The Names She Kept

Chapter One: The Midwife's Shawl

The road down to the Skeen place was not a road at all but a suggestion — two ruts worn through laurel thicket and red clay, steep enough that a mule had to sit back on its haunches for the last quarter mile. Mabel Corder knew every root and washout by feel. She had walked it in April mud and January ice, in the blue dark before dawn and the violet dark after sunset, and she walked it now in the thin gold light of a September afternoon with her leather bag in one hand and her shawl pulled tight against a wind that smelled of woodsmoke and coming rain.

She was thirty-four years old. Her hair was dark and heavy, pinned in a knot that never quite held, and her hands were the hands of a woman who had spent half her life reaching into the worst hours of other women's lives and pulling something living out of them. She was not beautiful in the way the word was used in magazines, but people trusted her face. It was a face that said: I have seen this before, and we will get through it.

Her reputation ran from Laurel Fork to the head of Cripple Creek and over to the German settlement at Konnarock, where the women spoke English only when they had to and trusted Mabel because she did not talk when talking was not needed. She had delivered breech babies and blue babies and babies born with the cord wrapped twice around their necks. She had lost four in seventeen years of practice, and she remembered each one — the weight of them, the silence where a cry should have been — with a precision that never dulled.

She did not think of herself as brave. Brave was a word for soldiers and people who chose their dangers. Mabel simply went where she was called, because the alternative was a dead woman or a dead child or both, and she could not sit in her kitchen and let that happen when her hands knew what to do.

The message had come at noon, carried by Arlie Skeen's youngest brother, a boy of fourteen with a face like a startled rabbit. Lula's time had come. Lula was early. Lula was asking for Mabel.

Arlie Skeen had been at Camp Lee since March, training with the 80th Division, and Mabel had assumed he would still be there or already shipped to France. But the boy said Arlie had come home two days ago — furlough, he said, though his eyes slid sideways when he said it, and Mabel understood that furlough might mean a dozen things in September of 1918, when the camps were crowded and the newspapers were printing numbers no one wanted to read.

"How far along is she?" Mabel had asked.

"Ma'am, I don't know about such things."

"Is she walking? Talking? Screaming?"

"She's lying down and she's hot. Arlie says come quick."

Hot. That word had snagged in Mabel's mind like a fishhook, but she had pushed it aside. Women in labor ran fevers. It happened. It was not always a sign of something worse.

She had packed her bag with the usual instruments — the curved scissors, the silk thread for tying, the bottle of ergot, the clean cloths boiled that morning and folded into tight squares — and she had kissed Will on the forehead where he sat at the kitchen table marking papers, and she had told Mae to see that the boys washed before supper, and she had gone.

Now the Skeen cabin came into view below her: a two-room structure of chinked logs with a tin roof that threw back the late light like a mirror. Smoke rose from the chimney. A dog tied to the porch rail barked once and then lay down, as if the effort of alarm was too much for such an afternoon.

Arlie Skeen met her at the door.

He was twenty-six, a big man with red-brown hair and the thick hands of someone who had split rails since he could hold an axe. But he looked diminished. His uniform hung loose at the shoulders, and his eyes had the wet, unfocused shine of a man who had not slept. He smelled of sweat and something else — something sharp and medicinal, like camphor rubbed on too thick.

"She's bad," he said.

"How long has she been laboring?"

"Since last night. But it ain't just the baby. She's burning up. I put cold cloths on her and they come off hot inside a minute."

Mabel stepped past him into the cabin. The front room was dim and close, the windows shuttered against drafts, and the air had a sweetness to it that made her stomach tighten — the sweetness of fever sweat, of a body working too hard against itself.

Lula Skeen lay on the bed in the back room, propped on pillows that were dark with perspiration. She was twenty-two, small-boned, with hair the color of corn silk plastered to her temples. Her lips were not the right color. They were dusky, almost blue, as if she had been eating berries, and her breathing came in shallow, wet pulls that Mabel could hear from the doorway.

"Lula," Mabel said, keeping her voice level. "Lula, honey, I'm here."

Lula's eyes opened. They were glassy and far away. "Mabel. I dreamed you was already here. I dreamed you brought the baby out and it was a girl."

"Let's make that dream come true. Can you tell me where the pain is?"

"Everywhere," Lula whispered. "It's everywhere and it's nowhere. I can't tell anymore."

Mabel set her bag on the chair beside the bed and washed her hands in the basin of water Arlie had set out. The water was lukewarm. She washed twice, the way Ottie Prater had taught her — once for the dirt you could see, once for the dirt you couldn't.

She examined Lula quickly and found what she expected: the baby was low and positioned well, ready to come, but Lula's body was fighting on two fronts. The contractions were strong but irregular, as if the fever and the labor were pulling her in different directions, each demanding everything she had.

"Arlie," Mabel said, not turning from the bed. "I need more water. Boil it first. And I need every clean cloth in this house."

"Is she going to be all right?"

"I need the water, Arlie."

He went.

Mabel leaned close to Lula. "Listen to me. You've got a fever and you've got a baby coming and we're going to handle them one at a time. The baby first. Can you push when I tell you?"

"I'll try."

"Don't try. Do. You hear me? When I say push, you bear down like you're moving a mountain."

