Outlawed(11)

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.

“I knew of a girl who, because her father was a ne’er-do-well and a drinker, was forced to keep all the records for her family’s farm,” Father Malvey wrote. “She was unable to conceive a child until her father was prevailed upon to assume his responsibilities, whereupon she fell pregnant and was soon the happy mother of twins.”

“I don’t think Father Malvey knows what he’s talking about,” I told Sister Tom.

“The bookseller told me he’s the best there is,” said Sister Tom. “The medical school in Chicago just bought five copies.”

“What luck for the bookseller,” I said, “and for Father Malvey.”

Sister Tom gave me a half-smile.

“I think I need something by a master midwife,” I said. “Someone who’s delivered babies.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Sister Tom. “But if the bookseller has to hunt it down, it’ll cost extra.”

It took me three weeks to copy enough books to earn Mrs. Alice Schaeffer’s Handbook of Feminine Complaints, and another six for the bookseller to bring it to me on his way back from Denver. Spring turned to summer at Holy Child. On Sundays we had services outside in the meadow so we could see the fertility of the earth, and afterward the Mother let us gather geraniums and black-eyed Susans and put them in pitchers and drinking glasses all around the dining room, and that small brightness made us giddy with joy, giggling into our nighttime tea at jokes that would have been nonsense to my friends back home, about Sister Martha’s clumsy catechism, the time she guessed that Saint Ignatius was the patron saint of weasels. All the while my mind moved along two tracks. I came to feel at peace in the convent; I no longer woke each morning expecting to see my sister still asleep in the next bed, and I no longer cried when I milked the cows. I looked forward to taking my vows in September and changing my gray shift for a black robe. But I felt a lack in my head and heart, which I understood that Sister Clementine and some of the other devout sisters filled with baby Jesus, but which no story could fill for me, especially not one in which I could play no part, I who could neither carry a child nor, locked away in the convent, even do what my mama had trained me to do and help bring children into the world. Instead I thought about what I might learn from Mrs. Schaeffer.