The Reluctant Midwife Page 29

  All day, I thought about Becky’s problem. I had a little money saved from the wooden bowls I crafted on the lathe that Hester sold for me at the flea market in Delmont. There were three cars in the drive . . . Becky needed the Pontiac to get to work. Hester needed his Model T to make his rounds, but I figured Patience wasn’t going anywhere, so that left the Olds for me.

  I let Becky put me to bed just as usual. I could do it myself, of course, but I like her to touch me. So gently she holds my chin and opens my mouth to brush my teeth, then pushes my hair from my eyes. I lie on my back and she straightens my pillow and pulls up the covers. For just a split second, her breast brushes my chest as she bends over me, but she doesn’t notice. She’s a nurse and I’m just a patient to her.

  Before sunrise, I made my move and tiptoed downstairs with my good clothes on. Not wanting to alert the household, I pushed the Oldsmobile out into the road before I turned on the ignition.

  Getting Trustler’s X-ray result was easy. I’d driven to Pittsburgh plenty of times when I used to take Priscilla shopping. Funny how things come back to you, just like when I did Patience’s surgery. The body remembers. The hands remember.

  At West Penn Hospital, when I introduced myself as Dr. Blum and said I was from White Rock CCC Camp, the report was handed over without question. It took all of three sentences to get what I came for. Coming home was more difficult.

  I ran out of gas at the West Virginia border and had to walk ten miles back to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, but the Texaco station was closed. Then it took me three hours to find a farmer willing to sell me five gallons of gas and I had to walk the ten miles back.

  I arrived home to a dark house about two A.M., took off my shoes, dropped the folder on the kitchen table, and cat-walked up the stairs to bed. I was never in the military, but I now know how soldiers must feel when they make it back to camp. As I fell asleep I smiled to myself. Mission accomplished.

  39

  Asylum

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so withdrawn. The thought of Drake having tuberculosis was really upsetting me,” Captain Wolfe opens up. “My wife died of TB, but silicosis, that’s different. There’s hope.”

  We are in his sedan, driving to Torrington to pick up Drake Trustler and I am elated. Silicosis, I’ve read, is serious, but at least it’s not communicable, and Drake can come back to the camp.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” he goes on, stroking his scarred cheek, and for the first time telling me about his dead wife. “I didn’t want to put her in the tuberculin asylum, but the doctors said it was her only chance. The cool mountain air would soothe her lungs and isolating her would keep me from getting it.

  “I drove her up to Cresson near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the middle of winter. It was the nicest sanatorium I could find. She had her own room and everything. Caroline was a teacher, an elementary school teacher, and she loved children, though we never had any ourselves, a beautiful, delicate woman. They say that happens. The good die young. . . .”

  He looks over with tears in his eyes and it strikes me that the man is still in love with his wife. I think about my husband, David. Do I still love him?

  The captain goes on. “I went up to see her every other week and the last day is like a hand-tinted photograph imprinted in my mind. It was a beautiful spring day, but something was off, the yellow of the forsythia was too yellow, the grass was too green, the red on her handkerchief too goddamn red.

  “I left with a bad feeling and the next day she died, died alone.” The captain wipes his eyes. “If Drake had had TB, I couldn’t have stood it.” After that there’s silence.

  “Drake can’t stop talking since he’s been back at the camp. It’s like he’s been given a new life,” Boodean confides later that afternoon when we’d sent Drake over to the cookhouse for supper.

  “Well, I’m sure he was worried about TB. Everyone knows tuberculosis is incurable. The thing is, Boodean . . . ” Here I lower my voice. “Silicosis isn’t much better. It’s not contagious, which is a plus, and the deterioration is slower, but in the end . . .” I stop, hoping my meaning is clear enough.

  A few minutes later, Drake comes back into the infirmary whistling. His color is better, he gained five pounds while in the hospital, and we intend to keep the weight on. Mrs. Ross even got him some smaller uniforms so he doesn’t look like a scarecrow, and she plans to bring him pound cake that’s full of eggs and cream from her farm every week.

