August 29, 1945
The next morning, Fran was up before the sun to get what the mountain people called a soon start on their nursing rounds. But first she had to milk Bella again. That had to be done twice a day. Morning and night. But at least this time she didn’t have an audience, although she could never be sure of that here at the center. People came seeking help at all hours.
Fran only lacked ten deliveries having the required amount for her training. Most of the deliveries in their district in the last couple of months had been routine. Only two women had been carried out to the hospital. Routine was good. That’s how births were supposed to be, but they were never ordinary. Each time Fran helped a baby come into the world it was a marvel. A miracle of life.
But being a nurse-midwife here in the mountains was much more than delivering babies. Willie was right about the things she would see and treat. A bean up a child’s nose. A broken bone. Gunshot wounds. A chopped toe. Lung ailments. Worms. Stomach problems. Anemia. Bee stings. Sometimes it made Fran’s head spin.
It was hard to imagine one person being able to handle everything at one of the centers by herself, but Betty said that if Fran stayed on in the mountains once she received her certification, she might be assigned to a center alone.
If she stayed on. Fran hadn’t thought about that. She simply thought about each day that came. Could she meet the challenges of whatever happened? A new infection to treat. The proper medicine to ask the doctors to prescribe. A chicken to pluck for their dinner. Lamps to fill with oil. Pills to count and keep in their pharmacy cabinet. Mice to keep out of their supplies. Records to keep on each patient.
Betty was even more inept than Fran with the housekeeping and stock tending. Before Fran moved in to the center to take the extra bed, a neighborhood girl stayed at the center to tend to the cooking, the garden, and the livestock. Betty made no secret of the fact that Fran’s abilities fell far short of the mountain girl’s.
But she was learning. Betty might not hand out many compliments, but she rarely found reason to fault Fran either. Except in the way Fran wanted to learn more about the mountain people.
As they saddled their horses to head up to the Locke house, Betty once again took the opportunity to lecture Fran against embracing mountain ways.
“You have to remember you’re a nurse. An educated nurse-midwife.” Betty looked over at Fran as she mounted her horse, Moses.
Fran led her horse, Jasmine, in a circle to calm her. Jasmine was a tough little mustang, but headstrong. Fran stroked the horse’s dark brown neck and whispered some nonsense words.
“Don’t take all day with that horse. You need to let her know who’s boss.” Betty frowned at Fran and continued her lecture. “The same as you have to let the people know you’re the one with the medical expertise. Not them. You have to remember your training and not listen to the people here. They’re a superstitious lot who depend on old wives’ tales for cures. Last winter one of the men told me he’d cured the cramps in his feet by putting his shoes upside down under the bed.” Betty made a sound of disgust.
“What could it hurt if it worked?” Fran swung up into the saddle and patted Jasmine’s neck when she danced to the side. Finally, the horse settled.
Betty clicked her horse forward, then turned to give Fran a hard look. “See, there’s your problem. It didn’t work. The only thing that could do is keep mice from nesting in his shoes. The cramps in his feet went away because I told him to drink more water and eat some pickles.”
Eating pickles was Betty’s answer to various complaints, from morning sickness to asthma. She pushed greens too in order to strengthen women weakened by bearing and nursing one baby after another.
“For the potassium,” Fran said.
“Yes. The people here don’t have the means to have fresh fruit all the time. They do have their vegetables and fruit in the summer, but they need better diets all year long. Some of them appear to subsist on gravy and biscuits.”
“I suppose they have to make do with whatever they have.”
“So they do, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enlighten them about proper diets and necessary hygiene. We have to make the changes we can.” They rode their horses into the creek bed and started climbing. When the creek was low like now, it made the easiest way up into the mountains. “That’s our duty as nurse-midwives.”
“Yes, of course.”
“A better diet. Shoes so the children won’t get worms. Vaccinations. Emphasizing safety around the fireplaces. We suffer a bit with the heat now, but I can assure you these warm months are the best times here. Things get considerably harder when winter blows back our way. Ice and snow are not strangers to these mountains.”
“Are you able to make the rounds then?” Fran remembered how sometimes a heavy snow could shut down Cincinnati.
