Once a Midwife Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated to the individuals of conscience and courage

  around the world. Stand tall.

  Epigraph

  I have been lost before and come into these woods

  to lay my body down.

  And you have taken me in arms of light and sang to me,

  rocked me gentle in the limbs of trees.

  You have taken me in arms of light and sang to me

  and wiped away my tears with new green leaves.

  From the private journal of Patience Hester

  Liberty, West Virginia, U.S.A.

  1941–1943

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Winter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Spring

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Summer

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Autumn

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Winter Returns

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Praise

  Also by Patricia Harman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Winter

  1

  November 22, 1941

  The Ties that Bind

  Mama, what’s that?” my son, Danny, asks as a vehicle roars over the stone bridge that spans the Hope River, just outside of Liberty, West Virginia.

  I look away from the newspapers in the rack set out on the sidewalk in front of Gold’s Dry Goods and shake my head, swallowing fear. NAZIS TAKE SEVASTOPOL IN RELENTLESS ADVANCE TOWARD MOSCOW, the headlines read. I try to keep it from the children, but I’m worried about Europe’s war spreading like a virus around the world. It’s happened before. It could happen again.

  In the last few weeks, the Germans have taken Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkov, places my veterinarian husband, Dr. Hester, has obsessively marked on the National Geographic Map taped inside our bedroom closet.

  The roar gets louder as a bolt of lightning streaks down Main. Mira, my littlest, clings to my skirt. Sunny and Sue, the twins, stand hugging each other. “I don’t know,” I answer, catching our reflections in the store’s shiny window, a Norman Rockwell painting, Farm Woman and Children Go to Town.

  There she stands in her blue wool coat, small but strong. She wears wire-rim glasses that keep falling off her short nose and her straight shoulder-length brown hair is tied back with a ribbon, a pleasant rosy-cheeked woman, with her shoulders back, but not what you’d call a real looker.

  Her brood of four is healthy and handsome too. The dark-haired boy wears a wool cap and clean overalls. Twin towheaded girls in red dresses with plaid jackets turn from the displays in the store window, and a smaller girl, with freckles, has a worn brown teddy bear tucked under her arm.

  The vehicle spins around in front of the Saved by Jesus Baptist Church at the other end of Main and I can just make out a bright-red motorcycle with a sidecar of the same color. The driver, dressed in black leather with a scarlet scarf around his neck, races his motor and heads back this way. He stands on the seat like a circus performer and salutes as he passes.

  “Wow!” Danny yells.

  The motorcyclist stops again on the bridge over the Hope, revs the motor, and shoots back into town. He screeches to a stop in front of Gold’s Dry Goods, then cuts the motor, slowly pulls off his helmet and goggles, then shakes his black curls.

  “Ma,” Mira whispers, squeezing my arm. “That’s a woman!”

  The female rider, with large brown eyes and skin the color of a newborn fawn, stands with one hand on her hip, swinging her leather helmet by its strap. A thin blond boy, with pale blue eyes, sits hunched and unsmiling in the sidecar.

  “Bitsy!” I yell, jumping off the high curb and almost falling on my hands and knees in the street. “You’re home!”

  HAVE YOU EVER noticed that when you’re reunited with an old friend, someone you’ve been through hard times with, it’s like you’ve never been apart? That’s how it is with Bitsy and me.

  I turn the page in my journal. It’s a beautiful book that I’ve had for years, but it won’t last much longer. Even with my cramped cursive, it’s almost full.

  When I saw the bouquet of tulips embossed on the cover in Stenger’s Pharmacy years ago, I had to have it, so I spent my last dollar and bought three! This was before Wall Street collapsed in ’29 and I still had a dollar.

  Inside the brown leather, in the top corner of each lined page is a small colored print of a poppy or a rose, a toad or snail, some living thing. There’s a lock and a key that I keep on a long ribbon around my neck, along with my gold watch . . . the gold pocket watch Mrs. Kelly, my midwife teacher and friend, left me when she passed on.

  My life has been difficult at times and the delicacy of the empty pages in the journal is what charmed me. The diary is like a friend I can talk to, some gentle, sensible woman . . . someone who would laugh at the things I laugh at and understand when I cried.

  TONIGHT, AFTER MY husband, Daniel, and the children are in bed, Bitsy and I sit curled on the sofa in front of the fireplace with my old beagle, Sasha.

  “Nice place,” Bitsy says, looking around. I adjust my glasses to see what she sees: a fireplace with a large framed mirror on the mantel, an upright piano, a worn blue davenport, two rocking chairs, and a new electric floor lamp with an amber glass shade.

  There’s an oil painting of me as a girl hanging over the sofa and my husband’s framed photographs of racehorses, farm horses, and hunting horses all over the walls. A braided red rug gives warmth to the room and there’s a wood heater stove near the stairway.

  “The stained-glass lamp is the first new thing that Dan and I have bought since the Great Depression,” I tell my friend. “That’s what they call it now, the Great Depression.”

