The Last Midwife: A Novel Read online

  “I heard you been hurt. You all right?”

  Daniel answered for Gracy. “Dr. Erickson says so.”

  “Oh, Little Dickie. I’d rather Gracy tended me any day. He’s learning proud.”

  Gracy glanced up at the doctor, who heard the remark and reddened. She was glad when Daniel replied, “Maybe he’s not so bad.”

  Mittie held out a plate to Daniel. “I brung you an apple cake. It’s all I had, but Gracy’s been good to me, so I wanted to bring something. I expect before the day’s out, you’ll have enough food for a week.”

  Daniel nodded. Then he said in a loud voice to Gracy, “Mrs. McCauley’s brought you a cake.”

  “I came to sit up with her,” the woman said.

  Daniel shook his head. “No need,” he said firmly. “I’ll do it.”

  “She’s my friend,” Mittie insisted. Then she added, “This thing about the Halleck baby…”

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t believe a word of it. But there’s others. Folks out there’s willing to believe the worst of a person, and some of them are women Gracy’s been good to. I just feel like I ought to be here, to stand up for her. I wouldn’t want her left alone for fear—”

  “Nobody’d hurt Gracy!”

  The woman shook her head. “Looks like maybe somebody already tried.”

  * * *

  When Little Dickie finished with Gracy, he pulled a quilt up to her chin and told Daniel and Mittie they could go to her.

  “I gave you a scare,” she whispered.

  “She shouldn’t talk,” Little Dickie said. “She hit her head bad, and she’ll have to stay in bed a week.”

  “Oh, bosh!” Gracy muttered, then sank back into the pillow as if the words had been too much for her.

  Little Dickie ignored her. “Her leg isn’t broken, and that’s a miracle I’d say, but it was twisted around and it’ll hurt her for a time, maybe a long time. Maybe forever. She can take laudanum if the pain gets bad.”

  “I never took opiates in my life, and I won’t start now.”

  “I put ointment on the bruises and cuts—”

  “Kerosene works fine,” Gracy said.

  “You let her rest,” Little Dickie told Daniel. “I’ll come back this evening and check on her.”

  He stood and made for the door, but Gracy called to him and he stopped. “I’m obliged, Dr. Erickson. I’m grateful for your care. Maybe I wouldn’t have made it without you.”

  The doctor stood a little straighter and nodded.

  “I’ll pay you now,” Daniel said, reaching into his pocket and taking out a coin. “Is that enough?”

  “It’s enough.” Little Dickie took the money and smiled a little. “Wish everybody was so prompt in paying.” As he opened the door, he asked Daniel in a low voice, “You find out who cut down that tree?”

  “The sheriff’s working on it. You got any ideas?”

  “Me?” The doctor appeared flustered and shook his head. “How would I know?”

  “You seemed to have a powerful hate for Gracy yesterday.”

  “And I saved her life today,” he replied, picking up his bag and leaving the house.

  When the doctor was gone, Daniel asked Gracy, “You think Little Dickie might have saved your life?”

  Gracy smiled. “No, but what harm does it do for him to think it?”

  “You’re a good woman,” Daniel said, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Mittie, as if finding the conversation too personal, went to the dry sink and busied herself.

  “You really think somebody tried to kill me?” Gracy asked.

  Daniel thought a long time, then sighed. “I don’t know, honey. Your buggy hit a tree that was laying across the road. I don’t believe it was there by accident. I think somebody cut it down so’s you’d hit it. John thinks so, too.”

  “Somebody tried to scare me?” She shivered a little, glad Daniel was there to protect her but wishing Jeff were, too. He’d been her protection ever since he was a little boy and had thrown rocks at a mean dog to scare it away from his mother.

  Daniel nodded.

  “Or kill me?”

  “Maybe so.”

  “But they didn’t.” Then she teased, “Are you awful glad, Danny?”

  Daniel clasped her hand. She thought he wanted to tell her he loved her, but Daniel wasn’t much for such talk. Besides, Mittie McCauley was in the room. It didn’t matter, however, because Gracy knew.

