The Runaway Midwife Read online

  “I’ve lived here fifteen years. Came from Windsor with my husband, Lowell. It was our dream to retire on Seagull and we did, but he only lasted two years. Lowell’s heart failed. He died in his own bed, right next to me.”

  “You didn’t try to get him to the hospital? I saw they have a landing pad with a big H for helicopters behind the clinic.”

  “No. He wanted to stay home. Said he was at peace. Died looking out the window at Lake Erie.” Her eyes are dry and she smiles fondly. “Died looking at the waves and the water and the seagulls. A big white one flew over just as his heart stopped.”

  “Were you all alone? Just you and him?”

  “Just us. Oh look, you almost stepped on it.” I stare down at the sand and right next to my boot is a round oval disk the size of a tablespoon. “That’s a beauty. Blue is the rarest,” the old lady tells me as she holds it up to the sun.

  COMMON MERGANSER

  Diving duck with long pointed bill

  Male: White body, green head and black back

  Female: Gray with a crested rufous head

  Diet: Fish

  Habitat: Rivers, ponds, lakes

  Range: Northern Canada to Mexico

  Voice: Harsh quack or wheezy yeow

  Size: 22–27 inches

  Wingspan: 34 inches

  Cedar and Incense

  The best time for observing birds in the cove is the very early morning. Then huge flocks are to be seen: Canada geese, ducks of all kinds, seagulls and some I can’t identify. There’s another new bird, smaller than a mallard, a black-and-white diving duck that I’ve identified as a lesser scaup. (There are also greater scaup, but the book says they’re mostly found on the ocean.) Sitting on the upper deck, I’m so immersed in my bird book, looking at the photos of waterfowl, that I jump out of my chair at the sound of a vehicle.

  “Hi, you ready to visit the farm?” It’s Rainbow, standing on the lower deck. Damn, I think, and send out a sharp sigh. I don’t really want to visit the commune. I just said yes because the locals irritated me with their prejudice. I’m perfectly happy right here, and not only that, I expect it to be weird. Still, there’s no getting out of it now.

  “Be a couple of minutes. I’ve got to lock my cat in the bathroom. If I don’t, he’ll tear something up or pee on the rug.”

  “I didn’t know you had a cat.”

  “I just adopted him, a miserable, wild, malnourished stray with a lot of health problems. He definitely had infected eyes and also a torn ear where he got in a fight with something, maybe a dog or raccoon. Apparently, I needed a roommate.”

  For the next five minutes we search the house and finally find Tiger under the dresser. Rainbow is able to catch him and comes to me holding the animal up to her chest.

  “Wow, he really likes you,” I comment.

  “I’ve always had cats. We have three at the farm.”

  “I’ve never had a cat or a dog. My husband is allergic.” (Whoops!)

  “I didn’t know you’re married.” She sits down at the round wooden table in the kitchen holding Tiger, while I check the litter box in the bathroom.

  “I’m not anymore. He died in Iraq. I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Gosh. When was that?”

  I give her a very sad look, take a big breath and repeat my mantra. “I don’t like to talk about it. Brings up too many feelings. It was a long time ago.” That should shut her up.

  “Sorry.” She comes over and hands me the cat, then on the way out to her truck, she takes my hand and pulls me close. “I just have to give you a hug! John, one of the men on the farm, was in combat in the Middle East too. He lost his left hand in an explosion, but the wounds were deeper than that. It’s been hard.” She’s a tall woman, taller than me and she smells of cedar incense. It’s like being hugged by Mother Earth.

  CHAPTER 21

  New Day Farm

  I’m not sure what I thought the hippie commune would be like, but I suppose I’d pictured tepees with longhaired dudes walking around half-naked and people smoking dope. Maybe there would be an open shed with a wood cookstove and a long picnic table, a couple of shaggy horses out in the field, a cow, chickens scratching, a few new lambs, babies sitting in the dirt. What I discover is totally unexpected.

  New Day Farm is situated on the northeast part of the island, about a half mile south of Burke’s Country Store. The main house is a big two-story log lodge, well back from the road, probably built in the 1950s by some wealthy family for a retreat. It must have seven or eight bedrooms.

