The Reluctant Midwife (15 page)

“Agreed . . . Mrs. Ross,” he calls, “Can you type up the offer and bring in the forms. This meeting is over. You'll need to make a list of supplies. There's already an account at the pharmacy in Liberty and anything they don't have we can order through the army quartermaster in Pittsburgh. I'll also assign one of the young men as your first aid officer. Can you come on Tuesday and Friday?” He doesn't wait for my response.

“The physician at Camp Laurel, Dr. Crane, will come Mondays and Wednesdays. Then we'll go uncovered on weekends and hope the medic can handle it. I'm going to add you to the payroll as an LEM. . . . That's the best I can do . . . Mrs. Ross!” He shouts these last words.

“An LEM?”

“LEM, locally employed man. We hire fellows to teach specialized skills—forestry, mechanics, driving heavy equipment. Most of the CCC boys are from cities and know nothing about working in the woods.

“We also hire cooks, carpenters, and unemployed teachers from
the surrounding area. Headquarters in Washington has decided it will help the economy and keep down locals' resentment about the camps.

“Mrs. Ross!” he shouts again, though by this time she's standing right at his elbow. “Get Mrs. Myers's dress size and order her a surplus army nurse uniform. Make it two.”

“I'd like Boodean for my assistant, if he's willing.”

“Who?”

“Boodean, the young man who was here when you came in. I'd like him for my medic. He was very helpful with the wound repair and may have an aptitude for this kind of work.”

“Agreed.” The little man looks at his watch. “Can you stay and fill out the employment forms and the medical report? I have to go. It's three forty-five, and I'm teaching the class in business math at four.”

Holy moly! I have to be in Liberty to pick Dr. Blum up by four thirty!
Hastily, I make my report about the accident and my medical care and then turn to the employment form. Twenty minutes later, the secretary gives me a nod as I check on the patient in the miniature infirmary one more time. He still sleeps and Boodean sits at his side, but when I look around for Captain Wolfe he's nowhere in sight.

“Well, I guess I'm done, Mrs. Ross. Is there anything else?”

“No, honey. Thank the lord you were here. We'll see you next Tuesday.”

As I hurry out the door, a chorus of deep voices startles me. “Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!” Eight or nine young men rise from the steps where they've been keeping a vigil for their friend Jed Troutman. “Nice work, Nursie!” a short, bright-eyed fellow calls out.

“It's
Nurse Myers
,” I correct, my face turning red.

“That's what I meant,” the smart aleck answers.

It's Indian summer and each day is hotter and dryer than the last. Nights are in the fifties, days in the eighties. It's so hot even the goldenrod is drooping.

Lately, I've been reading the newspapers that Daniel brings over aloud in an attempt to stimulate Dr. Blum's mind. We sit at the table after our midday meal while I peruse the headlines.

“Listen,” I say to him. “‘
RECORD HEAT. SEVEN DAYS IN A ROW. OVER NINETY IN IOWA AND A DROUGHT HAS SPREAD ACROSS EIGHTY PERCENT OF THE USA. IT'S RUINING THE RANCHERS AND FARMERS
.'”

I turn to the comics and check out the latest
Li'l Abner
cartoon, then notice the caption on the next page under the photo of a short man in uniform who looks a lot like Charlie Chaplin.

“ADOLF HITLER, LEADER OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST WORKERS' PARTY, TAKES OVER GERMANY.”
I read the headline, but skip the article. “I don't know why we should care. Germany's so far away.”

Outside the window it's another cloudless, sunny day. “Looks like a good afternoon to pick the last of the beans,” I tell my silent partner. “We better get back to work.” I find our straw hats and buckets and lead him out to the garden.

An hour later, a breeze ruffles my hair and within minutes I'm holding on to Dr. Blum's arm. The sky has turned dark and the wind is almost ripping my clothes off.

“Come on! We better get inside.” I pick up our buckets, pull on Dr. Blum's arm, and head for the house. Small branches, torn from the trees, are flying everywhere, and then the rain comes, hard, cold pellets that sting.

“Is this a tornado?” I say out loud as we pull the blue door closed behind us. We have no telephone to call for help, not that anyone would come. No radio to listen to a weather report. No shutters to cover the windows. No basement to hide in. Then I remember the underground springhouse out by the barn.

“Blum! Come on!” He is sitting on the sofa staring into space, as if he doesn't hear the roar or feel the house shake. “We need to get to the springhouse,” I shout into his face, shaking his shoulders.

“Blum, help me. Please! I can't do this alone.” The doctor rises slowly like a man in a dream, and I lead him to the back door, where we stop under the porch eaves. Water streams down the hillside, already four inches deep in the low places. Then the thunder comes and the lightning.

