Meek and Mild

by Newport, Olivia

  “We’ll find Daed.” Fannie glanced at Lizzie, who nodded. “You can stay with him.”

  “I want to see the baby!”

  Sadie was rarely petulant, but Fannie took no risk. “You will stay with Daed and you will not complain. Get your shoes.”

  Fannie fastened a cloak around her neck and snatched up her daughter, shoes still in hand, and ran toward Lizzie’s buggy.

  “Where is Elam?” Lizzie started the horse moving.

  “I’m not sure.” Fannie was at least certain Elam had not left the farm, but they said so little to each other these days. She made her best guess. “Take the wide trail that goes to the north field.”

  Lizzie drove while Fannie shoved Sadie’s feet into her shoes and fastened them. Only then did she see that her daughter’s cloak had not made it into the buggy. Mid-November was no time for a child to be out in a field without warmth. Fannie removed her own cloak and wrapped Sadie in it.

  “There!” Sadie pointed. “There’s Daed.”

  Fannie expelled relief and gratitude for her daughter’s sharp eyesight. Lizzie raced the wagon toward Elam.

  “I have to go to my mamm,” Fannie said as she nudged Sadie out of the buggy.

  “The baby’s coming!” Sadie said.

  Fannie fastened her eyes on Elam’s. Their words may have dissipated over the weeks, but the understanding in his eyes had not. He knew she could not take a five-year-old into a difficult birth. As Lizzie started driving again, Fannie twisted in the buggy to see Elam rearrange the oversized cloak on the girl. Fannie shivered in the wintry air—and with a good dose of trepidation. The distance was only a mile and a half, but Fannie could think of a dozen things that could go wrong—a broken axle, the horse gone lame, a fallen tree blocking the road.

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  Lizzie grimaced. “The midwife says the baby is not turned right. And it’s taking a long time for a woman who has birthed five other children. When Martha started asking for you, the midwife said not to waste any time.”

  Fannie burst into the house while Lizzie tended to the buggy. Her father interrupted his pacing in the front room long enough to acknowledge her presence. Fannie touched his shoulder on her way past.

  In the bedroom, on the same bed where Fannie was born nearly twenty-five years earlier, Martha writhed.

  “She’s so white,” Fannie said to the midwife as she moved to the bed to clasp her mother’s hand.

  “Fannie,” Martha whispered.

  “I’m here.”

  “My precious daughter.”

  Fannie looked at the midwife, waiting for words of reassurance that the baby had turned or labor was progressing—something. But the midwife’s face told nothing.

  Fannie wanted Clara.

  She went to the shelf where she knew her mother kept notepaper and pencils and scribbled a note. With a glance at her mother, Fannie strode into the front room. Two of her brothers had joined their father, and Lizzie was just coming in the front door.

  “I need someone to take a message to Clara,” Fannie said.

  The boys looked at each other. Her father shook his head. He wouldn’t leave now. None of them would.

  “I’ll go up to the main road,” Lizzie said. “There will be somebody heading north.”

  “Give me the note,” her father said. He turned it over and sketched a map, circling an X to mark the destination for its delivery.

  Clara’s eyes blurred as she read the note for the second time. An English boy brought it, shoving it awkwardly into her hand and mounting a sagging mare. Watching the animal’s ponderous, slow progress back toward the road made Clara wonder just how long ago the boy took possession of Fannie’s frantic scrawl on the Maryland side of the border.

  Mamm in labor, it said. Baby taking too long. Come.

  Clara put fingers to both temples. Her father had taken two horses to the blacksmith to be shoed. Rhoda had taken the buggy with a third into Springs before picking up the children from school on her way home. The fourth had a troublesome fetlock, and Hiram had told the family not to use it under any circumstance.

  He could not have foreseen this circumstance, Clara thought. But she could not risk causing the horse to go permanently lame.

  Please, God.

  It would take at least ninety minutes to travel on foot to the Hostetler farm. If she ran most of the way, she might shave time, but running in thick shoes and long layered skirts under a woolen cloak would not make for good speed.