  “I thought you’d have a hand-painted sign at the entrance that said NEW DAY FARM, with multicolored streamers blowing in the wind,” I kid Rainbow as we pull up to the house, but she doesn’t get the humor.

  “We talked about having a sign but decided, at this point, to keep a low profile. I don’t know if you’ve picked up on it, but the locals don’t seem to like us.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Well, can I show you around? Then we can go in. Lunch will be soon.”

  For the next thirty minutes we walk around the buildings and into the fields. There’s a blue metal barn, two big plastic greenhouses, two small ones and a white wooden structure they call the school up by the road with windows that face the lake. Most remarkable to me are the four huge solar panels, each with thirty-six window-sized sheets of glass, situated behind the barn, invisible from the road. (Oh, how Richard would love this! I think, and though I no longer love him, I do love the part of him that wants to find a way for people to live sustainably.)

  “The big greenhouses are heated by solar power,” my host explains. “The others have cold crops, like spinach and kale. Eventually we’ll grow our own tomatoes too.”

  “How’d you get the big solar panels? They must cost a fortune.”

  “Terrance and Dian sold their house in Toronto. We’re looking into getting a wind generator too. Canada is very supportive of alternative energy.”

  “What about the farm? Land on an island with a lake view has got to cost a bundle.” (I’m afraid I’m asking too many questions, but Rainbow is so open, if I asked her bra size, she’d probably tell me.)

  “Wade inherited the farm and another ten acres further north from his uncle who didn’t have children. The lodge was in bad shape when we moved in. We only had an outhouse and we had to carry water, but we have three bathrooms now.”

  She takes my arm and leads me up on the back porch and into the kitchen where I smell onions and garlic and the sweet aroma of baking bread.

  “Hello, everyone. This is Sara, my friend from Gull Point,” Rainbow introduces me. Two women wearing long skirts are working at a wooden cookstove and they stop to give me a hug. A man at the sink is washing fresh greens. (It’s the tall guy with the ponytail I saw at the country store, now wearing an apron that says YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT, and he has to stop and hug me too.)

  LUNCH IS A noisy affair with twelve adults, four children and a baby all eating and talking at once. I’m served split pea soup with bits of carrots, a fresh micro-green salad and corn muffins. There’s also cold unpasteurized cow’s milk, homemade butter and honey that comes from their bees.

  At our table, I’m introduced to Wade and Dian, two of the people I saw at the store. Dian’s baby is Annie and Rainbow seems like the infant’s second mom. There’s one other man named John, who I noticed at the country store, but I didn’t realize he has only one hand. He eats in silence, looking down at his plate, a handsome guy in his early thirties with short brown hair, an aquiline nose and wire-rimmed glasses.

  “I wish you could stay longer,” Rainbow says as we stand in the drive, ready to get into the truck. “Tonight is the May Day drum circle. It’s really cool. A few of the locals came last year. This is the first one this spring.”

  I give her a half smile. I know about drum circles. They had them in Torrington every Friday night in the summer at Maple Ridge Park, but my husband and I never went. “Those people are a bunch of crazies!”
Richard said and I believed him.

  People like us didn’t go to drum circles. We went to silent auctions for the Sierra Club, biology faculty dinners, concerts at the civic center, or we went nowhere at all.

  When I get home, I wave goodbye to Rainbow, then I go up to the gazebo to watch the sun set in a blaze of red and orange. It’s been a good day and I’m happy I went to the farm. Molly Lou may be prejudiced toward the hippies, but I was impressed with their dedication and all they’ve accomplished.

  It makes me wonder about my old life, how much my parents, the nuns and Richard influenced my opinions. Here on Seagull Island, where no one knows me, my life is a clean slate and my mind is clearer too.

  To the right of the gazebo are a flock of white gulls floating sedately, but there’s another flock further out, whirling in a circle as if they’ve found a new school of fish. I have my bird book and binoculars and for the first time see an auburn-headed mother duck and two fuzzy yellow babies. I study the pictures in my guide and finally decide she must be a canvasback.

  In the quiet, a thought comes to me. This is pure happiness. When you stop trying to figure everything out, you find happiness.