“Babies don’t check the weather when they decide to be born. We go where we’re needed. The horses have special winter shoes to help in the ice and snow. But if the horses can’t go, we walk. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one of those jeeps out here?”
“They have a couple at Wendover and the hospital now.”
“Named, I suppose,” Betty said.
“Naturally.” Fran laughed. “Mrs. B does like naming things. Woody says one of them is Clara Jane and the other Diamond Lil.”
“I could use a Diamond Lil about now.” Betty slowed her horse and pulled a handkerchief out to dab her face. “It must be going to storm, as close as it feels this early in the day.”
“I hope so. Everybody’s sass patches need rain.”
“See, there you are.” Betty shook her head. “Calling gardens sass patches. I’m beginning to think you must be from Harlan instead of Cincinnati.”
“Do people come to the midwifery school from Harlan or here in Leslie County?”
“Not as far as I can recall. Mrs. B brought in all her nurses. In the beginning, most were from England. Then she found a few New Yorkers like me to recruit. Mrs. B has a way of making it sound like such an adventure. Did she recruit you?”
“A different woman presented the program. Said she was a frontier nurse in the thirties. The best time of her life.”
“I suppose she promised you a horse and a dog too.”
“I have the horse.” Fran stroked Jasmine’s neck and let her move over to a pool in the creek to take a drink. Betty let Moses drink too. “But how come you don’t have a dog?”
“Never cared much for dogs. Way too many of them around here, with hounds on every porch.” Betty pulled on her reins and started up the creek again. “I guess you like dogs.” She said it like that might be a character defect.
“I do, but I’ve never had one. My mother said town was no place for a dog.” Fran looked at the land around the creek. “Here seems a perfect place.”
“A perfect place for the dog to bring home ticks and fleas.” Betty snorted. “I think Mrs. B put that in about a dog for every nurse, just to recruit those girls like you who have romanticized ideas of owning a dog. Back when England first went to war and most of the English nurses headed home for the war effort, she was desperate for nurses to fill their places. That’s why she started the midwifery school. But now with the war over—praise the Lord—we should have an abundance of staff.”
“Brought-in women.”
“You are hopeless.” Betty kicked her horse out in front.
Fran smiled. She was hopeless, but she liked the mountain vernacular. The poetic sound fit with the hills and hollows. Granny Em’s rhythm.
Cincinnati seemed far away as she followed Betty out of the creek and onto a rocky trail. The city might have a rhythm too, but few stopped to listen for it. Not even Fran when she was there. She’d been busy planning ahead. Everything she’d done had a reason for it. All leading to her imagined future with Seth. She wasn’t sure she’d ever stopped to take in the blessings of whatever moment she was in.
Not that what she was doing now didn’t have purpose. It did, but here the very landscape made you stop and pay attention. A person had to look and listen when out on the trails. Your horse’s hooves clattered on the rocky trails and splashed through creeks. Birds sang you along the way and sometimes signaled your progress to those ahead. Flowers bloomed in abundance, watered by Mother Nature. Boulders and trees sometimes blocked the paths, and it didn’t do to think about what the blackberry bushes might be hiding in their tangle of briars. But most of all, a person had time to think while riding up and down the hills.
At a cabin near the trail, a couple of children paused from playing in the dirt to wave. Betty reined in Moses and Fran followed suit. The mother came to the door carrying a baby. One delivered by Betty before Fran came to the district.
“You’re out right early.” The woman stepped out on the stoop. “Are you needing a drink or some eats?”
“That’s kind of you, Mrs. Newcomb. We’ll come back this way another time.” Betty knew how to talk with the mountain people, even if she didn’t embrace their ways. “But how is little Marcus doing?”
“He’s thriving, Nurse Dawson.” When she held the baby up for them to see, he kicked his legs and giggled. “He’s done learnt to crawl. I have to set one of these’n to watching him so’s I can get my work done.” She nodded toward the little girls who had edged back toward the stoop closer to their mother. The oldest one might be five, but in the mountains, children learned responsibility early.
“It’s good you have help then.”
The woman smiled. “That’s ever bit the truth. I couldn’t make it without my Deena and Lydia here.”
The two little girls looked like they got two inches taller under their mother’s praise.
