The Reluctant Midwife (8 page)

“This is the animal doctor I told you about, Mrs. Bazzano, Dr. Hester. He has the epinephrine.” The vet kneels on the floor, touches the shaking boy on the arm, and then opens a leather bag like I carry.

“How much does he weigh?” Hester asks Mrs. Bazzano.

“Sixty pounds at his last doctor's visit. Maybe less. He's not been eating the past few days.” Daniel fills a syringe from a glass vial. I had expected some kind of inhaler, but now that I think of it, his patients probably don't use inhalers and an injectable will work faster . . .
if
it works.

“Uhhhhh. Uhhhhh. Uhhhhh.” Joey makes a strange noise as he forces air in and out. Then he stops breathing altogether and falls back.

“Arm.” Daniel orders, and I pull up the boy's nightshirt sleeve. The vet doesn't bother with cleansing the skin, he just jabs the needle in and pushes the plunger. “I'm not sure I have the dose correct,” he whispers. “I gave him what I would give a good-sized dog. I have a little more if it doesn't work.”

Then we wait. Thirty seconds. I'm holding my breath along with Joey, wondering how long you can go without air before your heart stops. I count the seconds in my head. Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven. At last Joey gasps! Relief is almost instantaneous.

Mrs. Bazzano and I look at each other and I wipe her tears. She pulls a white hanky out of her pocket and wipes my bloody nose.

It isn't until dusk three days later that Dr. Blum and I leave the Barnett Boardinghouse. Nick and one of Mrs. Bazzano's men had retrieved our Pontiac and, thank God, I'd asked Daniel to check on our six poor chickens still locked in the barn. I'm not much of a chicken farmer, but I know the birds have to eat and he took them some feed.

The chauffer slaps Blum on the back as we stand in the driveway getting ready to leave. “Well, old buddy,” he wisecracks, “I expect you'll beat me in poker the next time I see you.” The men have taken a shine to the doctor, always setting him up with a hand of cards when they play. Not that he ever actually joined them. He just sat where he was, holding the fan of cards in front of him like the other Joes. “He has a real poker face,” they kidded.

Mrs. Bazzano and the children, including Joey, wave from the porch.

The vet had offered to take Isaac home with him days ago, but Mrs. Bazzano was paying me two dollars a day, renting our rooms, and feeding us, so we happily stayed. Also I didn't want to leave until the order for three asthma inhalers came in on the train.

Before I turn up Wild Rose Road, I stop at the Hesters' place. Inside I can hear Patience playing the piano, something familiar, “
Oh! Susanna, Oh don't you cry for me, For I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee.”

A few minutes later at the kitchen table over coffee and gingerbread cookies, I tell Daniel how much I appreciated him helping me out with Joey. “I wanted you to know what it meant to me, your help at the bedside. You saved the boy's life. Here's something from the child's mother.” I hold out a ten-dollar bill. “Mrs. Bazzano also asked me to tell you how grateful she was.”

“Bazzano?” Patience asks. “Bazzano?” She turns to Daniel. “You didn't say who they were. That's the Bazzano family from Pittsburgh?”

“Yes,” I answer quickly. “Somewhere near Pittsburgh.”

“Don't you know who they are?”

“I know quite a bit,” I answer smugly. “The lady said her husband owned a restaurant, but he was killed in an accident last year and they had to leave town. I figured they were deep in debt or something. Nice woman, but she has her hands full with five children, and the little boy, so sickly.”

“Don't you know who they
are
?” Patience asks again. Both Daniel and I shrug. “That's
John Bazzano's family
. The Pittsburgh mobster! The
late
mob boss. He was assassinated in New York City last year.
The ice pick murder?

“We read about it in the newspaper, Daniel,
right here at this table
. Bazzano was stabbed some twenty times in the chest with an ice pick and discovered a few days later in a trash bin. It was big news.”

“
That
John Bazzano?” Daniel now recalls the story, but I draw a dead blank. Most likely it happened around the time I was dealing with Dr. Blum's illness and had stopped reading the paper.

“The ritual murder was in retaliation for Bazzano wiping out three brothers in a rival Pennsylvania gang.
All three
. Can you imagine?”