  CANVASBACK DUCK

  Male: Gray with a white chest and round chestnut-red head

  Female: Paler with rust on the head, black bill, red eye

  Diet: Dives and dabbles for seeds, buds and snails

  Habitat: Lakes, estuaries, marshes

  Voice: A low croak and a quack

  Range: Canada to Mexico

  Size: 20–24 inches

  Wingspan: 3 feet

  Trillium Flowers

  Lately I’ve been taking my feline on longer and longer strolls on Gull Point and he’s gained in strength and girth. His eyes have cleared and his torn ear has healed, though it will always have a V-shaped notch on the top.

  The thing is, we are like friends. I talk to Tiger, explain things to him. I ask his opinion. I sit on the sofa with him and rub his orange fur while I read. And petting him is not just for his pleasure, though the cat’s purr tells me he’s happy. It’s also for mine.

  Each time we walk on the beach, I look for the old lady, the one who makes sun catchers out of glass beach stones, but I’ve never seen her again and it makes meeting her seem like one of my dreams. Maybe it was . . .

  TODAY FOR THE first time I saw two robins out on the lawn, the first ones this spring. The bigger brighter one had a long juicy worm and the smaller one, the female, wanted a bite. I watched with the Nelsons’ binoculars as she chased him and finally got a nibble. Good for her!

  Later, for the first time, I took an inland walk, but left Tiger at home. With his leash, he’d get tangled in the undergrowth and without the leash he’d wander off.

  Hiking into the forest, I see pockets of water everywhere and the bare twisted trees are thick with vines. This is truly a swamp and I have to scramble in and out of the thickets to make my way through.

  Sick of the brambles, I head for the light at the edge of the woods and there in a pasture, well away from the road, I observe a strange sight.

  A ewe is lying on the ground, straining silently, with a little water balloon coming out of her vagina, and I instantly know what it is. “Baaaaaaaaaaa,” the mother says. (It’s the amniotic sac, her water bag.)

  I have no business here in the farmer’s field and know nothing about lambing, but the midwife in me must see the mother and baby safely through their passage, so I sit down on the grass and rest my back against a tree.

  The sheep strains over and over, but with no great distress. Now and then she looks at me with big eyes and then goes back to her work. “Baaaaaaaaaaa!” she says, and I know it hurts, so I say words of comfort, just like I would to one of my patients.

  “It’s going to be okay . . . You are almost there . . . Your baby will be born soon . . . You can do it . . . You are powerful and strong . . .”

  Little by little, the transparent water bag emerges intact until I can see movement inside. First come two hooves! There’s a nose! Then suddenly . . . swoosh . . . the whole slimy wet mass is lying on the grass.

  I fight the urge to jump in and help, but the big white sheep doesn’t need me. She rises and begins licking her newborn. Lick. Lick. Lick. Her long pink tongue comes in and goes out. Lick. Lick. She’s removing the sac from the little animal’s face and he gasps and shakes his head. “Baaaaaa, baaaaaa,” goes the lamb. “BAAAAAA,” answers the mother. One life coming out of another! Just a simple miracle, but all around us are miracles.

  BESIDES SEEING THE birth of the little lamb, the amazing thing about my hike is the new bird sounds. I’ve been so fixated on the water birds that I haven’t paid much attention to the songbirds. There are hundreds of red-winged black birds, robins, starlings, wrens and slate-colored juncos. There are so many twittering high in the treetops that it sounds like the Amazon jungle!

  On the way back, deep in the woods, I come to a swampy place so wet I have to circle around it, and that’s when I see them, hundreds of trillium flowers, white trumpets with three petals, looking up at the sun. They are so beautiful I have to kneel down.

  We humans think we are so important because we build houses and we can transport ourselves on horses, in autos and airplanes. We think we’re better than other animals and plants because we can talk and read and destroy the whole earth with the push of a button, but here in the woods I’m just one other life form, no better than a tree or a sheep or a trillium flower.

  Praying is something I’ve done a lot of—at Little Sisters of the Cross Academy, of course, but also more recently when I asked God to take care of Karen and Robyn (wherever their souls may be) and asked Him to watch over my Jessie on the other side of the world. Today my prayer, kneeling in the circle of trilliums, has only two words.

  Thank you.

