The Last Midwife

by Sandra Dallas

  “Well, then, what do you have to say about it?”

  “I say it’s a disgrace to charge this good woman with the crime of killing a baby. A poor child is dead, and Mrs. Brookens had nothing to do with it. Why would she do such a thing? Anybody can tell you there are venal men who are trying to blame Mrs. Brookens for the death of the infant. They have a powerful hate. I suggest you look to her accusers, sir.”

  “You think one of them did it?”

  “You’ll have to ask them. That’s all for now. I will be pleased to talk to you after the trial is over and Mrs. Brookens is acquitted of this crime. Until then, she has my instructions not to discuss the case. I’ll make it hard on you if you speak to her again.”

  The editor looked alarmed. “But what if my wife goes into labor? She isn’t due for more than a month, I reckon, but the Sagehen knows that up here in the high country, babies come anytime.”

  Ted chuckled. “In that case, you have my permission to contact her, but if you ask her about the trial, I’ll instruct her to return home.”

  “I doubt she’d do that,” the editor said.

  Gracy smiled. “You don’t have to worry about that, Joe. I’ll be there for your wife. I just won’t answer your questions.”

  “Much obliged.” He started to turn away, then spotted Jeff and held out his hand. “Say, aren’t you the Brookens boy? Come back to stand beside your ma, have you? Where’ve you been? Maybe the Sagehen isn’t the only story here.”

  “I been farther west, looking to find a gold mine.” Jeff grinned.

  “Any luck?”

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s no story.”

  “Come along, boy,” Gracy said. “We’ll go back to the house. You coming, too, Mr. Coombs?”

  Ted excused himself, saying he had to get back to Denver. He’d be up in a few days to talk to Gracy, confer about the witnesses, plan a strategy. “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Brookens. There’s not much of a case against you.” He said that in a loud voice.

  Gracy only nodded and turned to Jeff. The sight of her son was the best thing in the world to take her mind off the manslaughter charge. They set off, Jeff between his parents the way they had always walked, not talking, because there were stragglers on the street. They turned down the trail to the cabin, and Jeff kicked aside several tin cans lying in the path. “Something’s been in your can pile, scattering everything,” he said.

  “Somebody sent by Jonas Halleck to spy. Or maybe it’s Coy Chaney,” Daniel told him. “Someone’s been skulking here at night, looking for trouble. I’ll pound him if I catch him.”

  Jeff turned to Gracy. “You in danger, Ma?”

  “No—”

  “She sure as hell is,” Daniel interrupted. “Somebody tried to kill her when she was out birthing the Boyce babies, felled a tree across the road where she ran into it. I’m thinking Jonas Halleck is behind that, too. They ought to put him on trial for trying to kill your ma. I told her no more babies till this is over, but you know her. She won’t listen to me.”

  “Then I reckon I’ll go along with her when she gets called out,” Jeff said.

  “Are you staying that long? You’re not here for just a day?” Gracy asked. Her face softened at the idea. She’d bake him brown-sugar cookies and dried apple pie, his favorite fixings.

  “I’ll stay as long as you need me, maybe longer. I’ve been doing some thinking. I’ve got things worked out.”

  “I’m glad, real glad,” Gracy said. “You tell us when you’re ready.”

  * * *

  She should have been mending, because Jeff had brought home clothes that needed it, but mending didn’t steady her nerves like quilting did. So later that day, Gracy sat at the quilt frame that hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room. Daniel had made the frame for her when they moved into the cabin, designed it himself because the cabin was too small for a standing frame. It was a large square made of slats of wood and suspended from the ceiling by ropes, and it could be lowered when Gracy worked on a quilt, then raised to the ceiling to keep it out of the way. She had taken the frame down the day before to soothe herself, and now she sat down to quilt for a few minutes.

  Gracy worked on her quilting until near dinnertime, then pulled on the ropes to raise the frame, but not before Jeff leaned over to view the quilt in progress. It was one of Gracy’s “people” quilts, as Jeff called them, made up of crude fabric figures set into squares that had been stitched together. The quilt top had been placed on top of a batting and a backing and set into the frame.

