The Birth House Read Online Free PDF

wool blanket, I lay flat on my belly, peering through the loose boards into the kitchen below. Miss B. was squinting, looking in my direction. I whispered down to her, “I’m safe.” She smiled and nodded, then put her finger to her lips and turned to answer the knock at the door.
    A tall, serious-looking man stood in the doorway. He introduced himself as, “Dr. Gilbert Thomas.” Miss B. invited him in, took his long overcoat and hat, and wouldn’t let him speak again until he was settled at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. She patted his shoulder and then smoothed the slight wrinkle she’d made in his dark suit coat. “Well, ain’t you tied up proper, like every day was Sunday?” Taken by her kindness, his voice halted and stuttered each time he tried to say shouldn’t and don’t, as if the words were too painful to get out. He sat cockeyed to the table, his knees too high to tuck under it, his fine, long fingers shyly wringing the pair of driving gloves that were sitting in his lap. Except for the hints of grey in his hair that shone silver when he turned his head, Dr. Gilbert Thomas looked as if someone had kept him clean and quiet and neatly placed in the corner of a parlour since the day he was born.
    In a slow, steady tone, the doctor began what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech. “As a practitioner of obstetrics, I am bound by an oath to my profession to come to the aid of child-bearing women whenever possible.” He winced back a sip of Miss B.’s strong coffee and continued. “You, as well as other generous women in communities throughout Kings County and across the Dominion have had to serve in place of science for too long.”
    Miss B. smiled and pushed the sugar bowl and creamer in front of him. “A little sugar there, dear?”
    “Thank you.” He spooned in the sugar and doused the coffee with a large splash of cream. “Imagine the benefits that modern medicine can offer women who are in a compromised condition…a sterile environment, surgical procedures, timely intervention and pain-free births. The suffering that women have endured in childbirth can be a thing of the past—”
    Miss B. interrupted him, catching his eyes with her gaze. “What you sellin’?”
    Dr. Thomas’s stutter returned. “I, I…I’m just trying to tell you, inform you of—”
    “No. You ain’t tellin’, you sellin’…if you gonna come here, drummin’ up my door like you got pots in your pants, then you best get to it and we’ll be done with it.”
    She waved her hand in the air as if to shoo him away. “Oh, and by the way, whatever it is, I ain’t buyin’. I figure if I tell you that right now, you’ll either pack up and leave or tell me the truth.”
    Dr. Thomas continued. “The truth is, Miss Babineau, I need your help.”
    She settled back in her chair. “Now we’re gettin’ somewheres. Go on.”
    “We’re building a maternity home down the mountain, in Canning.”
    Miss B. interrupted him. “One of those butcher shops they calls a hospital?”
    Dr. Thomas answered. “A place where women can come and have their babies in a clean, sterile environment, with the finest obstetrical care.”
    She scowled at him. “Who’s this ‘we’?”
    “Myself and the Farmer’s Assurance Company of Kings County.”
    “How much the mamas got to pay you?”
    He shook his head and smiled. “Nothing.”
    Miss B. snorted. “You’re a liar.”
    “I won’t charge them a thing. I won’t have to, we—”
    “You got a wife?”
    “Yes.”
    “And she’s a good girl, a lady who deserves the finer things?”
    “Well, of course. But I don’t see—”
    “How you expect to keep her if you don’t make no money?”
    He laughed. “I get paid by the assurance company.” He lowered his voice and smiled. “And you could get paid too…if you participate in the program. They’ll give you five dollars for every woman you send to the maternity home.”
    Miss B. got up from the table. “What I gots, I