The Reluctant Midwife (34 page)

“Miss Myers, would you braid my hair? Mama used to braid my hair, but Mrs. Stenger had so many children with us there, she didn't have time.” It's Sally, standing barefoot at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a pink flour-sack dress, her long white-blond hair uncombed. She's holding a wooden hairbrush. Blum left the house before sunrise to assist Hester with a prolapsed uterus in one of Mr. Dresher's cows and I have been upstairs reading his journal again. What strikes me is all that silence. A year of silence.

“You can call me Becky.” I take the brush and have her sit on the braided rug in front of me. “One pigtail or two?”

“Just one, straight down in back . . . I don't like to call grownups by their first names. It feels rude.”

“Right. I had an Aunt Petunia once who wanted me to call her Pet. I couldn't do it. How about
Aunt Becky
.” The girl thinks it over.

“Should I call Dr. Blum
Uncle Blum
?”

“No, his name is Isaac. I think you should call him Uncle Isaac.”

This girl needs some decent clothes. I pull Sally up in my
lap. She's a big girl, not a baby, but I'm already thinking like a mother.

A mother . . . I say to myself . . . I never saw myself as a mother. Certainly, I never wanted to be pregnant or give birth. Sometimes I envied women with children, the physical closeness they had to their little ones, but here I am with Sally in my lap and the feelings of wanting to provide and protect her are undeniable.

Mother
, I think. Mother is about love. It doesn't mean the one who gives birth. It is the one who braids your hair.

The Hope River runs clean and clear again, the ash and debris from the wildfire gone. For a few weeks even the homeless abandoned it. Now, as we wind ourselves through the willows, I notice a few of the traveling people are back, but in smaller numbers; only two camps, one white and one black, constructed away from each other in ramshackle wood shelters with hobo stoves made of tin and clotheslines tied to the trees.

The men nod as we pass but the women, wearing ragged, dirty housedresses, turn away, ashamed to be seen looking so destitute. These are not vacationers camping along the river for the fun of it; they have nowhere else to go.

It's been only a few weeks since we adopted the Hucknell children and we three families have gathered on the bank of the Hope for a Sunday picnic. Even Sarah Maddock has come, wearing her braces and leaning on a walker that her husband ordered from Sears. Reverend and Mrs. Miller are here too, with a boy and a girl from Hazel Patch, to talk about their school.

“It would actually help us to have you participate,” Mrs. Miller says. “There are only twelve students, ages five through fourteen. It's a cooperative, certified by the Union County Board of Education. The closest other school for coloreds is on the far side of Delmont.”

“And the Hazel Patch folks won't mind white children at their school?” I have to ask the question.

“Heavens no!”

“Then it's settled,” Daniel comes in. “We'll all volunteer and you can expect four new pupils in the fall. . . .” He turns to the children. “Now, how about a game of Duck Duck Goose?”

While the kids and the men play the silly circle game, Patience and I wander downstream. She made a new sling, a smaller flowered one, so that she can carry Mira everywhere, and we find a flat rock where she can sit with her bare feet in the water and nurse the baby. I lie there looking up at the clouds and listening to the river as it sings below.

“How are you going to do it?”

“What?”

“Be a midwife with a baby, a toddler, and two school-aged children.”

“I've thought about that. It will be harder, but maybe you'll help me.” Here she grins. “I know how you love childbirth.”

I can't help but smile back. “Helping women have babies when
you're
in charge isn't so bad.”

“So you'll be my partner, like Bitsy?”

I don't answer at first, trying to pull all the pieces of my life together, mother, nurse, midwife. Then I shrug. “I guess I could.”

Patience cheers and kicks water up like a little girl. “Yay!” And the drops come down like diamonds, sparkling in the sun.

“Dinner!” It's Mrs. Maddock calling from the riverbank.

Our picnic, on blankets, isn't exactly a feast, just whatever we could throw together; potato salad from Patience, deviled eggs from me,
fresh home-baked bread and bean pickles from Mrs. Maddock, and cold milk from Moonlight, the Hesters' cow.