  “From now on, until it gets warmer, Drake, I want you to sleep in the clinic, and the major says you can be Mrs. Ross’s assistant, sending out the twenty-five-dollar checks to the boys’ families and doing other little jobs for her.”

  Drake just chews his gum and smiles.

  “Then in a couple of weeks, the captain plans to station you in the new fire tower during the day, a nice easy job, so you can get your strength back and continue to heal. A corpsman from the motor pool will drive you up with your lunch, and you’ll sit in the lookout station with a shortwave radio and binoculars, looking for signs of smoke and calling in anything suspicious.

  “That’s swell, Nurse Becky. I know I’m blessed that I don’t have TB. I was pretty sure you’d have to send me to one of those sanatoriums, like where my grandpap went to die.”

  “March through May is fire season,” Boodean interjects, “and the fire index is higher this year because we didn’t get the heavy snows, so it’s not like this job is a piece of cake.

  “Before the oak and maple leaves pop out and provide shade, the forest floor is as dry as a tinderbox. One spark from a steam engine or an untended fire and it’s all over. Thousands of acres can burn in a day.”

  “That’s why us boys are ready and trained,” Drake adds with pride. “It’s part of the CCC mission . . . to stamp out forest fires. Yee-ha!” He laughs, proud, but still making fun of himself.

  April Fool

  Today is April Fools’ Day and the doctor and I have been home in the little house at the end of Wild Rose Road for three days. It was hard coming back. I miss the Hesters, but Patience is well and doing fine; in fact she attended a birth on her own the day I went into Torrington. An easy one, she told me, right on the outskirts of Liberty, so she didn’t have to drive too far. It was Ida May’s cousin Betty Lou Cross, having her third, and now all the women on Patience’s list are delivered. In a way this gives me peace, but also a feeling of emptiness, like something important has gone out of my life.

  So now here we are, back where we started, but it’s not a happy landing. I watch Blum out in the garden turning over the soil with a garden fork, and I’m still pissed as hell. All this time, he could drive, find his way to Pittsburgh, go to a hospital, and pick up a report, while I have been taking care of him as if he were a prince! What a fool I’ve been! And how did I not realize that the man was so functional? It can only be that I was still treating him like an invalid while clearly he was recovering.

  And another thing: how did he know where to go? Patience didn’t seem as surprised as I was. She knew he’d been driving the tractor and even the Model T when he went out on calls with Daniel, but neither of us can remember talking about which hospital or which radiologist was causing me grief. For the first time, it occurs to me, with a turn of the stomach, that he has been reading my journal.

  The son of a bitch!

  April 3, 1935

  Becky is on to me. She’s moved her journal and she’s acting strange, so she must have realized I’ve been reading it. The problem is, reading her thoughts has become a compulsion, and even though I know I should stop, I find myself drawn to her room, like an opium addict to laudanum.

  I peek under the mattress and find the journal gone. I search her drawers and the top of her closet. I can’t stop. There are footsteps on the back porch and quickly I dart across the hall to my own room and lie down on the bed. If she peeks in, will she think I’m sleep? Will she see my heart pounding?

  Upright

  “Hip, hip, hooray!” we all cr
y. Today Mrs. Maddock walked!

  Mr. Maddock, who was once an engineer, invited us all over, even Dr. Blum, whom he apparently no longer fears, to witness the demonstration of a pair of leg braces, much like President Roosevelt’s, that he’s made for Sarah. She was able, using the wheelchair for support, to walk down the garden path to the driveway and back again. Maddock hovered behind her in case she fell.

  “I have been practicing standing for weeks,” she tells us, straightening the collar on her pretty flowered dress. “Holding myself up with the help of the braces, on the backs of chairs and the back of the sofa. I figure if FDR can do it, so can I, but I still get very tired. I don’t know how the president does it!”

  “He has a handsome young man who pretends to be his body guard stand next to him to give him support,” Daniel explains. “Look at the photos of him in the newspapers giving a speech or waving to the crowd, there’s always someone at his side.”

