The Midwife of Hope River

by Patricia Harman

  “Snow for Christmas! Sasha and Emma!” I exclaim, dancing around and rousing them into a frenzy. I dress quickly, pull on my boots, and go out to feed Moonlight, then take the dogs for a walk up the back hill to cut a small pine tree. I even fall backward in the snow, creating snow angels.

  Last Christmas I didn’t have a tree, didn’t celebrate at all. Mrs. Kelly was dead. Ruben was dead. Nothing to celebrate, really. It was bitter cold, and the frozen ground was as bleak as my soul.

  Now back in the house, I prop my small pine in a bucket of spring water and craft paper chains from colorful ads in the Ladies’ Home Journals I found in the attic. For icicles, I cut foot-long pieces of thick white yarn, and, since I don’t have a star, I attach one of Mrs. Kelly’s wooden angels at the top. My project takes most of the day.

  “Don’t you think the tree looks nice?” I ask Emma and Sasha as they sprawl on the braided rug next to the heater stove. They tilt their heads back, considering; then Emma stands up and licks my hand. Buster, my calico, snoozing on the back of the davenport, is unimpressed.

  Last winter, I cried all the time, cried because I missed Mrs. Kelly and Ruben, cried for Lawrence and my mother and father and all the others long gone to me. The tears could have filled a washtub. Even the pregnant women stopped coming around, not that I was in any shape to help them.

  The rest of the season was a long hibernation, but in spring I woke up. Sally Feder, who’d given birth to twins with Mrs. Kelly when we first moved here, was pregnant again and asked me to help her. Sally was a big, calm woman with nice hips and utter sureness in her body, so I picked up my bruised heart, stuffed it back into my chest, and went back to work as a midwife.

  Calamity

  William MacIntosh was right. For three days it snows, a real blizzard, and the only time I step outside is to milk Moonlight. Then at noon today the sun comes out and, like the Count of Monte Cristo, I’m released from the dungeon, given back my life.

  “Let’s go sledding, dogs!” I dress hurriedly, pull on my boots, coat, scarf, and mittens. In the barn I find a sheet of old corrugated tin and struggle through two feet of powder up the back hill.

  “Hi-ho, world!” I shout. “I’m raised from the dead!” I shout some more. “Hi-ho. Hi-ho!” There’s an echo, and I’m just happy to hear a human voice, even if it is my own. “Hi-hooohhhh! Hi-hooohhhh!” Over and over again. The dogs leap up on me and then wallow in the deep white.

  The first trip down the slope is awfully slow as I pack the run.

  The next jaunt is better.

  The third ride is really fun. I stand grinning at the top of the rise, panting from the exertion, my cheeks flushed, my nose running, my knit tam half off.

  The fourth excursion is slick as slime.

  On the fifth trip I rip my left calf open on the corner of the rusted metal.

  “Damn!” I say to the dogs, not yet aware of what’s happened, thinking at first that I’ve only torn my thick wool trousers. Then the blood comes and finally the pain.

  “Damn! Damn! Damn!” I curse some more, and the swearing seems to help.

  “Oh, Emma, look what I’ve done!” Emma bounds over and licks my hand, then noses the blood, but I shoo her away. The barn is an eighth of a mile away, and beyond that is the house. Already I’m chilling and my damp clothes begin to freeze. If I could find a stick for a crutch it would help, but I’m out in a field without trees or bushes. I try first to move my knee, and though the pain brings tears to my eyes and I swear like a sailor, it still bends.

  For the next hour I scoot, hobble, and limp toward the house. The dogs follow, and when I look back, they are licking at a trail of red in the pure white snow.

  “ ’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house” . . . blood and tears. The gash on my leg is as long as my thumb, with a flap of skin a quarter inch deep. A tight pressure bandage, made from a dish towel, stops the bleeding, and I consider sewing myself back together with the suture from my birth kit. But my satchel is upstairs and anyway, I don’t have the courage to stick a needle though my own flesh.

