These Healing Hills

by Ann H. Gabhart

  Eating pickles was Betty’s answer to various complaints, from morning sickness to asthma. She pushed greens too in order to strengthen women weakened by bearing and nursing one baby after another.

  “For the potassium,” Fran said.

  “Yes. The people here don’t have the means to have fresh fruit all the time. They do have their vegetables and fruit in the summer, but they need better diets all year long. Some of them appear to subsist on gravy and biscuits.”

  “I suppose they have to make do with whatever they have.”

  “So they do, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enlighten them about proper diets and necessary hygiene. We have to make the changes we can.” They rode their horses into the creek bed and started climbing. When the creek was low like now, it made the easiest way up into the mountains. “That’s our duty as nurse-midwives.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “A better diet. Shoes so the children won’t get worms. Vaccinations. Emphasizing safety around the fireplaces. We suffer a bit with the heat now, but I can assure you these warm months are the best times here. Things get considerably harder when winter blows back our way. Ice and snow are not strangers to these mountains.”

  “Are you able to make the rounds then?” Fran remembered how sometimes a heavy snow could shut down Cincinnati.

  “Babies don’t check the weather when they decide to be born. We go where we’re needed. The horses have special winter shoes to help in the ice and snow. But if the horses can’t go, we walk. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one of those jeeps out here?”

  “They have a couple at Wendover and the hospital now.”

  “Named, I suppose,” Betty said.

  “Naturally.” Fran laughed. “Mrs. B does like naming things. Woody says one of them is Clara Jane and the other Diamond Lil.”

  “I could use a Diamond Lil about now.” Betty slowed her horse and pulled a handkerchief out to dab her face. “It must be going to storm, as close as it feels this early in the day.”

  “I hope so. Everybody’s sass patches need rain.”

  “See, there you are.” Betty shook her head. “Calling gardens sass patches. I’m beginning to think you must be from Harlan instead of Cincinnati.”

  “Do people come to the midwifery school from Harlan or here in Leslie County?”

  “Not as far as I can recall. Mrs. B brought in all her nurses. In the beginning, most were from England. Then she found a few New Yorkers like me to recruit. Mrs. B has a way of making it sound like such an adventure. Did she recruit you?”

  “A different woman presented the program. Said she was a frontier nurse in the thirties. The best time of her life.”

  “I suppose she promised you a horse and a dog too.”

  “I have the horse.” Fran stroked Jasmine’s neck and let her move over to a pool in the creek to take a drink. Betty let Moses drink too. “But how come you don’t have a dog?”

  “Never cared much for dogs. Way too many of them around here, with hounds on every porch.” Betty pulled on her reins and started up the creek again. “I guess you like dogs.” She said it like that might be a character defect.

  “I do, but I’ve never had one. My mother said town was no place for a dog.” Fran looked at the land around the creek. “Here seems a perfect place.”

  “A perfect place for the dog to bring home ticks and fleas.” Betty snorted. “I think Mrs. B put that in about a dog for every nurse, just to recruit those girls like you who have romanticized ideas of owning a dog. Back when England first went to war and most of the English nurses headed home for the war effort, she was desperate for nurses to fill their places. That’s why she started the midwifery school. But now with the war over—praise the Lord—we should have an abundance of staff.”

  “Brought-in women.”

  “You are hopeless.” Betty kicked her horse out in front.

  Fran smiled. She was hopeless, but she liked the mountain vernacular. The poetic sound fit with the hills and hollows. Granny Em’s rhythm.

  Cincinnati seemed far away as she followed Betty out of the creek and onto a rocky trail. The city might have a rhythm too, but few stopped to listen for it. Not even Fran when she was there. She’d been busy planning ahead. Everything she’d done had a reason for it. All leading to her imagined future with Seth. She wasn’t sure she’d ever stopped to take in the blessings of whatever moment she was in.

