The Midwife

by Jolina Petersheim

  “Looper?” I call; my voice trembles.

  Ernest Looper shifts his body, although he is straddling the top of a twenty-foot ladder. Old salt stains tie-dye his red shirt with white. He grins down at me and hooks the hammer over one shoulder. “Know it looks bad now,” he says, “but—”

  “I’m not here for that.” I pick my way through the debris and wrap my fingers around the ladder’s base—steadying it, steadying myself.

  Looper holds on to the shiny lip of the new roof, whose old gutters are still clotted with pine needles and leaves. Making sure I’m out of harm’s way, he drops the hammer to the ground. His steel-toed boots clang against the aluminum rungs as he climbs down the ladder. He wipes his forehead with the hem of his shirt and stoops, seizing a glass of tea sitting on a cedar stump drifted with splinters from his ax. I imagine that Alice brought this refreshment to Looper. Picturing the two of them talking as the two of us are talking now, an old sense of propriety looms. But I cannot focus on such piffle when my daughter’s life may be hanging in the balance. And I cannot drag into my misfortune this man who has obviously come here for charity alone. My mind whirling, stomach clenched, I begin to turn away.

  Looper clutches my arm. “What’s wrong?”

  I cannot meet his eyes. If there is compassion in their familiar gold-green depths, memories will spill over the compartments of my life, causing me to remember how wonderful it was to rely on someone besides myself. How wonderful it was to rely on him.

  “I think . . . I’ve found my daughter.” I have to breathe around the amazement and the sad understanding that she has been here for weeks. “Amelia,” I add. “The redhead.”

  For a while, Looper says nothing, and I wonder why he will not rejoice with me or at least ask for proof. Instead, he just touches my left hand clenching my right arm and interlaces our fingers. “What will you do?” he asks.

  “Do?” I step away from him. But he keeps holding my hand. “What can I do?” I snap. “I’m going to see her, Looper. After all this time, I’m going to bring her back.”

  “From Split Rock?”

  “From everything.”

  “And what if she doesn’t want to come?”

  I look up at him and withdraw my hand. “What do you mean by that?”

  Seeing the hurt filling the corners of my eyes, he sighs and stares out over the garden’s rows that are becoming indistinguishable as the harvest season draws to a close and the weeds reclaim the untilled earth. “Just don’t set yourself up for heartbreak, Beth.”

  “You can’t break something that’s already broken.”

  Looper says, “Maybe you can’t.” I hear him move toward me, his truck keys already jangling in his hand. “But you can sure make it harder to mend.”

  19

  Amelia, 2014

  I fold my arms to stop their shaking, though it’s so hot outside. The leaves on the trees—the trunks stick-pinned to the long grass lining either side of the road—are limp in the humidity that’s only gotten worse since the early-morning rain. Wilbur Byler flicks the blinker and takes a right again. He’s slowed way down since we left the Mennonite community, but the child-safety locks are still on. The automatic controls are shielded by the pudgy flat of his left hand. I look up at him through the rearview mirror. A bead of sweat traces my spine.

  “Where . . . where are you taking me?” I whisper.

  His dull eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. “Sure can’t take you back to the Rissers’,” he drawls, “and have you shaking the family up by spreading rumors about Lydie and me. I seen how the two of you been talking.”

  I twist the fabric of my borrowed cape dress. I have no money with me, no cell phone, no driver’s license, no jewelry to pawn. I don’t even own the clothes on my back. My identity has been stripped. After years of taking my parents for granted, even resenting their smothering support, I realize just how well they’ve protected me all these years. “I won’t tell anybody about you and Lydie,” I say, my words rushed. “My parents will pay—”

  “Quiet!”

  Startled, I point my frightened gaze back to the road.

  “I always knew there was something off about your birth mother,” Wilbur continues, though his voice is so distracted he might as well be talking to himself. “She was too eager to become Mennonite. Too eager to change her identity, her name. Seemed to me she was running from something—or somebody—so when I seen this article in the Tennessean with her old name in it, saying she’d kidnapped a child, I kept it for a while and watched. I watched her with you. I watched her with others. She was so jumpy that I just knew she was the same one that article was talking about.”