  Since the sides of the wound come together, I pour a little soap and water into the tear, rinse it out, place a goldenseal compress across it to help prevent infection, and tie on a new bandage, hoping it will heal. Eventually I make myself a splint and hobble into the pantry to find some Bayer Aspirin. The bottle says to take two, but I take three, hoping it won’t kill me.

  It is never fun to spend Christmas alone, despite what I told Bitsy, even if you’re a nonbeliever. Last year, the holiday passed in a fog. This year I have a tree, but with my injury I’m in no mood to celebrate.

  I light the kerosene lamps, build up the fire, and, after I hobble out to feed the cow and chickens, lie back on the couch. The little pine in the corner looks so forlorn, all decked out like a streetwalker with nowhere to go. Emma and Sasha stare at me with big eyes. “Okay, guys, we can at least sing.” My mother’s old hymnal is in on the bookshelf with her Bible, just within reach.

  “Any requests for your favorite carol?” I ask Emma. Sasha raises his eyebrows, but neither makes a comment. “Okay, then, we’ll sing them all.”

  “O, come, all ye faithful,” I begin, “joyful and triumphant.” I’m not very joyful; in fact, I almost choke on my tears, remembering times my family stood around the piano, my mother playing and my father singing in his bright baritone with his head thrown back. “O, come ye, o, come ye to Beth-le-hem!” He wasn’t a gambler yet or much of a drinker. That came later.

  Then there was the year with Lawrence when we strolled along the Lake Michigan docks on Christmas Eve caroling to anyone who would listen. “Come and behold Him, born the king of angels . . .”

  Even in Pittsburgh, in the good years, when Mrs. Kelly and Nora and I lived together and half our friends were Jewish or agnostics, we sang the old carols, celebrating not so much the birth of Jesus as our collective hope for light in a dark world.

  “It’s a pagan festival!” Ruben would laugh, but he knew all the words and sang louder than the lapsed Christians.

  I swipe my tears with the back of my hand and determinedly sing on. “The first Noel the angels did say was to certain poor shepherds in fields where they lay.” I sing louder and louder, banishing the memories, one song after another banishing the ghosts of Christmas past. “It came upon a midnight clear.”

  The dogs howl with me, both of them now standing next to the sofa, their snouts pointing up like wolves. “Whooooo! Whoooo!” I wail with them, egging them on. Buster escapes up the stairs, his hair standing on end. “O, come, all ye faithful!”

  I’m singing so loud, I don’t hear the sound of a car whining up the hill. I don’t hear the footfalls in the snowy path to the house. I don’t hear the first soft knock on the door.

  13

  Visitor

  I’m in the middle of “Star of wonder, star of night” when the beagles start growling and run for the door. Someone knocks again, louder. My face goes hot and my stomach cold.

  I have nothing on but my long johns with one leg rolled up above my knee, my camisole, and Nora’s old red silk kimono. On my feet are wool socks with holes in the toes. I can’t imagine who would make a social call on Christmas Eve. Maybe it’s the traditional stranger you read about and I must let him in and give him dinner or it will be bad luck all next year. Realistically, I know it must be about some woman in labor.

  “Who’s there?” I wrap my kimono closer and pull my long underwear down over my cut.

  “It’s Daniel Hester. I saw your lights.”

  The vet? Possibly he’s passing this way after tending a sick horse, but the intersection with Raccoon Lick and Wild Rose is a half mile away. I crack the door and find him standing on the porch with a bottle of booze swinging in his hand, totally illegal.

  “Where’d you get that?” I ask, indicating the glass container with a nod. “You could get arrested for violating Prohibition.” He’s wearing a dark brown trench coat with his brow
n felt hat pulled low on his head and already smells like booze, but his stance is steady, and without asking he steps out of his rubber boots and walks in. “The music sounds great. You have a nice voice, and the beagles do too!” He smiles at his little joke and flashes his strong white teeth. (“All the better to eat you with, little Red Riding Hood,” comes to me.)

  “Were you really making a sick call on Christmas Eve?”

  “No, just lonely,” he says without embarrassment, looking round the room.

  “What about your wife?”

