The Last Midwife Read online

  Gracy shuddered, because Granny Alice was a dirty old woman who wouldn’t wash her hands even if she’d been out pulling weeds. She spat tobacco juice on the floor and was known to make a dent in a jug of corn liquor while attending a mother. Sometimes she passed out from the liquor and was no help at all.

  “Gracy’s Granny Nabby’s girl. She knows,” Lucy said.

  Black Mary started to protest, but a pain hit her and she cried out.

  “I’ll examine her,” Gracy said, and she knelt on the floor beside the woman, who was laid out on an old quilt that had been covered by layers of newspaper. She lifted the petticoat that served as the woman’s nightdress, hoping to see the baby’s head emerging, but instead, there was a foot, and Gracy gasped. “The baby’s turned. It has to be righted.” She’d seen Nabby do that a dozen times, but her shoulders slumped and she wished again that she had not come. She wasn’t a midwife. How could she do this by herself? What if the baby died, or Black Mary? Everyone would blame her. They’d shun her and maybe Nabby, too.

  “Is Ma going to die?” a little child no bigger than a willow switch asked.

  And then it hit Gracy like she’d been smacked in the face with a tree branch that Black Mary’s life and that of the baby really did depend on her. Maybe the Lord had sent her. She took a deep breath, and calmed herself. She smiled at Lucy and said everything would be all right, saying it the way Nabby did. She glanced at Annie Laurie and told her to rub Black Mary’s back and wash her brow with cool water. Best to keep the woman busy because she would only get in the way.

  Gracy knelt down beside Black Mary again and parted the woman’s legs. A pain seized Black Mary, and she strained, arching her back like a cat’s. “Don’t push, Black Mary,” Gracy said. “I got to get this baby righted before it comes out.”

  That birth was something people in the hills talked about for years, how a ten-year-old girl delivered a baby that was breeched. Gracy reached into the womb with her child’s hands and turned the infant a little. Then when at last Black Mary couldn’t hold back the baby any longer, Gracy eased it along the birth canal, tried to slide it out by the feet, but they were too small and wet to hold on to. So she grasped them with a cloth, and out that baby came, sliding into Gracy’s hands. “A girl, Black Mary!” Gracy announced. She stared at the wonder of the infant in her hands, then bound the cord and cut it. She held out the baby to Lucy, telling the girl to rub it with the oil Gracy had brought, while she dealt with the afterbirth. She wrapped it in a piece of newspaper and handed it to the boy. “Salt it, then plant it under a tree,” she told him.

  “And be careful Old Betty don’t know where it is, for she’ll dig it up and put a hex on Black Mary,” Annie Laurie said, speaking for the first time since Gracy had begun attending the mother.

  Gracy nodded. Nabby didn’t believe in such things, but many of their neighbors did, and Nabby did not want to offend, so she always smiled and said it made sense to treat the afterbirth with caution.

  The boy looked at Gracy as if to ask whether he should follow Annie Laurie’s instructions, and Gracy said it wouldn’t hurt. He shrugged his thin shoulders and gave Gracy a wry smile, and she knew he no more believed in the danger of afterbirth than she did.

  Out of necessity, other girls in those hills might have tended their mothers in childbirth, when no woman was available. But no girl had come as a granny woman, had taken charge as if she were a regular midwife, had birthed a baby that might have killed its mother and itself. Lucy told it about what Gracy had done, claimed she had saved the lives of Black Mary and the baby, whom they named Marjorie, and maybe she had. The little midwife became a wonder, and the curiosity of it embarrassed her. She cared only about Nabby’s praise, and the old woman was quick to give it. “You learned well, girl. You came when you was needed, and you helped. That’s all a body can ask,” Nabby said, and Gracy knew Nabby would have praised her even if Black Mary or her baby had died.

  But they hadn’t. Gracy did not know how long she worked with Black Mary. Time meant nothing to her. She didn’t know that the sun set that day and the sky darkened and was lit by stars. She wasn’t aware her shoulders ached and her back near broke in half. Not until the baby was safe in her arms did she glance up to see Lucy, her brother, and the others gathered around the bed. She smiled at them, and they laughed and clapped with joy. And Gracy felt a joy so great it was as if she herself had given birth to the child. The feeling was not pride. It was a kind of radiance, like the burst of a sunrise, that warmed her soul. She knew then that she had the gift.