I swallow hard. “Those people were mobsters?”

In the end Patience holds out her hand and takes the ten-dollar bill. When times are hard, it doesn't matter if the money is dirty or the money is clean.

“
Old MacDonald had a farm. E-I-E-I-O
,” I sing to Dr. Blum as I scrub our linens on the washboard in the big galvanized metal washtub. It lightens my load to have a little money in the money jar. “
And on his farm he had a chicken. E-I-E-I-O
.” The sound of a motor interrupts my song as a battered green pickup truck loaded with wood pulls into the yard.

What now? It's Reverend Miller from Hazel Patch, the Negro pastor who changed our flat when we first returned to Union County. A tall, young black fellow sits in the front beside him.

I hurry outside, pulling Blum along. “Why, Reverend, how nice of you to stop by. Won't you come in?” I inwardly cringe, knowing I have nothing to serve them, no biscuits, no apple butter, not even coffee.

“No need for that, ma'am, though I thank you kindly.” He tips his straw hat and wipes sheen from his wide handsome brown face. “We brought you some wood. A tornado touched down in Hazel Patch in April and wreaked havoc. We're trying to get the hillside cleaned off. I just dropped off a load to the Hesters, and Patience said you could use some too.”

“I thought tornados didn't happen in the mountains.”

“Oh, they happen, but only every ten years or so. Where do you want us to stack it?”

I survey the bed of the truck. That's a lot of wood! Some of the
trunks are six inches, some only four, but still good for the cookstove. “To the side of the house I guess.”

“This is Nate Bowlin.” He indicates the young man with him, a tall fellow of about eighteen who's eyeing Dr. Blum as if he were a ghost. The physician still stands next to me and I note that his pants are ripped and hitched up too high, like an unkempt scarecrow or one of the homeless men down by the river, and I'm suddenly embarrassed. I hadn't given any recent thought to how we're dressed when we're out on the farm because we don't usually get company.

“Be right back,” I say to cover my discomfort, then I lead Blum into the house and sit him on the davenport. “Stay.”

Returning, I find the wood almost all stacked in a pile taller than I am. The Reverend and Nate finish up. “Could I offer you a few dollars? I just got paid for a nursing job. That's a lot of firewood.”

“No. No.” The Reverend puts up his hand. “You need what you have.”

He opens the truck door and I think he is going to leave, but he stops, takes off his hat, and looks toward the blue door. “We've been praying for the doctor. Any change?”

I shrug, surprised. “Not much. Maybe a little. One day he got up and dressed himself.”

Reverend Miller shoots me a big smile and his very white teeth illuminate his dark face. “Well now. That's something!” he says as if dressing yourself was a real accomplishment. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“Okay, Blum. Time to get to work.” I'm dressed for the outdoors in old slacks and a plaid cotton shirt that Patience gave me.

Her old six-foot-long crosscut saw hangs on spikes under the porch and I carefully carry it out to where I've lined up two sawhorses I found in the barn. Sometimes I think the doctor is making progress and other times he seems like a little boat bobbing along without rudder or sail. I plunk a straw hat on his head and once again my loneliness hits me like a locomotive loaded with coal.

Get a grip, Becky, and quit feeling sorry for yourself. If you expect to have cooked food this summer and heat in the fall, you have to cut up this wood
. I lay the first log, about eight feet long and the width of my forearm, up on the sawhorses then give Isaac one of the handles.

Just then, I hear another car whining up Wild Rose Road. Two cars in one day! We're getting to be Grand Central Station!

“How ya doing?” the vet asks, jumping out of his Model T and going straight toward Dr. Blum. He reaches out to shake hands, and when Isaac ignores him, he picks up the doc's right mitt and pumps it. “Glad to see you. Here let me give you some help.” Blum is still standing with his left hand on the saw handle and Daniel Hester takes my place and begins to pull and push.

“Bitsy and I used to store our firewood under the porch,” Patience tells me, gathering little Danny up and climbing out of the passenger-side door. She plops her little fair-haired boy on the steps and gives me a hug. “It stays nice and dry there. . . . I'm so sorry we don't get over more. . . . Our life is crazier than the Pittsburgh Zoo. Are you doing okay?” She studies my face.