  “Well, I have my guardian angel, Milton.” She plunks back down in her wheelchair and Mr. Maddock pushes the conveyance up the side ramp to the porch, where we find celebration refreshments on a white wicker table—lemonade and sugar cookies that Mrs. Maddock has made herself.

  Whenever I have been in Sarah Maddock’s home, I’ve appreciated all the adaptations Mr. Maddock has made to accommodate his wheelchair-bound wife and wonder if he will have to remake all the shelves and cupboards now that she can walk. In the kitchen, pantry, and water closet everything has been built low, so that Sarah can reach from her wheelchair. It’s amazing what disabled people can do if given the appropriate tools.

  “Saw fire warning signs on Salt Lick today as I came into Liberty,” Daniel mentions, munching a cookie. “I guess the CCC boys put them up. Surprised we haven’t had more trouble with the corpsmen. In some towns they raise holy hell.”

  “Couple of boys got drunk at the bar a few nights ago,” I add, “and Sheriff Hardman put them in the drunk tank overnight, but that’s the only trouble I’ve heard of. Captain Wolfe and the superintendent run a tight ship.”

  “That’s good,” Daniel agrees. “Got to make those boys tow the line.” Here he looks at Blum as if this were an inside joke and I swear Blum actually smiles, the bastard!

  April 14, 1935

  For months we’ve been listening, as Daniel reads aloud from the Torrington Times, about the conditions in the Great Plains, how it’s estimated that 100 million acres of farmland has been lost to the winds, and I’ll admit I thought it an exaggeration, but there’s something to be said for hearing about it firsthand.

  Mrs. Rumer, who went out by train to Arkansas for her older brother’s funeral, told Daniel what she’d seen, as we sat drinking lemonade on her porch after testing her cattle for TB.

  “When the dust cloud came over the horizon, it felt like a shovelful of sand was flung in my face,” she began. “We were out in the yard and could hardly make it back to the house. Cars along the road came to a standstill. I saw it with my own eyes. . . . My sister-in-law and the children live with the red dust, day in and day out.

  “They can’t escape it, and my brother George had to live with it too, until it killed him. ‘Dust pneumonia’ the doctors call it. The red grit gets deep in the lungs and then you fever and die, especially old people and children.

  “They eat dust, sleep with dust. Watch dust strip their hope away.”

  And then yesterday there was no doubting the stories. Hester and I were working out in his garden (we’ve been trading days back and forth from my garden to his) when a wind came up and strange orange clouds began to boil over the mountains.

  We’d heard on the radio out of Wheeling that it was storming in Ohio, so we weren’t surprised about the clouds, but the color, that was another thing! On our way across the barnyard, heading for the house, the sand hit us full force.

  Next thing, lightning, and then the sky turned copper red. The air became heavy with grit. I couldn’t believe it. We were getting some of Mrs. Rumer’s dead brother’s farm.

  Then on the news today everyone’s talking about the “Dust Bowl” and “Black Sunday,” the biggest dust storm yet and the only one that made it all the way to the East Coast.

  Apparently, an Associated Press newsman and his photographer were caught just north of Boise City and got pictures of the black clouds as they blotted out the sun and rolled across the prairie. The reporter’s the one who coined the name “Black Sunday,” dirt in the air so thick, you couldn’t see through it, and some of it made it all the way to our mountains! Damnedest thing.

  Scoundrel

  A few years ago, I’d have been glad not to hear doors banging, children crying, voices in another room, but now that we’ve returned to the house with the blue door it’s the silence that gets me. With only the doctor for company, it’s quiet as a mausoleum. Even our three-legged dog doesn’t bark unless a deer walks right past him.

  The worst part is my relationship with Blum. Since I realized he’d been reading my journal, I don’t brush his teeth anymore or lay out his clothes. I cook for him, so he won’t starve, but that’s all.

  What bothers me most is the suspicion that it wasn’t just once that he read my journal but many times. Thusly, I have doubled my effort to locate a good hiding spot. So far, the loose floorboard under my dresser seems the best place. I don’t think he can possibly find it, but still I keep picturing him with the little leather-bound book open over his knees.