  When all was well, Gracy handed the baby to Black Mary, who smiled at the child-midwife. Some with a houseful of children might have wished the baby hadn’t survived, but Black Mary grinned at the infant and said she was God’s blessing, brought to life by the youngest midwife in a hundred miles. Black Mary had never been more than five miles from her cabin door, and she figured the end of the earth wasn’t much more than a hundred miles away.

  Granny Nabby never arrived. When Gracy was satisfied the mother and baby were all right, she took up her things and started for the door. The boy stopped her on the porch and handed her a dime. “It’s all we got,” he said, “but it’s due you. We don’t care to be beholden.”

  Gracy thought to tell the boy to keep the money, because she didn’t care if she was paid. The happiness she felt was worth more than a dozen coins. But she wanted to save his pride. So she took the dime and wrapped it in a rag and put it into her bundle. Later, she punched a hole in the coin, threaded it on a string, and wore it around her neck.

  Four

  The pounding on the door woke Gracy from a deep sleep. Had the person been banging for a long time? It wasn’t like her to sleep through a knocking. Maybe she was getting too old. She slid her feet into her shoes and glanced at her bag. She had not replaced the herbs she’d used in Mayflower Gulch and tried to think what would be needed. Her supplies were neatly stacked in the pie safe, so it would take only a minute to gather the replacements. Gracy’s dress was not on the hook near the bed, and she realized she had not taken it off after she and Daniel finished dinner. Her troubles, the melancholy she felt about her work, had tired her so that she’d gone back to bed after dinner, sleeping fully clothed.

  Now, as she made her way to the door, she wondered who could be in labor. The Richards girl up on Turnbull Mountain wasn’t near her time, but Richards women weren’t reliable. One sister had been a month early by Gracy’s reckoning, while the other had been a month past due. Or maybe it was the woman two streets over who had just moved down from Middle Swan. Gracy hoped it wasn’t Mrs. Tucker. She did not want to have to hitch up her buggy and drive over a rocky road that afternoon—or evening. Was it already evening? Gracy wasn’t sure what the hour was.

  The cabin was dark and cold, but then it often grew chilly in the afternoons when the rains came. The storms on the Tenmile were harsh, not like the gentle rains Gracy had known in Arkansas, rain that fell so softly you could stand outside with your head raised to the heavens and feel as if an angel were washing your face. The Tenmile rains came down in torrents, sharp and cold, and they chilled a person to her bones. The water gathered in the range high up, then rushed through the gullies and canyons. You could drown on a perfectly nice day if you were caught in a flash flood down below.

  Gracy had seen it happen. A girl was playing in a gully once with not an inch of moisture in it when a rush of water from a cloudburst came down toward her, sweeping her up and carrying her a mile away, before she lodged in some willows. Men had looked for her for two days before they found her floating among the willow branches, her hair spread out around her, looking like a princess from a fairy tale.

  Gracy had been among the searchers, hoping against hope that the girl had washed up on a sandbar and was waiting to be rescued. Usually the searchers were men, but the mother had begged Gracy to help. The child would be chilled, maybe feverish. Or her leg might be broken, the mother had pleaded. Gracy prayed the woma
n was right, but she knew there was little chance the girl had survived. Still, she went with Daniel and the other men, because the child reminded her of Emma and she couldn’t bear the sorrow of losing another golden girl. She and Daniel plodded through the bushes until they came to where the water from the gully flowed into the creek. The child’s body was half a mile downstream.

  Daniel lifted the girl out of the water and laid her on the ground. Her dress was nearly torn off, and her arms were bruised, twigs in her hair. But her face had not been touched, and when the mother saw her, she said God had performed a miracle, that her child was only sleeping. But she wasn’t. She’d drowned a minute after the flood waters snatched her, Gracy thought. She helped wash the child and lay her out for burial, thinking the girl did indeed appear to be sleeping. Lying in the coffin, her small hands neatly folded over her breast, the poor thing looked as if she could sit up and rub her eyes and ask what she was doing there. Emma had been like that on her deathbed, white and still, her hair about her face like curls of sunshine.