Lula almost smiled. "I never moved a mountain."

"Tonight you will."

The labor lasted three hours. It should have lasted one. Lula's strength came and went like a lantern in wind — bright for a moment, then guttering, then bright again. Between contractions she shivered so violently that the bed frame knocked against the wall, and Mabel had to hold her shoulders to keep her from rolling off the mattress.

Arlie stood in the doorway with his hands at his sides, opening and closing his fists. Mabel sent him away twice and twice he came back. The third time she let him stay because she needed someone to hold the lamp steady, and his hands, for all their shaking, were better than a nail in the wall.

At half past eight, the baby crowned.

"Now, Lula. Now. Push."

Lula pushed. Her face went dark with effort, the veins standing out at her temples, and a sound came from her that was not a scream but something older and deeper — the sound of a body doing the one thing it was made to do, even as it was failing.

The baby came into Mabel's hands slick and hot and furious. A girl. She cried before Mabel could clear her mouth, a thin, outraged wail that filled the cabin and made Arlie Skeen drop to his knees in the doorway as if someone had cut his strings.

"A girl," Mabel said. "Lula, you have a daughter."

But Lula's eyes had closed. Her breathing had changed — it was faster now, shallower, and there was a sound in it that Mabel had never heard before, a bubbling, drowning sound, as if Lula's lungs were filling with water from the inside.

"Lula."

No answer.

Mabel tied and cut the cord with hands that did not shake, because hands that shook killed people. She wrapped the baby in a clean cloth and laid her in the cradle that Arlie had built from poplar wood, and then she turned back to Lula.

The young woman's lips were the color of a bruise. Her chest rose and fell in quick, desperate hitches. When Mabel put her ear to Lula's chest, she heard what no midwife should ever hear: the ocean. Lungs full of fluid, drowning on dry land.

"Arlie. Is there anyone else? A neighbor? Someone who can ride for Dr. Bost?"

"It's nine miles to Bost."

"Then someone needs to ride nine miles."

Arlie ran. Mabel heard the horse go, hooves on packed earth fading into the dark.

She sat beside Lula Skeen for the next hour. She propped her upright to ease the breathing. She sponged her face and neck and wrists with cool water. She spoke to her in the low, steady voice she used for women in the worst of labor, the voice that said I am here and I am not leaving and you are not alone.

Lula opened her eyes once. "Is she all right? The baby?"

"She's perfect. She's sleeping."

"Tell Arlie —" A cough tore through her, wet and deep, and when it passed, there was blood on her chin. "Tell Arlie to name her something pretty."

"You'll name her yourself."

But Lula shook her head, and in her eyes Mabel saw something she recognized — not fear, but certainty. The certainty of a woman who knew she was leaving and had made her peace with the door.

Lula Skeen died at twenty minutes past ten on a Tuesday night in September, while her daughter slept in a poplar cradle three feet away and the crickets sang outside as if nothing in the world had changed.

Mabel closed Lula's eyes. She straightened the bedclothes. She washed the blood from Lula's face with the same hands that had brought her daughter into the world, and then she sat in the chair beside the bed and held the dead woman's hand and did not cry, because crying was something she could do later, at home, in the dark, where no one needed her to be steady.

The baby woke and fussed. Mabel picked her up and held her against her chest, and the child quieted at the warmth, and Mabel stood in that cabin with death on one side and life on the other and thought: This is what I do. This is what I have always done. I stand in the doorway between them.

When Arlie came back with Dr. Bost's assistant — a young man named Harbin who looked as though he had been dragged from sleep — it was too late. Harbin examined Lula's body and said words that Mabel would hear repeated many times in the weeks to come: influenza, pneumonia, cytokine storm. Words from medical journals, clean and clinical, that did nothing to explain the sound of a woman drowning in her own chest.

"There's a sickness at the camps," Harbin said quietly, pulling Mabel aside. "Camp Lee, Camp Devens, all of them. It's spreading. You should wash everything you touched. Burn the linens if you can."

Mabel looked down at her shawl, the brown wool shawl she had worn every day for three years, the one Mae had mended at the fringe last winter. It was spotted with Lula's sweat, her blood, the dampness of a room where death had done its work.

She should have left it. She should have burned it there in the Skeen yard along with the cloths and the bedding. But the night was cold and the walk was long and she was tired in a way that went deeper than her bones, and so she pulled it tight around her shoulders and started up the mountain.

The stars were out. The air was sharp with frost. Somewhere below her, Arlie Skeen was holding a daughter whose mother he would never see again, and somewhere above her, Will and the children were sleeping in a house that still smelled of the biscuits Mae had made for supper.

Mabel walked between those two worlds, carrying the flu in the weave of her shawl, though she did not know it yet.

She did not know that the thing clinging to the wool was smaller than a speck of dust and more patient than grief. She did not know that it would slip from fiber to skin to breath to blood with the ease of water finding a crack in stone. She did not know that within a week, the church bell at Laurel Fork Methodist would ring for four funerals, and that the sound of it would become so familiar that the children would stop looking up.

She knew only that she was tired, and that home was above her, and that the road was steep, and that she had brought a living child into the world tonight even if she could not save the mother.

She climbed.

The shawl held her close.