than was necessary. And she passed that sense of wonder on to the mother, exclaiming over the fingers and toes as tiny as birds’ claws, the eyelashes thin as thread, the button of a nose.

  It was not the money or the gold dust or the barter items that sent Gracy over icy trails, that drew her out of sleep-warm quilts at midnight to face cold and howling blizzards. She went where she was called because she knew a woman needed her, because new life waited for her. And so she gladly hitched her horse to the buggy or climbed onto a mule, riding astride like a man, her medicine bag tied to the saddle, hiking up mountainsides when the slopes were too steep for horses.

  Late at night, she would wake to footsteps on the stones that led to the house. She was as sensitive to them as a mother to her baby’s cry. Even before she heard the knock on her door, Gracy was out of bed, fastening her dress, her feet searching for her shoes.

  “I’m sorry it’s so late,” the man would say.

  “No trouble. I’ve been thinking her time might come tonight and could hardly sleep for the worry of it,” Gracy would reply, wrapping her cloak around herself, picking up the bag that was always ready, cutting a chunk of bread to slip into her pocket, since she did not know when she would eat again.

  “I wanted to wait till morning to fetch you, but she hurts so.” If it was the first time, the man would twist his hands together, a look of anguish on his face, taking steps toward the door as if that would hurry Gracy. Even when he had come for her before and had a houseful of children, the man would be anxious, troubled. Men in those mountains were used to pain, a skull torn open by a rock fall, a hand crushed in an ore chute, fingers frozen in an ice storm. They knew how to ease the hurting. But childbirth bewildered them. There was nothing they could do to end the pain. And at the bottom of a man’s confusion was the fear that his wife might die, that he would lose the person he loved most in the world, only to be replaced by a mewling piece of flesh. What would he do with it?

  Gracy would reply, “Then it’s good you came. No sense to being noble. Even if her time will be a while yet, she’ll need someone to hold her hand, make sure everything’s all right. I don’t mind being rousted out.” And she didn’t. She was bothered more when the call came late, when she didn’t arrive until the baby crowned.

  Gracy kept her bag next to the door. She would go through it after each birth, washing or replacing what had been used so that she was always ready. If Daniel had slept through the knocking, Gracy wouldn’t wake him. He’d know when he rose in the morning and found her note that she had gone and might be away two or three days. She never knew how long the lying-in would be. The knocks from husbands or neighbors, or even small children, came so often that Daniel was as used to them as the din of the stamp mill crushing the ore across the valley. And so he often slept on while Gracy roused herself and slipped out into the cold. When Emma and then Jeff were small, Gracy had awakened Daniel so that he could take the children to the neighbor lady who cared for them while Gracy tended her women. Daniel had fussed when Emma was a baby, said him being a man, it wasn’t right he had to care for a child that way, even for the few hours. But Emma had died, and late in life, when Gracy thought there’d never be another child, Jeff had come to them, and Daniel was so grateful to her that he sometimes stayed home to care for the boy himself. But of course Jeff was grown and gone off, and the couple was alone in the house—incomplete without their son.

  * * *

  Gracy knew from the time she could first remember that she would be a midwife.

  The granny woman who’d catched her in a cabin in the Arkansas hill country had taken a fancy to Gracy. Gracy’s mother had already given birth to ten children and was worn out by the time Gracy came along. There was still a child at her breast, born barely nine months before and not enough milk for two little ones. At first, Gracy’s oldest sister, Orlean, cared for the infant, putting her finger into the milk pail and letting Gracy suck it. But Gracy did poorly, and when the granny woman came around to check, she snatched up Gracy and said the baby would die if she didn’t get something more to nourish her.

  “There’s naught I can do for her. Take her,” Gracy’s mother said, thrusting her hand at the puny baby. And so the old granny woman had scooped up Gracy, wrapped her in one of the clean soft cloths she carried in her bag, and taken her home. She fed Gracy with warmed goat’s milk and raised her up. “Prettiest baby I ever saw,” she told Gracy over and over again, but she was given to saying that to all the mothers of new babies. The truth was, Gracy wasn’t a pretty baby and wasn’t pretty when she grew up, either.

  Nabby, the midwife’s name was, had never married, never known herself what it was like to push a baby into the world, like the hundreds she had delivered. But she knew how to care for Gracy and how to love her, too. Gracy had learned from that, learned that you didn’t have to give birth to a child to give it a mother’s love.

  Gracy grew up in a log cabin filled with dried herbs hanging from the rafters and bottles and jars of ointment and salves and concoctions lining the shelves. Before she could read, Gracy had learned how to mix the medicines Nabby used, had accompanied the old woman on her missions of mercy. She’d seen babies born, sometimes coming so easily that all that Nabby had to do was hold out her arms to catch them. But Gracy’d also seen the complications, the babies wedged crosswise or coming into the world feet first. She’d seen babies born dead and one so deformed that Nabby refused to show it to the mother. But Gracy saw, and it vexed her. She never stopped wondering why God created such beings. “God don’t make no mistakes,” Nabby told her, but Gracy wasn’t so sure.

