The Midwife of Boone Hollow

Chapter One: The Goat Trail

Pearl Whitten was scraping the last of the apple butter into a stone crock when the dogs set up their racket in the yard.

She knew the sound. Not the low rolling growl they gave a fox, and not the wild treeing bark they saved for coons. This was the yelping welcome they gave people they had seen before, and at that hour of an October night, people who had seen the dogs before meant one thing.

She wiped her hands on her apron and opened the door before the knocking started.

The boy on the step was one of the Tharps. Eleven or twelve, bare feet gone white with cold, his hair pushed up on one side from sleeping. He had run the whole way and could not get his breath to talk, so he stood there swallowing air with his hands on his knees.

"Docia," he managed.

"How long has she been at it?"

"Since dinner, I reckon. Ma sent me at dark and I got turned around above the bluff."

Pearl did not waste time telling him he should have come at dinner. There was no use in it, and besides she knew why he hadn't. The Tharps lived down on Cane Branch in a cabin with a dirt floor and a stovepipe that leaned, and they did not send for anybody until they were past the point of pride.

"Sit by the fire while I get my things," she said. "There's cornbread in the warming oven. Eat it, all of it, I don't want to hear about it."

Her satchel hung on its peg by the door where it had hung for twenty years. She had packed it that morning out of habit, the way another woman might have wound a clock. Scissors boiled and wrapped in a square of clean muslin. A ball of stout thread. A tin of lard. Twists of paper holding shepherd's purse and yarrow and a little of the powdered ergot she kept for emergencies and used maybe twice a year. A pint bottle of whiskey, mostly for washing her hands and the sudden faintness of fathers. Clean rags, boiled and dried and folded, more than anybody would think a body could need.

Otis was awake. She had not heard him rise but he was standing in the bedroom doorway in his union suit with his suspenders hanging, big and slope-shouldered, blinking like a man surfacing out of deep water.

"Tharps'," she said.

"I'll walk you to the branch."

"You've got the mill at five."

"I'll walk you to the branch," he said again, and that was that. In twenty-five years she had learned which of his sentences had hinges on them and which did not.

He carried the lantern down the wagon road with the boy trailing, and at the place where the road quit and the goat trail started down through the rocks, he handed her the light and took her hand and turned it over and pressed something into the palm. A wedge of cold cornbread wrapped in a rag.

"You never eat," he said.

"I eat."

"You never eat at a birthing."

He went back up the road. She watched the shape of him go until the dark took him, and then she started down.

The goat trail dropped four hundred feet in a quarter mile, switching back on itself among limestone ledges, and in places you went down it sideways with one hand on the rock. Pearl was fifty-four years old that autumn. Her knees knew the trail better than her eyes did. Below, the oaks stood so thick that the lantern light came back at her off the trunks, and the creek talked to itself over the shoals, and somewhere up the slope a screech owl made its small shivering cry, which the Tharps would take for a sign and which Pearl took for an owl.

The cabin was one room and a lean-to. There was a fire going too hot and six people in the room and the smell of a straw tick that needed changing. Ora Tharp met her at the door with a face like a closed fist.

"She's been hollering three hours," Ora said. "Now she's quit hollering."

"That's not always bad," said Pearl. "Send the men out. Put water on. Two kettles."

Elzy Tharp took his hat and went, and took his boys with him, and Pearl was glad of it. She had learned early that a room with fewer men in it was a room where a woman could work.

Docia Tharp was fifteen. She lay on her side on the tick with her knees drawn up and her braid stuck to her neck, and her eyes went to Pearl and stayed there, and Pearl saw in them the particular animal terror of a girl who has understood, too late, that there is no getting out of this by wishing.

"Hey now," Pearl said. She knelt. She put the back of her hand to the girl's cheek, then her palm flat and warm on the taut belly, and left it there through a pain, feeling the whole hard swell of it rise and hold and let go. "You're doing it right. Everything hurting you is the right thing."

"It ain't coming," Docia said.

"It's coming. It's just coming wrong end first, is what I expect."

