The Midwife

by Jolina Petersheim

  A flock of crows cawed, dissonant with the community’s lilting hymns. The water made my nerves tingle. The material of my dress swirled behind me and then sank as I walked deeper into the creek, resisting the urge to gasp from shock. Sound seemed heightened; colors appeared sharper. My daughter shifted languidly in my womb, as if the water had awakened her senses too. Fannie took my hand. Her fingers clutched for mine, seeking their warmth.

  The singing ceased as abruptly as it had started. The silence somehow made me feel exposed, almost ridiculous for demanding that I be submerged in a cold, wash-out creek when we could have sprinkled my lowered head in shelter and in warmth. I glanced up to see the three deacons standing on the creek bank, their arms folded. They wore black pants and black coats with the collars pulled up around their ears. Some of the women—Esther Glick, Anna Miller, and Ruth Erb—wore black bonnets with the regulatory pleated two-inch brims. This helped to conceal their eyes. But their lips appeared so dour, I wondered if they would truly welcome me into their cloistered community with a dip in water and a few well-placed words.

  Fannie squeezed my hand. I squeezed back and smiled, although my features trembled with fear. I shifted my gaze from the community rimming the bank to Bishop Yoder, who had begun to speak in Pennsylvania Dutch. At first, Fannie tried to interpret for him, but I shook my head, letting her know it was all right to stop. I wanted to immerse myself in the words of another language, in the customs of this antiquated world, where I prayed all of my troubles and sins could truly be forgotten, giving my daughter and me hope to begin again.

  Bishop Yoder finished speaking. Water sloshed around him as he moved toward me. Fannie touched my forearm and then stepped back, trying to find her footing amid the slippery rocks. The bishop put his arm around my back and motioned for me to cover my nose. I did and looked to the sky, watching the crows’ black bodies cyclone upward.

  “Auf deinen Glauben den du bekennt hast vor Gott and viele Zeugen wirst du getauft im Namen des Vaters, des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes, Amen,” Bishop Yoder said.

  Then he dipped me backward. The movement was as graceful as a dancer’s, although Bishop Yoder had never danced and, other than that starlit waltz with Ernest Looper, neither had I. The cold crested over my head, blocking all insecurity and sound. I felt my baby ripple inside my womb. It was difficult to tell where the torrent buffeting my body ended and her movements began. When the bishop brought me to the surface, warmth flowed out of my loins, starkly contrasting with the frigid creek. I was too diverted to recognize it at the time, but the moment I was brought gasping from water to air like a woman reborn was the moment that my bag of waters broke. It was the first step in ushering my daughter into the world. It was the first step that would lead to her being taken from me, just as I had taken her from her parents.

  Amelia, 2014

  I come in from the springhouse, where I’ve been talking with Uriah, and look around to see if Lydie’s still in the kitchen. But Lydie’s not in the kitchen, nor in the dining room. I go up to our bedroom and find my roommate sitting on the bottom bunk. She’s writing so hard and fast, the pencil pokes through the paper on her lap, tearing the letter.

  “What’re you doing?” I ask.

  Lydie jumps and uses her elbow to block the page. A blush covers her face like a stain. “Just let me finish,” she says, “and I’ll help you.”

  Is she writing to Uriah? The idea bothers me more than I’d like to admit. If Uriah and Lydie had showed up at my high school last August, I know I would’ve thought they’d just walked out of the twilight zone. But somehow here, nothing’s really the same. My closest friend is a sixteen-year-old girl who still wears her hair in pigtails. The boy who holds my attention is one who I’d normally never give a second look.

  Testing Lydie, I point to the window, watching her out of the corner of my eye. “Guess who I just saw out in the springhouse?” Of course she doesn’t play along, just keeps looking down at her lap, so I say, “Uriah. He was talking to Wilbur Byler.”

  The pencil slips from Lydie’s fingers and rolls across the wood floor. The two circles of pink drain from her cheeks. “Were you able to . . . understand?”

  Picking up the pencil, I sit next to Lydie and duck my head so my hair won’t tangle on the springs beneath the top bunk. “No. But Uriah seemed pretty shaken up.”

