The Amish Midwife

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Mrs. Glick motioned to James to cut in behind her, but he shook his head, his eyes dancing. Widow that she was, she and nearly all of the other ladies had a crush on James. Through the years he would go to church with Dad now and then even while he was in college, driving down for the morning and staying for lunch. As it turned out, he made a much better Mennonite than I, although he hadn’t joined the church. I had—but then I’d left.

  Sophie and I filled coffee cups and punch glasses. Our group of seventeen seemed to be a little messy, so I hunted for and found more napkins in the top drawer of my mother’s antique hutch. I paused for a moment, my hand flat against the cherrywood, wedged between two pies. Would I keep the hutch? It wouldn’t fit in my apartment. Would I sell it? I couldn’t imagine.

  As James followed me around the table, heaping his plate with food, I tried to take a small spoonful of everything. I overheard Sophie tell Mr. Miller I’d found a document written in German. “Do you think you could translate it?” she asked him.

  “Say what?” Mr. Miller shouted, leaning forward.

  Mrs. Miller halfway cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “Lexie needs you to translate something.” Sophie motioned my way. Every eye in the room landed on me.

  “No need to do it now,” I said, stepping toward him and making sure he could see my lips. “I can bring it by your house later.” I marveled at Sophie’s audacity, butting in about my letter and turning my wanting a little vacation into a search for my birth family and possible involvement with a midwife who was in trouble.

  Mrs. Miller stood. “We’re getting ready to go to Boise. To visit our son.” She was always to the point.

  “Let’s take a look at it now.” Mr. Miller smiled as he handed his empty plate to his wife and she headed to the kitchen. He was a happy man and always eager to help.

  James settled onto the far end of the mauve sofa, beside Mrs. Glick. I stood for a moment, frozen, not sure I wanted all of these people to know what the letter said. Mrs. Miller returned to the room.

  “Go on, Lexie,” she said. “We don’t have all day.”

  I put my plate on the coffee table and headed down the hall. Every eye in the room was no longer on me when I returned. They were all on the carved box in my hands.

  “Oh, my,” Mrs. Glick said.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Mrs. Miller plunked back down into the chair beside her husband.

  I pulled out the letter and handed it to Mr. Miller.

  “Let me have a look at that box.” Mrs. Glick abandoned her plate on the coffee table too and was inching her way to the edge of the sofa, her arms outstretched. I handed it to her.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” James asked.

  Mr. Schmidt, who sat beside Mrs. Glick, ran his hand over the carved top. “Looks like sycamore wood.”

  I’d wondered what it might be.

  “But it must have been carved when it was green.” He squinted at the box. “Years and years ago. You don’t see work like this anymore.”

  “Look at the turrets.” Mrs. Glick spoke loudly. “And the waterfall.” She pulled it away from Mr. Schmidt and held it so she could see the front. “And the flowers. They’re edelweiss.”

  Mr. Miller kept his eyes on the document as he spoke. “Edelweiss? Are you sure?”

  Mrs. Glick was too enthralled with the box to answer. I wanted to take it from her but turned my attention back to the letter. “Can you read it?” I asked.

  “Most of it.” Mr. Miller paused. “It’s to an Elsbeth. From Abraham, her father.” He squinted. “He says he’s leaving her a place called Amielbach when he dies in hopes she will return home someday.”

  A place called Amielbach. That must be the name of the house, the one carved into the lid of the box.

  “Does he mention anything about Pennsylvania?” Surely that was where the house was.

  “No. He doesn’t say where the property is.” Mr. Miller stretched his back. “The letter is written in high German, mostly. That’s what I learned as a kid. But there are some odd phrases like…” He read words that sounded as if they were German to me—wie and der. Then something like Esel am Berg. He lifted his head. “It means being perplexed by an unexpected situation. But the phrase isn’t high German. It’s considered a Helvetism, a colloquial saying in Swiss German, which is technically an Alemannic dialect.” I must have looked perplexed because he started to speak slowly. “It’s a dialect similar to what’s spoken by a group of Amish in Indiana. It originated in Switzerland, but it’s evolved over the years. And the language the Swiss Amish use today is oral, not written.” For a minute I thought he was going to dive into a full-fledged lecture about the development of German dialects, but then he stopped abruptly as if he remembered he wasn’t teaching.

