by Sara Dahmen
“He is,” she says, and follows my lead, filling the room with her companionable silence.
Chapter 20
11 August 1881
I sit in the golden sunlight of the late afternoon. Widow Hawks tinkers loudly in the kitchen. She insists on cooking supper, that I am to stay off my feet and rest another few days, but I want to help. Maybe if I try my hand at being a housekeeper again, I will have my decision.
Stay, or go?
All I know is my time in the West has made me prefer less pampering. I am still bleeding, and I feel faint when I stand for too long. Widow Hawks hovers nervously each day. She says her people do not typically have such difficult births, and she is uncertain about what to do.
There is a rumble of a voice in the house; the doctor must be back from his rounds.
“Where is she?” I hear him through the open window. There is more muted chatter, and then he darkens the sunlight over me. I look up. I do not have a bonnet on, but I do not care, and he is unreadable and black against the sun.
“You’re doin’ all right?”
I shrug. “Just tired.”
He crouches next to me, careful, as if I am breakable.
“You look awful pale. You’re still bleedin’?”
I nod, and trace the pattern of the wood on the chair. His hand comes to cover mine to stop my half-hearted picking of the grain. The touch is unexpected, and fills me with a strange, fuzzy tightness. It is as if I am newly awakened. I have long realized he is a tactile man, very much because he is a doctor. But I also know I respond to his touch now, as if my being has readjusted to my world. Emotions course through me quicker, stronger. It is incredibly disconcerting. I’ve spent my life curbing my questions, my fascination with learning, my unfashionable passion, and now the flood surges through me, urging me to swim in feelings and to forget about logic and properness. As much as I don’t like to admit it, I now delight in the doctor’s touch, more so than I recall. But at what cost?
“Mrs. Weber, I’m very sorry about the child.”
“It’s not your fault.” I do not like to think he blames himself. “Really, from what I understand, this is natural.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “You nearly died. I should not have let it go so far.”
We are quiet. I reflect on this. He is right. I know I was close to death, and that the recovery might be longer than is typical. The thought of what I might have lost: my friendships to him, Widow Hawks, Alice, Anette, Sadie, and even Kate and the others . . . it makes me weak to think of it.
Is that my answer?
There is so much I want to try and see and experience. I’m determined yet to thoroughly clean the house, to grow and harvest the garden. I want to get better at nursing. When I miscarried, I was fading without thought. I did not understand how the loss of my life was so near, and what it would mean to lose it. But I think I might, now. And I know, as surely as I know I like his hand over mine, that Doctor Kinney is the first doctor I completely trust. Perhaps I did before this. In fact, I know I did. But it was never so acute, nor so obvious to me.
“I was thinkin’ . . .” he starts quietly, breaking into my reverie. “We need to bury the wee babby. It’s too hot to wait. There is the small Catholic cemetery. My great-aunt Bonnie is buried there, along with a few others, and he could rest next to her. If you don’t have a preference, that is.”
I glance at him. “That’s fine.”
“You’re not even Catholic, are you?”
“No.”
He shrugs. “I’m impressed you’ve put aside your preferences for mine. What are you, then? Calvinist? Episcopalian?”
“Congregationalist.”
He nods as if he was expecting something like that, and then presses his hand flat against mine, trapping my palm against the wood.
“Mrs. Weber. The babe. It was very small. At first, I thought it’d died in the womb a long time ago for the size, but then you should have had a fever, and it would have festered and killed you.”
My heart stops, and my head jerks back, snapping a cord in my neck, agony shooting down my shoulder. I try to pull my hand out, but he has it trapped almost painfully against the wavy bark of the chair.
“You say Mr. Weber was ill. Often, and it was a lengthy illness. A weakness. And even if he was robust until his death . . .”
I refuse to look at him, closing my eyes, willing the tears to stay put, my chest to pump air in and out. What now? He’s asking the questions I feared. If only! If only I hadn’t miscarried! Then perhaps the babe would only be late . . . or small . . . or . . .