I shrug and smile to show that I'm game, just the good old outdoorsy girl living the good old farm life with the good old catatonic boy. My act doesn't fool her and she nods toward Isaac. “Pretty hard, huh?”

I turn away. If she only knew the tears that I'm hiding. “We're making it. Pastor Miller brought the wood and I found the two-person saw under the porch. Thanks for thinking of us. Do you want to come in? I don't have any coffee or anything.”

“That's okay. Put on the water. I brought you a jar of peppermint leaves I dried last fall. We can have tea.”

Patience follows me through the blue door with her little boy and gives him his red metal fire truck to play with.

“Oh, the house looks so pretty. Do you have everything you need? Is there anything more I could lend you?”

“No, Patience.” I smile, looking around the room at the white walls, the shining windows, at the sofa covered with a blue-and-green quilt, at the white curtains I made of muslin that Patience donated, at the bookcase that now holds our books, mostly medical. I have even set out my paints and brushes in a clear quart jar, and on the back wall hung one of my paintings,
Purple Iris on a Hillside
.

“You've given us all this! All I need now is a job with cash money. I can't live on your charity forever. There has to be something.”

“Times are tough. . . . There aren't many jobs, Becky.” Patience stares out the window. “Try not to worry. We'll share what we have and you'll share with us. That's how people get by nowadays. The thing is, you can't have too much pride.” For the first time, I notice how worn she looks.

Outside, there's the
swish, swish, swish
of the two-man crosscut, and when I look through the window, I see the vet and the doctor, pulling back and forth equally. There's the sheen of sweat on Isaac's face, and when Daniel stops for a break, he takes a swig from a silver flask and then holds the same flask to my charge's lips.

I am horrified at the offer of liquor to a catatonic, but Patience laughs, looking over my shoulder. “Boys will be boys!”

I could run out and stop them, but I hold myself back. Dr. Blum is actually working, and the pile of cut firewood grows.

“Did you hear there's a CCC camp going up south of town?” Patience asks, dropping back into the rocking chair. “Camp White Rock. They're going to build a state park, plant trees, clean up the forest, and build a lookout tower for wildfires.”

“A state park! That's just what we need in times like these, a place to picnic.”

Patience seems embarrassed to have to tell me. “It's not the park that's important. It's the money that it'll bring into Union County. Also the CCC means jobs for young men all over the country. The wages are small, but they get plenty of food and a place to live. It's part of Roosevelt's New Deal. The fellows also get a check for twenty-five dollars a month sent home to their families, so in the end families and women benefit too.”

“What if a woman doesn't have a husband or a son? What if all she's got is a man too addled to pull his end of the two-person saw,” I snap, acid leaking out of a rusty car battery. Patience puts her hand to her mouth, shocked by my bitterness.

“I'm sorry,” I apologize. “I'm just worried is all. Even if I find work, I don't know what I'll do with Dr. Blum.”

“You could leave him with me.”

“I don't think that would work—what if you had to go to a birth?”

The midwife adjusts her silver wire-rim glasses. “I take Danny with me sometimes.”

“Danny's different. He's little and cute. Anyone would want to help take care of him. Dr. Blum isn't cute; in fact, to some people he's downright scary.”

“Danny
is
cute,” she admits, then counters my negativity: “But you have to have faith. If you can't find a job, you have us and if you do find a job, we'll figure something out.”

Then she changes the subject. “On Saturday I have to go into Liberty to see Lilly Bittman. You remember her? She's pregnant again and cramping. The blind girl who married the shopkeeper at Bittman's Grocery? A sweet woman with bright red curly hair?”

“Cramping? I didn't even know she was pregnant. I was in the store a few weeks ago, but Mr. Bittman didn't say anything. How far along is she?”

“About five months. She's worried she's going to have the baby too early. I gave her husband strict orders to keep her in bed.”

“When I go in to look for work again, I can see her,” I offer, happy to have something I can do to help my patron. “Save you a trip. My money from Mrs. Bazzano isn't going to last forever.”

“Would you? I'd be grateful. Daniel has to travel so much; the cost of gas is killing us.”

I look at Patience in her thin yellow dress. Her cheekbones are hollow and I know mine are too.