  “What’s that you’re working on, Ma?” Jeff asked.

  “Just a quilt. Something to keep my fingers out of trouble.” She tried again to raise the quilt frame, but Jeff held the ropes.

  “Who’ve you got in it?”

  Gracy shrugged. “Nobody, just people.”

  “I think that’s me.” He pointed to the figure of a man in front of a mountain. “Look, you made me a shirt out of that yard goods once.”

  Gracy shrugged, a little embarrassed. “You were never out of mind. Maybe I was making the quilt to keep you warm when you came home.”

  “You knew I’d come back?”

  “Of course I did, son. The ties between us are too strong.”

  “You were right.” Jeff studied the quilt. “Is that Pa in that square, with his gold pick?” He smiled at his father.

  “Looks like.”

  “And there’s Sandy, sitting right in the middle of what looks like the can pile.” Jeff pointed to a square, then moved his finger to another. “And you, Ma. I can see you down there in the corner, holding a baby. Who’s the baby?”

  “Any one of them, I expect. I’ve birthed so many.”

  “It’s not me, then?”

  “No…” Gracy stopped. She moved Jeff’s hands from the rope and raised the quilt. “It’s not done yet, but there’s no time for quilting with you here. I got to get to your dinner.” She secured the quilt but didn’t go to the dry sink or the stove. Instead, she sat down on the bench at the table and pointed to a seat in front of the fireplace, and said, “Take a chair.” He sat down. “I need to know first how you came to be here,” Gracy said to Jeff, leaning forward.

  Jeff nodded. “I guess you got the right. It was John Miller wrote me.”

  “John?” Gracy was startled. “How’d he know where to find you?”

  Jeff took a deep breath. “I couldn’t write to you. I told you I wouldn’t. I had to go off by myself, work things out.”

  Gracy nodded. Daniel had been a wanderer, too, before they were married.

  “I asked John before I lit out if he’d write to me and let me know how you were doing. He sent me a letter the day that dead baby was brought in and told me I’d best get home.”

  “You knew about the baby, then,” Gracy said.

  “Yes, but I didn’t know whose it was. Isn’t Mrs. Halleck kind of old to have a baby?”

  Gracy wouldn’t tell him about Josie. She hadn’t even told Daniel. Ted and John were the only ones she’d confided in. So she asked, “John knew where you were, and he never told us? Us worrying maybe you were dead or hurt?” Gracy’s voice was filled with disappointment.

  “I made him promise he wouldn’t.”

  “That’s not a promise meant to keep.”

  Jeff stared at the floor at a spot where a tin can lid had been nailed over a knothole. “Maybe not, but I said I wouldn’t write him at all if he told you. I wanted to be by myself, figure things out without you explaining them to me. I was angry, too, didn’t want anything to do with you for a time.”

  “You had no right,” Daniel broke in. He had been standing in the doorway, listening. “You had no right to go off like that and bring sorrow to your mother. Wasn’t right at all.”

  “And you, Pa, did you have the right?”

  Gracy stood and went to Daniel, putting her hands on his shoulders, kneading the old muscles with her strong hands. “It’s all right, Danny. We gave him cause. But he’s
back now. That’s all that matters. We’ll be a family again.” She turned to her son. “I tell you, Jeff, you walking into that courtroom was the happiest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s been the loneliest year of our lives.”

  “Not a year, Ma. Only two hundred thirty-seven days. I kept track.”

  “Two hundred thirty-eight,” Gracy told him.

  “That’s if you count the first day. I don’t, because I was sitting on Jubilee Mountain that day, looking down at the house, thinking, could I really go? I saw you come out of the cabin with my note in your hand, the one I wrote telling you I was going off. You looked around. But you didn’t look high enough. You didn’t see me.”

  “Would you have come back if I had?”

  Jeff shrugged. “I’d have gone away sometime.”

  “I expect he’s right about that, Gracy. There was just so much we could tell him,” Daniel said.