CRACK!
A tree somewhere close is struck and comes down. “We'd better go!” I shout. “I'll hold on to you.” I push Blum down the three wooden steps but he stops again. I push him once more and that's when he does something wholly unexpected. He throws me over his shoulder and, like a fireman, heads for the only safe shelter we have.

We're halfway to the springhouse built into the side of the hill when the hail starts, chunks of ice the size of marbles. Even in Vermont, I'd never seen anything like this. Blum is slipping and sliding over the ice-covered ground. I'm still slung over his shoulder and I try to cover our heads.

At the entrance to the underground shelter, the doctor deposits
me in the mud and I look up, expecting, perhaps, a smile saying “Surprised you, didn't I?” But there's just the same blank stare, as if his picking me up was a reflex that didn't involve his mind.

Thunder rumbles ever closer, with lightning right after it; we are in a war zone of light and sound and when I pull open the door, it blows off its hinges and sails away. Panting, we both fall inside, safe for the moment, watching nature go crazy in front of us.

Within an hour, the tempest is over, but it isn't until the sun comes out that I get up my nerve to look outside to see if our barn and house are still standing. They are, but pellets of ice still litter the ground.

The garden is a mess. It's good we picked most of the beans and tomatoes before the storm, because only one in three plants is left standing. The root vegetables, like carrots and beets, are okay.

When we crunch across the ice toward the house, I find that we do have a broken window where a branch from the old oak in front flew right through the glass. A row of shingles has also blown off, but these things are small. Already, Mr. Maddock and his tractor are coming up the road.

He pulls up near the house. “You folks okay?”

“Yes, thank you. And you?”

“Had to carry the missus down the cellar steps. Nearly fell. Lost a few chickens. They were outside and there was no way I could get to them. The cattle hid in the gulley down by the creek and the horses were locked up in their stalls.”

“I didn't even think of
our
chickens. Good thing they were in the barn. I'll have to fix my roof, though. Water got in. And there's the one window.”

“Mrs. Maddock says she's cooking up baked beans for your supper. You aren't to trouble about it.” He looks at Blum, who is sitting on the porch staring into space again. You can tell it riles him. “Can't that man do anything to help you? Can't he get up and do something?”

“Not much. He can't do very much. He doesn't know how to help me.”

Except once,
I think,
one time today . . . when I really needed him
.

By evening, Patience and Daniel also come up Wild Rose Road to check on us.

“Hello!” Patience yells, jumping out of the Ford. She's invented some kind of carrier for her little boy, a sling made out of bright cloth that she wears around her hip. It makes her look like a native from Borneo, but I doubt she cares. “Are you okay? Did you get much damage?”

From her cheerful expression you'd think she was talking about something dangerous but fun, a trip through the haunted house at the county fair or a roller coaster ride. I'm already up on the roof trying to tack down some wooden shingles over the hole while Blum sits on the porch bench.

“How you doing, old buddy?” Daniel says to him. “Hold on, Becky, I'll give you a hand.” He crawls up the ladder. “Looks like you'll need a new window too. I might have an old one out in my barn.”

When the work is done, Patience brings a basket of sandwiches out of their auto and I bring out Sarah Maddock's baked beans.
We sit on the porch eating companionably as the sun drops behind the green leaves and a V of geese overhead honks as they fly southward. Daniel offers the doctor a sip from his hip flask, but I put out my hand to stop him.

“You don't give a mentally handicapped person alcohol,” I inform him, as if I'm the matron at a Rehabilitation Hospital for Disabled Soldiers. The vet looks puzzled and a little hurt, because he's been doing it all along, but Patience breaks the awkward silence.

“So it must have been scary. The worst storms always come from the west. Being on the east side of Spruce Mountain, we were spared. The hail was rough though. A stone the size of a baseball cracked Daniel's back windshield.”

“It's okay.” Daniel laughs, regaining his footing. “That rattletrap has seen better days and it didn't break all the way through. I just need the glass to stay together until the economy turns around.”

“The hail was bad here too. Stones not so big, just the size of marbles, but they covered the ground like snow and the temperature must have dropped forty degrees in fifteen minutes. I was afraid the house might blow down. Was it a hurricane or a tornado?”

“Radio out of Wheeling says it was a freak tornado, only touched down in a few counties, but it did some damage.”

Daniel stands. “Come on, old man,” he says to Blum. “Let's drag those fallen branches under the porch. We may as well store the wood where it can get dry.” He takes Blum's arm and guides him away.

I don't tell Patience about Isaac's heroic action when he carried me through the tornado to the shelter. It seems too unreal, as if I imagined it. I don't tell her that he actually seemed to understand that we were in danger. I don't her tell her that for a moment Dr. Blum seemed to be present, to be with me, to be back.