  Not that what she was doing now didn’t have purpose. It did, but here the very landscape made you stop and pay attention. A person had to look and listen when out on the trails. Your horse’s hooves clattered on the rocky trails and splashed through creeks. Birds sang you along the way and sometimes signaled your progress to those ahead. Flowers bloomed in abundance, watered by Mother Nature. Boulders and trees sometimes blocked the paths, and it didn’t do to think about what the blackberry bushes might be hiding in their tangle of briars. But most of all, a person had time to think while riding up and down the hills.

  At a cabin near the trail, a couple of children paused from playing in the dirt to wave. Betty reined in Moses and Fran followed suit. The mother came to the door carrying a baby. One delivered by Betty before Fran came to the district.

  “You’re out right early.” The woman stepped out on the stoop. “Are you needing a drink or some eats?”

  “That’s kind of you, Mrs. Newcomb. We’ll come back this way another time.” Betty knew how to talk with the mountain people, even if she didn’t embrace their ways. “But how is little Marcus doing?”

  “He’s thriving, Nurse Dawson.” When she held the baby up for them to see, he kicked his legs and giggled. “He’s done learnt to crawl. I have to set one of these’n to watching him so’s I can get my work done.” She nodded toward the little girls who had edged back toward the stoop closer to their mother. The oldest one might be five, but in the mountains, children learned responsibility early.

  “It’s good you have help then.”

  The woman smiled. “That’s ever bit the truth. I couldn’t make it without my Deena and Lydia here.”

  The two little girls looked like they got two inches taller under their mother’s praise.

  “We best be on our way.” Betty flicked her reins to start Moses moving.

  “You headed up to the Locke place?” Mrs. Newcomb asked. “I hear tell Sadie is punying around. I’m glad my girls do fine.”

  “Healthy children are a blessing.” Fran spoke for the first time as she turned Jasmine to follow Moses.

  “That’s the good Lord’s own truth,” Mrs. Newcomb called after them. “You tell Ruthena if she needs anything to let me know. Anythin’ at all.”

  Fran smiled and waved. She knew Mrs. Newcomb meant it. Neighbors on the mountain took care of one another. But then she could almost hear Betty and Willie reminding her that sometimes the neighbors carried on long-running feuds too. That was one of the things Mrs. Breckinridge told her nurses to strictly avoid. Feuds and paying any notice to moonshine stills they might accidently run up on as they went about their rounds. The nurses were to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye toward that sort of thing.

  They were there to serve the mothers and children who lived in their district. Sometimes the people’s cabins were within hollering distance of one another. Other times the houses were high in the hills, surrounded by trees and hidden from the world, like Woody’s house. A long climb from the center, but through a beautiful stretch of woods. Woody said Granny Em’s cabin was a half-hour ride beyond his home, even higher up.

  Granny Em told Fran she liked being high where she could just pitch her troubles out the window and let them roll clear to the hollow, never to be seen again. She did, as Mrs. B said, seem to favor Fran. She’d stepped out from beside the oak tree in the center’s yard to meet Fran when she first rode up to Beech Fork a couple of months ago.

  When Fran asked her how she knew she was coming, Granny Em laughed. “I don’t have a special seer’s eye, if that’s what you’re hinting a
t. But I got eyes and ears to watch the signs. A body can figure out a heap of things by watching the signs.”

  Fran had no idea what signs she could have watched to know when Fran would arrive at the center. But then, there was the mountain girl told to give up her bed at the center. And Woody had been at Wendover and had probably heard she was on the way. The boy wasn’t exactly closemouthed about anything he knew.

  She had no doubt he had shared with everybody on the mountain how inept she was at milking, since several of the women had given her some hints on dealing with a cranky bovine.

  They still had a mile or so to go when a loud hello sounded behind them. They turned their horses to wait. That kind of hailing generally meant somebody had a need.

  A man riding a mule bareback appeared around a bend in the trail. The mule’s neck was lathered around the reins.

  “The folks down yonder said you headed up this way,” the man said when he got closer. “Good thing. Saved me some time.”

  “Is your wife having problems, Mr. Nolan?” Betty asked.

  They’d checked on Mrs. Nolan the end of last week. The girl, little more than a child herself at age seventeen, was expecting her first baby.

