The Reluctant Midwife Read online

  “Yeah.”

  “Just don’t let him wander,” I interject. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing and might scare someone or get hurt.” I pull the black medical bag out of the car, just as a woman cries out.

  Blue

  “Oh, not again! Not again! Joey. Joey. Stay with me, Joey,” a woman screams. Mr. Rioli grabs my arm as we race up the stairs to find in the front bedroom, the fancy lady I’d seen in town kneeling next to a bed. To the side, on the floor, I can see a child’s pale feet and I can hear his labored breathing. The room is filled with exotic-smelling smoke so thick I almost choke.

  “Ma’am,” I introduce myself. “I’m Rebecca Myers, registered nurse. Can I help you?” When she turns I see that her face is red from crying.

  “Oh, thank the Lord!”

  “Mommy?” a voice from behind us interrupts.

  “Hush, Allegra. Go back to the other bedroom and keep your sisters quiet. The nurse is here.”

  “But we’re hungry.”

  “It doesn’t matter! Go ask Mrs. Barnett. Go!”

  The older child leaves and I don’t get a look at her because I’m now on my hands and knees with the mother, helping the boy to sit up. He’s a handsome kid, but his sandy-blond hair is sweaty and matted and his lips are blue. He breathes out with a high-pitched whine, and then coughs. Over and over he coughs and tries to push his air out.

  “Nick,” I order. “Open the windows. We have to get some of this smoke out.”

  “But Mrs. Barnett said it would make him better.”

  “I know people say breathing incense helps, but I’m a nurse, if you want me to help, you have to do what I say. Open the windows.”

  I pull out my stethoscope and listen to the child’s lungs and heart. His respirations are rapid, forty a minute, and there’s a marked expiratory wheeze.

  “It’s okay, Joey. Breathe with me. In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out.” The child’s eyes, in his blue-white face, focus on mine and he makes a low moan, like wind being forced through a narrow pipe.

  “Oh, Joey,” the mother sobs. “My little Joey. I’m so sorry. If only your father were here. I’m so sorry.” Her tears fall on the boy’s head as she caresses it and I see that her emotions are louder than the boy’s breathing.

  “How long has Joey been having these spells?” I try to settle her down.

  “It’s his sixth fit today—before that he would have one or two a month, but he fell ill from the night air, or maybe it’s a reaction to the greenery—we had an inhaler but he’s used it up and I wrote down the medication we need and had Anthony take it to the pharmacy, but the pharmacist said he didn’t have it—he told Anthony we might be able to get some in Torrington, but we don’t want to go back there . . .” Her sentences run on like the Hope River flooding with chunks of ice in March.

  I take my glass thermometer out of its metal case and put it under the boy’s arm. The mother looks surprised.

  “I can’t put it in his mouth. When he breathes like that it won’t be accurate.” Then I wait the two long minutes during which the boy and the mother begin to calm down.

  “It’s ninety-nine degrees. Close to normal. What else have you tried?”

  “Anthony got him some Schiffmann’s Asthmador Cigarettes at the pharmacy, the last pack they had, and blew smoke in his face, but it didn’t help.”

  “Okay, I’m going to run to the pharmacy myself to see if Mr. Stenger has some epinephrine somewhere in back. I’ll get your driver to take me. Maybe, since the pharmacist knows me, I can persuade him to help. Epinephrine is what’s in the inhaler, right? It’s the medication the doctor from Pittsburgh gave you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Yes, that’s what they use. . . . Mr. Rioli!” The driver is listening to everything, just outside in the hall.

  Getting away from the house gives me some time to think. If the boy keeps going on like this, he could go into cardiac arrest and the next asthma attack could be his last . . . or the one after that. I’m just praying that Mr. Stenger will be able to find some epi stashed away in the back. Even a few drops could be used in the child’s nose.

  “Step on it, Nick,” I order as we peel out of the drive. It isn’t until we get to Main that I remember Dr. Blum. Hopefully, he’s still on the porch with his babysitters.

  “Little Joey going to be okay?” the chauffeur asks me.

  “I don’t know. I’ll do what I can. It depends on if we can get some kind of medication with a bronchodilator in it. Status asthmaticus can be fatal.”