She washed her hands in the basin with the lye soap she carried herself, because in twenty years she had learned not to trust another woman's soap dish, and she greased her right hand with lard, and she examined the girl while Ora held the candle. What she found under her fingers was not the hard round crown of a head. It was soft and cleft, and there was the little coil of a cord, and when she pressed she felt the ridge of a hipbone.

Breech. Bottom first, legs folded up, the way Tuck Yarnell called a buttermilk baby, for no reason he ever explained.

Pearl sat back on her heels a moment and let herself be afraid. That was Tuck's teaching too: be scared first, quick, get it done with, then work. Fear held off gets in the hands.

"Ora," she said, "I'm going to need you steady. Not praying. Steady."

"I can do both," said Ora Tharp.

"Then do both quiet."

It took two hours. She got the girl up off her side and onto her knees at the edge of the tick, leaning into her mother, because a baby coming backwards needs all the help gravity will give. She kept her hand in and her hand still, waiting. That was the whole art, and no doctor in Springfield had ever learned it: knowing when to keep your hands out of the way. A breech will come if it is let alone until the last, and then it needs everything you have all at once.

The hips came. Pearl hooked a finger and brought one foot down, then the other, and the little slick legs kicked once, and Docia screamed in a way that made the dogs go off outside. The body came to the shoulders and stopped. Pearl felt the neck, the arms folded wrong, and she turned the whole child a quarter way around, the way you would turn a key that has stuck, and one arm came free and then the other. Then only the head, and the head is where breech babies are lost, because they cannot breathe and cannot wait.

"Push now," Pearl said. "Push if it kills you, push."

She braced her forearm under the little body and put two fingers to the cheekbones inside and flexed the chin down and eased, and the head came, all at once, hot and wet in her hands, and the baby was blue as a plum.

She cleared the mouth with her finger. She laid the child face down along her own forearm and rubbed the small back hard, harder than a mother could stand to watch, and blew a short breath across its face. Nothing. She did it again.

The baby coughed, and drew, and began to holler with a thin outraged wail, and Ora Tharp burst into tears and put both hands over her mouth.

"Boy," Pearl said. "And he's mad about it."

She tied the cord and cut it. She delivered the afterbirth whole and inspected it by candlelight, because a piece left inside will kill a woman in three days and nobody will ever know why. She kneaded the girl's slack belly until the womb clenched down like a fist under her palm, and the bleeding slowed, and she never once reached for the ergot. She washed the girl and put her in a dry shift, and she put the baby to the breast and showed her how, and Docia looked down at the small red thing at her chest with an expression Pearl had seen a thousand times and had never found a word for. Not love yet. Something more startled than love.

Elzy Tharp came in at gray light and looked at his daughter and his grandson and did not say anything about either. He stood turning his hat.

"We ain't got money," he said.

"I know it."

He went out to the lean-to and came back with a half-gallon jar of sorghum molasses, this year's, still cloudy, and set it on the table like a man setting down a stone.

"That's more than money," Pearl said, and meant it, and took it.

She climbed the goat trail as the sun was coming up somewhere on the other side of the ridge. The light in the woods at that hour did not fall in shafts; it hung. Every wet leaf held some of it, and the great white oaks and the black oaks and the shagbark hickories stood up out of the fog so thick you could not see forty feet, and what light there was looked like smoke standing among the trunks. Her back ached. Her forearms ached, which was the particular ache of a breech. The sorghum jar swung against her leg in a feed sack.

She had caught, by her count, four hundred and eleven babies in Boone Hollow and the branches that fed it. She had lost eleven, and she could name every one of them, and she did, sometimes, walking home.

This one had gone right. That was all. There was no arrangement you could make about the next one.

At the top of the ridge she stopped where the trail came out into the old field and looked down at her own place: the cabin with its dogtrot, the smoke standing straight up out of the chimney, the bee gums in a row along the fence like a congregation of stumps, the woodpile Otis kept squared up as neat as brickwork. He had gone to the mill hours ago. He had left the fire banked for her anyway.

That was, in her opinion, the whole of what people meant when they said love, though she had never once said it out loud.