“Good,” said Sister Tom. “Then you should find this interesting.”
After that I spent all my free time in the storeroom, copying the book onto a stack of loose-leaf paper so thin I had to be careful not to tear it with the pen. It was three days before I realized what I was copying.
The book started innocently enough, with a chapter on cramps and irregularity. At first it made me angry to read about women whose biggest problem was a little pain a few days out of the month, but copying down the names of familiar herbs soothed me. The second chapter was about remedies for hot flashes and melancholy during menopause. But the third one was called “Remedies for a Late Period,” and I didn’t have to read long before I knew what I was looking at.
I was twelve when Susan Mill came to see Mama. I’d seen scared girls before—girls with sores between their legs, pregnant girls bleeding, girls with black eyes and bruises on their arms. But Susan—funny Susan, usually chatty, just that year old enough to court—she scared me. She looked like a ghost in our house, walking so softly her feet made no sound, her eyes focused on nothing.
“I’m a month late,” she said. “Can you help me bring down my period?”
I didn’t know what she meant then but Mama did. She said, “Are you sure, Susan? If it’s money you need—”
“I don’t need money,” Susan said.
“If it’s a married man, it’s all right, you know. His wife might be mad, but now that you’re pregnant, everyone will support you. He’ll have to take you into his house, if that’s what you want. You have the power now.”
Then Susan gave Mama a look I’ll never forget, a look of total contempt.
“If you can’t help me, Mrs. Magnusson,” she said, “just say so.”
I expected Mama to get mad—she never liked people mouthing off to her—but instead she just nodded once and said, “Remember this, because I’m not going to write it down.”
Then she explained how to get to a hairdresser’s in Oxford, and told Susan to ask for a woman named Saphronia there, and to bring fifty golden eagles, which was five times what Mama got paid for a birth.
Afterward, when I asked what Susan was going to do, Mama explained that despite what we’d been taught in school, there was a way to end a pregnancy, but it was dangerous, because anyone who did it or had it done could go to jail, or worse. And so when someone wanted to do it, it usually meant something very, very bad had happened to her.
“What happened to Susan?” I asked.
Mama said she didn’t know yet, but for the next three days I saw her whispering with her friends from town, Mrs. Olsen and Mrs. White and Mrs. Barrow, and when Susan came back from Oxford, Mama helped her meet a man who was a miner, and that man married her and took her out to silver country with him, and she never came back to Fairchild as long as I lived there. And whenever people said what a shame it was that the Mills didn’t get to see their only daughter anymore, Mama’s eyes went ice-cold.
“I know what your book is about,” I told Sister Tom. She was reshelving the biographies of the saints. Sister Clementine always got them out of order.
“And?”
I wasn’t sure if I should be afraid of Sister Tom. It was possible she was trying to trap me somehow, get me in trouble with the Mother. My position at Holy Child was still uncertain—before I took my vows, I knew the Mother could simply kick me out if she wanted to, and then I’d have nowhere to go. So I gave what I thought was the safest answer I could.
“Does the Mother know?” I asked.
Sister Tom just smiled—not a cruel smile, but not one I could understand.
“You’d be surprised what the Mother knows,” she said.
That didn’t do me much good.
“I don’t want to get sent away,” I said.
She motioned for me to sit. It was almost time for vespers. The library was empty except for us and the light in the windows was low. A few strands of Sister Tom’s hair had escaped from her headscarf. They were the color of wheat.
“Do you know why I came here?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“I was learning from my mama, just like you,” she said. “But my mama was the opposite of yours. Girls and women came to her when they were in trouble, and she gave them abortions.”
I nodded like I wasn’t surprised, but I was. I had thought everyone at the convent was barren, like me. And when I imagined Saphronia, the woman Susan had gone to in Oxford, I had imagined an old witch like in the picture book I used to scare Janie and Jessamine on October nights, with long fingernails and snaggleteeth. But of course an abortionist could be a woman like Mama, could have a child of her own.
“The sheriff made me watch when they hanged my mama,” Sister Thomas said. “All the girls in town had to watch. My mama was an example of what happens when you leave the path of baby Jesus and Mother Mary.”
Her voice was so cold it chilled my blood, so bitter I could taste it.
“But the sheriff gave me a choice,” she said. “The convent or the jail. He didn’t care which one I chose. Either way, no man would ever marry me, I would have no child. I would never go among ordinary people as long as I lived.”
Sister Tom smiled then. “This is jail,” she said. “You don’t have to worry anymore. You’re already here.”
I could’ve refused, of course. I could’ve told Sister Tom to find someone else, and spent my free hours with Sister Rose, working my way through An Unmarried Woman’s Book of Daily Prayers. But I was curious—I wanted to know what the woman in Oxford knew that was so secret and dangerous Mama couldn’t even talk about it. And so I began my criminal career there in the house of God, with a leaky pen instead of a pistol and books instead of silver for my reward.
In Sister Tom’s book I read about a woman in Rapid City who was courted by a man she did not want to marry, who forced himself on her and made her pregnant; she drank black root and miscarried at thirteen weeks, and went on to have two healthy boys with another man. I read about a woman sick with sugar-in-the-blood, whose midwife said a baby would surely kill her; she took a mix of tansy oil and clarified butter, and she miscarried, and she lived. I read about a woman whose father made her pregnant, and I understood why Susan Mill had looked at Mama the way she had, and why she had gone away.
I read, too, about a woman who drank lye to end her pregnancy and died. I read about a woman who drank turpentine to end her pregnancy and died. I read about a woman who could find no one to help her, though she went to three different towns and inquired with seven midwives, an herbalist, and even a dentist, and so she tried to end her pregnancy herself with a knitting needle, and hemorrhaged, and died. I had not thought I could ever feel lucky again, but sitting safe in the storeroom as I read about how that woman bled all day long and into the night, I did.
When I had copied a full book, Sister Tom traded it to the bookseller who drove his wagon up and down the road between Denver and Chicago for On the Causes and Treatment of Female Disorders, by Father Boniface Malvey, who was a priest and a doctor. Sister Tom let me cut the pages myself; my heart was in my throat as I opened the cover.
But quickly Father Malvey began to disappoint me. He said the proper cure for uterine fibroids was to drink a solution of one part water and one part bacon grease, which I knew was no cure for anything. He said going outside on a full moon night could cause a pregnant woman to give birth early, which even the old wives in Fairchild knew was just a silly superstition. And when it came to barrenness, he listed the following possible causes: frigid or irresponsible mother, wearing boys’ clothes at a young age, too many spicy or bitter foods, idleness, and excessive focus on unwomanly pursuits like bookkeeping.