  What choice did she have? Clara pulled the front door closed behind her, gripped her skirts to raise the hem, and established a stride at the maximum length her legs would permit. Anxiety fueled speed, and for the first mile she forced breaths.

  In.

  Out.

  In.

  Out.

  Faster. Deeper.

  Dread dredged her depths, burning her stomach and lungs.

  Martha’s last baby had been so long ago, and she had looked so unwell the last few weeks.

  And the dream, with Martha grief stricken while a baby’s cry faded away.

  And Martha’s sister had died birthing a baby at a much younger age. The absence of Clara’s mother from her life stabbed her afresh. She had been too little to know what was happening to Catherine Kuhn, too little to know that the life flashed out of her mother’s body, too little to know she missed her chance to say good-bye.

  But Clara was not little now. She knew the danger Martha faced. Bending over and putting her hands on her knees, she paused to properly empty and refill her lungs several times.

  Please, God. Please. Show me Your way in this.

  Terrified that she was racing to say good-bye to her aunt, her mother’s only sister, Clara resumed her trot for another half mile.

  An automobile engine roared behind her, and the driver sounded the horn. Annoyed, Clara moved even farther to the side of the road. The horn sounded again.

  “Clara!”

  She stopped running again and spun around. “Andrew!”

  He pulled up beside her, grinning. “Feel like a ride?”

  “Maryland,” she said, gasping. “Will you take me to my aunt’s?”

  His face sobered. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. I know what Mose said, but I have to be there now. Will you take me?”

  “Get in.” Andrew leaned over to open the passenger side.

  The hours crawled into darkness.

  In a narrow wooden chair with her knees pushed up against the side of the bed, Fannie held her mother’s hand and folded her spine over her lap to press her forehead into the mattress. This was as close as Fannie had come to prayer in months.

  “I’m so sorry, Mamm,” Fannie murmured. “So sorry. So ashamed. Will you ever be able to forgive me?”

  “Love,” Martha said between labored breaths. “Love bears all things.”

  Martha’s face transformed as another contraction sliced through her. Her grip crushed Fannie’s fingers. Fannie looked up at the midwife, who spread her hands on Martha’s belly and nodded.

  “It’s better?” Fannie asked.

  “The child is in position.”

  Fannie let out a long, slow breath.

  Atlee Hostetler came into the room, ashen. “It’s never been this way before.”

  “Every birth is different,” the midwife said.

  “Why would God ask her to go through this?”

  Fannie vacated her chair, making room for her father to sit beside his wife. He was never in the birthing room for the arrival of his other children. This time he shuffled in every hour or so when he seemed not to tolerate waiting in the front room, staying for a few minutes before withdrawing again. Even he felt the trepidation.

  In the corner, next to the fireplace warming the room, Clara sat on a second narrow wooden chair. Fannie moved across the room and leaned against the wall beside Clara, whose face had no more color in it than Fannie’s father’s.

  “I was
n’t thinking,” Fannie murmured. “I only knew I wanted you with me. I know how you feel about births. If you want to go—”

  Clara shook her head. “You were right to send for me. I only wish I could do something to help. I hate how she is suffering.”

  “Even the midwife can think of nothing to do but wait,” Fannie said.

  “Then we shall wait,” Clara said, “but I am praying with every breath.”

  They watched Atlee wipe Martha’s face with a damp cloth, love still passing in their glances after more than a quarter of a century together.

  “What if she doesn’t survive?” Fannie’s words rode a breath.

  “We will pray that God brings her through her travail,” Clara said.

  But Clara sounded unconvinced. It was impossible that she was not thinking of her own mother’s passing, Fannie realized.

  “My father will not be able to manage a baby,” Fannie said.

  “Don’t think of it!”

  “I have to,” Fannie whispered. “I’m her daughter. She would want me to take in the baby.”

  And in that moment, Fannie realized she would do so without hesitation. A helpless, motherless baby would suffer enough in the years ahead. She could give it a good start.