  “My wife?”

  “The lady at the window . . . in your kitchen.”

  “Nah, no wife. She’s my part-time housekeeper.”

  “So you thought I might want some company?”

  Hester ignores my question. “I like your Christmas tree. Reminds me of when I was a kid. We made those colored paper chains in my one-room schoolhouse in upper New York State. Got colder than hell up there. Sometimes forty below. Coldest I’ve seen, since I moved south, is thirty below. What happened to your leg?”

  I look down at my lower limb and notice the blood seeping through my long johns. Not a pretty sight.

  “What happened?” he asks again.

  “Cut it on some corrugated metal this afternoon. It’s okay.” I don’t mention the sledding. “I can get around. All I need to do is get to the barn and back.”

  “Can I look?”

  I feel like saying “Do you have to?” On the other hand, he is almost a doctor, and this is like getting a free house call.

  “I guess . . . Will you make me pay with more veterinarian assistant jobs?” I think this is funny, but the vet is all business, leading me back to the sofa, sitting me down, picking up my ankle, gently removing my crude bandage.

  When he gets down to the laceration, we both wince. It’s an evil-looking wound, and the edges that I thought had come together are now peeling apart.

  “I need to do something about this,” Hester says as he stands up and puts his coat on. “My bag is in the Ford.”

  I contemplate arguing, but he’s out the door.

  When he returns, he goes into the kitchen, washes his hands, and sits down in the rocker. He reaches into his black doctor bag and pulls out one of his curved needles with suture, a glass syringe, and a vial of clear liquid.

  “Is that numbing medicine?” I asked hopefully. If it isn’t, I’d better find something to bite on, like in the old cowboy movies when the Doc gives Tom Mix a stick to grip between his teeth.

  The vet looks at me. “You don’t think I’d stitch you without topical anesthesia, do you?”

  I shrug, thinking, Yeah, maybe; you didn’t numb Moonlight!

  Twenty minutes later, my cut is cleansed, dusted with some kind of antiseptic powder, stitched back together with black thread that makes my leg look like one of Frankenstein’s limbs, and bandaged with a clean white surgical dressing.

  The vet gives me a packet of the white powder from his bag. “In three days, remove the gauze and start dusting your wound with this on a daily basis. It might help prevent infection. You have to be very careful in the barn. Don’t get the wound dirty. You could get tetanus or lose your leg.”

  Is he kidding? The man has his back turned while putting his needle holder back in its case. Tetanus! I roll my eyes.

  “You ever have a rum toddy? Holiday cheer?” Hester holds up his booze bottle.

  My leg is throbbing, and I think that the alcohol might do me some good, but I remember what Katherine MacIntosh said about rumors. Did Mr. and Mrs. Maddock hear the vet’s car come up the road?

  I throw caution to the wind. “Okay.”

  The vet steps back on the porch and brings in a bottle of fresh milk. “A Christmas present,” he says with a laugh. “If you didn’t answer the door, I was going to leave it on the steps . . . Where’s the sugar?”

  I try to stand.

  “Keep your leg up. I’ll find it.”

  Through the kitchen door I watch him pour the milk into a pot and stir the coals in the cookstove. “What are your dogs’ names?” he calls over his shoulder.

  “Emma and Sasha.”

  “Like Emma Goldman? The anarchist?”

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  “My grandmother was a Russian immigrant. Sasha was Emma’s name for her lover, Alexander Berkman, wasn’t it? My gram told me the story of the riot at Homestead in ’92. How Sasha Berkman tried to assassinate Frick, Carnegie’s henchman, the dastardly opponent of the workers.” He says this in a mocking tone, and I wonder whether he mocks himself for knowing this history, his grandmother for her tales, or the union men who struck Car-negie Steel and battled the private security guards in hand-to-hand combat. If he is mocking the unions, it pisses me off. The struggles of workers and labor unions have been dear to me for the last fifteen years.

  A few minutes later he returns with two steaming mugs and his bottle of rum, which he sets on the floor near the sofa. I’m surprised and a little alarmed when he plunks down next to me, careful not to jiggle my leg.