Damn this! Nothing works!
I thought to flee from prying eyes on my thickening waist. Now I face the same type of discovery, but for a different, inverted reason.
Which is worse?
Nothing—nothing good came of my damnable curiosity to try something. To live just for a few days with something a little brighter and happier than I’d ever had before.
He’s waiting for an answer, or anything I can give him, and I search my mind for the words, coming up with nothing sustainable, nothing worth trying.
“I don’t want to go back.”
It’s not what I meant to say, and he shifts a little, though his palm continues to trap mine.
“Go back?”
“I don’t want to go back East.”
“I’m not askin’ about that. I’m askin’ about your husband. Your babby.”
My laugh is odd and bitter and tinny. “The child wasn’t my husband’s, if that’s what you’re getting at—as I’m sure you’ve figured.”
The admittance is a trap in itself, binding me to the truth, and I can feel the doctor tremble with it once, briefly. Perhaps he is only reacting to the shattering of my reputation, the crack of the shell of proper civility I wrapped around myself. Now will he send me East? I have given him his answer.
And I will go. I will go back and leave everyone else, and leave him, if he asks me to go. But I don’t want to. Faced with it, I have my answer.
“Whose, then?”
That he asks at all is a surprise.
“A man.”
“That much I can manage on my own,” he says harshly. “But—was it somethin’ else? A . . . an unwanted man?”
My other hand covers his, grasping it strongly. My chest feels tight, and my head still pounds and aches, but I know that I need to touch someone, and am desperately thankful for his sensitive ways. He is willing to continue looking for a way to save my character, to give me a reason beyond my wantonness to have come to such a low point. He still wishes to think well of me, and for a moment, I want to play along. I want to continue a lie, a charade of falseness that gives me the same quiet pity of the townsfolk. I could say it was a rape. I could ask him to tell everyone that it was Henry’s child. I could still live here under the guise of the proper, respectable widow. I’d have the adventure, the work, and a kind man to care and cook for. I’d have the friends I’ve made—more friends here than I ever had in Boston, and no one would be wiser.
But I can’t. I can’t feel the strong pull to him while also holding tight to a story that isn’t true. If I’ve ever flattered myself as one who liked to learn the root of a question, and searched for the answer to a problem, then I must stop pretending. I must give my own reality a voice.
“It wasn’t a man who forced himself on me, Doctor Kinney,” I tell him, my voice soft and muted. “And you’re right. The babe was the child of a lover. The cousin of my brother-in-law.”
“And you didn’t want to marry him? He didn’t care for you? Or the child?”
“He never knew,” I admit. “It was a brief affair, only a few days of . . . of enjoyment.” The word sticks in my throat, and I cough it out. “And it was mutual. We started and parted ways understanding that it was simply a . . . an exploration. I’d never had relations with anyone but Henry, and those were . . . ah. Few. I . . . I wanted to learn. And I didn’t think I could conceive anyway, at least not w
ell.”
“And you didn’t think to tell him?”
“I didn’t love him. I didn’t wish to marry him. What would it have served? He might have felt beholden to propose, and I might have been tempted to say yes. To bind myself to another plain, cold union . . . Anyway, I couldn’t.”
“And with Mr. Weber already gone, it would have been quite apparent what had happened. This—the job, this life. It was an escape.”
He slips his fingers away from mine, and the air under my hand is cool and empty.
“So, you hid here to preserve your properness, your widowhood, and respectability.”
I nod once, staring at the prairie dust flaking onto my boots. I know I am foolish and weak, and stupid for putting so much stock into appearing so perfectly refined.
“And why wouldn’t you tell me this when you were bleedin’ out? It could have meant your death. I would have known it was a miscarriage from the start, for how early it was!” His words are a lash and a question filled with sadness. “Couldn’t you trust me even in your time of need?”