  “At least…at least until he could manage,” Fannie said. After all, the baby would not be hers. It was her sibling, not her offspring. Fannie would not try to replace the emptiness of her own womb with the fullness of her mother’s. Her father would want to hold and rock his own child.

  But Fannie would rouse to do whatever the child needed.

  “Of course you would,” Clara said. “And I would stay and do everything I could, just the way your mother did everything she could for me. But we must pray, Fannie. We must pray that this child will know your mother’s love for many years.”

  Atlee kissed his wife’s forehead and withdrew once again. Martha rested between contractions.

  Fannie signaled the midwife, who joined the huddle in the corner.

  “Tell me the truth,” Fannie said.

  “I don’t know,” the midwife said. “The labor is going into its second day, and your mother is very tired.”

  Fannie bore her gaze into the midwife’s face. “Will she survive?”

  Martha groaned.

  Andrew had never met Atlee Hostetler before, but already he liked him. Nearing fifty, Atlee looked not like a sun-wrinkled, worn-out farmer, like many men Andrew knew, but like a bronzed, hard worker in robust health. The brown curls of his hair and beard showed no hint of going gray. This was Clara’s onkel, the man who welcomed Clara into his home for weeks at a time during her childhood. Andrew studied Atlee’s features, searching for some glimpse into the years before Clara Kuhn had flooded into Andrew’s daily thoughts. This home, this farm, had always been a refuge for Clara. On another occasion, Atlee’s eyes might have been a clearer window to Clara’s history.

  Atlee’s face creased more deeply with each hour that Andrew observed him. Andrew had spent most of the evening on an amply stuffed davenport, while Atlee pulled a cushionless straight-back chair from the dining room—that could not have been comfortable beyond the first twenty minutes of his vigil—and positioned it in the corner of the front room nearest the bedroom. Atlee came and went from that chair, never seeking better comfort or a bit of nourishment. This was as close as Atlee could come to sharing Martha’s suffering, Andrew supposed.

  Atlee had sent his sons to bed hours ago. Andrew wondered whether any of them were sleeping. The oldest Hostetler son, Abe, had taken his little boy to an upstairs bedroom and stayed with him after extracting a promise from Lizzie to wake him the moment there was news. Lizzie floated between the kitchen and the front room with continuous pots of coffee and plates of food, first meats and cheese and later sweets. No one ate. Occasionally she went into the bedroom to minister to her mother-in-law in some small way.

  Midnight came and went.

  “Thirty-seven hours,” Atlee murmured. “The others were not like this.”

  Andrew thought of the meidung. What if it were Mattie Schrock in travail and Caleb sitting stiffly in a chair? Or John Stutzman and his wife? If he was needed, Andrew would have come.

  He stood up, crossed the room, picked up a dining room chair, and set it next to Atlee. He would not speak or make any pretense of understanding what Atlee felt, but he could sit beside him rather than in comfort across the room. Andrew listened to Atlee’s breathing, shallow and jagged with nerves.

  Lizzie came in from the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and filled the empty mug in Atlee’s hands.

  The scream that erupted from the bedroom jolted the three of them. Atlee sought a place to set down his jiggling mug, and Lizzie took it from him before he sloshed coffee all over himself.

  Rapid footsteps closed the small distance between the bedroom and front room. When Clara appeared, the strain in her face lurched Andrew’s heart rate up. At the same time, footsteps thudded down the stairs, and Abe appeared.

  Lizzie set down the coffeepot. “I’m going back in.”

  Andrew stood, catching Clara’s elbow. “What happened?”

  “The midwife says the baby is coming soon now.” Her breath came shallow and fast.

  Was it still alive? Andrew left his question unspoken. He could only imagine its weight on Atlee, who stood to lose both wife and child.

  Atlee rose abruptly. “I’m going to the barn. I have a cow that’s been poorly.”

  They watched him go out the front door. Andrew looked from Clara to Abe, who seemed unperturbed at Atlee’s withdrawal. Atlee had not left the house since Andrew and Clara arrived—and probably not for hours before that. A midnight visit to the barn confused Andrew.