I'm waiting for someone to say grace and am surprised when Sally begins. “God is great. God is good.” All the little girls chime in. “And so we thank Him for this food.”

I catch Isaac's eye and well up with tears.

“Who wants to wade to the other side of the river?” Daniel jumps up when we've eaten our fill. “Who's with me?” Most of the children raise their hands and start taking off their shoes.

This is an adventure. None of us has ever crossed the Hope before, except over the bridge into Liberty. Daniel and Blum are scouting for a shallow place and immediately I start thinking of danger. Someone might drown! But then I see Patience kicking off her boots and handing the baby to Sarah Maddock for safekeeping.

Fools come in all sizes, those who heed no caution and those who heed too much. I unlace my shoes.

“Are you going across, Sally?”

“I don't know. I'm afraid.”

“I'm scared too, but there's a bunch of us. I think we'll be all right.”

Even the Reverend and Mrs. Miller come in. We are all barefoot with our pants or skirts hitched up high, and then two more children from the homeless camps run over. They want to join the fun, and their parents, seeing the number of adults participating, wave them on.

Here we are. Can you see us? All holding hands, brown and white together, a chain spanning the river? Daniel leads the way,
little Danny on his shoulders, with Mr. Maddock at the end, thirteen of us crossing the Hope, ice-cold water up to our knees and no one falls.

The other side of the Hope River is not beautiful. The ground is bare and brown where the flames scorched the earth, but we can look back at the green where we came from. For a while we lounge on rocks or play in the sand, the boys and girls wading and splashing in the cool shallows.

Then as the kids become hungry or bored, the grownups begin to shepherd them back. Braver now, they cross in twos and threes. Sally returns hand-in-hand with Mrs. Miller, who has become her friend.

“When you come to our school, Sally,” Mildred Miller confides, “I will be your teacher. Have you ever played with colored children before?”

“Not until today. I never touched a brown hand before today, but my daddy told me that there isn't no difference. He said we're all the same under the skin, same blood, same heart. He worked with plenty of coloreds in the PWA.”

I think about that. Despite his violence, Alfred Hucknell gave a legacy of equality to his daughter.

“Dessert, everybody!” Sarah Maddock calls, getting her famous strawberry cake out and cutting pieces for the children, even the homeless kids.

Isaac and I are the last to leave.

“Come,” he says, standing. He reaches for my hand and we wander down the bank away from our party, where the river runs
fast and deep. There are rocks here as big as autos and I'm hoping he doesn't want to go for a swim. I'm not that big a fool.

“Look! The land is already healing.” He bends down and pulls me to my knees next to the river. “Green plants growing up through the ashes . . . some of the seeds had probably sprouted before the fire, but some were dormant and released by the flames.” He's talking like a professor again.

“Shhhh,” I say, putting one finger to his lips. “Shhhh. Just worship. From devastation comes new life.”

We look into each other's eyes, but it's too much for me and I shift my gaze.

This is a man I've lived with since his wife died and he fell apart, a man I worked with for seven years before that, but a different man now, rising from his own ashes. And I am a different woman.

“Lying with you that first night when I first brought Sally home,” Blum says, “I felt I'd come home myself.”

I wrap my arms around him. “You are home.” We stay like that, kneeling on the ground for a long time.

Finally, Isaac breaks the silence, “Do you think a person can be born again?”

“You mean born into Christ, like religion?”

“No, not that way. Just you open your eyes and you see everything fresh and in a new way.” We are still locked together and I stare out over his shoulder at the green trees and the sparkling grasses on the other side of the river, trying to understand what he means.

“I was in a dark cave of my own making,” he goes on, “and you rolled away the stone. Not everyone gets a second chance.”

“It was a very heavy stone,” I joke, but he isn't joking.

“Come here.” I gesture, as I let go of him and crawl across the sand to the edge of the water. “Lie down.” He looks at me funny but does what I say. “On your back.”

I cup both my hands and drip cold water over his head, run my fingers through his hair. He doesn't struggle. I don't have to hold him.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm baptizing you.”

