The Reluctant Midwife Page 2

  “The house, all its contents, his clinic, and two acres were put up for auction by Mountain Federal on . . .” Here he consults the documents again. “February twenty-fifth, 1934. Mr. Churchouse, an investor from Charleston, bought the property for a song. I’m sorry.” The prematurely balding attorney closes the folder, as if that puts an end to it.

  “So we have no place to live? He has no home?” I’m getting a little hysterical now.

  Linkous glances at the doctor, then back at me. “What happened?” he asks in a whisper. “I’m so sorry. Was it a stroke?”

  I’m too upset to sugarcoat it. “The nerve doctors aren’t sure. Maybe a stroke, though they can’t determine the source of the damage. Maybe shock at his wife’s death.”

  The lawyer’s dark eyebrows shoot up. “I heard about Mrs. Blum. A tragedy. She seemed a fine woman.” I know what he means. She was a looker.

  Back in the Pontiac, I stare out the window at the boarded-up stores on Main Street. What now? Blum sits like a manikin from Levy’s Dry Goods. We have only ten dollars, not enough for gas to get back to Perrysville and no family that either of us can turn to. I have never felt so alone.

  When I left Liberty four years ago, Wall Street had crashed and a few stores had closed, but farmers, miners, tradesmen, and their families still came to town for necessities. Now, all along Main, I see only two autos and one very swaybacked horse attached to a cart. For Sale signs are everywhere. At first glance there are only a few shops left open, the grocery, the barbershop, Stenger’s Pharmacy, and the Eagle Theater, but that’s apparently only on Saturdays. Farther down, there’s a bar with a neon sign and Ida May’s House of Beauty, but that’s all.

  “Welcome home,” I reflect out loud, flopping my head back on the leather driver’s seat. I could be working at Walter Reed Hospital right now in a clean white uniform and a starched hat. Instead, I sit hunched in a cold car, nearly destitute, a caretaker of a mentally incapacitated ex-physician with no place to live and no place to go. It’s not like I’m Dr. Blum’s wife or sister, for god’s sake, I’m just his last friend, well, almost a friend—actually more of a colleague. I look over at the poor fellow and straighten his collar.

  For a moment I consider renting two rooms at the Barnett Boardinghouse and trying to find work in Delmont, twenty miles up the road, but I know, just by looking at the number of men on the courthouse steps, that there will be no jobs there either.

  The same out-of-work miners, loggers, mechanics, and laborers who were sitting on the benches four years ago, when I lost my job, are still here, only then there were only five or six of them. Today there must be twenty lounging about, smoking Luckies and corncob pipes, hoping for some kind of day work. I watch as one spits a wad of tobacco on the sidewalk, and it’s here the tears come. I really have no idea what to do next.

  “Mr. Linkous should have at least taken us home to his house for the night,” I complain to my mute companion. I get no response, but I continue my one-sided conversation.

  “After filling the gas tank three times, we have only ten dollars.” I scramble through my change purse, and add, “And forty-five cents. . . . Not enough to get us back to Perrysville, and anyway, where would we go when we got there? We still owe three months’ rent to the landlady and can’t ask for shelter from your brother.”

  “We have the Pontiac, only six years old.” I take a deep breath and go over our assets. “We have two strong bodies. We have twelve years of higher education, but only one mind, between us.” Here my voice breaks and Blum looks over.

  Then he speaks again, the second time in a year. “Patience.”

  “Patience! Are you out of your mind?” At this, I actually smile because he truly is out of his mind. “If you think we can just sit here patiently on the corner of Sycamore and Main and someone will come to our rescue, you are sicker than I thought!”

  Then I get it: Patience Murphy, the midwife.

  Shelter

  “Patience Murphy!”

  Once again Blum amazes me. It’s like his once brilliant mind is hibernating, and for a moment it sticks its nose out of the cave and makes an observation.

  The midwife of Hope River, Patience Murphy, was one of my only friends when I lived in Liberty four years ago. You’d think there’d be others, but for a single professional woman in a small mountain town, there weren’t many options.