  “Status what?”

  “Status asthmaticus . . . asthma attacks that go on and on without a break.”

  Long Shot

  The chauffeur, knuckles white and jaw clenched, grips the wheel as we head into town, but our trip to the pharmacy is fruitless. When Mr. Stenger insists he has no epinephrine, we leave in a hurry after wasting precious time.

  “What now?” Nick asks.

  “Let’s go back to the Barnett Boardinghouse and I’ll call the local vet and see if he has any medication that might help. He lives out in the country. Maybe he’ll bring us something.”

  “I could go get it, if you tell me where. I could persuade him.”

  “What’s with you anyway? I thought you were going to get rough with Mr. Stenger back there?”

  “I just . . .” (The blush moving up his baby face surprises me.) Before the driver can answer . . .

  “Hey! That’s the vet!” A black Model T with a dent in the rear is moving away from us down Main. “Can you catch him?”

  The Packard shoots forward, horn blaring, and the Ford screeches to a halt. I jump out while we’re still rolling. “Ill child with asthma,” I yell to Daniel Hester. “We need epi.”

  “Where?” Daniel yells back, standing on the running board.

  “Barnett Boardinghouse.”

  “I’ll have to go home. I have a little there.”

  “The boy is critical,” I offer, as he speeds away, then bite my lower lip. The sun is too bright for early May. It should be softer. The shadows are too harsh and I don’t know why I care so much about one little boy of one apparently very rich family, but I do.

  On our return to the rooming house, we find the child has fallen asleep and is breathing quietly, but it doesn’t last. An hour later, his eyes snap open and lock on to mine. He sits up in bed, puts his hands around his neck, and looks around wildly.

  “Breathe in . . . Breathe out . . . Look at me, Joey! Do it like this. I know you feel like you can’t get your air, but breathe slower. In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out.” The boy starts to cough again and it’s all we can do to keep him in bed. Once, he sits up so hard his head hits my nose and it begins to bleed, dripping red on Mrs. Barnett’s white sheets.

  “Nick,” the mother shouts. “Help, Nick. We need you. This time it’s worse.”

  There’s the sound of heavy feet coming up the steps and when I look up both Daniel Hester and Nick Rioli are trying to make it through the door at the same time. The vet is wearing dirty blue coveralls and smells like manure, but he’s here and I feel less alone.

  “This is the animal doctor I told you about, Mrs. Bazzano, Dr. Hester. He has the epinephrine.” The vet kneels on the floor, touches the shaking boy on the arm, and then opens a leather bag like I carry.

  “How much does he weigh?” Hester asks Mrs. Bazzano.

  “Sixty pounds at his last doctor’s visit. Maybe less. He’s not been eating the past few days.” Daniel fills a syringe from a glass vial. I had expected some kind of inhaler, but now that I think of it, his patients probably don’t use inhalers and an injectable will work faster . . . if it works.

  “Uhhhhh. Uhhhhh. Uhhhhh.” Joey makes a strange noise as he forces air in and out. Then he stops breathing altogether and falls back.

  “Arm.” Daniel orders, and I pull up the boy’s nightshirt sleeve. The vet doesn’t bother with cleansing the skin, he just jabs the needle in and pushes the plunger. “I’m not sure I have the do
se correct,” he whispers. “I gave him what I would give a good-sized dog. I have a little more if it doesn’t work.”

  Then we wait. Thirty seconds. I’m holding my breath along with Joey, wondering how long you can go without air before your heart stops. I count the seconds in my head. Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven. At last Joey gasps! Relief is almost instantaneous.

  Mrs. Bazzano and I look at each other and I wipe her tears. She pulls a white hanky out of her pocket and wipes my bloody nose.

  9

  Ice Pick

  It isn’t until dusk three days later that Dr. Blum and I leave the Barnett Boardinghouse. Nick and one of Mrs. Bazzano’s men had retrieved our Pontiac and, thank God, I’d asked Daniel to check on our six poor chickens still locked in the barn. I’m not much of a chicken farmer, but I know the birds have to eat and he took them some feed.