“Baptizing me?”

“In the name of the sun, and the trees, and the holy water.”

Then Isaac Blum grabs me, pulls me right down on him so that our bodies are one, and in the shallows of the Hope, we baptize each other.

About the author

Meet Patricia Harman

About the book

Interesting Facts about the CCC Camps

Reading Group Discussion Questions

Read on

Have You Read? More from Patricia Harman

PATRICIA HARMAN, CNM,
got her start as a lay midwife on rural communes and went on to become a nurse-midwife on the faculty of Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and West Virginia University. She lives near Morgantown, West Virginia; has three sons; and is the author of two acclaimed memoirs. Her first novel,
The Midwife of Hope River
, was successful around the world.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
hc.com
.

Interesting Facts about the CCC Camps

F
ORMED IN THE DEEPEST PART
of the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corp was one of President Roosevelt's first New Deal programs. He believed that this “tree army” would revive the rural economy and keep urban youth “off the city street corners.”

By 1933, 40 percent of working-age U.S. citizens were unemployed. From 1933 to 1942, the CCC program, coordinated by the U.S. Army and the National Forest Service, employed three million of them to plant a billion trees, build fire towers and fire trails, construct dams and state parks, and correct soil erosion on forty million acres of land.

The Civilian Conservation Corp accepted only unmarried men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five whose families were on relief. The men were paid thirty dollars a month, but twenty-five dollars of it was sent home to their mothers. In return, the government provided everything the participants needed, including clothing, tools, and training.

Over the course of the Great Depression, 500,000 young men were enrolled in the corps and 2,600 camps were built from Maine to Oregon. White Cliff Rock camp, featured in the book, is fictional but typical of many mountain camps.

Usually, the men lived in tents to
start with and then constructed cabins and dorms from local materials. Most of the boys had never been more than a hundred miles from home before. As can be imagined, there were sometimes conflicts that had to be dealt with in a military manner, and the camps weren't always popular with locals who viewed the outsiders with suspicion. Though planned to be multiracial, the country wasn't ready for that, and in the end separate camps were designed to house African-Americans as well as Native Americans.

National Archives and Records Administration

It took a few years and a lot of
national publicity to sway the public, but eventually with Eleanor Roosevelt's support, the young men of the tree army became the heroes of the New Deal.

National Archives and Records Administration

Reading Group Discussion Questions

    
1.
 
When Becky returns to Liberty in 1934, she is broke and finds out that Dr. Blum's home has been sold for back taxes. Currently, many families have lost their homes to foreclosure. Have you ever been poor or nearly destitute? How do you think you would react?

    
2.
 
Dr. Blum's disability is frustrating to Becky. Even though she's a nurse and a friend, she doesn't really have to take care of him. What would you do? (Keeping in mind that he has no family willing to take him and there were no adult social services available during the Great Depression.)

    
3.
 
Becky came from an affluent family. She has never had to want for anything. It's hard for her to accept the charity of Mr. Bittman when he gives her the box of rotten apples. . . . How do you think you would feel?

    
4.
 
Patience, the midwife of Hope River, is comfortable with the noises and smells and sights of childbirth, but Becky finds them unsettling and downright scary. How do you feel?

    
5.
 
Facing the hard winter, Patience tells Becky that they will all have to pull together and somehow they will get through. In our mobile society, what place do family and community play in your life?

    
6.
 
If you, like Patience, had to stay in bed for three months to keep from losing your baby, do you think you could do it?

    
7.
 
What do you think about the friendship between Dr. Hester and Dr. Blum? How does the vet help Dr. Blum heal?

    
8.
 
How does Blum's experience being helpless and poor change him?

    
9.
 
How do we heal one another? Have you ever had an experience when a friend played a big role in helping you heal physically or emotionally?

  
10.
 
Have you ever heard of the CCC camps? How do you think they would benefit society today?

  
11.
 
What is it that the Hazel Patch folks have that many others in Union County do not?

  
12.
 
The forest fire of 1935 left death and destruction in its wake. Have you ever faced a natural disaster? How did it change you?