  Lydie looks down again but doesn’t say a peep. Then she crumples the page and hurls the letter onto the quilt on her bed. “I’m going downstairs,” she says, smoothing out her dress.

  After Lydie leaves, I last about two seconds before my nosiness gets the best of me, which is pretty two-faced, considering my mom’s snooping through my diary to find out the things I’d never tell her is part of what drove us apart. I lean back and grab the letter my roommate’s thrown. I glance down at the scribbled sentences. But even with a class in introductory German, I can’t figure out a word. I know this is why Lydie didn’t keep hiding the letter when she saw that I’d come in our room, or why she didn’t mind leaving it out in the open when she went downstairs. But the name on the letter is easy enough to understand, even without knowing their foreign tongue. It’s a name that’s beginning to make my spine tingle: Uriah.

  Narrowing my eyes, I mash the letter up again and pitch it back onto the bed. I’m annoyed with myself and with my roommate, who must have a real flirtatious streak beneath her sweet Little House on the Prairie costume. Suddenly, everything makes sense: that time at breakfast when Uriah reached across the table to touch the top of Lydie’s hand; how Lydie cries herself to sleep almost every night; the way Uriah stalks around here like he’s carrying the world on his shoulders.

  I can picture Lydie downstairs in the kitchen, her big eyes—almost cowlike, now that I think about it—and spaghetti wrists as she chops up a vegetable to go with supper. Without the tranquilizer of Uriah’s attention and Lydie’s friendship (for I’m starting to wonder if she ever wanted to be my friend), I find that my numbness wears off and I just feel . . . sad.

  It’s always been like this: whenever I keep myself busy—flitting from project to project or from boy to boy with no time to think—I can forget about my mom’s ongoing disappointment, along with this hole in my heart that no amount of attention from the opposite sex can fill. But when life slows down like it has now . . . well, all of the pain surrounding my mom’s frustration floats to the surface. Even so, my loneliness makes me miss her so much that I’d rather face her anger than remain here in Hopen Haus, where I have no one but a baby in my belly to remind me of the trust that’s been lost in me and, if I keep this baby against my mom’s wishes, I will never get back again.

  Beth, 1996

  I had been Fannie’s assistant for two weeks when she asked if I would help her sister Charlotte if any labors took place after sundown. Charlotte was the Hopen Haus dorm mudder, since Charlotte was single and both Sadie and Fannie had husbands and families to go home and tend to every night. When a boarder drew close to delivery, it was necessary for Charlotte to have an assistant until another boarder could ride over to Fannie’s and bring her back. Fannie and Elmer’s house was only a mile from Hopen Haus, as the crow flies, but the switchbacks on the potholed road and steep incline made the distance seem farther. At times, a girl would be in labor, and there would be no way of contacting Fannie. Unlike most Old Order Mennonite communities, no one in Dry Hollow even had a telephone installed in their barn. They had to rely on farmer Walt Hollis’s phone line if there was an emergency.

  Seeing the need, I agreed to Fannie’s request and became Charlotte’s stand-in midwife, though I would soon need her birthing assistance myself. Those first few times, my heart would race as I changed sheets on the bed in the birthing room—which is the examining room now—or stuffed the firebox with split wood and set a pot of water on the stove to boil, sure that before Fannie’s arrival, a baby would be born. But Fannie somehow always made it in time.

  The Sabbath evening I went into labor, Charlotte confided
in me that we were supposed to try to give Fannie the night off. Fannie’s arthritis was swollen from standing in the frigid creek during my baptism earlier that day, which made me feel guilty for wanting the unprecedented immersion. But at that moment, when Charlotte and I were speaking, I did not realize I was already in active labor. I had not yet correlated the breaking of my waters with the warm flood when I was brought to the surface of the creek. I knew my uterus was contracting, yet I assumed it was Braxton Hicks because my contractions were not increasing in frequency or duration, and I could talk through each one without pausing for breath.

