The Reluctant Midwife Page 20

  “Do I hear three dollars? Three dollars, now three, now three, will ya’ give me three?” I’m surprised when the crowd stands silent and no one raises their hands. The auctioneer is confused and the bankers seem concerned.

  “Okay now, gents. Loosen up. Let’s try two. Two-dollar bid, now two, now two, will ya’ give me two? Will you give me two, just two greenback bills?”

  “Two bits,” says Mrs. Stone in a little-girl voice.

  “That’s unheard of! Do I hear a dollar? One greenback dollar! Now one, now one. Will you give me one?” He goes on like this for five more minutes, but the wide gray sky just muffles his singsong. Finally . . .

  “Call the sale!” someone yells, and the auctioneer, having no other bids, has to close.

  “Sold for one quarter,” he yells with disgust and knocks his gavel on the table. “Unbelievable! Why she’s worth twenty times that much!”

  Mrs. Stone hands the quarter to one of the suits, takes her animals back in the barn, and the sale goes on. Twenty goats all sold to Mrs. Stone for ten cents, or two bits, and each time her voice gets stronger.

  I begin to understand that this auction is rigged. Not one of these neighbors plan to buy the old lady’s farm; they’re here to make sure no one else does.

  The auctioneer leads the crowd to the farm machinery. “What am I bid for this 1920 John Deere? It’s a beauty. Not a speck of rust on her,” he begins without spirit. “Do I hear twenty? Twenty greenback dollars. Now twenty. Now twenty. Who will give me twenty?” Again no one bids. “Do I hear ten?”

  The bankers rub their clean-shaven chins and wipe their spectacles. This sale isn’t going as planned, and there’s no way anyone is going to get the two hundred dollars in back taxes that someone has decided Mrs. Stone owes.

  I look around the crowd, wondering who the oil and gas man might be and see One-Arm Wetsel, Mr. Hummingbird, and Charley Roote, the old veteran who was one of my grocery delivery customers, along with a dozen other familiar faces.

  “Do I hear ten, ten, ten?” Dead silence. The auctioneer shakes his head and looks at the bankers. One of them shrugs. The John Deere goes to Mrs. Stone for three dollars.

  I stay until the actual land comes up for sale, and for a minute I think the farm is lost. The auctioneer starts the bidding at two hundred dollars and is down to one hundred dollars when a man with slicked-back hair wearing a pin-striped suit exits a late-model Graham and walks toward the front. This is it, I think, the company making its move.

  The oily-haired weasel starts to raise his hand to bid, but is immediately surrounded by farmers who, without even touching him, make their point clear. Mr. Hummingbird towers over him at almost seven feet tall, and Charley Roote strolls over and opens his jacket to display a pistol tucked into his belt.

  “We don’t think you really want to buy this farm, mister,” Charley growls, boring into the fellow’s eyes. “It wouldn’t be healthy. We think you want to get right in that shiny auto and go back where you came from. Understand?”

  The farm goes for five dollars, sold once again to Mrs. Stone. Thinking it over, I realize she’s spent about twenty dollars in all, and now she’s clear and free of the bankers, tax men, and the oil and gas company . . . at least for a while.

  Penny Auction

  By the time I get to White Rock I’m two hours late.

  “About time you got here,” Boodean chides me. “Lucky the brass had to go to Camp Laurel for a meeting. What happened, car trouble?”

  “I’m sorry. Did I miss anything?”

  “Nah. Just a bellyache and a boil. Then Lou Cross came in for some more of that salve you had made for his wart at the pharmacy. He says it’s really working.” Mrs. Ross holds out a cup of fresh coffee and I tell them about the farm auction, but no one is as excited about it as I am.

  When I get home, I get a better reaction. Eager to narrate the story, I run up the stairs to tell Patience and she gets so worked up, Daniel has to tell her to calm down.