  Ira Nolan wasn’t much older and looked beside himself as he pulled up his mule. “Her back was hurting some last night and then today she started punishing bad. My sister said I better fetch you even if it weren’t the time you set for it all to commence.”

  “Babies don’t always cooperate with our time schedules, Mr. Nolan. But don’t you worry. She’s far enough along that everything should be fine even if she is in labor.” Betty used her most calming voice.

  “You are coming now, ain’t you?” He looked between them with near panic that they might not listen. “Both of you.” He settled his gaze on Fran. “My woman was askin’ for you.”

  Betty spoke up before Fran could. “I’ll come now, and Nurse Howard can come after she checks on a sick child.” Betty turned away from the man toward Fran and lowered her voice. “Since this is a first baby, I’m sure you’ll have time enough to make that visit. You best go on to check on Em too if nobody’s seen her up that way. From there you can take the trail across the hill to the Nolans instead of going back down to the center. That will save you a good hour.”

  “Do I know that trail?” The mountain paths still confused Fran.

  “You have your map, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Fran thought of the paper carefully folded in her saddlebag with the traces and creeks marked. She’d studied it time and again, but most of the markings remained a mystery to her.

  “It’s time you figured out how to find your way on the hills.” Betty’s mouth tightened with irritation. “Try to keep the direction in your head. The Nolans are due west of the Locke cabin.”

  “All right.” Fran looked around. The sun was to her face. East. She just had to go opposite that.

  Betty sighed as she turned Moses to follow Mr. Nolan. “Try not to get lost.”

  9

  Jasmine whinnied and jerked her head when Betty turned Moses to follow Mr. Nolan back down the trail. Fran kept a firm hold on the reins. The horse tossed her head again and only grudgingly started on up the mountain.

  She was a surefooted little horse but ready to shy at most anything. So far, Fran had only been unseated once, when a dove flew out of a rhododendron bush directly in front of them. Fran, as startled as Jasmine by the sudden whir of wings, slipped out of the saddle when the horse reared, with no harm done except to her dignity. Jasmine hadn’t even run away, but turned to nuzzle Fran’s shoulder as if wondering why she was sitting on the ground instead of in the saddle.

  “I hope you know where you’re going, little horse.” Fran leaned down on the horse’s neck close to her ear. “I’m not sure I do.”

  Fran could get lost in a minute. She tried hard to get her directions straight. East, west, north, and south. But where she needed to go was often some spot between north and south, east or west.

  Betty told her to learn the creeks. Cutshin. Bear Branch. Chokeberry. The creeks all ran into the Middle Fork River. At least Fran did know the river. She’d even learned the best crossing places. But the creeks were different. They all looked alike. Water tumbling over rocks, downhill. Her father had once told her about the Continental Divide, where all the water flowed south on one side of it and north on the other. Or was it east and west?

  That didn’t matter here in the mountains. She did know up and down. Just not north and south. At least not after the trail made a few twists and turns.

  East and west, she reminded herself. Check the shadows. Moss on the north side of the tree. North, east, south, and west. That should be easy enough.

  Right now she wasn’t worried. Unless she’d gotten completely off the trail, the Lockes’ place was not that far up ahead, and if need be, she could retrace her way to the center. What made her throat tight was the thought of finding her way over the mountain to the Nolans’.

  She didn’t want to let Lurene Nolan down. Betty could handle the birth, if indeed Lurene was in labor, but Fran had promised the young woman to be there with her. Betty was all business and Lurene needed somebody to hold her hand and let her know she could get through this. Her mother had died some years before of tuberculosis, leaving a young Lurene to grow up in a house of men. Her father and brothers were little help to her now. She needed a woman’s touch. And not just Betty’s businesslike get-this-done-and-over-with touch, but a sweet touch of love. Fran could almost see Betty frowning at her silly thoughts.

  A baby coming safely into the world was their business. Not filling in for mothers long dead. Other women in the neighborhood could do that if such was needed. But Fran couldn’t see why their business couldn’t include a gentle touch of caring. One woman to another.