  “He’s going to pray,” Abe explained.

  “He has claimed a sickly cow as long as I can remember,” Clara said.

  “Should someone be with him?” Andrew said.

  Abe and Clara shook their heads.

  “He is not alone. He will meet God in the barn,” Abe said.

  Andrew nodded. It would not be the first time God made Himself known among animals and hay.

  “Am I weak for needing a break?” Clara said. “Martha has no relief.”

  “Lizzie went in,” Abe said. “And Fannie is still there. My mamm will never be alone in this.”

  A wail came from upstairs.

  “Is Thomas all right?” Clara asked.

  “Probably just dreaming. I’ll go back to him.” Abe padded out of the room and up the stairs.

  Fannie stumbled into the room, and Clara stepped over to embrace her.

  “She’s hardly talking.” A sob disrupted Fannie’s effort to speak. “She’s exhausted. I don’t know what to do.”

  The cousins clutched each other. No meidung could break the bond Andrew witnessed.

  Fannie drew in an enormous breath. “I must go back.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Clara said. “Whatever happens, love surrounds Aunti Martha.”

  Fannie withdrew to the bedroom. Clara turned to Andrew.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Clara blanched. “I can’t help thinking about so many other births.”

  “They bring great joy.”

  “Most of the time,” Clara conceded. “I was too young to come when Fannie’s brothers were born, but I remember the celebrations still going on by the time I visited to see the new babies.”

  “Is the midwife worried?”

  “She’s not sure if she’s hearing the baby’s heart rate too slow or Martha’s heart rate too fast.”

  Anguish passed through her face. Andrew gave no voice to the looming question. Shouldn’t there be two heartbeats?

  “Rhoda’s first three babies came far too soon. No one would let me see them, but I know they were far enough along to look like babies.”

  “Don’t dwell on that now,” Andrew said.

  “It’s hard not to.”

  “This is not the same. This baby is ready t
o be born.”

  “When this is over,” Clara said, “I have to tell you about Rhoda.”

  “And I’ll be here to listen.”

  Clara could not bear the thought of watching Martha suffer. Neither could she wait outside the bedroom. A scream directed her choice. She jumped away from Andrew and pushed open the door to her aunt’s anguish.

  The midwife was on alert. Lizzie and Fannie were on either side of Martha, supporting her back for the final push.

  “Here’s the head,” the midwife said. “Now the shoulders. Yes, here we go. One more big push.”

  Four women held a collective breath while the fifth bore down.

  “A girl!” the midwife said.

  Where was the cry? Clara was present when Sadie was born, and her cry filled the room immediately. Josiah, Hannah, Mari—she’d heard all their cries from down the hall. It was taking too long.

  The midwife tied the cord and cut it in a well-practiced motion. “A blanket,” she said.

  Lizzie lurched into action, unfolding soft cotton.

  “She’s not breathing!” Martha reached out a hand.

  The midwife turned the infant upside down. The tiny girl protested immediately. In five seconds Lizzie had her in a blanket.

  “Let Clara hold her,” Martha said, falling back against the pillows. “She is Catherine.”

  “Catherine!” Clara laid one arm across the other to cradle the child. The tiny one looked like an English doll, perfectly formed with long dark lashes sweeping against her cheeks. Tears filled Clara’s eyes at the baby’s perfection—and safe arrival. She raised a glimmering glance to her aunt. “I’m so glad you’re both safe.”

  “After your mother died, Atlee and I always said we would name our next daughter for her.” Martha laughed. “Then we produced a string of boys.”

  “You should hold her.” Clara watched her aunt’s beaming, exhausted face.

  “Let me see her face,” Martha said. “Then go show Atlee all is well.”

  Clara glanced at the midwife, who nodded as she awaited the afterbirth. All was indeed well. Seeking the fine line between holding the babe securely but gently, Clara inched up the side of the bed and turned little Catherine for her mother’s inspection.