“We best be on our way.” Betty flicked her reins to start Moses moving.
“You headed up to the Locke place?” Mrs. Newcomb asked. “I hear tell Sadie is punying around. I’m glad my girls do fine.”
“Healthy children are a blessing.” Fran spoke for the first time as she turned Jasmine to follow Moses.
“That’s the good Lord’s own truth,” Mrs. Newcomb called after them. “You tell Ruthena if she needs anything to let me know. Anythin’ at all.”
Fran smiled and waved. She knew Mrs. Newcomb meant it. Neighbors on the mountain took care of one another. But then she could almost hear Betty and Willie reminding her that sometimes the neighbors carried on long-running feuds too. That was one of the things Mrs. Breckinridge told her nurses to strictly avoid. Feuds and paying any notice to moonshine stills they might accidently run up on as they went about their rounds. The nurses were to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye toward that sort of thing.
They were there to serve the mothers and children who lived in their district. Sometimes the people’s cabins were within hollering distance of one another. Other times the houses were high in the hills, surrounded by trees and hidden from the world, like Woody’s house. A long climb from the center, but through a beautiful stretch of woods. Woody said Granny Em’s cabin was a half-hour ride beyond his home, even higher up.
Granny Em told Fran she liked being high where she could just pitch her troubles out the window and let them roll clear to the hollow, never to be seen again. She did, as Mrs. B said, seem to favor Fran. She’d stepped out from beside the oak tree in the center’s yard to meet Fran when she first rode up to Beech Fork a couple of months ago.
When Fran asked her how she knew she was coming, Granny Em laughed. “I don’t have a special seer’s eye, if that’s what you’re hinting at. But I got eyes and ears to watch the signs. A body can figure out a heap of things by watching the signs.”
Fran had no idea what signs she could have watched to know when Fran would arrive at the center. But then, there was the mountain girl told to give up her bed at the center. And Woody had been at Wendover and had probably heard she was on the way. The boy wasn’t exactly closemouthed about anything he knew.
She had no doubt he had shared with everybody on the mountain how inept she was at milking, since several of the women had given her some hints on dealing with a cranky bovine.
They still had a mile or so to go when a loud hello sounded behind them. They turned their horses to wait. That kind of hailing generally meant somebody had a need.
A man riding a mule bareback appeared around a bend in the trail. The mule’s neck was lathered around the reins.
“The folks down yonder said you headed up this way,” the man said when he got closer. “Good thing. Saved me some time.”
“Is your wife having problems, Mr. Nolan?” Betty asked.
They’d checked on Mrs. Nolan the end of last week. The girl, little more than a child herself at age seventeen, was expecting her first baby.
Ira Nolan wasn’t much older and looked beside himself as he pulled up his mule. “Her back was hurting some last night and then today she started punishing bad. My sister said I better fetch you even if it weren’t the time you set for it all to commence.”
“Babies don’t always cooperate with our time schedules, Mr. Nolan. But don’t you worry. She’s far enough along that everything should be fine even if she is in labor.” Betty used her most calming voice.
“You are coming now, ain’t you?” He looked between them with near panic that they might not listen. “Both of you.” He settled his gaze on Fran. “My woman was askin’ for you.”
Betty spoke up before Fran could. “I’ll come now, and Nurse Howard can come after she checks on a sick child.” Betty turned away from the man toward Fran and lowered her voice. “Since this is a first baby, I’m sure you’ll have time enough to make that visit. You best go on to check on Em too if nobody’s seen her up that way. From there you can take the trail across the hill to the Nolans instead of going back down to the center. That will save you a good hour.”
“Do I know that trail?” The mountain paths still confused Fran.
“You have your map, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Fran thought of the paper carefully folded in her saddlebag with the traces and creeks marked. She’d studied it time and again, but most of the markings remained a mystery to her.
“It’s time you figured out how to find your way on the hills.” Betty’s mouth tightened with irritation. “Try to keep the direction in your head. The Nolans are due west of the Locke cabin.”
“All right.” Fran looked around. The sun was to her face. East. She just had to go opposite that.
Betty sighed as she turned Moses to follow Mr. Nolan. “Try not to get lost.”