  A few people reached out to me when I first left the Coal Miner’s Mission at Scotts Run and took my job as the Union County public health nurse. The pharmacist Mr. Stenger and his wife invited me to dinner, but their five wild children drove me nuts, and I never followed up with a reciprocal invitation.

  The schoolteacher, Marion Archer, took me shopping in Torrington, but she talked so much I couldn’t stand it. Then there was Priscilla Blum, Dr. Blum’s wife. She and Patience . . . they were my almost friends . . . and the doctor . . . but that was purely professional.

  Patience Murphy and her young colored assistant, Bitsy Proudfoot, live only ten miles out of Liberty on Wild Rose Road. We can be there in thirty minutes. Maybe Patience will allow us to stay with her for a few days. I’d be grateful even to sleep in her barn.

  I start up the Pontiac and roll down Main Street, past the closed shops, past the courthouse, the train station, the fire station, the water tower, and the Saved by Faith Baptist Church.

  As we cross the stone bridge over the Hope, I feel Dr. Blum straighten and look down at the water. On the far side two men are fishing. They raise their hands in salute and I wonder if they recognize the doc or are just being friendly.

  It hadn’t occurred to me, until now, that when people hear that Dr. Blum is back, they might expect him to restart his practice. I tighten my mouth. It isn’t often that I let myself feel the whole weight of his tragedy. Mostly I just do my duty as a nurse, puzzled and angry, wondering how I got into this.

  I know the answer, of course. I just never thought it would go on and on. Now what can I do? Leave him on the steps of a poorhouse or abandon him to the state asylum for the insane? I’ve been in those hellholes, and you don’t do that to someone you care about.

  As I turn onto Salt Lick, a wind comes up and I’m almost run into a ditch by a green truck, the kind that they used in the Great War, now filled with young men in khaki uniforms. When the guys see me, they yell out their catcalls. “Hey, baby!” “Hi ya, doll!”

  CCC, CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS, it says on the cab. As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the feds are hiring young men from all over the country, giving them work to do in rural areas instead of going on the dole, and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to see them here, even in Union County.

  Their whistles give me a lift, but only for a minute. From a distance they can’t tell I haven’t put on makeup in two days nor washed my short dark hair since we left Perrysville. They can’t see the lines of worry and sadness around my brown eyes.

  The shadows are long and it’s nearing six by the time we labor up Wild Rose Road, past the Maddock farm, where Sarah Maddock, the crippled woman, and her husband, an engineer, from Huntington, live. The Maddocks moved to her family’s place after she was brought down by polio some ten years ago.

  At the end of the gravel lane, sits Patience Murphy’s home, a small two-story white cottage with a periwinkle blue door. The house was in no great shape when I last saw it, but it looks way worse now, and the picket fence that I used to love is gone. What’s more, Patience and Bitsy have let the yard go. The grass has grown up and a branch on the big oak in front swings in the wind like a broken arm.

  “Hello!” I call, jumping out of the car, but Dr. Blum doesn’t follow. Unless I guide him, he won’t move at all, even if he’s hungry or thirsty or has to pee. He’s a wind-up toy, without volition, and I’m the winder.

  When I step up on the porch and look through the cracked window, I see Patience’s old sofa, but no piano and no paintings on the wall. That’s one of the things that impressed me about the midwife the first time I
came here, her display of original artwork, something you don’t see much in the mountains except in the homes of the coal barons, bankers, and railway executives. I also was interested in her small bookcase with two shelves of novels, children’s books, and medical texts.

  It’s dawning on me now that no one lives here, but just to be sure, watching carefully for copperheads, I head out through the tall grass to the barn behind the house. The double doors creak as I peek in. What am I afraid I’ll find? Dead animals? The skeleton of a midwife I once admired hanging from the rafters? My imagination is too fertile. Always has been.

  What I discover is . . . nothing. There are no signs of recent life, not a cow or a horse or even a chicken. Shafts of pale light shine down from the loft and the air smells of dust and old manure.

