The Midwife of Hope River Read Online Free PDF Page B

that was it.
    Mrs. Rebecca Myers sat on my worn sofa in her pale blue nurse’s uniform with the crisp white collar and dark blue sailor tie and showed me how to fill out the birth certificate. I watched her, wondering where this very precise woman with the midwestern accent, obviously university-trained, came from. She wasn’t a local, that was for sure.
    The public health nurse asked to see my birth kit. I offered her tea and had a few books on my shelves and paintings on the walls, so she must have thought I was a decent person. That’s the other requirement I mentioned before: you must be of good moral character . . .
    Becky is my friend now, and I know a little bit more about her. She’s a widow like me, and she’s not from the Midwest. I had the accent wrong. It’s Vermont, but she worked at Walter Reed during the war, then came to West Virginia to work in the mining camps during the typhoid epidemic of 1918. The Presbyterian Women’s Mission asked her to stay, and now she’s employed by the state Department of Health in Charleston.
    It hadn’t been easy, she told me. This was on her second visit, and we were sitting out on the porch. Local doctors had objected to her presence at first, thinking she was practicing medicine. If you ask me, she probably knew more than they did, but she’d never say it. “You have to understand how to work within the system,” she warned. “Don’t overstep your bounds.”
    Becky’s the one who told me about the Frontier Nursing Service in Hyden, Kentucky, and encouraged me to keep records of my births in this diary. Before that, I just wrote the date and baby’s name in the family’s Bible like Mrs. Kelly did.
    Mrs. Myers asked why I didn’t go to the nursing service in Kentucky for more formal training. She’s a registered nurse with a degree from some fancy college up north, Yale, I think, and that’s where she heard about the school for midwives. She forgets that I’m not a nurse and have no money for travel or tuition. Anyway, who would take care of mothers like Delfina while I was gone? Not Dr. Blum. He charges twenty-five dollars if he comes to your home, thirty dollars if you go to his hospital. Twenty-five dollars would buy shoes for the whole Cabrini family for two years.
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    I pull my rocking chair over to the front window to admire my journal in better light. It’s a beautiful book and quite too expensive. When I saw the bouquet of tulips embossed on the brown leather cover, I had to have it.
    Inside, in the top corner of each lined page is a small colored print of a poppy or rose, a toad or snail, some living thing. There’s a lock and a key that I keep on the cord with Mrs. Kelly’s gold watch. My life has been difficult, and the delicacy of the empty pages is what charmed me, like a friend I could talk to, some gentle, sensible woman . . .
    Mr. Stenger, the balding pharmacist with one lazy eye, gave the journal to me in trade, as well as twenty dollars, for taking care of his seventy-three-year-old mother, Cora, when her foot went bad from sugar several months ago.
    I stayed in her home in Delmont, bathing her, cleansing the open sores, using my comfrey and goldenseal poultices and some of the medicated powders from the pharmacy. More than anything, I cooked, did her household chores, and kept her foot elevated so it could heal.
    That was before I inherited my cow from the Johnsons and had to be home every evening. When the bank foreclosed on their farm at the bottom of Wild Rose Road, they couldn’t take the cow with them to Wheeling. Besides, I’d delivered their son and they wanted to repay me.
    I inherited this house and land too, from Mrs. Kelly, after she passed. Turned out she’d made an appointment to prepare her will with Mr. Linkous, the lawyer in Delmont, just three weeks before her demise. I found that out later from Mr. Johnson,