  Nor did she understand why bearing children had to be painful. She asked Nabby about that, but the midwife just shook her head. “The Bible says in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and some say that means a woman has to pay for Eve’s sin. But I never held with that. There’s plenty of wicked
ness that men done in the Bible, and it don’t mean men today pay for it.” She thought over Gracy’s question. “Others say suffering makes a woman love her children, but that ain’t true neither, for it don’t explain why I love you.” Nabby shook her head. “I guess God knows why there’s pain, but He ain’t told me. I think it would be easier to plant the seed in the ground and harvest the baby come fall, but then there’d be no need for me.”

  Sometimes when a mother needed Nabby’s attention, Nabby handed the baby to Gracy to care for. Or Gracy tied the cord and then used Nabby’s stork scissors to cut the lifeline between mother and child. Those were special moments for little Gracy, and while still a child herself, she had come to feel a sort of ownership of the babies she helped birth.

  Gracy’s world was not all births—and occasional deaths—however. Nabby paid Orlean a dime every month to take Gracy to school. “Ignorance! It’s a terrible thing to grow up not knowing,” Nabby had explained when Orlean escorted Gracy to school the first day.

  The Arkansas schoolhouse Nabby sent Gracy to wasn’t far, and Gracy could have walked to it by herself, but Nabby insisted that Orlean accompany her and paid the sister the money. Gracy chafed to think she was not allowed to attend on her own. But then she realized that if Orlean didn’t take her, Orlean couldn’t attend school, that Nabby really was paying Orlean to go to school herself, an opportunity none of their brothers and sisters had. From Nabby, Gracy learned about such kindnesses, and like Nabby, she was quick to extend them. She shared the bounty that came from Nabby with her family, and apparently did so with the old midwife’s approval. If Nabby saw that the dress she’d made for Gracy was being worn by Sabra, her next older sister, or that the store-bought candy ended up with Gracy’s brothers, she didn’t comment. When you give someone a gift, it’s theirs to do with as they would, Nabby taught.

  There had been no stigma to Gracy’s being given away. Times were hard, and plenty of children in the Arkansas hills were placed with relatives or friends when there was no room at home for them. And so Gracy went back and forth between the two families. But it was Nabby’s house that was home to her.

  The midwife’s cabin was the place where she learned how to cook in an open fireplace, to smoke venison, parch corn, and dry apples and pumpkins. She learned the signs of nature, which phase of the moon was best for planting—root vegetables in the dark of the moon, aboveground vegetables in the light, corn under a full moon, and never plow on Good Friday or lightning will strike the crop. Pound a nail into a fruit tree that doesn’t bloom, and it will bud out. Never grow ivy. Only mean people grow ivy, Nabby insisted.

  Gracy learned to spin and weave and to quilt. Next to birthing babies, Gracy loved quilting best. She would sit in Nabby’s rocker on the porch, stitching the pieces of fabric together, making shapes of the scraps left over from Nabby’s dressmaking or the pieces cut from usable parts of worn-out clothing. Nabby pieced together the shapes to form stars, for a star was her favorite pattern. Stars were comforting, just like the stars in the sky that guided Nabby through the night to some far homestead. Starting a quilt on Friday brings bad luck, Nabby told her as she showed Gracy how to cut out the shapes, and remember the dream the first time you sleep under a new quilt for surely it will come true.

  And of course, Nabby taught her to deliver babies.

  Gracy’d birthed the first one when she was just ten years old, and she had been so frightened that she’d almost refused.

  Lucy, a girl from school who was no bigger than Gracy herself, had come to the cabin to fetch Nabby. “Ma’s in a bad way and Pa ain’t no help noway. Tell Granny Nabby to get up over the hills,” Lucy said. But Nabby wasn’t there. She had gone miles away to deliver another baby, leaving Gracy behind, because it was a month for school, and Nabby didn’t know when she’d return. Gracy would need hours to find her, and when she did, she wasn’t sure Nabby would leave. The woman the midwife was attending was a first-time mother and might not be strong enough to survive the birth, Nabby had confided to the little girl when she left. Black Mary, Lucy’s mother, already had a brood. Black Mary was what they called her to distinguish her from the other Marys who were her kinfolk, because her hair was as dark and glossy as a raven’s wing. And because her moods were as black as the inside of a barrel.

  “Black Mary knows as much about it as Granny Nabby,” Gracy told the girl. “After the first five or six, it’s just like shelling peas.” She’d heard Nabby say that often enough. “You tell her Granny will be along as soon as she comes home.”

  “But Ma’s hollering like I never heard her before. If Granny don’t come, who’ll catch that baby? My brother ain’t fittin’ for it. None of us kids is.”

  Gracy shrugged. “I can’t help. Granny isn’t here.”

  “Then you come,” the girl said.

