The Midwife of Hope River Read Online Free PDF

“Push!”
    â€œOkay, this is it! Children, help your mother to squat.” I get down to show them. “Izzie, you keep the baby’s head low, don’t let it work back.”
    The woman is straining for real now. The urge is spontaneous, and the whole head is crowning. I reach behind me with one hand, dip my gloved fingers in the oil I use to counteract tears, and swipe it around the woman’s opening. Usually I would slow things down at this point, but a birth canal tear is the least of my worries.
    â€œYi, yi, yi!” Delfina is yipping. I don’t know Italian, but her meaning is clear. Her opening burns like a ring of fire.
    Then the head is out . . . silence. Everyone stares, even the boy. There’s nothing stranger than the sight of a woman with a baby’s head sticking out of her, one life emerging from another.
    I lean lower, feel for the cord around the neck, and am surprised when I find none. The newborn is already scrunching up its face, a good sign. I wipe its mouth with a clean piece of rag. “Last push!” The baby spins three times as a cord at least three feet long unwraps around his chest and a little boy falls into my lap.
    Now we are all laughing. Laughing and crying. Language doesn’t mean anything in the presence of true joy. My eyes meet Izzie’s, and I see how much he loves his wife and new baby and these dirty kids. Delfina’s head falls back into his arms.
    Praise Jesus, the words come to me as I look up at the crucifix.
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    October 30, 1929. New moon setting over the mountain.
    Live-born male, 6 pounds, 4 ounces. Name, Enzo Cabrini. Seventh or eighth child of Izzie and Delfina Cabrini. Presentation, cross lying, cord around the body three times. Active labor, two days. Pushed five minutes with father holding the head down. No tears. Blood loss one cup. Mrs. Cabrini knew to put the baby right to the breast. Also present two young children, who helped the mother squat. No payment again. The women in the camp wouldn’t help us.

4
    Midwife
    It’s been one week since Mrs. Cabrini and Mrs. MacIntosh delivered.
    I remove the blue ribbon from the last used page of my journal. The day I went to check on them, both mothers were doing well and seemed to have plenty of milk. Bitsy and Mary will wait on Katherine for her two-week lying-in period. Delfina is already up cooking and cleaning.
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    A few years after Ruben’s death and the disaster at Blair Mountain, when the fog around my heart finally lifted, I began to assist Mrs. Kelly with births along the south shore of the river in Pittsburgh. I couldn’t go back to Westinghouse, not after what happened. Sophie took me with her at night, more to shake me from my grief and self-absorption than because she needed me. I attended another fifteen births here in West Virginia before she died, that made thirty-five, but I’m still a novice, and after the last two births, I’m beginning to wonder if I should be attending mothers at all.
    I didn’t refer to myself as a midwife at first. That changed when Dr. Blum gave my name to the state health department and I was required to register. I’d met Blum only that one time, when Sally Feder had her twins. Mrs. Kelly had never needed him again. At first I was flattered that he remembered me. Later I realized that it wasn’t because he thought I was so great; he just wanted someone to take care of the poor so he wouldn’t have to. That came after Sophie’s heart attack. Now I’m the only midwife between Delmont and Oneida, except for an elderly black woman, Mrs. Potts, but I’ve never met her.
    It’s easy to be a licensed midwife in West Virginia, no exam or anything. All I had to do when the home health nurse, Becky Myers, sputtered up Wild Rose Road in her Model T was demonstrate that my house was clean and I could read and write. Then I signed some papers saying that I understood the regulations, and