  “This is great. This is great,” she keeps saying. “The people are taking control! They’re fighting back.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I continue, enjoying her enthusiasm. “The farmers stood up to the bank, and Mrs. Stone got her land back. Then they chased the oil and gas man off the property. The auctioneer didn’t even bother to sell the household contents, because by then he knew they were beaten. The whole thing must have been fixed by someone. . . .”

  Daniel, who reads the paper religiously, enlightens us. “I’ve heard about these sales in the Times. They’re called penny auctions and started in the Midwest. Nationwide, they estimate, a quarter million farms have been foreclosed on, so the farmers are getting organized.”

  “But they don’t have a union, do they?” That’s Patience, always a union supporter.

  “County agriculture societies seem to be the instigators,” Daniel goes on. “Or sometimes they’re spontaneous. However they happen, the locals bid ridiculously low and some won’t bid at all. If an outsider or a land speculator shows up, things can get rough. There have even been a few deaths, though no one was charged. The banks walk away with a fraction of what’s owed and the farmer gets his land back. This may be the first penny auction in Union County, but it won’t be the last.”

  “After it was all over,” I share with a smile, “I saw the old lady wave at Mr. Roote, so I think maybe he was the one who got the other farmers to show up. She was almost gay, and he was standing very tall.”

  25

  November 25, 1934

  Today I have been thinking about my life as a physician, and I’m not proud. I could enumerate my wrongdoings, each omission or co-mission seared on some twisted lobe of my brain, but the list is too long. I’ll just tell you one event that sticks with me. There were so many. . .

  Mary Proudfoot comes first to mind, the MacIntoshes’ cook, an African queen. Back in 1930, when we still lived in Liberty, she was carried to my small clinic after her fall down the MacIntoshes’ back stairs. I knew something was fishy, but chose to ignore it.

  Mrs. Proudfoot, a highly respected colored woman, was as strong as an ox. At six foot tall she was my equal. How does a woman like that just fall down the stairs at one in the morning? And why was she fully dressed at that time of the night?

  William MacIntosh, the coal baron, had brought her to me in his Oldsmobile. The man was upset, almost crying, and smelled strongly of booze. This was no surprise. Though it was still Prohibition, anyone could get liquor when he wanted.

  The cook was unconscious, her pupils dilated and unequal, and she had bloody spinal fluid coming out of her nose, a sure sign of an intracranial bleed. I should have done an immediate craniotomy, but I called the funeral wagon and sent her to Robinson, the Negro physician across town.

  Robinson was a good doctor, don’t get me wrong, that wasn’t the problem. He’d trained at Meharry, and we’d had many discussions sitting in the dark on his back porch, sipping his homemade apple wine and talking about new medications and different approaches to surgery, but Mary Proudfoot died on his operating table before he could perform the surgery. The delay in transfer cost the woman her life.

  What kind of physician does that? And why? Was it laziness? Was it because of her color? Was it because everyone in town knew MacIntosh had lost his fortune and didn’t have a red cent to pay me? Whatever the reason, I beg Mary’s forgiveness and Robinson’s too.

  First Snow

  Snow, like feathers, falling softly, down and down and down. “I hope the installers from the Mountain Farmers Telephone Co-op come today, although with this snow they might not,” I worry out loud.

  “I lived for a long time without a phone before I moved here.” That’s Patience, resting back on her pillows. She has good days and bad days and I never know what each will be. Lately she’s taken to knitting little things for the new baby, tiny booties, a sweater, and this seems to cheer her, give her hope.

  “But it would be so nice to know that you
had a pedestal phone like Lilly’s on the bedside table.” I hold out a blue-and-white-flowered chipped teapot filled with hot water. “Raspberry tea?” She nods her head yes. We’re eating breakfast up in her room off a wooden tray that I constructed myself and then painted with flowers.

  “I hate leaving you alone today. Daniel and Blum are out on a call. We don’t even know when they’ll be back. What if you need something? Maybe I should quit my job.”

  “No, Becky. You can’t quit. You’ve done a lot for us, just moving in. I’ll be okay.” Patience turns, smiling. “I love the snow.”

  “So do I. I grew up in the north country, Brattleboro, Vermont.”

