Outlawed(79)

“Alice Schaeffer?” I asked.

“That might have been her name. She had women coming in and out, you see—women who couldn’t have children. There was an outbreak of something—maybe spotted fever, it’s hard to remember now. Suspicion fell on her. The sheriff was involved.”

“Do you know where she went?” I asked.

The woman fixed me with her blue eyes, and I realized she could see after all.

“Wherever it is,” she said, “I imagine she wouldn’t want anyone to find her.”

The sunroom was lined with glass windows looking out on the pool. A young couple in blue bathing costumes kissed each other ceremonially on the lips, then stepped into the water.

“Where was the surgery?” I asked the old woman.

“On the eastern edge of town, if I remember right,” she said, “opposite the school.”

It was late afternoon when we reached the spot, and school was just letting out. I saw three girls walking hand in hand in hand, and thought of Ulla and Susie and me. By now both Ulla and Susie must be mothers, I knew; perhaps their children would play with my sisters’ children. The thought did not even make me sad anymore. It was like an image seen through very thick glass, its impact muted and distorted.

The building opposite the schoolhouse was low and small, its roof clearly damaged in a hailstorm. But inside, I saw it had been designed for calm and comfort. The windows were large and looked out on the mountains, and even through the dust that lay thick on the glass, the light in every room had a sweetness to it, like cool water.

“We should stay the night here,” Texas said. “We can start back in the morning. I’m sorry, Ada. I know you must be disappointed.”

I nodded, but I could not quite believe that Mrs. Alice Schaeffer was gone. Her presence filled the surgery. The front room was large with a wide bed, a washbasin, and a variety of cushions of different shapes and sizes. I recognized them from the handbook—Mrs. Schaeffer had recommended a peanut-shaped pillow for back labor, and a smaller, cylindrical one between the knees to help with the pain of transition, and I saw both set neatly next to the bed, along with others whose uses I had not yet learned.

In the back room was a narrower bed and three dark-wood cabinets. One was full of instruments—a speculum, forceps, a scalpel, an assortment of needles—many now ruined with rust. A second held bottles and jars of tinctures, ointments, and tonics, some familiar and some new to me. The third was full of notebooks, ordered by date, each one containing details of observations, operations, births, and deaths. I was reading Mrs. Schaeffer’s records of a series of women who had suffered miscarriages in the winter of 1889 when I heard the knock at the back door.

It was past midnight. The woman who stood before me had come on foot, alone. She was young, probably younger than me, with dark eyes and a forward jut to her lower jaw that made her look determined.

“Are you Mrs. Schaeffer?” she asked.

“I’m sorry to tell you,” I said, “but Mrs. Schaeffer’s gone.”

“All right then,” the young woman said, quickly as though the words were casual, but with a catch in the back of her throat. She turned to walk back into the night.

“Wait,” I called after her. “Do you need a midwife?”

She turned back to me, her face sad and sardonic, the smallest hint of hope playing about her mouth.

“I wish what I needed was a midwife,” she said.

“Come inside,” I told her.

In the morning the others found us seated together at the desk in the back room. The young woman had told me the history of her family, who was barren and who had many children, and now she was telling me about her town, the illnesses that had passed through when she was younger, and the ones that had sickened her in the past year.

“Who is this?” Texas asked.

“This is Minnie Parrish,” I said. “She’s my patient.”

“Well, you’d better hurry up and treat her,” Texas said. “If we don’t get on the road soon we’ll lose the light.”

But I had already stripped the bed and set a pot of water boiling to sterilize the bedsheets and instruments. I had made a preliminary inventory of the cabinets, finding all the ointments parched and the herbs dusty, but a few seed packets tucked behind the camphor from which I could start a little garden. I had found an empty notebook, a fountain pen, and an inkwell with a little ink still liquid inside it, and I had opened the notebook to the first page and written that day’s date at the very top. Below it I had written down everything Minnie Parrish said.

I was afraid, and I was uncertain—I thought it distinctly possible that what had befallen Mrs. Schaeffer would also befall me. But I had received, in the preceding months, an excellent education in how to evade suspicion—and, once it could be evaded no further, how to fight for my life. Now, I reasoned, was the time to employ what I had learned.

“Tell the Kid thank you,” I said. “If any of your number needs a doctor, you can always send them to me. And if any of my patients needs safety, I hope I can send them to you.”

I want to tell you about the years that followed, about the births I witnessed and the deaths, about the women I treated and the books I wrote, about what I learned from the notebooks and what, eventually, other midwives learned from me. But those are other stories for other days. This story ends in September in the year of our Lord 1895, when I came over the mountains a wife and a widow, a doctor and an outlaw, a robber and a killer and ever my mother’s daughter, and set up shop in the surgery of Mrs. Alice Schaeffer and got to work.