The Midwife of Hope River
Page 29

Clara gave birth one hour after I got there, and I gave her some pennyroyal tea, which caused her to cramp, and massaged her uterus until the clots came out and the bleeding stopped. (Reminder to myself for next spring! Grow more pennyroyal, as it’s useful for many things, including getting fleas off the dogs.) I was paid a loaf of bread and a bushel of potatoes. Got back into bed and dropped into sleep as if I’d never been disturbed.
Ruben
The second dream is of my late husband.
The Polish Club is crowded with steelworkers and radicals. There’s a smell of tobacco and beer. Ruben sits at the end of a long table, surrounded by friends.
Ruben’s a big man, over six four, with a large jaw and a flat nose like a prizefighter, but his brown eyes snap with intelligence and good humor. His stories are funnier and his laugh louder and more infectious than anyone else’s. Even if he weren’t wearing a red shirt open at the throat, he’d be hard not to notice.
He winks at me and the pink rushes into my cheeks. When I get up to buy a glass of cold cider, he meets me at the bar, spins me around, and gives me a kiss.
Waking to the cold room, I can still taste his mouth, feel his familiar skin, one day from a shave, and his curly wild hair. I run my hand across the bed, reaching for him. He always took the left-hand side.
My socialist husband didn’t start out to be a union organizer. He wasn’t ever a miner or a factory worker, which embarrassed him if it ever came up. He was a college graduate from the University of Pennsylvania (the same school Mr. Hester went to, now that I think of it) and a writer for the Pittsburgh Press. In December of 1907, as a green reporter, he was sent to get a story about the Monongah mine explosion in West Virginia, fifty miles southwest of Pittsburgh.
“I spent a week there,” he tells me on our first date over coffee and crullers at the German café near the Point. “And it changed my life, talking to the widows and the priests watching the bodies being brought out of the mine.
“The corpses were carried on stretchers by the dozens and taken to the morgue, where a steady stream of people filed past day after day. Three hundred and sixty-two boys and men, dead, burned, mangled, leaving two hundred fifty widows and over a thousand children without support. Three hundred and sixty.” The big man has tears in his eyes. “When relatives or friends recognized a miner the wails would rip the gray sky open . . .
“There was one guy, the coroner, Mr. Amos, who had been on duty since the first man was found. I don’t know how he did it, day in and day out, looking at all those bodies, cataloging them, wading through the deep sorrow.
“Outside the mine openings and in front of the morgue, masses of mostly women stood in the rain shivering, braving the cold to get a chance, one last time, to see the face of their dead. Most spoke Italian, but you could be deaf and dumb and still understand, just from the tear-stained faces.
“I talked to one rescue worker, a mining engineer they sent over from Torrington State College. He let it drop that it was so dangerous down under that even the trained rescuers had been pulled out for three days. Fire belched from one of the holes, and you could smell burning flesh, but there was no way to get to the victims. They were probably all dead anyway . . .”
Ruben stops to chew his lip, looking away. It’s a strange conversation for a first date. Ragtime tinkles on the player piano.
“A mine inspector I’d met at the Monongah tipped me off about the Darr Mine in Westmoreland County, twenty miles east of Pittsburgh. Said there was a ventilation problem there and that, as usual, the foreman from the Pittsburgh Coal Company told him they’d get to work on it.
“Not two weeks later, I was up at the Darr, doing a piece on unsafe mining practices, when it blew up. I was right there, heard the explosion myself that time, felt the earth shake, saw the women and children trying to dig their fathers, brothers, and sons out with their bare hands. I joined them, scratching the earth until it was clear that another two hundred thirty-nine miners were dead. No one survived but the few men at the opening . . .” He stops his story and looks straight at me.
“This is crazy,” he chides himself, wiping his face. “Let’s dance.”
Someone put a polka roll in the player piano. My napkin fell to the floor as Ruben pulled me up. He was a big man but light on his feet. We danced to escape the sound of the explosions, the mothers crying, the dead miners’ bodies piling up at the morgue. Everyone was clapping as we whirled around the room. Half the time, my feet missed the floor.
I’d been with a few other men before Ruben: Lawrence, of course, and Michael the glassblower and Peter from the Brotherhood of Russian Workers. We were all anarchists or socialists then, or leaning that way. That first night with Ruben, we celebrated Henry Ford’s announcement that he was giving all his employees an eight-hour workday. My love felt bad he couldn’t take me home to his all-men boardinghouse near the steel mills, so I took him home with me. Nora and Mrs. Kelly were already asleep, but they wouldn’t care.
Oh, Ruben . . . heart of my heart. I am so sorry.
17
Runaway
All day it rains, turning the snow to mush, and I do nothing but reread the first three chapters of DeLee’s Obstetrics and wonder when Bitsy will return. I am beginning to wonder if she will return. I expected her right after New Year’s, and it’s already the fourth. If she doesn’t come back, I will be sad. I’ve gotten used to her.
It’s well after dark when, lying on the sofa, I close my eyes for a moment and have another dream! This one is about the veterinarian. An indignity! What’s he doing inside my head?
In the dream it’s summer. Hester and I are lying in the loft of a dark barn. Not my barn, another larger one, with light that comes in through the cracks in the rough-cut oak boards. Our bodies, still clothed, are pressed together. Nothing else happens, but when I wake, my heart’s pounding and I try to remember what his body felt like.
A few minutes later, I hear the drone of a motor coming up Wild Rose Road and then banging at the door. As usual, the first thing I think of is the law, like that night the feds came looking for Ruben and we hid him in the attic, or the other time, after he died, when they came looking for me. Turned out they just had some questions about the IWW at Westinghouse, but Mrs. Kelly and I were so scared we didn’t go out for three days, and not long after, we left the city for good.
I grab my red kimono and hurry to the window. A dark coupe is parked at the fence. The pounding starts up again.