  “You know, the neighbors may have seen you coming up the road. You can’t stay long.”

  Hester grins. “I cut my headlights.”

  That makes me smile. “What made you so sure I’d let you in?”

  He shrugs and looks away. “I wasn’t sure. Thought I’d give it a try.”

  The warm milk and rum go down easy. It’s the only alcohol I’ve had since the blackberry wine Mrs. Kelly made when we first moved here as grieving widows—but this is much stronger. One cup, I think, and this fellow will be on his way.

  He swallows the sweet liquid, nods with appreciation, and goes back to his story. “My maternal grandmother was Russian and my grandfather Polish. When they first came to the United States, neither could speak English. They took classes at the settlement house in New York City. That’s how they met.

  “My grandparents on the other side were German farmers, here since the 1700s. I told you we had a farm in upper New York State? My parents met at Cornell.” He recounts all this as though I’d asked him for his pedigree.

  Despite myself, I’m interested. “Did they both graduate from Cornell?”

  “My father took a degree in agriculture, my mother in teaching. That was in the 1880s.”

  “My mother was a teacher too.”

  The vet picks up his bottle, reaches over, and, before I can say anything, pours another dollop into my mug, then pours a larger one into his own and knocks it back. Both the dogs stand with adoration at his knee, and he ruffles their fur. Even Buster has crept back downstairs. They must know he’s an animal lover.

  “Want to sing some more?” he asks, moving over to the piano. I could have guessed that with such hands he’d know how to play.

  “I guess.” I’m already feeling the effect of the rum.

  For an hour we sing while the horse doctor bangs out the tunes. “Angels from the realms of glory, wing your flight o’er all the earth . . .”

  “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen . . .”

  At first I just recline on the sofa like a good patient, but later I hobble over and sit on the end of the piano bench so I can see the words in the vesper book. We are careful not to touch, not even our shoulders. The man smells faintly of pine and fresh mowed hay. We have another drink.

  “Okay, one more carol and you better go. Do you know this one?” I laugh. We are old friends now, thumbing through the hymnbook, singing in harmony.

  “ ‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.’ It’s one of my favorites. Longfellow wrote the words during the Civil War when he heard that his son had been wounded.”

  It’s so nice to talk to someone who would appreciate that bit of trivia or even know who Longfellow was. I have two other acquaintances in Union County who would be familiar with the New England poet: the pharmacist’s wife, Mrs. Stenger, and my nurse friend, Becky Myers, both college-educated women, but I haven’t seen either of them for months, not since my tr
ip to town in November. Katherine MacIntosh reads books too, but only romances. Bitsy reads well, but so far just my medical textbook. She won’t put it down.

  “I don’t remember this one. Go through it once.”

  I sing the first verse while he plays the piano.

  I heard the bells on Christmas Day

  Their old familiar carols play

  And wild and sweet

  The words repeat

  Of peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.

  Hester catches the tune and joins in on the second verse. It isn’t until the third that his voice breaks.

  And in despair I bowed my head.

  There is no peace on Earth, I said.

  For hate is strong

  And mocks the song

  Of peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.

  He stops there with tears in his eyes and when he stands, he almost knocks the kerosene lamp over. The man sways and holds on to the piano, then plunks back down on the bench.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.” He tries his half smile. “Those words, ‘For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on Earth’—for a minute I was back in the trenches with bullets flying over my head. I did things I’m not proud of, killed other men just to survive. They weren’t my enemies; they were someone else’s enemies.

  “There was this one guy, a big German blond, he shot down my horse. This was at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in 1918. I could have taken him prisoner, but I was so blind with rage, I bayoneted him three times. Blinded by fury . . . I think of it sometimes. He was a mother’s son. There was no reason for it.” He shuts his eyes tight and swings his head as if to banish the vision. “I’d better go.” With one hand on the piano he lurches to his feet again.

  “You’d better not!” I catch him in my arms to keep him from falling over. For a second we stare at each other, but it’s only a blink.