  Fran could learn from the women. She had never carried and birthed a baby. Neither had Betty or most of the frontier nurses. It was no wonder the mountain women sometimes looked askance at them giving out advice on caring for their little ones with no hands-on experience with children of their own. Fran wanted to go past the textbooks and lectures. She wanted to embrace how the mothers felt. That would better equip her to help them deal with the labor and birthing pains.

  In the Cincinnati hospital, the doctors generally put the mothers into a twilight sleep to lessen the pain of labor. Births followed a more natural path here in the mountains. The mothers accepted and endured the pain of labor, but they welcomed the nurse-midwives to ease the baby’s path into the world.

  Fran caught a whiff of smoke right before she broke out of the trees into the clearing around the Lockes’ place. A sturdy two-story log house sat squarely in front of her, with various outbuildings around it. A garden patch looked good, in spite of the scarcity of recent rains. Woody had to be carrying water from the creek to keep it green.

  Smoke in the air meant Mrs. Locke was cooking or perhaps heating her laundry water in iron kettles over a fire in the yard.

  “Hello.” Woody swung down out of a tree to land in the path in front of Fran.

  Fran was ready with a strong hold on Jasmine’s reins. “You’re giving Jasmine a panic.”

  “She’s fractious for sure.” Woody reached to touch the horse’s nose. “Reckon I could ride her on to the house?”

  “Sure. My legs could do with a little stretch.” Fran swung her foot over and slid off the horse to the ground. “Don’t you have a horse, Woody?” When she thought about it, Woody was always walking when she saw him.

  “Naw. We have the mule, but he ain’t much for riding. Does a fine job plowing and hauling wood. That sort of thing. Ma traded off Pa’s horse after he passed. Said the Waynards over in the next holler needed her worse than we did. Pa always said Ma was generous to a fault. He pestered her some about that, but he didn’t really mind.” He stroked Jasmine’s neck and grinned over at Fran. “I’m hoping Ben will want a horse when he gets home. Make getting around these hills a mite easier.”
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br />   “I suppose so.” Fran handed the reins to Woody. Jasmine stood still for him to mount. “She never stands that still for me.”

  “She’s just tuckered out from climbing the mountain.” He looked around. “Where’s Nurse Dawson? Ma sent me out here to watch out for you in case you’uns needed help carrying your saddlebags or anything.”

  “She got called to a laying in.” Fran smiled as she walked along beside Woody on Jasmine. Betty wouldn’t like her using the mountain term, but Betty wasn’t here.

  “It’s good you come on. Sadie is punying around for certain. She won’t even go crawdad hunting with me at the creek. They’re plenty easy to catch right now with the water so low. You think it’s gonna rain soon?” Woody looked up at the sky and didn’t wait for her to answer. “The sunrise was kinda red this morn. That sometimes means rain on the way.”

  “I hope so. Our garden at the center could use a good soaking.”

  “Yeah. Ours too. I’ve ’bout broke my back hauling water for Ma’s tomatoes. And if the late corn don’t get a dowsing soon, we won’t have naught but nubbins.”

  Woody peered up at the sky again, where a few white clouds floated along and offered not the least threat of rain. The boy sighed. “Pa always said it rains easy when it’s wet and hard when it’s dry like now.”

  “Your pa sounds like he was a wise man.”

  “He was that. Everybody said so. He knowed a lot about everything, but he always said a man could learn more. That’s how come Ma is making me keep on with school.”

  “School’s in session now, isn’t it?” When Woody nodded, Fran went on. “Then how come you’re not there?”

  “A man can’t be expected to go every livelong day. I wouldn’t get nothing done if I did that. I figure I can learn all the teacher knows to teach me, going a couple days a week.” At the porch, Woody slid off the horse. “Mr. Harkins is fine with that. Claims it’s some quieter on the days I ain’t there. He’s about give up on getting me to talk proper. You know, not saying ‘ain’t’ and the like, but if I did that, folks would think I was putting on airs, sure as anything. I’ll wait till I go to lawyering school to start city speak.”