  On the way back to the house a flash of lightning catches my eye and then the dark clouds growl, like dogs giving warning. Thunder is scaring the frost out of the ground. That’s what the old-timers say in Vermont.

  With a sinking heart I must face the facts. Patience Murphy is gone. Then the rain comes, cold tears.

  3

  Roughing It

  Last night, as soon as there was a break in the weather, I ran for the car and got some supplies. Then, after a cold supper that I’d packed before we left Perrysville, I put Dr. Blum to bed on the dusty sofa and I lay down with an old army blanket on a bare mattress upstairs.

  Looking around, it’s clear that Patience and her friend Bitsy have been gone for months, probably years. There’s nothing in the kitchen cupboards, no pots or pans, only a few tiny mice droppings, and the house smells faintly of mold.

  The wood cookstove is still here, as is the heater stove and an old metal lantern, but we have no dry wood to make a fire or kerosene for light. The midwife never did have a phone or electricity. As in most of rural America, the power and telephone lines haven’t reached into the hollows or up the mountains, and now with the Great Depression, the farmers won’t get them for years.

  Luckily, I’d stowed a few candles in our emergency kit, and sometime after midnight, before I fell into a troubled sleep, I got out my nurse’s notebook and tried to think about our situation. It wasn’t good.

  Problem: Two Adults. Impoverished and Homeless.

  (I can’t believe I’m writing this about myself! How could this happen to a woman like me?)

  One male physician, age 45, 6' 2" and 164 pounds at last weigh, fit enough but quite useless.

  One female nurse, 42, 5' 4" and 128 pounds, with two college degrees but no survival skills. She’s not even a good cook.

  Ten dollars and forty-five cents. (I actually got out of bed, opened my pocketbook, and counted the change again, wishing, like anything, that I’d taken Alvin up on his offer of a few dollars for assisting at his wife’s emergency delivery.)

  Food: a half loaf of bread, a chunk of cheese, three apples, and a Hershey’s Bar left from our stop at the Four Leaf Clover Cafe.

  Two heavy wool blankets from the trunk of the car.

  Our clothes.

  Some medical books and equipment that I suppose we could sell, but who would want them?

  I lay here, now listening to rain slash the side of the house and thunder roll away over Spruce Mountain and wonder what could have happened to Patience and Bitsy. There were rumors that the KKK was out to get them, and that thought makes me sick.

  Somewhere in the house, water leaks through the roof, a steady drip, drip. Twice I hear the doctor moan in his sleep, and once I think he’s crying, but it stops.

  Another Life

  This life of poverty is new for me; counting pennies, sleeping on a bare mattress without proper linens, not knowing what we will eat tomorrow or where we may go.

  I was born into a life of ease in Brattleboro, Vermont, the youngest child of Dr. Donald and Martha Farenthold, but my life wasn’t trouble free. Father was a drunk and not a jolly one, though no one in town knew the shadow we lived under.

  A respectable member of the community, Dr. Farenthold was sober at his medical office and the hospital, but as soon as he got home, he’d fall into his big chair, open a medical journal, and uncork the bottle. By nine he was plastered and we lived in fear that someone would need him in the night and we would be exposed.

  In the early days, Mother tried to divert him with outings and family games, but he would get belligerent. Sometimes he’d even bash her around. To stay away from him, she volunteered for various charitable organizations, the Children’s Home Society, the Red Cross, and the Lutheran Women’s Club.

  Then, when I was fourteen, Mama got uterine cancer. . . . Ironic, a doctor’s wife dying of a treatable disease. She could have had a hysterectomy if they’d found it in time, but by then my parents were hardly speaking.

  Our home, a big Victorian with a white picket fence around the lush lawn, not ten minutes from the Connecticut River, had been anything but peaceful, but after Mother died, it was a tomb.

  For a few years, we had a maid and a cook, but eventually Father ran them off, and my brothers and I had to fend for ourselves. Darwin and William, nine and ten years my senior, who attended Amherst College just down the road, left for Harvard Medical School as soon as they could. That left Father and the house to me.