  Jeff stood and looked out the window, making it clear he was finished with the conversation. So Gracy moved to the fireplace, set kindling, then took a match to the wood, and it flared up. When she was satisfied the kindling was burning, she reached into the wood box for larger pieces. “I wasn’t expecting you, so it’s only what’s left over for dinner. But I’ll bake a pie for supper. There’s currants I picked only yesterday, a whole pan of them.”

  “I guess I’d come home just for your pie, Ma.”

  “Oh, go on with you. I was never known for my cooking,” Gracy said, clearly pleased.

  Jeff went to the fireplace and took down a piece of ore that he turned around and around, studying it. The mantel was filled with rocks—ore samples and a peach can of gold nuggets smaller than the tip of a baby’s finger. Then he asked his father whether he’d found a vein that last year. It was like old times, Gracy thought, the two men sitting, hefting ore samples, talking about gold prospects, while she hummed at her cooking, pleased to care for them.

  She listened to them for a time, then turned to thoughts of the hearing at the courthouse that morning. It had been harder than she’d expected, people staring, smirking, as if she hadn’t birthed almost every young’un in the room. But listening to Coy Chaney and Little Dickie Erickson talk about her as if she were the devil’s wife had almost undone her. A time or two, she’d had to sniff back tears.

  And if listening to the charges against her hadn’t been enough, she worried about the young women who would need her when their time came. Would they trust her now? Would they go to Little Dickie instead? He’d be better than no one, but the women wouldn’t like him. He was too brusque. He lacked sympathy and patience. He’d try to hurry the women along instead of waiting for nature’s own time. So some women might turn to a sister or a mother to deliver their babies. And then what would they do if things went wrong? Gracy would never forgive her accusers if a baby or a mother died because someone believed Gracy was a killer and wouldn’t send for her in time of need. And she would never stop blaming herself.

  She couldn’t worry about that now. There was the trial to think about. The charges weren’t going away as she’d hoped. She would be tried for manslaughter and maybe sent to jail. Ted Coombs was right, she knew now. The prosecutor would dig up everything she’d ever done wrong and throw it out there. Ted had asked was there anything he should know, something that would throw him off if he wasn’t prepared for it.

  Gracy shook her head. She took out a bowl and added flour and the mixings for biscuits. There was leftover stew in the larder. She could add a little water, more potatoes, and make it stretch. She’d cut some lettuce and wilt it with salt and vinegar. It wouldn’t be a dinner to brag on but not such a poor one at that, most likely better than what Jeff had eaten the last two hundred thirty-eight days.

  She stared out of the window at Jeff and Daniel, who’d gone outside to chop wood. They worked the way they had from the time Jeff was little. They bore such a strong resemblance to each other. Gracy had seen Daniel in the infant’s face the first time she held him—the chin, the ears bent forward. Only a Brookens had ears like that. The hair, though, that was like his mother’s. Even if it wasn’t apparent to others, Gracy had seen the connection. She always did with a baby.

  “You came home,” Gracy muttered. Despite the events of the day, she felt a surge of happiness. Jeff had come to terms with things, she thought. They would go back to what they’d been. But no, Gracy knew. Things were different now. They’d never be the same.

  Thirteen

  Earl, the stable boy, took down the sidesaddle that hung on the wall and carried it to the horse. Gracy had come to the stable before dawn because she wanted to visit the babies, now nearly four weeks old, that she’d birthed in Mayflower Gulch. She would have called on them earlier, but her accident, the hearing, and Jeff’s return had kept her away. Gracy wished she could take the buggy, which had been repaired, but the trail between the two cabins was not wheel-clear. Mayflower Gulch was closed in the middle, no way from one end to the other except on horseback. She would have to pick her way through the trees and across streams. If she took her buggy, she’d have to go down one trail and back, then take a second trail to the other cabin. So she’d asked Earl to saddle Buckshot, one of the stable’s horses.

  “No sidesaddle,” she told the hostler. “I’ll take a man’s saddle. You ought to know that by now.”

  “I just thought you might want to ride like a lady. You know, with what’s happened … what people will think…” Earl’s voice trailed off.