  Yesterday at breakfast, I finally came out with it.

  “Blum, you are a bastard and a dickhead!” (Those were the only words I could find.) “After all I’ve done for you, you creep into my room and look in my journal. What kind of man are you?” That’s what I said. He just hung his head, didn’t answer. Not that I really expected him to.

  The idea of leaving him has come to me lately. If he can drive to Pittsburgh, he’s much more functional than I imagined. But if I left, where would I go? I still have my job at Camp White Rock and I could move into town, but I don’t make enough money to afford it.

  On the other hand, I have become fond of the farm at the end of Wild Rose Road, the daffodils, the brook, the oak in front just budding out. This is our second spring here and the early crops have already been sowed. And then there’s the chickens, only six of them, but they all have names, Mary, Martha, Madeline, Molly, Maria, and Minny. Minny’s the littlest, a red Bantam that lays brown eggs. What would I do with them if I left?

  I suppose I could tell Blum to leave. Tell him to wrap his few clothes in a bundle, tie them to a stick, and hit the road like a hobo, but then I’d be here alone. That would not be a good idea, not with the homeless men drifting over the land.

  Just yesterday two rough-looking fellows came to the door and the hair on my neck rose up like a cat’s. Bums, I thought, looking for handouts, but it turns out I was wrong.

  “Would you like to buy some nice hard coal, ma’am?” the bearded one asks, taking off his dirty cap. His hands are almost black and there’s soot on his nose. They lead a jackass loaded with burlap bags of the black gold. “Two bits a bag; burns nice and hot.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “We dug it ourselves. We’re no thieves if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You dug it? I thought all the mines had closed in Union County.”

  “They did. MacIntosh Consolidated went bust five years ago. Horse Shoe barred the gates and evicted us from our mining shacks this December, but the coal is still down there. It belongs to the people, same as air or water.” (This must be what Sally was talking about when she told me her pa was working his coal mine!)

  “Listen, lady,” the thin dark man holding the jackass growls. “It will be cold again this winter, and you’ll be sorry if you pass this up. If you don’t want it, someone else will. Mrs. Hester, the midwife, sent us up here. She took four bags yesterday and Mr. Maddock took three today.”

  I’m suspicious . . . “Is this what they call ‘bootleg coal,’ from those diggers
over in Pennsylvania? I read how out-of-work miners are digging pits on the hillsides and how the cops arrested some two hundred men, but the jury wouldn’t convict them.”

  “Damn right! Pardon my French, ma’am. Some call it bootlegging, but Sheriff Hardman calls it sensible. We have wives and kids to feed. Do you want some or not?”

  My mind spins like a top. The price is good, but technically the fuel is stolen. On the other hand, Mr. MacIntosh, the coal baron, died by his own hand at the beginning of the Depression and his widow, Katherine, and her little boy moved back to Baltimore, so they’ve given up on Appalachia. Now the coal is just sitting there and the miners are only scratching a living from the earth, same as Dr. Blum and I.

  I make a snap decision. It’s not cold now, but it will be this winter. “I’ll take the rest of what you’ve got, all four bags and I’ll take more if you’re ever up this way.”

  “Well, thank you, ma’am. Where should we put it?”

  I show the men where we keep the firewood under the porch and run upstairs for a dollar. Returning, I grab two biscuits from the kitchen and wrap them in a piece of newspaper.

  “Here,” I say, after turning over the money. “For your journey home, in case you get hungry.” The men look surprised.

  “God bless you, lady,” the dark fellow says. “You and your man.” He looks over at the garden where Isaac is hoeing potatoes.

  Here I almost choke. My man! If they only knew how close I am to getting rid of him!

  April 17, 1935

  I miss Becky. She has cut me off, called me a dickhead and a bastard. Not that I didn’t deserve it. The worst part is, I know reading her private journal was wrong, but I’ve never felt so close to anyone and now I’m alone again.

  The problem is, I can’t say I’m sorry. Reading her most private thoughts has changed me. Something deep inside has been touched.