That he feels inadequate now, in the middle of my confession and revelations, jolts me hard, and I twist to look at him fully. He gazes over the garden, with its leafy, heavy, wide squash leaves, the maroon and green of the beet fronds, and the climbing, weeping beans. The slash of his mouth is set, and the trickle of small lines around his eyes are smooth in the light.
“I trust you. I did. I do. I asked for you from the start when I began to bleed.” Why do I say this? Does my word even matter? Will he ever believe me? Will he understand that most of what holds my tongue is the properness of society, the careful cultivation of upright virtue I tried to emulate before and after my marriage?
He heaves a sigh and shifts so he’s sitting on the ground next to the chair, his arms folded around a knee, looking almost forlorn.
“You told me all this, you know. Me and Esther. When we were tryin’ to keep you awake. You answered the questions, but the answers didn’t always match what you’d said before.”
I want to bury my head in my skirts and settle for my hands. “Then why are you asking me now?”
“I wanted to hear you say it—if you’d say it—when you were aware. If you’d tell me the truth of it. But I still have a wonder . . . I wonder why you didn’t simply have it cut out when you were in Boston. Surely there are practitioners there who could you. And you’d continue on, as if there never was a child or a lover. You’d have carried on as a modest, appropriate widow and no one would be wiser. Why here? Why this hard life?”
His questions are allowed, but I wish he wouldn’t ask. Can he not just be satisfied with my answers, and my simple admittance? Why must he want to understand it all?
“I knew an abortion to be dangerous. And it’s illegal.”
The doctor gives a short nod. “I know. The American Medical Association was on a trail to illegalize it startin’ in ’57, well before I started my apprenticeship.”
“And there’s little information on it,” I add, suddenly wishing to vindicate myself and my actions, explain my desperation. “The Comstock Act has banned the pamphlets on anything to do with . . . with sex.”
The doctor looks up sharply, but he doesn’t frown. Instead he leans forward. “You understand the laws, then? How did you find—”
“The library. There are a few medical books there that hadn’t been banned, or a librarian hadn’t confiscated them yet, so I pieced together some of what could be done. And I asked my friend Lucille. She was always good for knowing things a lady shouldn’t know. It sounded very dangerous. Worse than giving birth.”
“It is, that,” he agrees. “Dr. Ed Kellogg and his wife Delia are well-known over in Helena for handlin’ abortions. I think he’s on trial yet again for another woman’s death. You truly did try to teach yourself such things? A woman, learnin’ the trade?”
“Henry didn’t like it,” I say. “He didn’t like when I tried to find answers to his illness, and he said I could only continue doing so if I didn’t tell the doctors my theories. It embarrassed him, to have a wife who liked to learn so much. I tried to shut off my interest. I truly did. But then with his sickness, and later, with the babe in my belly . . . research seemed the only thing to do.
“And I know childbirth is just as dangerous, sometimes,” I continue, surprised he is handling my revelations so pragmatically and quietly. Hope inexplicably rises in my blood, shoving away the tendrils of pain in my womb. “But I thought I’d take my chances with it. So, I couldn’t stay. I had to . . . hide. As you say.”
“It might have worked,” he says slowly. “Had you not miscarried. I might never have known.”
“I know.”
“And would you ever have said anythin’?”
“Would I need to?”
He shrugs, and shifts to look over the prairie. His deliberate movements, calculated to keep us separate and our eyes unlocked, slaps my chest. It is exactly what I feared: avoidance, judgment, disgust. Even here, I must face the consequences of allowing myself to be free with my feelings.
What a stupid woman I am. What a failure—even with all my learning.
“I suppose . . . you had no reason to trust me with the truth,” he says calmly, surprising me with his stoic comment. “And I . . . I know what it is, to be in the city and try to fit in . . . and what it means to be unable to do so.”