  My son’s delivery had taken twenty-four hours. I had such excruciating back labor that Deborah Brubaker had been forced to hold my shoulders and press her knee into the small of my back, or else I would writhe and howl in pain. Unbeknownst to me, this time I slept through some of my harder contractions. It was morning but still pitch dark when I awoke and realized I was truly in labor. At my gasp, my roommate Hannah sat up, one hand supporting her womb. Her ruffled bangs and the bent collar of her pajama top were outlined by the moonlight splintering through the curtains.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  I nodded and told her to go back to sleep. Labor was quickly losing its excitement for all of us because we were starting to feel like watched pots the midwives were waiting to see boil. A Hopen Haus girl was giving birth every other week, and the sounds from the birthing room kept many of us awake through the night as we clutched our stomachs and imagined ourselves going through that exact same pain. But even as I reassured Hannah, my voice shook.

  Aware that I couldn’t hide my labor for long, I went out into the hallway. My pace slowed as another contraction hit me. I leaned against the wall and panted through my mouth, my breath stolen by fear of the unknown as much as the pain.

  Pulling my nightgown taut, I stared down at my stomach. Though the rest of my body had stayed thin, my abdomen had distended to a size I could not have imagined possible had I not seen it before with my son.

  After much prayer and deliberation, I had chosen not to tell Fannie about the chromosomal abnormalities Dr. Hancock and Dr. Michaels anticipated my child to have. I knew I could not give birth at the hospital, where I would be required to fill out paperwork that would lead the authorities to the only home I had left, consequently taking it and the baby from me. Placing this unborn child’s life in jeopardy just so I could claim her as my own seemed like the worst kind of selfishness. This caused me to wonder if—like many of the inherent character flaws we abhor and still somehow manifest—my mother’s selfishness swam through my veins. And yet I did not know what other option I had.

  For an hour or more, I continued to pace down the Hopen Haus hallway and breathe as my body prepared to give birth.

  However, soon I could no longer focus on the wonder of the process, as much as surrender to the pain the process created. I hobbled over to Charlotte’s room and knocked on her door. She answered immediately. Hopen Haus’s most stalwart midwife has not changed much in the past eighteen years. Charlotte’s hair was only highlighted with silver then, and perhaps her hips were not as wide. But she was the same gentle woman who opened her arms to whoever needed their soft embrace and never asked why.

  “Ach,” Charlotte said, rubbing the back of her neck and searching my face as another contraction struck. “Gwen’s in labor too.” She pushed the door open with her foot. Once the pain had subsided, I looked inside. The room was dimly lit by beeswax candlesticks in brass holders, positioned on either side of the bed. The cosseted warmth exacerbated the sweet odor my laboring body was also exuding. Twenty-year-old Gwen Roberts was clutching the sheets of Charlotte’s double bed. Thrashing from side to side, her head left a deep, sweat-soaked indentation in the white pillowcase. Her dark eyes rolled up and tears flowed down, sticking her frazzled brown hair to her cheeks.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” Charlotte said. “How far along are you?”

  “Not sure,” I replied. “’Least beyond the latent stage.”

  Charlotte twisted her pudgy hands. Behind her, Gwen bucked and bit her teeth into the pillow, stifling her moan. Glancing down the hallway, Charlotte turned to me and said, “I think her labor’s stalled. If you were not in labor, too, I would send you for Fannie right away.”

  Gwen groaned again. My womb contracted, as if sympathizing with hers. I leaned on the doorframe and forced my mouth into an O like Fannie taught, which was supposed to help our bodies stay relaxed as well. Charlotte rubbed her hand up and down my spine, which I couldn’t stand. There are few times in my life I actually like to be touched. Labor is not one of them.

  “I still have time,” I said, stepping beyond her reach. “I’ll go over to Fannie’s and bring her back. Maybe Elmer can ride over and get Sadie, too.” I glanced at Gwen. “Have you tried getting her out of bed? Making her do lunges or walk?”

  Charlotte whispered, “I tried. She thinks moving will make it hurt worse.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s better to hurt than to have failure to progress.”

  With these words, my teeth stopped chattering. My fear was giving way to a plan. I didn’t even go back into my bedroom, in case I would further disturb my roommates, but grabbed a gray woolen shawl that was hanging on the coat peg next to the front door. I headed down the porch steps barefoot and bareheaded—just wearing the floor-length nightdress that I had purchased through Lehman’s. The cold, damp grass numbed my feet as I hurried to the barn. I pried the wooden bar up and opened one side of the double doors. The scent of dust mixed with animal sweat and manure filled my nostrils, making me sneeze. Opening my eyes, I let the light from the full moon guide me across the cedar-chipped floor.