  It always surprised Gracy how folks looked askance at a lady who rode astride. There was no sense for a woman to have to sit in that uncomfortable sidesaddle position, her body half turned away and cramped, unable to dismount by herself. Where would she find a person to help her get off the horse at some lonely spot? She’d learned to ride astride in Arkansas, could race a mule with the best of them, even Daniel. She didn’t hold with being trussed up in a sidesaddle. Despite what Earl said, she didn’t care what people thought, not about the saddle she used, at any rate. She had a long ride by herself through the pines, and her comfort and safety mattered more than her reputation, tattered as it was now.

  Earl shrugged and took down a second saddle and swung it over Buckshot, while Gracy went to her own horse, Buddy, and rubbed his nose as if to tell him she was sorry he wouldn’t be going out that day. Then she mounted Buckshot, and Earl handed up her medicine bag along with a burlap sack that she tied to the saddle horn. The sack held jars of jelly, laundered cloths, and three baby quilts that Gracy and Mittie had made. They weren’t their fanciest work. There hadn’t been time for that, so they’d made string quilts. But they would keep the babies warm, and that was what mattered.

  She headed off in the borning light, too early, she hoped, for anyone to see her. Riding astride like she was, with her bag and sack attached to the saddle, she didn’t want folks to think she had left out. Besides, somebody out there might follow along and do her harm. There had been no more incidents since Gracy’s buggy hit the log felled across the road, but Daniel worried, and so did Jeff now. More than ever, they—and the sheriff—were convinced the accident had been the work of Jonas Halleck.

  Jeff had offered to go with his mother, and Gracy wanted him to. She couldn’t allow it, however. New mothers had questions of a personal nature, and they wouldn’t be honest with her if Jeff was along. What woman would ask Gracy how to treat cracked nipples or when to resume relations with her husband if a strange man was standing nearby? It was hard enough on the woman that her own husband might be listening. Besides, she wanted Jeff and Daniel to have their time alone.

  As Gracy left the last cabins in Swandyke, the sun hit the peaks of the Tenmile Range, shining on patches of snow higher up. Snow had been in the basins since Gracy arrived in Swandyke and might have been on those mountains since the beginning of time. As the sounds of the stamp mill and the smoke of morning fires faded, Gracy breathed in the mountain air, took in the sharp scent of juniper, and thought this was a place that God had made. She’d love
d the Colorado mountains from the time she’d first set foot in them. Now, she listened to the sound of wild things, the squirrels tsking at her, the birds pecking among the pine needles, a coyote or maybe it was a fox scavenging in the underbrush. This was where her heart dwelled, among the jack pines and the columbine and the pink summer’s-half-over, dwelled there as much as it did in the cabin with Daniel.

  If she were found guilty of the murder of the Halleck baby, she thought, she would have to leave these mountains. She’d be locked up in a prison somewhere, in a cell where she’d never feel the sun’s rays on her face, never see a one-flower gentian or a stalk of fireweed. She would die without the sun and the mountains, and without her to care for him, Daniel would likely die, too.

  She’d been in a prison once, back when the war had just started. Daniel was for the Union, but he hadn’t wanted to fight, knew too many Confederates to want to go to war against them. Gracy and Daniel had moved to California and then Nevada. It was the gold that called them west, but it was the war almost as much as the gold that made them stay. In California, there’d been tension between those who stood for the North and those for the South. Violence as well.

  Daniel and another Union man had been attacked by three men who called them turncoats and cowards and shot Daniel’s friend. Two of the instigators got away, but the third was arrested and charged with murder. Gracy didn’t know him, but the next day, she was called upon to deliver his baby. His wife was sickly, and when she asked Gracy to tell her husband about his new daughter, Gracy couldn’t refuse. She went into that jail, where half a dozen men were crowded into a single cell. The smell of unwashed bodies and human waste made her want to put her apron to her nose, and it was only with great effort that she didn’t. The husband sat on a bunk, scratching the graybacks that infested his body. “Don’t never tell my wife how it is here,” he said. “I can’t stand being locked up like this. I won’t never see my daughter. I don’t reckon I’ll last long enough.” And he didn’t. He and another man were shot down while trying to escape.