  STARLING

  A short-tailed iridescent black bird

  Very social, congregates in large flocks

  Diet: Mostly insects

  Introduced from Europe to NYC in 1890

  Sometimes they crowd out native species

  Voice: Squeaky, raspy, can imitate other birds

  Size: 7.5 inches, smaller than a robin

  CHAPTER 22

  Crumpled

  It’s a cold windy Friday and Tiger and I are on our way to visit Jed, the nurse practitioner at the clinic, for the third time. If he’s busy with patients, I’ll try to help him wash instruments. If it’s slow, I’ll sit on a stool in his office, my cat in my lap, and listen to the latest chapter in his novel or a new poem he’s written. (He still thinks I’m a fellow writer, so he likes to share, but knowing nothing about the art of writing, I don’t offer a critique.)

  Jed, I’ve come to realize, is a poet as well as a novelist. He reads like the narrator of a nature show on public TV and walks around gesturing. I smile, imagining my new friend. My friend, I think, quickening my pace. Jed doesn’t know who I really am, but he’s still my friend.

  About halfway to the village, crouching, ears back, my cat stops in the middle of the road. “What is it, Tiger?” I squat down, expecting to see a dog up ahead, but there’s something lying in the tall yellow grass.

  I approach slowly, until I see what it is, and then run forward. It’s a child, a boy of about eight crumpled like a wad of Kleenex under his bike. A large limestone rock is next to his head and he’s bleeding at the temple. Is this a hit-and-run motor-vehicle accident or did the kid just wobble into the ditch, fall off and hit his head?

  I check his pulse. It’s 38 beats per minute. Too low. Respirations are 10. Also too low. Tiger is pulling on his leash, so I tie him to a nearby bush. I have nothing with me to staunch the bleeding but my own clothes, so I unzip my parka and take off my flannel shirt in broad daylight.

  Quickly I get my coat back on and then use the soft shirt to make a bandage around the boy’s head, but what to do now? It’s not like I can flag a vehicle down. I might wait all day.

  I look at the chi
ld’s body. He probably weighs sixty or seventy pounds, too heavy for me to carry. I could run to the clinic and get Jed, but something about leaving the boy lying here distresses me. It’s forty-six degrees by the seagull thermometer back at the house, and if I’m cold, the boy lying on the ground must be close to hypothermic . . . What if he died?

  There’s nothing else for it. I will have to carry him. Even if I only make it thirty feet at a time, I must do it, but Tiger will have to stay here. I kneel beside my cat and check the rope. “Sorry, Tiger. I’ll be back soon.” Then I scoop up the child and stumble along, counting the steps as I go, until I make it to thirty.

  Gently I lay the boy down in the road. Breathe. Breathe. Then I’m off again, hoping a vehicle will come along, but no one passes. “It’s going to be okay,” I say to the boy over and over.

  As I get close to the clinic, I begin to call out, “Help! Jed, help me! Jed, help.”

  Fracture

  Accident! Unconscious child. Head trauma, blood loss and probable concussion,” I shout, when Jed finally hears me and opens the door. Within minutes he has the boy inside.

  “Warm blankets.” He points to a stack of white flannel hospital blankets on a shelf, while he assesses the boy. “Are you a nurse or something, Sara? You sound like one.”

  “I used to be,” I say and quickly change the subject. “I found him along Sunset Road near the cider farm, lying in a ditch next to a bike. I have no idea how long he was there. Know who he is?”

  “Might be the Kelly boy. I haven’t seen him for a while. They live on Middle Loop and school’s out again today. I better call Dolman; maybe he can find the parents, and I also have to call Windsor to get a helicopter here fast. He’s got to be transported.”

  Jed goes to the phone, while I take the boy’s vital signs again.

  “Blood pressure 70/40. Pulse 42. Temp 96.5,” I say, writing the stats on a scrap of paper. “Not good.”

  When we remove my makeshift dressing, I see that the gash on the child’s head is worse than I remembered. It’s a triangular flap about half an inch deep. “The skin would be easy to suture.” I think out loud. “But there’s a good chance there’s a skull fracture underneath that will require surgery. Why don’t we just pull it together with butterfly closure and apply a pressure dressing? I can do it if you want, while you start an IV.”