  Sophie’s head swung around, and she looked me straight in the eye. It was a knowing look, but I had no idea what it meant.

  “It is from Switzerland.” Mrs. Glick hugged the box. “I knew the flowers were edelweiss.”

  Mr. Miller extended the letter. “He goes on and on about being disappointed that Elsbeth is giving up her dream of being a teacher and her opportunity to work as a tutor. Sounds like it was for a wealthy French family. But that’s pretty much it.”

  “Does it say why she gave up her dream?” I asked.

  Mr. Miller again skimmed the pages. “No, just that he’s sorry she did.”

  “Thank you.” Disappointed, I took the pages from him. The analysis of the language was interesting, but I was hoping for more information. Next I reached for the box, but Mrs. Glick hugged it tighter.

  I stretched out my arms and then clapped my hands together, as if I could command the box to come to me. “I didn’t know there were Amish in Indiana,” I said, hoping to distract her.

  She stood, the box still in her arms. “They came with the last wave from Switzerland, more than a hundred years after the first group of Amish.”

  “You could stop by Indiana on your way to Pennsylvania,” Sophie said softly as Mrs. Glick finally relinquished the box. “You might find some information there.”

  James half stood and then sank back onto the couch, his plate lurching backward with the movement, his roll tumbling to his lap. His eyes met mine. “Pennsylvania? Lex, what’s going on?”

  FOUR

  I averted my eyes but knew my reddening face gave me away. “How about dessert?” I asked brightly. I turned toward the hutch and, speaking over my shoulder, said, “Mrs. Miller, your lemon meringue looks delicious.” As my guests served themselves from the top of the hutch, James shot me a questioning look. I mouthed, “Later” and turned my head away.

  After dessert Sophie said she had a mother to check on and she would talk to me soon. James assured the guests that he would clean up; we both knew most of them needed a nap by now. One by one they left, telling me I was in their prayers and whispering “God bless you” as they descended the back steps, gripping the rickety rail.

  That left me and James staring at each other in a kitchen full of dirty dishes.

  “What’s going on?” he asked again.

  I positioned the plastic plug over the drain. “I told Sophie I needed to get away, and she came up with a wild idea.” I started the water.

  He pulled the plug from the drain and clutched it against his side. “You want to go away?”

  “Get away. I felt that way last night.” I honestly didn’t know how I felt today—except numb. I pointed at his hand and then back to the drain. He tossed the plug into the sink.

  I inserted it again and squirted out some detergent. “And then Sophie got a phone call about a midwife this morning.” I told him the whole story as I trailed my hand through the water, stirring up the bubbles.

  “Why do you feel like you need to get away?” His voice was hurt as he bent down and retrieved the wooden dish rack from under his side of the sink.

  I eased a stack of china into the basin and without looking at him said, “Sophie thinks I need to find
my birth family.”

  “Oh.” His voice was gentle now. “Are you ready for that?” James was the one who had been studying abandonment and attachment issues. I was the one who had been trying, at all costs, to avoid talking with him about those things.

  My chin began to quiver as I scrubbed a plate and lowered it into the rinse water.

  “Did the box bring all this up for you?” He swished the plate around and placed it in the rack.

  “I’ve wanted to search since high school.”

  “You never told me that.” His voice sounded hurt.

  “I feel more alone than ever.”

  “You have me.” His voice was tender.

  I nodded.

  James and I had been partners in chemistry lab in high school. Back then, he was the bad boy, partying on the weekends, smart-mouthing our teachers at school, and teasing me about my cap and modest dresses whenever we were together. His parents divorced when he was a baby, and his dad remarried and started a new family. By high school James didn’t have much of a relationship with his father at all. His poor mother was so busy making a living that James had enough freedom to get himself in trouble on a regular basis.