  Gracy had to hold the mother back while the men lowered the small box into the grave, then shoveled dirt over it.

  “Stop them. Don’t they see she’s not dead,” the mother cried to Gracy.

  “She’s crossed over,” Gracy said.

  “She’s not. God wouldn’t do that to me. He took the others, but he let me keep her.”

  Holding the sobbing woman, Gracy found herself thinking she ought to have known some way to revive the child, and for a moment, she was filled with guilt. She wondered, as the mother did, why God was so hard on women. She remembered her own babies, born before their time, living only a few hours, and the ones given into her care because they were too sickly to live. And she thought again of Emma. “God don’t make no mistakes,” Nabby had told her, but He did. Emma was proof.

  The dead child’s mother was not right in her head after that. She had spells. She took to sitting outside the schoolhouse, telling passersby she was waiting for her daughter, saying the girl was old enough to attend school now. Once, Gracy saw her in the store buying cloth to make a dress for the girl. But people paid little attention because such behavior wasn’t unheard of in the isolated mountain towns. Other women went crazy because of the loss of their children from accidents or pneumonia. Or their minds gave out just from the loneliness, from the harshness of life on the range. Life could be warped that close to heaven, Gracy knew.

  The knock came again, and Gracy pulled herself out of her thoughts. She was too much taken with melancholy that day. She opened the door and said, “John?” and for a few seconds she was confused. She had expected the pounding to have come from someone who needed her help with a birth. The blessedness of sleep had wiped the memory of her trouble from her mind for a few moments. But now it came back as she recognized the sheriff at her door: He had accused her of murder, the murder of the Halleck baby. Gracy stared at him for a time as she gripped the door and remembered the death of the infant.

  “You going to make me stand out here in the rain?” the sheriff asked at last.

  “I forgot my manners,” she said, opening the door wide. She glanced behind John at the rain that came down hard, splashing through the jack pines onto the rocks and filling the washtub that she had forgotten to hang on its nail on the cabin wall. When the rain was done, the flowers would bloom brighter than ever and there would be designs of pine needles under the trees. But now, the sky was black with the heaviness of the moisture, and mist rose like smoke from a dynamite blast on the mountainsides. A flash of lightning lit up Gracy’s can pile an arm’s throw from the door, making the tin shine like silver.

  John stamped the water off his boots and came inside, flapping raindrops off his hat onto Gracy’s braided rug.

  “I don’t know where Daniel’s got to,” she said.

  “He’s down to the Nugget, drunker than Independence Day and spoiling for a fight. I ain’t seen him like that for a long time, maybe not since Nevada.”

  Gracy smiled then to remember how the least little thing could set Daniel off when he was young, how he seemed to relish a brawl. John hadn’t been much different.

  When they first came west, Gracy and Daniel had settled in California, where Daniel panned the streams. But too many men crowded the banks, and the pickings were poor, so after a few years, the two had packed up and moved to Virginia City in Nevada, where Daniel worked a claim. They’d met John there.

  He had been married then. His wife, Elizabeth, had been a bit of a thing, too fragile for the life of a mining camp. The harshness of it had bewildered her. She hadn’t understood the brightness of the sun or the land that was ugly from mining. Elizabeth was all but helpless at times, and Gracy, strong and resilient, adored her. The two women made an odd pair, Elizabeth tiny and pink with hair the color of a sunflower, Gracy bigger, taller, rougher, her skin wrinkled from the sun, hair like dried weeds. But they had been as close as sisters, glad for the company of each other in that bawdy town, glad for a chance to quilt and gossip about the wealthy ladies who were no better than themselves except that they had money. Those women shook their hands in the air to make them white and bloodless before opening the door to visitors, Elizabeth had told her, and they called for carriage and driver when they were only going next door. The two had laughed together at such foolishness.

  Elizabeth died in childbirth—and the baby, too. Gracy had attended Elizabeth, and she thought John would blame her just as she blamed herself for the deaths of his wife and child. But he didn’t. After Gracy explained it to him, he understood that Elizabeth’s birth canal was too small, that the baby had no way out.