  The chauffer slaps Blum on the back as we stand in the driveway getting ready to leave. “Well, old buddy,” he wisecracks, “I expect you’ll beat me in poker the next time I see you.” The men have taken a shine to the doctor, always setting him up with a hand of cards when they play. Not that he ever actually joined them. He just sat where he was, holding the fan of cards in front of him like the other Joes. “He has a real poker face,” they kidded.

  Mrs. Bazzano and the children, including Joey, wave from the porch.

  The vet had offered to take Isaac home with him days ago, but Mrs. Bazzano was paying me two dollars a day, renting our rooms, and feeding us, so we happily stayed. Also I didn’t want to leave until the order for three asthma inhalers came in on the train.

  Before I turn up Wild Rose Road, I stop at the Hesters’ place. Inside I can hear Patience playing the piano, something familiar, “Oh! Susanna, Oh don’t you cry for me, For I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee.”

  A few minutes later at the kitchen table over coffee and gingerbread cookies, I tell Daniel how much I appreciated him helping me out with Joey. “I wanted you to know what it meant to me, your help at the bedside. You saved the boy’s life. Here’s something from the child’s mother.” I hold out a ten-dollar bill. “Mrs. Bazzano also asked me to tell you how grateful she was.”

  “Bazzano?” Patience asks. “Bazzano?” She turns to Daniel. “You didn’t say who they were. That’s the Bazzano family from Pittsburgh?”

  “Yes,” I answer quickly. “Somewhere near Pittsburgh.”

  “Don’t you know who they are?”

  “I know quite a bit,” I answer smugly. “The lady said her husband owned a restaurant, but he was killed in an accident last year and they had to leave town. I figured they were deep in debt or something. Nice woman, but she has her hands full with five children, and the little boy, so sickly.”

  “Don’t you know who they are?” Patience asks again. Both Daniel and I shrug. “That’s John Bazzano’s family. The Pittsburgh mobster! The late mob boss. He was assassinated in New York City last year. The ice pick murder?

  “We read about it in the newspaper, Daniel, right here at this table. Bazzano was stabbed some twenty times in the chest with an ice pick and discovered a few days later in a trash bin. It was big news.”

  “That John Bazzano?” Daniel now recalls the story, but I draw a dead blank. Most likely it happened around the time I was dealing with Dr. Blum’s illness and had stopped reading the paper.

  “The ritual murder was in retaliation for Bazzano wiping out three brothers in a rival Pennsylvania gang. All three. Can you imagine?”

  I swallow hard. “Those people were mobsters?”

  In the end Patience holds out her hand and takes the ten-dollar bill. When times are hard, it doesn’t matter if the money is dirty or the money is clean.

  Windfall

  “Old MacDonald had a farm. E-I-E-I-O,” I sing to Dr. Blum as I scrub our linens on the washboard in the big galvanized metal washtub. It lightens my load to have a little money in the money jar. “And on his farm he had a chicken. E-I-E-I-O.” The sound of a motor interrupts my song as a battered green pickup truck loaded with wood pulls into the yard.

  What now? It’s Reverend Miller from Hazel Patch, the Negro pastor who changed our flat when we first returned to Union County. A tall, young black fellow sits in the front beside him.

  I hurry outside, pulling Blum along. “Why, Reverend, how nice of you to stop by. Won’t you come in?” I inwardly cringe, knowing I have nothing to serve them, no biscuits, no apple butter, not even coffee.

  “No need for that, ma’am, though I thank you kindly.” He tips his straw hat and wipes sheen from his wide handsome brown face. “We brought you some wood. A tornado touched down in Hazel Patch in April and wreaked havoc. We’re trying to get the hillside cleaned off. I just dropped off a load to the Hesters, and Patience said you could use some too.”

  “I thought tornados didn’t happen in the mountains.”

  “Oh, they happen, but only every ten years or so. Where do you want us to stack it?”

  I survey the bed of the truck. That’s a lot of wood! Some of the trunks are six inches, some only four, but still good for the cookstove. “To the side of the house I guess.”

  “This is Nate Bowlin.” He indicates the young man with him, a tall fellow of about eighteen who’s eyeing Dr. Blum as if he were a ghost. The physician still stands next to me and I note that his pants are ripped and hitched up too high, like an unkempt scarecrow or one of the homeless men down by the river, and I’m suddenly embarrassed. I hadn’t given any recent thought to how we’re dressed when we’re out on the farm because we don’t usually get company.