  “Me? I’m not a granny woman. I can’t deliver Black Mary’s baby any more than a cat can,” Gracy told her with a laugh.

  “But you delivered babies before. I heard tell of it.”

  “Not by myself. I only help Nabby.”

  “You have to come. I never seen nothing but a chicken laying eggs. Is that how it is?”

  Gracy smiled to think of women sitting on nests of eggs like broody hens. It would be some easier if they could give birth that way. In fact, Gracy’d once asked Nabby why babies couldn’t just be hatched. “Hard-boiled or fried up?” Nabby had asked by way of reply.

  “Come on, Gracy. Ma’s most out of her head. She rears and bucks. What if she dies?” The girl shuddered.

  “I got no bag, no scissors,” Gracy protested. The idea of delivering Black Mary’s baby by herself scared her out of her wits. She gripped the back of a chair in case Lucy tried to pull her out of the cabin. “There’s other women you can get to help. What about Aunt Sarah that lives west of you?”

  “She’s gone to visit her sister, and Ma wouldn’t let Old Betty that lives by the creek in the house for fear she’d put a spell on her.”

  “Even to deliver a baby?”

  “Ma’s stubborn. She’d rather die than let them tend her. Only Annie Laurie’s there, but she’s no more help than a yellow dog. All she done was give Ma a hot footbath. I guess I know more than she does, because the baby don’t come out of your foot. Annie Laurie’s the one sent me to fetch Granny Nabby. You got to help, Gracy. Ma and the baby dying, that’d be on you.”

  Gracy looked out the window, hoping she’d spot Nabby coming home, but the trail was empty. She wondered if Nabby had stopped somewhere to pick a bouquet of flowers or drink a glass of buttermilk. Maybe she should run down the trail and see. But she knew Nabby wouldn’t dawdle when Gracy was home by herself. Likely that baby hadn’t been born yet.

  “Come on,” Lucy said.

  Gracy glanced at the pie safe where Nabby kept her doings—her salves and lotions, the soft clean cloths. Nabby would want her to help, she decided at last. So Gracy found a flour sack and began to fill it. “I don’t have instruments, no forceps. Nabby took them. And I don’t have the stork scissors,” she said, going to the bench where Nabby kept her knife.

  “We got a knife already,” Lucy said.

  Gracy knew it was likely a frog sticker, and that wouldn’t do for cutting the cord. So she slipped the knife Nabby used to cut the herbs into the sack. Then she stopped to sharpen her school pencil and leave a note for Nabby. Perhaps the other baby had already arrived and Nabby would return in time. Gracy should have hurried—Nabby would have—but she held back, moving slowly, so that Lucy had to tug at her arm. Maybe if she lingered, Gracy thought, Black Mary’s baby would already be born. But that was not a thought Nabby would have had. It would shame Nabby, and so Gracy began to hurry.

  She followed Lucy down the trail and across a meadow and over two hills. She could hear Black Mary screaming from pain before she even spotted the cabin. When the girls went inside, Black Mary was lying on the bed, thrashing and hollering.

  “The baby won’t come out. It’s stuck-like. I’ve been
trying to help her, but I don’t know what to do,” Lucy’s brother said. He knelt beside his mother, sweat running down his face, wringing his hands. He was a stringbean of a boy, puny as a newborn kitten, but he had nice hands, big hands, Gracy noticed. He nodded his head at Annie Laurie and said, “She’s not worth much.”

  Annie Laurie sat beside the bed muttering. “There’s something wrong. I never helped at a birth like this. I ain’t knowing what to do. No I ain’t. It’s up to the Lord, not me.”

  “She wouldn’t help,” the boy said, “just kept saying it over and over like that, that it was up to the Lord.”

  It was not up to the Lord, however. It was up to Gracy. “Let me see,” she said, her own hands shaking. She clasped them together so that no one would see and tried to act confident, the way Nabby did. “She’s had others. It shouldn’t be so bad.” If those words coming from a ten-year-old sounded pompous, no one seemed to notice.

  A kettle of water hung on a crane in the fireplace, and Gracy asked the boy to pour some into a basin. He did so, and Gracy took a piece of lye soap from her sack and washed her hands. Most folks wouldn’t think that necessary since Gracy’s hands weren’t dirty, but Nabby had a notion that dirt could cause an inflammation, and so the midwife and her small assistant always insisted on cleanliness.

  Gracy told the boy to pour out the water and replace it with fresh, and when he did, she slid her knife and a length of twine into the basin, wishing she had the forceps, but Nabby had taken them. “Hang these cloths by the fire to warm them,” she ordered, taking a bundle from her sack and handing it to the boy. She sounded confident, although she wasn’t. Then she went to Black Mary.

  “Where’s Granny Nabby?” Black Mary demanded. The pain had eased and she scowled at Gracy.

  “She’ll be here directly, after she delivers another baby,” Gracy said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt.

  “Then whyn’t you get Granny Alice? A little girl like you ain’t knowing what to do.”