“It doesn’t matter,” said Mama. “Now her family will want you charged with witchcraft. And with the others, too, the sheriff won’t be able to protect you.”
I knew it was useless to argue. I saw already that my time was up and what little I had left would be taken from me. But I argued anyway.
“You said it was the measles. You always say German measles is dangerous for pregnant women. You tell everyone about it. Why would they think it was witchcraft?”
“They want to know what caused the measles,” Mama said. “Maybe if it had been just one woman, two, even three. I thought for a day or two we might be all right. But another loss right when people were starting to catch their breath—they’ll want someone to pay, Ada. They’ll want it to be you.”
We sat on the bed Bee’s daddy had bought for Mama before he left in the third month of her sickness. It was twice the size of her old one, with a heavy headboard made of rock maple all the way from Vermont. Bee and Janie and Jessamine loved to pile into Mama’s bed, but it always made me think of the nights of her sickness, when I sat with her after Bee was asleep, terrified to be with her in the dark when she had become almost a stranger to me, but terrified that if I took my eyes off her she might just give up, just quit breathing the way she’d quit dressing and cooking and getting out of bed. Every night I fell asleep in the chair next to Mama’s bed, and every morning I woke up and she was just the same, until one morning I woke up and she was better.
“So what do I do?” I asked Mama.
She smoothed a strand of hair behind my ear.
“I know a place,” she said. “You won’t like it, but you’ll be safe there.”
That night as I tucked Bee in, I told her I was going away for a while. She just nodded, those wide eyes taking everything in.
“You’re going to have to help Mama,” I said. “In a few years, you’re going to have to start learning the business from her.”
“Janie and Jess are older,” Bee said.
“Jess faints at the sight of blood,” I said. “And Janie can’t focus long enough to darn a sock, let alone stitch a wound. It has to be you.”
Bee nodded. She had dark brows like her daddy, who was half Polish, half Ojibwe and handsome—not like my daddy, whose long pale hatchet face I still remembered, though I remembered little else about him. Bee’s daddy had tried with her in the beginning, he really had, but only I could soothe her. And he still sent money every couple of months, and letters for Bee, which was more than my daddy ever had.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll be good at it. Most of it is just listening to people, and you already know how to do that.”
I wanted to give her a head start, so that in time, when she started to learn in earnest, she’d remember me. I taught her the song Mama had taught me to memorize the seven most important medicinal herbs and their uses. I showed her how to count a pulse and explained what it meant if it was fast or slow. I was halfway through explaining the early symptoms of the six childhood fevers when I saw that her eyes were wandering and her brows were knitted close.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Aren’t you scared?” she asked.
“Scared of what, Honeybee?”
She dropped her eyes from my face.
“I know people die sometimes,” she said. “Mama didn’t talk about it, but I know Sally Temple died.”
Sally Temple had lived on the outskirts of town with her husband, who was a ratcatcher. She was very young—just fifteen, some people said—and her baby came so fast that he ripped her all apart inside. Mama was finally able to stop the bleeding, but Sally had lost too much, and she died in her childbed with her new son screaming in the next room. I was there when she died and for weeks I dreamed of her, her little pointed face draining of color, the confusion and then anger and then panic in her eyes. Then Mama explained to me how she went on, knowing it could happen anytime.
“Mama says at every birth, death is in the room. You can try to ignore it, or you can acknowledge it, and greet it like a guest, and then you won’t be so afraid anymore.”
Bee looked skeptical.
“How do you greet it? ‘Hello, Death’?”
“She pictures the last patient she lost,” I said. “The death that’s freshest in her mind. She pictures that woman standing right there in the room with her. She looks the woman up and down. She doesn’t say anything, but sometimes she gives a little nod. Then she’s ready for the birth.”
“Does it work?” Bee asked.
I had seen Mama enter a birth with fear in her heart, if the baby was early or breach or the mother was sick with sugar or high blood pressure. Mama’s face was as confident as ever but still everyone in the room could feel something was wrong; the aunties’ hands would begin to shake as they wiped the laboring mother’s brow. And then Mama’s eyes would focus on a point in the empty air, and she would nod, and then the whole room would pull together around her, and the birth would go as well as it could possibly go, because she was in charge.
“It works,” I said.
I bent to hug Bee, more for myself than for her. She smelled like soap and cedar, just like she had ever since she was a baby.
“When I’m grown,” she said into my shoulder, “I’m going to come find you.”
I pulled back to look her in the face.
“Bee,” I said, “I’ll be back before you’re grown.”
“Okay,” she said, not believing. “But if you’re not, I’ll get a horse, and a map, and I’ll come help you, wherever you are.”
CHAPTER 2
The Mother Superior of the Sisters of the Holy Child said I could have sanctuary as long as I accepted baby Jesus into my heart. Baby Jesus had not helped me conceive a child, but neither had drinking four glasses of milk every day or keeping my legs above my head or lying down with Sam or anything else I had tried. I had nothing against baby Jesus.
“I accept Him,” I said.
The Mother raised an eyebrow.
“You’ll have Bible study with Sister Dolores,” she said. “In six months, if she thinks you’re ready, you can take your vows. Then you’ll be one of us.”
In the meantime, Sister Rose introduced me to Goldie, Holly, and Izzy. Sister Rose was a skinny girl with a gummy smile. She shared my room at the convent—two narrow beds, two chamber pots, a washbasin, and a crèche.
She was a natural with animals. The cows calmed visibly when they saw her, and when she touched their backs and cooed to them she was almost graceful. Holly, the Holstein, was the only one who let me near her. The others switched their tails or kicked or jerked their dugs out of my hands. But Holly was quiet, her eyes big and droopy, almost like she felt sorry for me, and Sister Rose showed me how to squeeze so I didn’t hurt her, so milk ran in a clean stream from her teat to the bucket.
Milking was a good time to cry. I was hardly ever alone at the convent; at matins and breakfast and Bible study and vespers and dinner, I was surrounded by sisters. But at milking time, Sister Rose was focused on Goldie or Izzy, and the wind blew across the meadow and shivered the barn windows and hid the sound of my cries.