It's Tuesday, my first day to work in the infirmary at Camp White Rock, a blazing-hot morning, and as usual I'm in a rush. I assist Dr. Blum with his grooming. Shave him, brush his teeth, clean his fingernails, and check to be sure his trousers are buttoned. I want him to look nice because Lilly is watching him.

“You're going to stay at the store again this afternoon. Do you understand? The camp is the only opportunity I have to earn cash money. Please don't mess this up. Just sit where they tell you and try to be sociable.”

I say this last part with a small grin, knowing
sociable
was not one of Blum's character traits, even when he was in his right mind. That's probably why his wife ran around on him. She was fun-loving in the extreme. Opposites attract, they say, and in this case it seems true.

I remember seeing her with a man at a restaurant in Charlottesville once, a handsome fellow with a new short haircut and sporting a seersucker blazer and white pants. It was summer and Priscilla wore a low-cut rose-colored dress, and he was touching her hand. I never told the doc about it.

When I get to Liberty, I drop Blum off at the grocery, and then stop at the pharmacy to pick up the supplies. When I hand Mr. Stenger the list, he reads it out loud.

He stops and raises his eyebrows

“
You preparing for the Battle of Gallipoli, Miss Becky?”

“You mean the narcotic? I may need it if there's a dislocated shoulder or a broken limb. When I was at the camp interviewing for the job, a boy came in with a deep laceration that had to be stitched, an accident at the sawmill.”

“No, I didn't mean the morphine. I'm not questioning your credentials to give it, but all this is going to be expensive. . . .”

“That's fine. Colonel Milliken said to put it on the camp's account.”

Stenger shrugs, rubbing his one lazy eye. “I guess the government's good for it, but the way the White House is spending, I wonder for how long.” He moves into the back room to get some of the items off the shelf, but keeps up a running patter as I pet the orange cat on the counter.

“You know, some of the folks around are pretty riled up about the CCC camp. Say the men will bring trouble into Union County, but I think the Conservation Corps is all that's keeping this town alive. You know . . . Bittman's Grocery, not to mention Gooski's Tavern. Marion Archer got on as a reading teacher out at the camp, and I hear Reverend Goody is teaching elocution. Half the lads, they say, have never been to school, or at least not for long.”

“Loonie Tinkshell works out there too.”

“Real glad you found a position, Miss Becky, and I'm very happy to have your business.” He wraps my supplies in brown paper as his lazy eye wanders toward the door, hoping, I imagine, to see another customer coming in. “Anything else?”

“This will do for a while.”

“See the headlines?” Stenger offers just to keep me in the store.

I glance at the newspapers in the rack next to the counter.
WAR CLOUDS DARKEN EUROPE
and underneath,
TESLA DISCOVERS NEW DEATH BEAM.

“What do you think of that?” Stenger questions.

“I don't know. It sounds dangerous.” I glance at my watch. “What if it got in the wrong hands?”

“Well, you know, Europe's a mess again. That Adolf Hitler's in power and it doesn't look good for the Jews. I guess Tesla is just thinking he could save a lot of lives, not have another Great War. One way or another the U.S. is going to get involved, mark my words.”

“Oh, I don't think so. We Americans have enough trouble of our own. . . . I have to go,” I say, excusing myself. “Don't want to be late for my new job.” I throw him a smile and back out the door.

I wasn't honest with Mr. Stenger, didn't say what I really feel. I
hate war
. Like a dust cloud rolling across Oklahoma, it has taken almost everything I loved: my brothers and my shell-shocked husband, even my father, who died of a broken heart after his soldier sons died, one by a bomb, one by the Spanish flu that ran through the barracks like a mad fox in a henhouse.

It's no wonder I'm always waiting for the next calamity. Patience once called me Henny Penny, the chicken who runs around yelling, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

If it didn't take so much courage to be a pacifist, I'd wear the white feather. I'd wear it proudly in my best hat or on my lapel,
but in the last Great War, to be a pacifist was to be a traitor, and I couldn't have taken the ostracism.

Blum probably
could
take it. He didn't really care what people thought of him, but he was a physician at Walter Reed during the war, and even though he never saw combat, he saw the results . . . broken men whom he had to patch up and send back to their shattered lives.

It's funny, now that I think of it, how all the males I've cared about have been broken men, broken healers; my father who was addicted to booze, David who returned from the war but never left the horror behind him, and now Dr. Blum.

“Sorry, I'm late.” I rush into the infirmary with the box of supplies, close the door, and pull on the white nurse uniform lying over the chair. I've brought my own starched nurse hat that I wore at Dr. Blum's office, but decide it looks silly and toss it in my bag. This is my first day in the clinic and together, Boodean and I (he's also dressed in white) look quite official when I come out into the waiting room and he leads the first patient in.