  “I don’t care about the boy,” he told her, all men sure that the first child would be male. Elizabeth had been in labor more than a day and was near dying with the pain of it. “By the living God, save Elizabeth, Gracy. You have to save Elizabeth, even if you got to kill the baby.”

  Gracy couldn’t do it. She couldn’t crush the skull of the fetus, couldn’t bring herself to kill the life that was about to emerge. She anguished over it as much as John did. Only after she realized that the baby was dead, had strangled himself with the cord, did she force herself to crush the tiny head so that the body could emerge. But it was too late for Elizabeth. John’s beloved wife lingered a day after the birth, John and Gracy at her side, Daniel pacing the walk outside the cabin, as he did when Gracy herself was in labor, for he could not abide a sickroom. When Elizabeth awoke for a minute and inquired about the child, John told her the boy was fine. Gracy turned away for fear Elizabeth would read the grief in her eyes.

  Elizabeth smiled, and it was over. She did not take a deep breath or use her last ounce of strength to sit up. Only after a moment did Gracy realize her friend no longer lived, and she felt the sorrow of it descend on her. Sometimes it seemed as if the burden of each death was added to the others until she was bowed under the weight of dead souls.

  John’s grief was a terrible thing to behold. He mourned worse than any man Gracy had ever seen, tearing his shirt to pieces, howling like a coyote, cursing God, cursing the gold that had lured him to Nevada, cursing everything but Gracy. In his sorrow, he held on to her, knowing that Elizabeth had been precious to her and that he and Gracy were joined together in their loss.

  Gracy believed John never got over the death of his wife. He had been a sober man, quiet, abstemious. But all that changed. He worked his claim only to get enough gold dust to spend on liquor, and he was drunk for two years. He turned mean and took on anyone who would fight him. That was because he wanted to die, Gracy thought. But he didn’t. Instead, he was hauled off to jail now and again, locked up long enough for him to sober up. But once released, he’d start all over again. His clothes became rags, and he rarely bathed, smelling worse than a backhouse. Gracy and Daniel were hard-pressed to defend him or even be his friends, but they were loyal. They stood by him.

  And then one day, John came to the little house in which Gracy and Daniel lived and presented him
self. Gracy almost didn’t recognize him. He’d gone to the bathhouse, then got himself shaved, his hair cut, and he’d bought a suit of clothes. Gracy wondered if John had found religion, but he didn’t explain himself, and he wasn’t partial to church, so she didn’t think so. He announced he was going to Colorado to start over, and wouldn’t Daniel and Gracy go with him?

  Gracy was anxious to leave Virginia City by then, to put the past behind her—to start over after what had happened there. It would be best for her, for Daniel, and especially for Jeff, who was four. Virginia City with its gossip and temptations was no place for the boy to be raised up. Gracy loved her son fiercely and wanted to protect him, just as she hadn’t been able to protect Emma. And so she told Daniel they were leaving, and not more than a month later, the three adults and Jeff traveled east to Colorado. They settled in Swandyke, but they didn’t stay together long. After her vagabond life in California and Nevada, Gracy wanted to put down roots in Swandyke—it would be best for Jeff, she’d said—and Daniel was willing. But John was restless. He grew bored with the poor leavings in his gold pan in Swandyke and left out, making the circle of the mining strikes—Georgetown, Central City, Leadville.

  Gracy and Daniel lost touch with their friend until he showed up in Swandyke again. His wandering days were over, he told them. And so was his search for gold. He’d be happy with a steady job, and so he’d been hired as sheriff. He was old for the job, but nobody else had wanted it.

  Gracy always thought John would find himself another wife, but he was not interested in women, other than those who worked in a house at the end of the path around the back of Turnbull Mountain. He had his needs, Gracy thought. He never mentioned Elizabeth, never spoke of whether he missed her, never indulged in recollections, and Gracy and Daniel did not bring up her name. Some men, like some animals, mated for life, and maybe John was like that. When anyone asked John whether he had a wife, he answered with an abrupt, “No.” Since it was poor manners in those mountains to inquire too deeply about a man’s background, people let it go at that, assuming John had never married. But Gracy thought he still mourned his wife, and she wondered if he felt he would betray Elizabeth if he found another woman.