  Though I found him intriguing—and smart, much to my relief, given that he was my lab partner—he made me nervous with his wide grin and reputation as a partyer. Then one day, several months into our junior year, he surprised me by asking if he could come over to study. I told him no. He showed up that night anyway and sweet-talked his way into the house. Dad helped us with our chemistry, something he’d been doing with me all semester, and when we were finished James brought up his English essay on conflict resolution. Dad was happy to help with that too, eventually explaining at length the Mennonite stand of nonresistance. Before James left, Dad asked him to go to church with us the next Sunday. Much to my horror, he accepted.

  Slowly, as James insinuated himself into my home and my church, the two of us went from being enemies to being friends. For the sake of that friendship, we kept things platonic back then. Nine years later, we reconnected when he called me after he found out while at church about Dad’s diagnosis. Soon he asked me out to dinner, and in no time we were dating.

  “We should finish the dishes so you can get back home and study,” I said now.

  Though I was using tomorrow’s midterm test as an excuse, we both knew that I wanted to be alone, that I wanted this conversation to be over. How could I tell James he wasn’t enough? That I needed something more to fill my empty soul?

  He left soon after that, hurt clearly shining in his eyes. I hurried to pack my things. My plan was to go back to Portland for a week and then return here to Dad’s place to go through his things before I decided whether to sell the house.

  After Mama’s death I prayed to God even more than I had before. I never told Him how I felt about her dying; instead, I told Him all the things I would have told her, a sort of cosmic joke on Him. Because He allowed her to die, He had to suffer my endless chatter. But gradually I stopped sharing. And sometime, by high school, I’d mostly stopped praying too. Not altogether. Communing with God was a hard habit to break, and from time to time I would catch myself blurting out—silently—a quick prayer. But even those brief petitions eventually stopped being regular. And they stopped being intentional.

  It wasn’t that I no longer believed, but I decided that God wanted us to take as much responsibility for ourselves as we possibly could. For me, that meant concentrating on academics. On the laws of physics and chemical equations and algebraic formulas. On absolutes that made sense. The idea of God didn’t offend my rationality. What did was that there were no formulas and equations I could count on except for the laws of science. I decided I needed to take charge of me.

  As I shoved my things into my suitcase, an empty eeriness settled over the house, and its creaks and groans startled me. I quickly finished packing and zipped my bag. Hurrying down the hall, I heard Dad’s voice call my name. My heart raced as I turned and walked into his bedroom, but the sound I’d heard was only a branch from the maple tree scraping against his window.

  By the time I had slung my bags in the back of my Honda CR-V, dusk had fallen. The windmill was statue still, and beyond the backyard the orchard darkened. Even so, the ordered trees offered comfort. I stepped toward them, longing to walk between the wide rows where I played as a child while Dad worked. But then that moment of twilight, where the world is neither light nor dark, lit upon the orchard and grief swept over me again, stealing my breath and leaving me weak. I turned and climbed into my car instead.

  Fifteen minutes later, after having driven south on I-5, backtracking to the coffee shop by the Woodburn outlet mall, I powered up my laptop and googled “Amielbach”—unsuccessfully. My search for “Abraham Sommers” produced several possibilities, including a couple with ties to Switzerland—although none to Pennsylvania or Indiana—but as I followed them, I couldn’t determine which would be associated with the box or Amielbach or with me. It was quite the puzzle.

  Giving up on that for now, I quickly skimmed my emails. There were a few work-related messages, including several condolences from colleagues and a photo of a baby I’d delivered the month before, sent by the new father with a sweet thank-you. I filed it with all the other pictures, and then I closed my computer, picked up my latte, and headed for the car, moving past the series of store windows with their shiny displays.

  In all honesty, I wasn’t a big shopper. It was hard to break my childhood frugality. I’d decorated my apartment nicely but inexpensively, and with the exception of a single pair of jeans, I didn’t go for designer clothes. As I moved past the row of outlets now, however, I could feel my steps slowing. Finally I came to a stop, deciding that I could afford to treat myself to something nice for a change.

