“It’s okay. Byrd Bowlin says he’ll drive me home. You should probably check on Moonlight and the calf.”
“I’m sorry, we have to go too.” That’s the Reverend Martin.
Hester offers to drive me, but I have Star, so I give Bitsy and Katherine a hug.
“Will we see you before you leave again for Baltimore?” I ask Katherine.
“I’ll try,” she says, “but I need to make arrangements about what’s left of the estate, then get William back to Baltimore on the train for his funeral next Thursday. He has family coming down from Boston.” I hug her again, holding on tight, trying to give her some strength. Then I turn toward the back of the church for my mount.
At the fork of Horse Shoe Run, I cringe when I spy the sheriff’s car waiting at the intersection.
“Where’s Bitsy and her brother?” the gruff fellow demands.
“Stayed for the reception at the preacher’s house.” I tell a white lie, knowing Thomas is halfway over the mountain, slipping through the spruce trees like the shadow of a gray fox.
“By the way, I talked to Mrs. MacIntosh before the funeral. Why didn’t you report that she’d gone back to Baltimore after a domestic dispute?” Hardman gives me the squint eye.
“We were scared. We didn’t want William to try to find Katherine. We were scared.”
July 30, 1930. Nearly full moon sailing through fast-moving clouds.
Birth of Daniel Withers, 6 pounds, 14 ounces, seventh child of Edith and Manley Withers of Hog Hollow. Bitsy and I delivered the baby together, my hands over hers. The Witherses are another family associated with Hazel Patch Baptist Chapel. Mrs. Potts was feeling poorly and didn’t come.
Present, besides Bitsy and me, were the two oldest girls, Ida and Judith, 10 and 12. Bitsy showed them how to cut the baby’s cord. Edith declared, when she put the baby to breast, that the afterbirth pains were worse than the actual labor, but I told her they were good because they’d keep her from bleeding. We were paid $2.00 and one home-cured ham. Seeing a new life come into the world after Mary’s death did both Bitsy and me good.
33
Drought
Flat gray clouds press down like iron, and I scan the sky each morning for a change in the weather. The air is full of wetness, but it won’t come down.
This morning Bitsy and I began to water the limp corn and beans by hand. The root crops, potatoes and carrots, are deep enough to find their own moisture. The tomatoes, Bitsy assures me, are more heat resistant. Back and forth we go, carrying two buckets each from the spring to the garden, giving a quart jar of liquid to each drooping plant.
“It’s a drop in the bucket,” I joke with my friend, but she doesn’t laugh.
Bitsy sets down her pail and arches her back, her eyes closed. “No rain today.”
“How can you tell?”
“No breeze. The wind will come before the rain.”
“I think the rain god might just send down a flood to mock all this work we’re doing,” I make light. My companion shakes her head and goes back to her watering. Maybe my reference to a rain god offended her. Since her mother’s funeral, she’s been reading the Bible daily. Twice as I passed her bedroom door I saw her praying on her knees.
A few hundred buckets later, our arms aching, our backs groaning, Bitsy looks up at the late-afternoon sun just burning through the haze. “I think I’ll take Star for a ride.” A frown flashes between my eyes, but I keep my thoughts to myself. Over to the Wildcat again. Is she checking on Thomas or going to see her sweetheart, Byrd Bowlin?
Thirty minutes later, I’m dragging my aching body up the porch steps with my basket of green beans when I catch the sound of a horse and buggy barreling up the lane. The dust is so thick I can’t see who’s coming. There goes my bath in the cool creek water! I’m so sweaty, I can hardly stand myself.
“Need you in Black Springs!” the young driver yells before he even pulls back on the reins.
“What’s up?”
“Mr. Hart says come quick, his woman’s bleeding.”
“I don’t know Mrs. Hart. Is she having a child?”
“She’s carrying, if that’s what you mean. It’s still in there.”
“Okay,” I mutter, “I’ll be right with you.”
Great, I think, as I run upstairs and pull my everyday gray-blue flowered housedress off the hook. Just when Bitsy leaves, I have an emergency. Luckily, Star, Moonlight, and the calf are out in the pasture, where they can graze and get water from the stream, and the chickens are locked in their pen. I grab the birth satchel and, as an afterthought, tie a bandanna over my head.
“Please hurry, ma’am. Mr. Hart was in an awful state.”
It’s going to be a rough ride.
Kitty
An hour later we pull up, in a cloud of dust, to an unpainted dogtrot farmhouse with two sections, a kitchen on one side and the living quarters on the other, separated by a central outdoor breezeway. Two white women wave frantically from the long shady porch. One is short and round, wearing a stained red-checked apron. The smaller of the two is crying and looks to be an albino: white hair, white skin, and pink eyes crying.
“Come in. Come. Hurry!” the round lady cries. “Lord help us!”
The scene in the bedroom is more terrible than I could have imagined. Blood is everywhere. It’s on the floor, on the bed, and all over the mother, who’s barely alive. There are actually bloody handprints on the poor woman’s swollen belly where someone has been trying to push the baby out. “Damnation,” I say under my breath and instantly regret it. Would Mrs. Kelly or Mrs. Potts talk like that? The two ladies who greeted me hover uselessly at the bedside. A third, gray-haired woman in a bloodstained green dress kneels next to the patient. Mr. Hart is nowhere to be seen.
“You the midwife?” the senior of the three asks. I nod. “The baby is stuck, and it’s killing her. We tried, but we can’t get it out.”
“Stuck. Stuck. Stuck,” the albino girl says, waving her hands in front of her face.
I study the patient. Something is very wrong here. Her limp legs are two sizes too large and full of water under the skin. A small, hairy head is visible between her thighs, and she’s hemorrhaging. I could take time to check the fetal heartbeat, but what would that prove? The baby may already be dead, and if I don’t do something fast, the mother will die too.