  Wilbur speeds up, as if to add to the tension. Not sure what to believe, I can’t decide if I want to hang on his every word or cover my ears. “To test my little theory,” he says, “I slid that article in a pile of newspapers when I knew she would probably see it. And see it, she did. You were only a little thing then, and when she read that article, she got sick in a box right next to where you were sleeping. But I knew that if I let on that I was onto her, she’d run. So I just bided my time. For two weeks I waited, and then I called the number in the article and said I thought I knew where that woman who’d kidnapped the child was. That she was hiding in a Mennonite community, in this place called Dry Hollow, Tennessee.”

  I squeeze my hands between my legs and fold my body over them. Only in this position can I breathe. I don’t know which scares me more—the thought of this man being insane, or the possibility that he’s telling the truth. Wilbur says, “It took longer than I expected. About three weeks or so. But then the phone call came. The investigator said they’d found evidence that my claim was correct, and the parents would be coming down the following week with a lawyer and papers and stuff. I was supposed to keep everything quiet. Even the newspaper wasn’t allowed to let anybody know what was going on.”

  I sit up. My arms wrap my waist. Isn’t the kidnap victim supposed to keep her captor talking—bonding—and then the captor feels so bad, he lets her go? “Didn’t it bother you to see a mom separated from her kid?” I ask, trying to separate myself from the kid in the story.

  “She hurt enough people over the years; I figured it was time she paid her dues.” Wilbur nods, pleased with himself. “Anyways . . . I don’t even know how it all went down. I wasn’t there ’cause I couldn’t just wait around, and the Fitzpatricks wouldn’t tell me when they were coming. They wired half of the reward money beforehand, and they said they’d wire the other half if I agreed to keep quiet and keep out of their way. I didn’t tell nobody what I knew. I acted just as shocked when you were gone as everyone else did.”

  The question I have been afraid to ask forces itself through my lips. “Who . . . who was my birth mother?”

  “Rhoda’s the one that birthed you.” Wilbur’s eyes narrow beneath his drooping hair. “But she was just the saro-gate. Like an incubator for your parents.”

  And thank you for that science lecture, I think. Laughter bubbles up from inside my chest, and I know that I’m in shock. But then the seriousness of this changed universe crashes in, making me press the heels of my hand into the socket of each watering eye. My vision spirals out of the blackness with waving yellow fronds, like I’ve stared too long at the sun. Rhoda, the cranky head midwife, a kidnapper? My kidnapper? Or stranger still, my birth mother? Can Wilbur be serious? But why does Rhoda always look at me like I’m someone she’s seen before, yet can’t remember my name? More than this, why did my dad send me down here, to the middle of nowhere, if there wasn’t a connection made before now?

  Opening my eyes, I replay the night my escape was set into motion; the same night I told my parents I was pregnant over supper.

  My dad shuffled into my room only after my mom had gone to bed with a sleep aid and a glass of wine. The leaf of paper he held out to me was flimsy, but his fingers shook as I took it from him and flattened it on my desk. The ceiling fan blades cast shadows on the type
d words, and for a moment I wanted to do anything but read them. Because, following my greatest letdown, I knew they’d have to change everything.

  “Read it to me,” I whispered. “I don’t think . . . I can.”

  He reached past my laptop and ran his thumb over my hand. Picking up the page, he unhooked his glasses from the pocket of his robe and used his index finger to push them on his nose. “‘Abandoned Mennonite Community Becomes Home for Unwed Mothers,’” he said.

  As my dad kept reading about a small Old Order Mennonite community located in Dry Hollow, Tennessee, that was abandoned when the group of two hundred and fifty members decided to move north, panic dried my mouth. Blood swam through my ears. Was he really going to ask me to go there? Was he really going to ask me to give up my life?

  My dad paused—waiting for me to refocus—before he read, “Rather than joining this exodus, Rhoda Mummau, one of the community members and head midwife for a home for unwed mothers called Hopen Haus, purchased from the community forty acres along with the farm’s Civil War–era homestead so the unwed mothers residing inside it did not have to leave when the surrounding property went up for sale.”

