Outlawed(2)

I knew from Mama that there was no such thing as curses and that sometimes the body simply went wrong all on its own, but I had never heard of a man being barren before. When Maisie Carter and her husband couldn’t have a baby, it was Maisie who got kicked out of the house and had to live down by the river with the tinkers and the drunks. When Lucy McGarry didn’t get pregnant her family took her back in, but when two of her neighbors miscarried the same summer, everyone looked to Lucy for the cause. I was eleven when she was hanged for a witch. I had not yet started going on rounds with Mama; I had never seen a person die. It terrified me, not the violence of it but the swiftness, how one moment Lucy was standing on the platform and the next she was dangling limp below it. I tried to imagine it myself: what it would be like to see and think and feel and then suddenly plunge into blackness—more than blackness, into nothingness. It kept me awake that night and for many nights after, the dread of it. But at the gallows I cheered with everyone else; only Mama did not cheer.

“I don’t want to sleep with someone else,” I said. “Can’t we just try a little longer?”

Mama shook her head.

“People are already starting to gossip,” she said. “My patients are asking me if you’re pregnant yet.”

She would find someone for me, she said. There were men who did this for money, men whose virility was proven and who knew how to keep a secret. When it was the right time of month, I’d meet with one of them during the day for a few days running.

“Don’t think of it as being unfaithful to your husband,” Mama said. “Think of it as keeping yourself safe.”

The man was a surprise to me. We met at my mama’s house, where he posed as a repairman (he really did repair Mama’s stove). He said I could call him Sam, and I understood that was not his real name. He was Mama’s age and ugly, with a scraggly mustache the color of mouse fur, a big belly, and skinny legs. But he was kind to me, and put me at ease.

“You ever want me to stop, you tell me,” he said, taking off his socks.

I did not want him to stop. I wanted him to do what he had to do quickly so I could go back to my husband with a baby in my belly and never be afraid again.

After our fourth meeting, when I was waiting to see if what we had done had worked, I asked Mama what really made women barren. Mama knew many things that Mrs. Spencer and the other people in our town did not know. She knew, for instance, that the Great Flu that had killed all eight of her great-grandparents was not, as everyone else said, a judgment from baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Mama’s teacher Sarah Hawkins, a master midwife, had taught her that the Great Flu had come to America on ships along with spices and sugar, then spread from husband to wife and mother to child and trader to trader by kisses and handshakes, cups of beer shared among friends and strangers, and the coughs and sneezes of men and women who didn’t know how sick they were and went on serving food and selling cloth and trading beaver pelts one day too long. Sarah Hawkins said the Flu was just a fever, a sickness like any other, and the only reason people put a meaning to it was that otherwise their grief would have overwhelmed them. Mama said Sarah Hawkins was the smartest person she had ever known.

But when I asked Mama about barrenness, she just shook her head.

“Nobody knows,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked. I’d never before asked Mama a question that didn’t have an answer.

“We don’t even know exactly how a baby forms in a mother’s womb,” she said. “How can we know why sometimes her womb stays empty?”

I looked down at my hands and she could tell I was disappointed.

“I know one thing,” she said. “It’s not witchcraft.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“People cry witchcraft whenever they don’t understand something,” she said. “Remember, the town ladies said a witch had put a curse on Mayor Van Duyn, and when he died the doctor found his lungs all filled up with tumors. The only curse on him was that pipe.”

“So why don’t you tell people?” I asked. “Everyone listens to you.”

Mama shook her head.

“I used to tell my patients,” she said. “Every woman worries about a curse if she’s not pregnant two months after her wedding. ‘That’s just a silly story,’ I’d say. But they didn’t believe me, and what’s more, some of them got suspicious, like maybe I had cursed them.”

Mama delivered all the babies in the Independent Town of Fairchild and cured most of the illnesses besides. She had set more bones than Dr. Carlisle and heard more confessions than Father Simon. Her reputation was so secure that even when she took to her bed after Bee was born, her patients were all but lined up at our door the day she got well. Nobody was suspicious of Mama.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why didn’t they believe you?”

“When someone believes in something,” Mama said, “you can’t just take it away. You have to give them something to replace it. And since I don’t know what makes women barren, I’ve got nothing to give.”

I didn’t get pregnant that month, or the month after. At my husband’s house my mother-in-law watched me all the time, like she might catch me in the act of witchcraft. Once she came into our bedroom while I was washing and began making small talk with me, forcing me to answer politely as I washed my underarms and private parts. I felt ashamed of my body then as I never had before, of my small breasts, stomach flat over an empty womb. She began to make me pray to baby Jesus in the mornings; we knelt together and asked him to send our family a child. My mother-in-law was not a particularly religious woman. She kept a crèche above the hearth and a copy of Burton on the shelf like everyone in Fairchild, but went to church only on holidays or when she was seized with a desire to appear pious. The fact that we were praying now—in stumbling words I imagined she half-remembered from some childhood catechism—showed me how desperate she’d become.