“But—”
“Let me finish!” he says, with a touch of his Irish heat. “I cannot fault your reasons. I am perhaps more fascinated that you would choose this, that you would take it upon yourself to leave the ease of Boston to save your reputation. That you’d teach yourself about the science, and be careful. It is what a properly bred woman would do.”
“Take a lover in the weeks after her husband’s death?” I ask bitterly.
“You were grievin’.”
“Not in the way you think.”
“Whether you were upset with the loss of Mr. Weber or the loss of the life you’d built and planned, it makes no difference.”
“So . . .” I feel I must ask, and I worry I will beg him if I don’t like his answer. “So, you’ll keep me on?”
He finally looks up at me, the blue eyes bright against the yellow and brown of the prairie.
“Of course I will. Unless you’ve any other secrets? A penchant for killin’ employers, for instance.”
Relief rains in me, stealing my breath and my heartbeat all at the same time. “No, you’ve managed to discover everything.” Except, perhaps, the way his nearness makes me flutter. That, however, seems completely irrelevant.
“About your babe.” He spins the conversation back to the beginning without preamble, as if we have not just delved into the depths of my lacking character, enormous shortcomings, and mistakes. I’m not sure what to make of his attitude, but he continues as if the discussion is purely natural. “We’ll bury him next to my auntie.”
That he will do this, even knowing the child is illegitimate, collides together with the relief. How can I ever repay him such kindness?
“I’d be honored,” I whisper, and then we are quiet together. I wonder if he too reflects on the strange way of life and death, as the prairie grasses undulate in ribbons against the hot August heat, spreading out before us like an endless sea.
Chapter 21
12 August 1881
Widow Hawks and the doctor decide I can finally have a bath, and I’m glad. The old blood on my skin is starting to stink badly. Doctor Kinney spends the evening hauling water up the stairs. I do not mind that it will be a cool bath, as the August heat is nearly unbearable today. The burial will be in the afternoon tomorrow, when the sun is lower.
We are all together at the doctor’s house still; me, because he refuses to let me leave, and her, because she refuses to tarnish my reputation. It’s laughable, now that they both know how disreputable I am, but they seem to be willing to shield all of Flats Junction about the truth of the stillborn child. I am grateful for them
both.
Widow Hawks takes me into the washroom and helps me with my clothes. I am to bathe completely nude to wash away any remaining crusted blood. Dried, pale streaks of it still run down my thighs.
The dark curtain is drawn between the tin tub and the door, but she sits next to me, ever wary of me fainting. We are quiet but for the sloshing of water along the sides of the tub. I look at her, where she sits serenely and brushes down my cleaned dress. Below, the doctor putters in his lab, the echoes of his tinkering audible all the way up the stairs.
“Why are you called Esther?” I ask.
She looks up and smiles. “My husband was Welsh, and he liked the name. I was called Esther Davies until his death, though some called me Esther Flies-With-Hawks. And then people started to use my old name, in a way.”
“Which do you prefer?”
She shrugs indifferently. “I am all of them, so it is no matter.”
I look again at her, at her lined face and gentle eyes, and I reach out a wet hand to touch hers.
“Thank you for being as a mother to me.”
She nods, and I press on. “I’m sorry Kate does not seem to treasure you as a daughter should. I wish I could do or say something to change that.”
She shakes her head, resigned and yet still content. I do not know how she manages the balance.
“Kate wishes to be seen as something she is not. I am proud of my daughter, and how she has made a strong life for herself. But she refuses to recognize her situation, that her half-native blood is both intimidating and sympathetic to the townsfolk. She’s been a success. They see her as one of them as much as their prejudices allow. No one harasses her, nor tries to hurt her. Still she dislikes to have me in town, as a reminder of her ties to my people. I suppose someday I must leave, must drop away to let her be. Maybe then one of the men might marry her, though I do not know if she wants to be married.”
“I think Doctor Kinney might,” I say softly, and am surprised at how difficult it is for me to say these words aloud, as if saying them makes them true.