  “I was raised in Deerfield, Illinois, near Chicago,” Patience offers, and I realize how little we know about each other.

  Then there’s silence as we both stare out the window.

  The roof of the barn is covered, the lawn, the meadows, the branches of every tree and shrub. And the snow is still coming. Up on the mountain, the fir and spruce are dark against the white. Here and there a golden oak that hasn’t lost its leaves brightens the scene.

  “So beautiful,” Patience whispers. “You asked me about my previous births the other day. . . .”

  “Don’t talk about it if it makes you sad.”

  “It’s okay. I think it’s important that you know. You are my midwife.” Here she gives me a sly smile, teasing, because she knows, unlike her, I’m a reluctant midwife.

  “I’ve been pregnant four times. I abrupted my first when I was sixteen. I was an orphan and conceived unexpectedly with my love, Lawrence, an art student in Chicago.

  “He was killed in a train wreck on his way to tell his parents that we wanted to marry. I read about it in the paper and lost the pregnancy a few days later. The baby was stillborn and, having plenty of breast milk and no other employment, I became a wet nurse.”

  I listen without comment, but my eyes widen thinking of so much sadness. To lose your lover and your child in one week! How could she endure?

  “What happened to your parents? Couldn’t you turn to someone in the family?”

  “My only grandma died of consumption, a slow, lingering death, then my father, a first mate on a freighter, died in a storm on Lake Michigan, leaving my mother and me deep in debt. A few years later, when I was twelve, Mama died of TB. She hemorrhaged in her sleep and I found her in her bloody bed in the morning. That left me alone and that’s how I got sent to an orphans’ asylum in Chicago.” She recounts all this as if describing the weather, a drought, a blizzard, a flood.

  “Is this too much for you?” she asks, squeezing my hand. The midwife has noticed tears in my eyes.

  “No, I’m just amazed. I had no idea you’ve had such a hard life.”

  Patience laughs. “We all have hard lives, Becky. Don’t you know that? Sometimes you just have to take your wounded heart out, stitch it up, stuff it back in your chest, and go on. . . .” Here she pauses and I picture myself doing that. Stuffing my wounded heart back in my chest.

  “Anyway,” Patience continues after smoothing her hair. “I mourned deeply, but I was young and eventually fell in love again. This time, the man was a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Pittsburgh, Ruben Gordesky. We married and were together seven wonderful years until he died in the Battle of Blair Mountain when he was only thirty-five, along with a couple of hundred other union men. I thought I’d never love again, then Daniel came along and we conceived our first time.”

  Here she gets a faraway look in her eyes. “We weren’t married or even engaged and since I’d never had a baby with Ruben, I assumed I was barren. . . . It was just something that happened in the middle of a thunderstorm. Oh, that sounds so bad!” She smiles and raises her eyebrows.

  “Here I was, trying to establish myself as a reputable professional and then I get pregnant and I’m not even married. I was distraught. The community would never accept me as a midwife. I even thought of taking some herbs that would make the baby go away, but I decided I deserved to be happy. If I wanted a baby, I would have one, to hell with what people would think.

  “Daniel found out I was expecting and we decided to marry. We had a date for the wedding and everything, invited the Maddocks and the Dreshers, one of Daniel’s big clients. Well, the wedding came off, a quiet one in town with Judge Wade, on a snowy day like this, but I abrupted a second time months later, went into painful contractions out in the fields bringing in the hay. I should have known better. By the time I got to the house, the baby came out on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. I named her Rosie, because she was so red, and I buried her behind the barn on Wild Rose Road with that other baby. You remember, the dead premature baby someone left in a carton at your clinic?”

  I let my breath out and consider coming up with an excuse to get out of the room, but Patience needs to talk, so I hold my seat. When something traumatic happens to you, whether it’s the loss of a limb, the loss of a lover, or the loss of a child, talking it through is part of healing.