  Nine

  Mittie McCauley came every day, bringing soup, a loaf of bread, a bit of cobbler made with the last of the raspberries on Potato Mountain. At first, Daniel growled. After all, he could take care of his wife. But the young woman brightened Gracy’s day, and besides, Mittie’s offerings varied Daniel’s cooking, giving them something to eat besides fried meat and potatoes. For this, Gracy was thankful.

  Mittie did more than bring food. She washed out the rags Gracy had used birthing the twins in Mayflower Gulch and spread them over bushes in the sun to dry, mended Gracy’s dress, which had been torn in the fall from the carriage, tidied the cabin. Perhaps best of all, she brought Gracy scraps of fabric in her favorite blue, and the two sat in the sun piecing.

  Mittie herself was like a bit of sunshine. Gracy remembered the first time the girl had come to the cabin, five, maybe six years before. Gracy had looked out the window and seen her staring at the house. She was slight but wiry, with sun-bleached hair and sunburned skin. She reached down and picked up a tin can that had fallen onto the trail and pitched it on top of the pile.

  The girl looked determined. She stood for a minute or two, staring at the house, her hands at her sides. She took a few steps, then stopped as she continued to stare. Then, determined, she walked to the cabin, straightened her back, and knocked. When Gracy opened the door, the girl said in a rush of breath, “I need your help.” And then she seemed to wilt, as if the words had taken all her strength. She clamped her mouth shut and seemed about to turn tail and run off.

  Women had come to Gracy before like this, had stood on her doorstep, mute as moles, thinking she could guess what they wanted, and sometimes she did. She stepped aside and gestured for Mittie to enter the cabin, knowing it wouldn’t do to prod. The girl would tell her in time or she’d make some excuse for calling, maybe say she’d come for the borrow of a spool of thread, and then leave without ever revealing what she wanted.

  After a time, when her visitor didn’t mouth a word, Gracy said, “I recollect you now. You’re Mittie McCauley, aren’t you?”

  The girl was startled. “How’d you know?”

  “I remember you from the church quilting. You took stitches as small as mustard seeds.”

  The girl smiled her pride. “I am vain about my quilting.”

  “You have good reason to be.”

  Mittie didn’t respond, and Gracy waited until Mittie said again, “I need your help.” She twisted her hands and opened her mouth, but no more words came out.

  So Gracy at last asked, “You’re having a baby, and you don’t want it?”

  Ever since Gracy had become a midwife, women had approached her and asked how to get rid of babies growing inside them. Gracy always listened. She offered comfort, told each woman that another baby wasn’t so bad or that the young man who’d gotten her pregnant was ripe for marriage and all she had to do was tell him her condition. Gracy didn’t judge, because she knew a woman had her reasons for not wanting a baby. She might have too many to care for already or was sick and thought another might kill her, and without her, what would become of the little ones? There were those who hadn’t any husbands, who’d been sweet-talked into lying with a miner or a traveling man who wouldn’t own up to being the father. Unmarried, pregnant, a girl might be disowned by her family and thrown out with no place to go except to one of the whorehouses. There were indeed reasons not to have a baby, and Gracy had heard them all. She didn’t want to abort the babies, not with instruments anyway; it went against her nature. But she was always sympat
hetic. If the women were insistent on ending their pregnancies, Gracy usually sent them to the woman doctor in Central City, the one who advertised her specialty was treating women who were “irregular.”

  Some of the women were too poor to afford a real doctor, however. Or they couldn’t get away to Central, for their husbands or families didn’t know about the babies, and what excuse could a woman use to disappear for a day? So Gracy gave them lady’s mantle or squaw vine, which were recommended to bring on a woman’s monthly, but the herbs mostly didn’t work.

  A few women were so desperate they threatened to kill themselves. Those were the ones who troubled Gracy the most, the ones who were on her heart, even years later. It wasn’t right, Gracy taking a baby like that, she who had lost so many herself. But it wasn’t right, either, to risk the life of a mother too run-down to care for the children she already had or destroy the future of a young girl barely past puberty who’d fallen for a sweet talker. One or two times, Gracy suspected, the baby had come about because a father had lain with his own daughter. Those were the ones Gracy ached over, the ones that made her wonder if God intended His gift to her to be used for death as well as life. She never talked to Daniel about what she did, never talked to anybody. After all, it was against the law for a midwife to take an unborn baby. But the law didn’t care about women the way Gracy did.

