Outlawed(6)

School was canceled; my sisters stayed home. Janie and Jessamine plaited each other’s hair and told increasingly outlandish stories about what they would do once they were allowed outside. Bee sat by the window and watched the empty street. Mama still made her rounds, but when she came home at night she was troubled, and circled the house doing small tasks as though trying to outrun her mind.

“The general store is closed,” she said, “and the bank. The church is empty—Father Simon visits once a day to light candles for the babies. Even the saloon is deserted.”

She didn’t say it, but I knew what she was afraid of: too many lost babies at once, and people would start looking for the witch. I was not the only barren woman in town. Maisie Carter was still alive, still young even; if she’d been fertile she would still be having children. But no one saw her, she came into town only rarely and bothered no one. I was the one whose expulsion from my husband’s home was a fresh scandal, whose barrenness was news.

After a week, though, the sick began to improve. None of them died; the measles that had been so deadly for babies in the womb turned out mild for those already on the earth. The saloon started serving again, the congregants returned to church. The general store and the bank reopened for business. Then Mama came home ashen-faced: Ulla had lost her baby.

“I didn’t even know she was pregnant,” I said.

Mama ignored me. “They sent me away,” she said, shaking her head. “They had Dr. Carlisle attending her. If she bleeds out, it will serve her stupid mother right.”

“Why did they send you away?” I asked.

Mama looked at me with weariness and sorrow in her eyes and I saw the answer before I heard it.

“Ulla is saying you put a curse on her. She’s saying you made her lose the baby.”

“I haven’t seen Ulla in months,” I said.

“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.