  “Be right back,” I say to cover my discomfort, then I lead Blum into the house and sit him on the davenport. “Stay.”

  Returning, I find the wood almost all stacked in a pile taller than I am. The Reverend and Nate finish up. “Could I offer you a few dollars? I just got paid for a nursing job. That’s a lot of firewood.”

  “No. No.” The Reverend puts up his hand. “You need what you have.”

  He opens the truck door and I think he is going to leave, but he stops, takes off his hat, and looks toward the blue door. “We’ve been praying for the doctor. Any change?”

  I shrug, surprised. “Not much. Maybe a little. One day he got up and dressed himself.”

  Reverend Miller shoots me a big smile and his very white teeth illuminate his dark face. “Well now. That’s something!” he says as if dressing yourself was a real accomplishment. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  Woodpile

  “Okay, Blum. Time to get to work.” I’m dressed for the outdoors in old slacks and a plaid cotton shirt that Patience gave me.

  Her old six-foot-long crosscut saw hangs on spikes under the porch and I carefully carry it out to where I’ve lined up two sawhorses I found in the barn. Sometimes I think the doctor is making progress and other times he seems like a little boat bobbing along without rudder or sail. I plunk a straw hat on his head and once again my loneliness hits me like a locomotive loaded with coal.

  Get a grip, Becky, and quit feeling sorry for yourself. If you expect to have cooked food this summer and heat in the fall, you have to cut up this wood. I lay the first log, about eight feet long and the width of my forearm, up on the sawhorses then give Isaac one of the handles.

  Just then, I hear another car whining up Wild Rose Road. Two cars in one day! We’re getting to be Grand Central Station!

  “How ya doing?” the vet asks, jumping out of his Model T and going straight toward Dr. Blum. He reaches out to shake hands, and when Isaac ignores him, he picks up the doc’s right mitt and pumps it. “Glad to see you. Here let me give you some help.” Blum is still standing with his left hand on the saw handle and Daniel Hester takes my place and begins to pull and push.

  “Bitsy and I used to store our firewood under the porch,” Patience tells me, gathering little Danny up and climbing out of the passenger-side door. She plops her little fair-haired boy on the steps and gives me a hug. �
��It stays nice and dry there. . . . I’m so sorry we don’t get over more. . . . Our life is crazier than the Pittsburgh Zoo. Are you doing okay?” She studies my face.

  I shrug and smile to show that I’m game, just the good old outdoorsy girl living the good old farm life with the good old catatonic boy. My act doesn’t fool her and she nods toward Isaac. “Pretty hard, huh?”

  I turn away. If she only knew the tears that I’m hiding. “We’re making it. Pastor Miller brought the wood and I found the two-person saw under the porch. Thanks for thinking of us. Do you want to come in? I don’t have any coffee or anything.”

  “That’s okay. Put on the water. I brought you a jar of peppermint leaves I dried last fall. We can have tea.”

  Patience follows me through the blue door with her little boy and gives him his red metal fire truck to play with.

  “Oh, the house looks so pretty. Do you have everything you need? Is there anything more I could lend you?”

  “No, Patience.” I smile, looking around the room at the white walls, the shining windows, at the sofa covered with a blue-and-green quilt, at the white curtains I made of muslin that Patience donated, at the bookcase that now holds our books, mostly medical. I have even set out my paints and brushes in a clear quart jar, and on the back wall hung one of my paintings, Purple Iris on a Hillside.

  “You’ve given us all this! All I need now is a job with cash money. I can’t live on your charity forever. There has to be something.”

  “Times are tough. . . . There aren’t many jobs, Becky.” Patience stares out the window. “Try not to worry. We’ll share what we have and you’ll share with us. That’s how people get by nowadays. The thing is, you can’t have too much pride.” For the first time, I notice how worn she looks.

  Outside, there’s the swish, swish, swish of the two-man crosscut, and when I look through the window, I see the vet and the doctor, pulling back and forth equally. There’s the sheen of sweat on Isaac’s face, and when Daniel stops for a break, he takes a swig from a silver flask and then holds the same flask to my charge’s lips.