  “It was depressing all right!” Bitsy laughs.

  “So where the hell have you been?” I ask. “No phone calls. Not even a postcard.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Well, yes! And who’s the boy?”

  “The whole story?”

  “Maybe the short version. It’s been almost ten years.” I start to laugh, but stop when I see my friend’s face.
/>   “What?” I ask, touching her on the knee. “What?”

  My friend wipes her eyes. “I’m so ashamed.”

  “Tell me. Start at the beginning.” I scoot over and put my arm around her. “You left West Virginia with Byrd Bowlin, your sweetheart, the night the KKK came to our farm. After what happened, I couldn’t blame you.”

  Bitsy’s brown eyes focus on the flames. “Byrd and I were married by a justice of the peace a week after we got to Philly,” she recalls. “I know you thought we were already shacking up, but you were wrong. There was nothing but kissing going on, and not much of that.

  “We lived with my brother, Thomas, at first, and he got Byrd a job as an electric-trolley-car driver, but it turned out because of the economy people didn’t have the money to ride trolleys. Since Byrd was new and a Negro, he was transferred to shoveling coal at the power plant.

  “All day long Byrd shoveled coal for the electric cars, but within a month he quit. It was as bad as being a miner, he told me. At first, he went out every day looking for work, walked the streets, stood in line at the unemployment office, but no one was hiring. Fifty percent of the colored men in Philadelphia were unemployed, thirty percent of the whites. I guess it was the same all over.

  “Thomas was supporting us, but it was hard on Byrd’s pride. Finally, I got a job in a colored woman’s beauty shop called Sweet Pea’s Salon and we rented a studio apartment for just $12 a month.

  “Mostly I just washed hair, oiled it, and swept up. Miss Evelyn, the owner, was from Harlem. I’m not sure she was even trained as a beautician, but she sure knew what she was doing.

  “Byrd didn’t like it. He said a woman’s place was in the home, and since he was the man, he should be working. That’s when things started going downhill. Whenever I got paid, he’d take the money. He said he’d buy groceries, but he gambled and drank.

  “I tried to hide the cash in my brassiere or my loafers, but he knew how much I made and he’d . . .” She glances at me and wipes her eyes again. “He’d make me strip until he found the cash. Then to punish me he’d force me to kneel naked on the cold floor all night.” Here she stops and rubs her knees as if she still feels the pain.

  “Oh, Bitsy!” I say. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you come home to me?”

  “I wanted to, but Byrd wouldn’t think of it. Also we had no money. Finally, I quit the salon; thinking if we were broke, maybe Byrd would start looking for work again, but this was the thirties, remember. Most young colored fellows were just sitting around on their front porches drinking beer or shooting craps.

  “Then one day he hopped a freight train for the West Coast like the other hoboes. I never heard from him again . . . my heart was broken.” She puts her hand on her chest and looks in my eyes for a long time. “My heart . . .” she says again, as if trying to hold the shattered pieces together.

  For a moment I say nothing . . . then, “That’s enough for tonight. You must be tired. You can sleep here on the sofa. You can sleep here forever. You are home now, Bitsy. You are home.”

  2

  November 23, 1941

  Baby Cabin

  Because I stayed up late talking with Bitsy and then wrote in my journal, I’m tired this morning. It was after midnight when we went to bed and I didn’t get to ask where she picked up the boy. All I learned is his name, Willie, and that he’s her ward.

  Outside, Sasha barks up a storm and the children call, “Ma. Ma. There’s a car in the drive!”

  I lift myself out of the kitchen chair too fast and a moan comes out. Sometimes I can rise with little pain if I do so carefully, but not today. My left knee has never been right since I was kicked when helping my veterinarian husband do tuberculin testing on Mr. Dresher’s cows. That was four years ago, and we were dead broke, so I didn’t go to the hospital in Torrington. What would they have done anyway?

  When I look out the front window I see a new burgundy Cadillac crossing the wooden bridge over Salt Creek. The vehicle is unfamiliar, but as Union County’s midwife, these interruptions are not unexpected. What shocks me is the gleaming luxury of the new auto.

  “Bitsy,” I yell to my friend who’s upstairs making beds.

  “We got company, probably someone coming for the midwives.” I say it like this, as if we’ve been doing deliveries together for the last decade, but in reality she was only my assistant for ten or twelve months. This was back in ’29, the year of the crash.

  “What can we do with the children?” she asks. “We can’t take them with us.”

  “No, we don’t have to go anywhere. Didn’t you see the little log cabin behind the farmhouse? The cabin is a place where women come to have their babies. Daniel and Dr. Blum built it for me when our family expanded and we adopted the twins. We’d better get a move on.”

  “Kids,” I announce as we come out on the porch, “Aunt Bitsy and I are going to be in the Baby Cabin. You know what that means. Don’t interrupt us unless someone is bleeding or the house is on fire.”

  “Do we need Mrs. Kelly’s birth satchel?” Bitsy asks.