  I’d never been inside the Coach purse store, even though women at work talked about the deals they had found there. I just couldn’t bring myself to spend oodles of money on a bag when I could get one for a fraction of the cost somewhere else. I’d grown up with simple dresses, practical shoes, and inexpensive purses, but today I felt that spending some money on myself might make me feel better. Plus, it would be nice to have a designer bag if I did travel. Or if I met my birth mother. In an instant I picked back up on my fantasies from high school. As I walked through the doorway of the Coach store, I imagined meeting her. She’d be happily married by now, of course. Living in the suburbs of Philly. A professional woman. A lawyer or financial planner or something like that. It was hard for me to imagine that she’d had more children. Maybe she and her husband had decided not to. He wasn’t my father, but out of respect for me…

  “Good evening.” A clerk greeted me.

  I responded, thankful I still had on my dress clothes and heels. At least I looked the part of a savvy shopper.

  Another clerk welcomed me a second later. As I browsed through the store, the fantasy began again. I would meet my biological mother at a nice restaurant in downtown Philadelphia—unless she’d moved to Manhattan. Then I’d go there. I’d wear slacks and a silk blouse and high heels to show I was proud of the height she—or maybe just my grandmother—had passed on to me. I’d look like her. Finally, I’d look like someone. She’d have blond hair and brown eyes and a wide smile, and she would hug me right away. Her husband wouldn’t be with her because, selfishly, she’d decided to have me all to herself the first time we met.

  I sighed. My fantasies hadn’t changed much since high school. I picked up a tote bag. Two hundred sixty-five dollars.

  James would think it was ridiculous. He’d paid for college entirely on his own with a few scholarships and grants. He’d had to take off several semesters, working as hard as he could to save money to keep going. He would think it immoral to spend so much on something so trivial.

  I looked at another wall of tote bags and then turned toward the back of the store. A sky blue shoulder bag caught my attention. Three hundred fifty-nine dollars. It had two outside pockets plus se
veral inside.

  “Here’s a wallet that goes with it,” the second clerk said. It was the same color as the tote and cost one hundred twenty-nine dollars. Mama had one that looked a lot like it when I was little, although she bought hers at a flea market.

  I left the store with the Coach shoulder bag and the Coach wallet both secure in a Coach shopping bag. I felt a little better. At least for the moment.

  Twenty-four hours later I was the provider on call for my clinic. I was the youngest practitioner in our center, even though I’d been practicing for almost three years. Two of our clients were in labor at Emanuel Hospital, babies 245 and 246 by morning, God willing.

  This was a much different environment than what I’d witnessed assisting Sophie, but I learned a lot watching her, such as not to take up a lot of space at the birth, and that what was happening was never about me—it was about the baby, and then the mother, and then the father. I learned to simply tell a woman who said she couldn’t go on that she could. I learned that some women scream through childbirth and some women don’t. I learned that the ones who don’t aren’t in any less pain than the ones who do. From Sophie, I learned that giving birth was a natural, normal part of life. It was something I struggled to remember working at Emanuel with its fetal monitors, intrauterine pressure devices, ultrasounds, suction tubes, oxygen lines, IVs, blood transfusions, anesthesiologists, obstetricians, surgeons, and neonatologists.

  I also learned that, even though a birth was never about me, each time I searched for something. A reaction from the mother when she held her baby for the first time. A look from the infant as she searched her mother’s eyes. Acceptance from the father. Joy from the grandmother. After every birth I asked the mother to email me a photograph of her baby. Most of my patients did. I kept the photos on my laptop and sometimes clicked through them, one after another. I’d been a part of each one’s incredible journey into this world.

  When I arrived that Thursday night, a fifteen-year-old was laboring in suite four. I frowned. Another teenage birth. I hadn’t seen her in our practice, which probably meant she hadn’t received much prenatal care. Maybe she’d come to us late. I read the chart. The girl was considering adoption. The baby was three weeks early. I grimaced. A juvenile primigravida—meaning a first-time pregnancy—and early. She certainly wasn’t the youngest I’d seen, but still my heartbeat quickened.