  I was a pale child, bookish and withdrawn. In school, even if I knew the answer, I was hesitant to raise my hand. Though pretty enough in an old-fashioned way, I didn’t date, didn’t participate in sports or girls’ clubs, just got all As and went home to try to keep Father from burning the house down or doing something else self-destructive.

  As soon as I was seventeen, just like my brothers, I applied for college. Girls didn’t go to university much in those days, but I argued that it would secure my future in case I never married.

  “An attractive girl like you! You’ll get hooked before you get your degree. It’s a waste of my money,” Father whined, looking over his glass of amber liquid.

  But I proved him wrong. I graduated from the University of Vermont with a teaching diploma in May of ’14 and didn’t marry for another six months. Luckily, Father was pleased with my choice, a young physician, Dr. David Myers, whom I’d met at a Chautauqua in Burlington.

  Following our honeymoon in New York, father sobered up for a while. We moved into a new Sears Roebuck Craftsman house that he had built for us, and by September, David had set up a practice.

  Everyone expected us to conceive right away, but we were having too much fun. We canoed the backwaters of the Connecticut River and danced in the ballroom of the Copley in Boston, but by late 1915 the party was over.

  War in Europe was on everyone’s mind, and David began talking about joining the medics. You’d think I’d object, but I actually encouraged him. I was young. What did I know of the horrors of combat? My brothers were already in Spain, and I would have joined too, only I was a girl.

  Within the month, David contacted a second cousin in Winnipeg and signed with the Canadian Army. Many of the young men from Vermont and Maine were doing the same.

  Our last night together, we walked the banks of the Connecticut, as the full moon rode the ripples, breaking into little shards of light. The June air smelled of honeysuckle and growing things. I was twenty-three. He was twenty-eight, and we had our whole life before us.

  “You are so lovely,” David told me, pushing a shock of his thick black hair back from his forehead. “Always stay this way, so beautiful with moonlight on your face.”

  I laughed. “I’ll be old someday. Will you still love me?”

  “Always, but you’ll never be old. Not to me. I’ll always see you like this.”

  “Even when I have strands of gray in my hair and wrinkles around my eyes?”

  “You’ll never be like that.”

  “If you say so.” I mocked him and did a little jig, my hands on my hips in the silver moonlight.

  “Trust me on this. Look at you; you’re too full of life.” He grabbed my hand and we ran along the grassy bank.

>   The next morning he left on the train for Montreal, so handsome in his new Canadian uniform, leaning out the window, waving. I never saw him smile like that again.

  Gunshot

  At dawn, a deafening blast rips open my dreams. Before I’m truly awake, I’m at the upstairs window of the little house with the blue door, staring down at a lean, leathered man wearing a black hat pulled down to his eyes, his firearm aimed at Dr. Blum, who is walking through the wet grass in his long underwear, straight at the gunman.

  “No!” I yell, flying down the stairs, missing every other step and twisting my ankle at the bottom.

  “No!” I yell again, slamming through the screen door, running toward the armed man to shield the doctor. “Don’t shoot.”

  The man lowers his double-barreled shotgun, and I see that it’s Mr. Maddock the neighbor from down the hill. I had met him once or twice when I made home visits to his paralyzed wife.

  “Miss?”

  “Don’t shoot,” I call again. “It’s me, Becky Myers, the home health nurse and . . .”

  “Well, what are you doing here? I called out to that fellow twice that he was trespassing, but he didn’t answer, just glared with those crazy blue eyes . . . then he started to come for me and I fired a warning shot into the air. There are hoboes all over these hills taking up residence anywhere they like, tearing up property, stealing and selling whatever’s not nailed down.”

  When I drag the doctor back to the porch and sit him down, I notice the front button of his union suit is undone. Maybe he was on the steps trying to relieve himself when Maddock showed up. (If it’s true, this is a first and would show some progress.)

  “This is the doctor. Doctor Blum. He’s not himself,” I explain to Mr. Maddock. “It’s a stroke . . . or some kind of brain attack.” (I’m making this up to keep it simple, and a stroke is something people in Union County might understand.)