  Sometimes she felt the Lord didn’t care, either, else why would He make childbirth such a danger to women. Why did He let women die when He could have told Gracy how to save them? Why did He seem to let his wrath settle on her when a mother or a baby died?

  Mittie stared at Gracy a long time, then shook her head. “Oh, no, ma’am.” She put her hands over her mouth. “Is that what you’re thinking, that I want to get rid of a baby?”

  Gracy waited.

  “I would never do that. Ever. I’d rather die than kill a precious baby. I came to see you for the opposite reason.”

  Gracy frowned, not understanding, and Mittie said in a rush, “I want a baby in the worst way. I’ve tried and tried, tried for eight years, and I’m barren as a molly mule.” The girl let out her breath and hugged herself. She was too embarrassed to look at Gracy, and she used her foot to worry a tin can lid nailed over a knothole in the floor.

  “Oh, my dear,” Gracy said, and reached for the girl’s hands. “I know the sorrow, know it myself.”

  “But you’ve got a son.”

  “Yes, and it took a long time before he came to me. I lost so many before him.” She wished Mittie could know the joy she’d had when Jeff smiled at her the first time, a toothless, wet grin, or came running into the cabin to tell her about his first day of school. He brought her the earliest columbine each spring, and together, they would smooth it flat and press it in the Bible. Even when Jeff was older, his face would light up when he came through the door and saw his mother.

  Mittie looked up, and Gracy could see her visitor was beyond girlhood, with worry wrinkles around her eyes. “Can you help me? You see, I got a good husband, but he’s about fed up with me,” Mittie said. “I worry he’ll taken out on me. He wants a son something fierce. What if he leaves me for somebody who can give him one? Then what would I do?”

  “Have you ever conceived?” Gracy asked.

  The girl looked embarrassed. “No, ma’am.”

  “Then maybe the fault is his.”

  Mittie’s mouth dropped open. “How could that be? He’s a man.”

  “It happens.”

  “Well, I never heard such a thing, and Henry—he’s my husband—he’d tell me I was crazy to say such.” She smiled a little. “He’s a big old fellow and likes his time in bed. The very idea!”

  Gracy nodded. She knew men believed they could not be at fault, but if a wife never even got pregnant, it was possible her husband was the reason. Gracy knew of too many times when a woman was “barren” with her first husband but fecund with her second.

  Mittie leaned forward and said earnestly, “You’re the Sagehen. You know all about babies. I thought you’d give me something so’s I could have one. Ain’t there some way? Ain’t there?” She thought a moment. “Do you think somebody put a spell on me?”

  Gracy had grown up with spells and incantations. She didn’t really believe in superstitions, although she didn’t run afoul of them, especially the ones about quilting. She never started a quilt on a Friday, just as Granny Nabby warned her, for a woman who did so wouldn’t live to finish it. She always wrapped a quilt around herself when it was finished, for good luck. And there was a time she’d been pleased when she broke her needle while quilting with her friends, because it meant she would have the next baby.

  But she did not believe that burning flowers brought death or that a wedding after sundown meant the couple would be unhappy. And she especially did not believe that one person could cast a spell on another.

  Still, she knew others accepted such things, and Nabby had explained that it was enough just to believe. A woman who was sure a cat walking across her sickbed meant death, might just give up. A man who woke up with the moon shining in his face could make himself turn crazy. It wasn’t that the superstitions were true, it was that the mind could make them so. You couldn’t just dismiss them. You had to give a cure. So Nabby once told a girl who believed she had boils because she’d been bewitched to burn a hair of the woman who’d put a spell on her, at midnight in the dark of the moon, and the boils would go away. And they had. When Gracy asked how Nabby had known the antidote, Nabby said she hadn’t but had made it up on the spot. So Gracy took such beliefs seriously.