  He finished the article and rattled off the list describing Hopen Haus’s financial and physical needs. Even though I was looking at the paper clutched in my dad’s hands, I was not listening to what he said. Instead, I was staring at the dark box printed on the left-hand corner, where a black and white image showed a middle-aged woman in a funny kapp covering half of her face with one hand.

  “Dry Hollow,” I whispered.

  “Yes,” my dad said, folding the paper and laying it on my desk. “Go to Dry Hollow, Amelia. Go . . . and find yourself there.” He leaned down and squeezed my fingers. For the first time in years, I responded by wrapping them tight around his hand. “When you return,” he said, “we’ll talk.”

  I glanced down at the article, not wanting to spend the last summer before my senior year in Tennessee. But what options did I have? My mom claimed that I had no life, that I had already wasted it the night I got pregnant and would never get it back unless I kept tomorrow morning’s appointment. An appointment where a counselor would act like she was giving me choices, when she was really getting paid to tell me what to do. That’s when I made my decision. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go. But . . . what about Mom?”

  My dad looked at me. The ceiling fan whirred and the computer’s screen saver kicked on before he folded his arms and sighed. “I’ll take care of her. I already put Dry Hollow into your GPS, and I’ll give you some money to hold you over while you’re gone.”

  I turned in my chair to face the closet, feeling both thankful for my dad’s kindness and overwhelmed by my choice to leave this life behind.

  My dad touched my arm. “Just look for Rhoda Mummau,” he said. “The head midwife. Tell her you read this article and that you’re pregnant. But don’t tell her your birth date or your last name or any information like that—you don’t want to get in trouble for being underage. . . . She’ll take you in.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “Because, Amelia,” my dad said, and then he looked away too, “it’s the right thing.”

  Wilbur Byler now flicks on his blinker and takes exit 42. After the van barrels down the ramp and turns left, directly ahead I spot the cage of the retired Scottsburough County fire tower. My throbbing pulse steadies at the sight of a landmark after miles of unfamiliar land.

  “You’re . . . you’re taking me to Hopen Haus?” I ask.

  “Got to,” Wilbur says. “Called your mom and dad last night. They’re coming down here.”

  Though the van is cruising past the courthouse, my head snaps back, whiplashed as my changed universe tumbles out of orbit. If Wilbur Byler has contact with my parents, he’s not crazy but actually telling the truth: my parents are my parents, but my mom’s not the one who birthed me. I was kidnapped in the womb and then, like a piece of missing luggage, reclaimed. And as I accept this truth, I feel like my entire life has been a lie.

  Rhoda, 2014

  Looper turns in at the house whose mailbox number matches the one on the envelope Rebecca Risser mailed when writing Lydie about the impending loss of her father. We are forced to park halfway up the lane, as the yard is crowded with every horse and buggy in the community and, if they rode through the night, the communities beyond.

  Two blond children—a boy and a girl—wearing their Sabbath best come running out of the house. The girl holds a spool of string while the boy caresses a homemade kite that is wider than his chest. They pause when they see us getting out of the truck. Their milk-white smiles and flushed cheeks let me know that they are Lydie’s siblings. Then they take off running again. The boy releases the kite. The diamond shape bounces against the earth until the boy’s momentum increases and the girl slackens the string. The kite sails toward the sun, and the newly fatherless children let out a whoop of exultation. The two of them sprint into the flower garden. Weightless, the kite continues fluttering through the air, anchored to this terrestrial ball by an angel-hair string.

  The children’s joy even on the day of their dawdy’s funeral tells me they do not fully understand the death that has just assaulted them. In this, they remind me of myself as I waved at my mother’s station wagon as it crackled down the lane—thinking she was on the way to the library or the grocery store, not knowing she was leaving us. My heart hurts for the Risser children. Reality will soon come hurtling in as surely as that kite will buckle in the wind and plummet to the earth. Though impossible, I find myself wishing I could do something to keep them buoyant, to suspend their oblivion to pain.