  “After that,” she continues, “I thought for sure that I couldn’t have children, but within six months I was pregnant again. This time, Daniel and I went to Torrington to the specialist and were told that I must have a blood disorder. He was pretty sure I would just keep losing babies and wanted me to have a termination and get sterilized.

  “He told us it would be too hard on me emotionally and physically to keep losing a baby every year. In a way, I think he was right, but Danny Boy stuck and he was worth everything. So despite the bleeding with this pregnancy, I don’t give up hope.” She rolls over and puts her head in my lap and I stroke her hair. Outside the window, the snow falls and falls.

  November 26, 1934

  Reading about Patience’s life in Becky’s journal, I am stunned. Who could have known the difficulties she’s lived through? I’m stunned and ashamed.

  How is it that Patience could lead a life of so much pain and still be a beacon of hope, while the loss of my wife destroyed me? Am I really that weak?

  The thing is, it wasn’t just grief. There was the guilt, the overwhelming guilt. And it wasn’t just her death. There was Teeleman, the drug rep. A double murder.

  Thanksgiving

  “I’ll say the blessing,” Daniel announces when our Thanksgiving feast is placed on a table next to Patience’s bed. “Lord, we thank you for this bounty and for these friends. . . . Amen.” It’s a short prayer and we have a white tablecloth and candles that Patience insisted on. We have all dressed up; the men, even Danny, in long-sleeved shirts and ties and Patience and I in our second-best dresses.

  Ordinarily, we begin our meal without preamble, and I’d thought Daniel was more like Blum, a skeptic when it came to God, but I guess I was wrong. Little Danny folds his hands, making a church and then a steeple, and there are tears in Patience’s eyes as she looks at her rounding belly. Maybe she’s saying a prayer for her unborn child. The fetus is now around twenty-eight weeks, too early yet, much too early.

  Outside, the snow falls again, tiny white flakes and there are three inches on the ground, but it won’t amount to much, which is good, because I have to go to work on Friday.

  “Do you want to carve the ham?” Hester asks Blum. I’m always surprised when he treats the doctor as if he’s normal, an intelligent companion who’s just lost his voice, rather than a handicapped patient who has lost his mind.

  Isaac takes the carving knife and slices the ham neatly with his nimble surgeon’s hands. We also have fried trout from the river, home-canned green beans, mashed potatoes, and a pumpkin pie with whipped cream that I made myself with a recipe Patience gave me. All of the food is from our garden or the farm animals, except for the flour, sugar, and lard, and this pleases me, because, for the first time, I had a hand in growing it.

  “Milk?” Patience asks pouring for everyone. I hold out my cup and am happy that I don’t have to go to work at the CCC camp today. I worry about the boys when I’m away too long, but they have the day off
too, so unless they get into some kind of shenanigans, at least there won’t be any serious accidents.

  I take in the room, the flickering candlelight on the faces of my friends. We don’t have much, but for this day, this week, we have enough and we are safe in each other’s care.

  Winter

  26

  December 15, 1934

  The day of Priscilla’s accident did not start out well. When I kissed her at breakfast she turned away. It was just a husbandly kiss on the cheek, but it offended her somehow and she brushed me aside with a sour expression.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You smell bad,” she said, and it hurt me. “And I’m sick of you, Isaac.”

  Priscilla was a very dramatic woman and said such things regularly.

  “Sick to death of me?” I tried to jolly her out of her bad mood, but this time it didn’t work.

  “Sick enough to file for divorce,” she announced.

  I turned slowly to assess her expression. Though we’d had a few hard times in the past, divorce or separation had never come up before.

  There was no twinkle in her eye, no smile. She stared at me with disgust, as if I were a fly in the honey. Then she leaned over and pulled a sheaf of papers out of the kitchen drawer. “Divorce Decree” it said on the top in fancy calligraphy and under that “Petition for Dissolution of a Marriage.”

  At first I just blinked, then I sat down and reached for her hand. “Darling, you can’t mean this. I know our marriage hasn’t always been easy, but it’s nothing you can throw away without talking.”

  “Watch me!” she slashed back.