  But before Gracy could answer the girl, however, Mittie said, “I guess I don’t believe there’s any spell on me. Who would do such a thing? I ain’t got any enemies, and Henry, why, he’s just a big old bear everybody loves.”

  “So you want—”

  “I want a herb, a potion, something that’ll get me with child,” Mittie interrupted. “Ain’t you got something?”

  Gracy sighed. That was it, of course. The girl wanted some magic concoction. Gracy was a believer in herbs. Black pepper sped up labor, and sometimes wild yam prevented conception, although not often enough. Hot ginger brought on menstruation.

  But first, she would talk to the girl, ask her if there were other problems. She led Mittie to Daniel’s chair and told her to sit. Then she took her own place and leaned forward, her hands grasping Mittie’s. “Sometimes the act isn’t done right,” she began.

  Mittie stared at Gracy, confused at first. When she understood, she glanced away, her face red. “It’s not worth talking about.”

  “Yes, if you truly want a baby, it is.” Gracy paused. “There’s the makings for coffee if you’d like a cup. I already built a fire. It’s no trouble to heat the water and grind the beans.”

  “No, thanks to you. I had my coffee already this morning.”

  “Tea, then?”

  Mittie shook her head.

  “So be it.” Gracy squeezed the girl’s hands and said, “There’s men that practice what’s called withdrawal. Now mostly that’s done to keep from having a baby, but sometimes men have other reasons.” A wife had once told Gracy that her husband did that for fear she’d rob him of his strength. “Do you understand what I’m asking you?”

  Mittie nodded and squirmed in her seat. “That ain’t the problem. We’re fine that way.”

  “And you don’t wash yourself right off?”

  “I lie there still as a log so’s all that will go up into my womb.” Mittie was so embarrassed that she hunched up her shoulders and stared over Gracy’s head, not looking her in the face.

  “I had to ask,” Gracy said. “You see, there’s some with strange notions, and seeing as I don’t know you … how would I know…” Her voice trailed off as she smiled at Mittie.

  “I guess you do have to ask, but me and Henry, we’re all right that way. It’s just something in me that won’t get a baby started, and I heard about you…” Mittie looked Gracy in the face.

&nb
sp; “Have you tried raspberry tea?” Gracy asked.

  “I’ve drunk so much raspberry tea my skin almost turned red. Ain’t there something else?”

  Gracy nodded. She went to the pie safe and took out red clover and explained to the girl how to take it.

  And so Mittie had taken it for weeks, months even, but the red clover hadn’t caused her to conceive. Later on Gracy gave her alfalfa and then nettles, but they didn’t work, either. Over the years, each time either one of them heard of a remedy, Mittie would try it, but nothing caused the young woman to conceive. Eventually, Gracy talked to her about adoption. There were so many babies and young children who needed homes. But Mittie was adamant. “I want my own baby. I couldn’t never love somebody else’s like my own.”

  Gracy had come to love the young woman, had thought Emma would have grown up to be like her, and indeed, at times, the two were almost like mother and daughter. They shared a fondness for quilting and Bible reading, and Gracy had hoped the girl might learn about the herbs, about midwifery, although she wasn’t sure Mittie was bent that way. Gracy grieved for Mittie’s plight, just as she had once grieved over her own.

  Now, the two sat outdoors a few days after Gracy’s accident, stitching in sunlight that sifted through the jack pines. “I believe I have my strength back, although my leg still bothers me. It wasn’t broke, only twisted, and I limp a bit,” Gracy observed. “I’m lucky there weren’t any babies born this week. But I expect the Richards girl will deliver anytime. I best be ready.”

  “She gave birth yesterday,” Mittie said, then looked away as if she shouldn’t have blurted out the news that way. She paused as she placed one quilt piece on top of another, not looking at Gracy.

  The old woman put down her needle. “She didn’t call for me? She must have thought I was too ill, but I could have gone to her. Richards women have an easy time of it.”

  Mittie turned her head to stare at a squirrel that was hollering.

  “Did her sisters help with the birthing?”

  Mittie looked directly at Gracy then. “She sent for Little Dickie.”