  Looper waits for me on the mulched path that leads to the porch. I pass him, mount the steps, and knock on the door. It is opened by a slender woman with dark eyes and an apron overlaying a cape dress cut from an equally muted cloth. “May I help you?” she asks. I glimpse a dimple when she speaks.

  “I’m looking for Lydie Risser.”

  “Jah. Hold on, please.” The young woman closes the storm door. Though I am dressed Plain, I notice that she does not invite me in. Perhaps it’s because I’ve asked for Lydie.

  Waiting, I look out at the pasture bordering the house, where a herd of doe-eyed Guernseys grazes in a clover field. The waning daylight shimmers across the velvet expanse of their smooth, buff hides. A few of the posts in the fence encircling the herd are made from ancient cedars; in places, the wires braiding the fence spear the rust-colored bark protecting the trunks. I am sure those trees were here when this strip of mountain land was just a patch of woods waiting to be cleared. It is all I can do not to walk over and curl beneath the trees’ extended boughs that screen this mind-numbing heat. I have not felt this elated and this tired since Hope—Amelia—was born.

  I hear a noise. Turning, I see Lydie Risser, holding on to the screen door for support. “Lydie?” I ask. “Are you all right?”

  Lydie looks over her shoulder. Pulling the door behind her, she steps out onto the concrete porch. “What are you doing here?” Her tone is not accusing, just curious.

  I glance around the grounds, as if expecting my daughter to appear from behind the dogwood tree or rhododendron bushes. I realize, though it is inconceivable, that I expect her to be as unchanged by time as is my love for her. “Is Amelia with you?”

  Lydie shakes her head.

  My stomach drops. I search her face. “She’s not?”

  “Someone said she went for a walk.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  “Not sure. I was upstairs, lying down.”

  I look at Looper. He shakes his head, just as perplexed as I.

  Lydie says, “There’s something else. . . .” I face the girl again. She stares down at her boots and hugs her belly. “Wilbur’s missing too.”

  The maternal alarm I feel gives my words intensity. “I’m going after her.”

  Lydie’s pale cheeks bloom, causing her freckles to disappear. And as the suspicio
ns Uriah Rippentoe roused are confirmed, my urgency alerts Lydie to the fact that I am aware that Wilbur Byler is her child’s father.

  Lydie sways and grapples for the back of a wicker rocking chair. Steadying herself, she clamps both hands on the outside of her womb and bites her bottom lip. Blood lipsticks her mouth. “I don’t think you should leave,” she breathes. “I’ve been having pains.”

  I point to the rocking chair, and Looper helps Lydie into it as if she is a baby herself. I kneel on the porch beside her and check her pulse. One hundred beats per minute. “How long have you been having contractions?” I ask.

  “Since last night. I . . .” Lydie pauses and flicks her eyes at Looper. He turns his head respectfully away. “I had bloody show,” she whispers.

  “But your water’s not broken?”

  She shakes her head, and her two plaits—furred in the humidity—swat her gently in the face. “I don’t think so,” she says. But the poor girl seems unsure.

  “Have you been timing your contractions?” I ask.

  She makes a wavelike motion with her hands. “They’re still too doppish.”

  Irregular, she means. Must be early first stage of labor. This is good. I was in such a hurry to leave and find my daughter that for one of the rare times in my years as a midwife, I forgot my birthing satchel. Plus, I am so exhausted, it would be safer to minister to Lydie alongside Alice Rippentoe’s capable hands. Having taken such pride in being an island unto myself, needing someone else is not easy to admit. Especially needing Alice.

  I ask Lydie, “You think you can make the drive back to Hopen Haus?”

  She nods and then grips the arms of the rocking chair. Her nostrils flare as she breathes through the contraction. Less than five minutes have passed since the last one, and already they are increasing in intensity, not allowing Lydie to speak. My stomach roils as I comprehend that she might be further along in labor than I thought. I am really not prepared to deliver a sixteen-year-old’s baby in a truck parked on the side of the road.