  The handsome roan, Sampson, nickered as I approached. I lifted the largest bridle, reins, and bit from one of the hooks in the tack room and entered his stall, wishing I had taken time to put on my shoes. I called to the gelding softly, ran my hand along his neck, and slipped the bridle over his ears. I worked the metal bit carefully into his mouth, framed with square teeth the size of domino pieces. He munched on it until he found the right fit and then relaxed his left kneecap and snorted twin gusts of warm air, letting me know that he felt perfectly fine.

  I was parallel with the ladder leading to the haymow when another contraction struck, forcing me to rest my forehead against Sampson’s side. He continued to just stand there—shaking his shaggy mane adorned with the bridle—until the contraction had ebbed and I was ready to move again. Leading him over to the corral, I climbed up on the bottom rung, wrapped the reins around my hand, and hoisted myself onto his broad back. He did not shift until I was settled. Even then, I had to prod his sides and click my tongue to ease him into a canter. We took the lane that wound past Hopen Haus. The windows were all darkened except for the tallow light shining from Charlotte’s room. Bowing my head, I said a prayer on Gwen’s behalf.

  Moonlight transformed the lane, turning the crusher run gravel into a skein of silver unfurled. The wind whistled down the mountain, bending the spruce trees’ nimble spines that were planted on either side of the road. As if genuflecting to each other, their elongated tips touched. Another contraction hit. I hunkered low on Sampson’s lunging back and wove my hands through his tangled mane. I clenched my eyes. Perhaps because of my position, the pressure of the contraction increased. I gasped, but Sampson did not flinch. His steps did not falter. For such a large horse, his strides were easy and smooth.

  Then the pain released as abruptly as it had descended. I sat up and saw the sleeping, saltbox homes of the Dry Hollow Community, with their plain fronts, identical porches, and pitched roofs sheathed in corrugated tin. Barns, painted to match, loomed over these modest dwellings. Their shadows eclipsed the houses and yards until the darkness was countered by the brightness on the road. I urged Sampson with a mild prod of my bare heels. His feathered hooves dug into the gravel. In the distance, a coyote let loose a lonesome howl.

 
Fannie and her husband lived on the same twenty-acre plot as their eldest son, David, who combed the mountain for game and enjoyed seclusion to the point of a hermit. Until they died or David got married, Fannie and Elmer had no intentions to move. Everyone assumed that David would always remain a bachelor. And so Dry Hollow Community knew the Grabers were as deeply rooted in their land as the twin black walnut trees on the knoll behind their home.

  I felt self-conscious as Sampson cantered up the Grabers’ lane. After all the strain Fannie had gone through for my baptism, the very least I could do was let her recuperate with an uninterrupted night’s sleep. But as another contraction hit, I had to grind my teeth to keep from crying aloud. Suddenly I no longer cared if I was inconveniencing anybody. I just knew that I wanted this baby out.

  Sampson’s hooves clattered over the cobblestones that were nestled in the grass leading to the cottage. Easing myself off his back, I knotted the reins to the Grabers’ porch and hurried up the steps. I used the knocker to tap on the door. I heard nothing. I was lifting my hand to knock again when the door opened. Holding on to the door frame, Elmer Graber stuck his head out. Coarse white hair sprouted from every angle. His beard trailed down his nightshirt to the waistband of his pants.

  Pushing his glasses up with one finger, he squinted at me. “Rhoda?” he rasped.

  By the moonlight, I looked beyond the glass lenses into Elmer’s tired eyes. It was the first time someone had said my new name in passing, and I was surprised by how much it affected me. I thought this must be a sign that my prayers had been answered and my past life as Bethany Winslow had been washed clean when Bishop Yoder dipped me into the creek. My eyes stung even as another contraction hit. I looked over Elmer’s shoulder and focused on breathing. My mind was fighting my body’s primal urge to bear down.