  “It’s already out there.” I smile, realizing that more than a decade ago, when we did deliveries together, we always carried the medical bag. “I only use it now when I go to home births. If the women come to me, the cabin is equipped with everything we need, except hot water . . . I still have to carry that from the kitchen.”

  “Sir, do you need assistance?” I ask as we approach the Caddy. A man wearing a natty brown tweed suit and a brown fedora gets out, slams the door, and wipes his very pink brow. The woman inside wears a green floppy hat that covers her face.

  “Oh, thank God. Are you the midwives? I’m Mr. Faye. We just drove down from Pittsburgh for a Sunday ride in the country and now my lady friend, Opal, has gone into labor. We stopped in Liberty, but there’s no hospital. Someone at the Mountain Top Diner told us about you. The thing is; she’s too early. Her physician at West Penn Hospital says she’s due near the end of January.”

  Bitsy stares at the man, then looks at me as we both calculate how premature the baby will be: almost two months . . . unless the doctor is wrong.

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place. We have a little lying-in home on the farm that we call the Baby Cabin. Would you like to see it? Why don’t you bring Opal inside and I can at least examine her and tell you what I think. Maybe there’s time to get her to Boone Memorial in Torrington.”

  Bitsy is way ahead of me. She’s already assisting Opal, who’s of African descent, out of the auto and guiding her along the stone path toward the cabin. The expectant mother is a look-alike for a young Marian Anderson, the famous colored opera singer.

  I catch up with them at the porch just as Opal has a contraction.

  “Oh, baby doll. I’m so sorry,” Mr. Faye says, the leather suitcase banging against his legs as he runs to get the door. From the look of his heavy tweed suit, his shiny shoes, and his fancy auto, he’s a city slicker for sure.

  Just as we get Opal inside, she gives a great grunt and her water bag breaks, but having set up the Baby Cabin for just such eventualities, I grab a handful of folded rags and wipe up the mess. The fluid is clear and that’s a good thing.

  “Oh my God!” Opal waves one hand in a frantic way as if trying to bat the pain away, and then leans down with both hands on her knees. “Something’s coming!”

  Single Footling Breech

  Bitsy, who’s as sharp as a briar, pulls back the covers on the double bed, throws a towel on the sheet, and helps the woman pull down her wet bloomers.

  “Aghhhhhhh!” Opal bellows, and bears down. I reach for a packet of sterile rubber gloves, intending to do a vaginal exam, but catch my breath when I see a tiny foot at the opening.

  “I think I’m going to be ill,” the man says, and backs out of the door.

  “It’s a single footling,” Bitsy whispers, gently pinching the infant’s blue foot to see if it still has circulation. The baby kicks her hand away, a good sign.

  “W
e have to break up the breech,” I say. “I’ve seen it done twice by Mrs. Kelly.”

  Quickly, I go to the cupboard and get out the birth pack, sterilized in the oven a week ago. Then, while my friend gets Opal more comfortable, I pull over the wooden table on wheels that our friend, Dr. Blum, made for me. I wash my hands and untie the pack. Inside is a simple collection of things we’ll need for the birth (and a few we hope we don’t need).

  Bitsy, as if she does this every day, quickly lays out our supplies; scissors, a rubber suction syringe, cotton tape to tie off the cord, and a bowl for the placenta. There’s also a container of oil that I use to help the baby slide out and equipment for stitching if we need it.

  With rubber gloves on, I work one finger in and release the second leg. Then, as quick as a wink the rest of the body slides out as far as the umbilical cord.

  “It’s a boy, Opal,” Bitsy says. “We can tell the sex already. You’re doing great!”

  Before I even ask her, Bitsy has the patient’s buttocks on the edge of the bed and we allow the weight of the baby to help with the delivery. My assistant supports the tiny body while I keep one hand on the patient’s lower abdomen. With a breech, as with any delivery, we must keep the head flexed. My friend smiles and I smile too. We’re working as a team, as we used to do. “Once a midwife, always a midwife!” I whisper.

  “Left arm. Right arm,” I say to myself as I gently turn the baby, and then lift him up until the chin comes out and he’s free. “You did it, Opal!” I tell her. Bitsy quickly wraps the tiny wailing boy and lays him on his mother’s chest.

  “Oh blessed God,” she whispers. “Is he okay?”

  “Yes, hear him cry!” Bitsy says. “He’s fit as a fiddle.”

  “The baby is beautiful, honey,” I say, ten minutes later, as I take him back from his mom, weigh him on my hanging scale, and give him a quick exam. He’s scrawny and brown like Opal, has all his fingers and toes and regular facial features. I check his palate, which is intact, and I smile when he sucks on my finger. If I’d had to guess I’d have said he’s a few weeks early, but not two whole months.

  While I’m doing the newborn assessment, Bitsy helps the new mom take off the rest of her clothes and re-dress in one of the flowered nightgowns I keep on hand for such occasions. Then we place the crying infant on the breast and cover both mother and baby with a quilt.