The Midwife's Tale by Gretchen Moran Laskas

Author:Gretchen Moran Laskas [Laskas, Gretchen Moran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48823-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

When Mama didn’t come the next day, or the next, I knew she must have had terrible trouble at the birthing. I tried to think who the woman might have been, but I was so caught up with my own fears that I had little time to spare on another’s concerns.

Lauren’s slight fever had broken by morning, but she continued to sleep on. She didn’t seem ill, just tired, but Alvin and me worried nearly to pieces and we wouldn’t leave her side.

Only once did I mention this might be on account of Herman, but Alvin wouldn’t hear of it. “Summer complaint,” he insisted. “She has it every year.”

When she woke on the afternoon of the second day, Alvin and I pretended that nothing was wrong, that nothing had happened. I know Alvin was proud when she called him Daddy, and with her words, I felt truly like her mama. Together, he and I took pleasure in her voice.

Alvin went out of his way to be charming, as I fixed Lauren the custard she had asked for. He told us funny stories, including Lauren’s favorite where he’d been chased by a bull as a young boy. Lauren always laughed when he got to the part where the bull’s horn caught his pant leg as he dove over the fence, sending him tumbling.

That night at dinner, we were more like our old selves—the people we had been before Herman’s visit. “Play your fiddle, Daddy,” Lauren asked, and his eyes lit in delight. Together she and I sang as Alvin played her favorite, “Barbry Allen.” He played “In the Pines” for me. I liked singing a song to Lauren that had been sung to me by Mama and to her by Granny going back as long as any of us could remember. The words in these songs are gruesome enough—ghosts of women loving unfaithful men, and hardly a body survives through the last verse—but we laughed as we sang them, paying less attention to the melancholy of the tune than our pleasure in the familiar.

Mama came in on us then, just as Alvin was tuning up to play “False Knight in the Road.” Seeing her in the doorway, the weariness of the past few days came back to me in a rush.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her eyes going from one of us to the next. When she saw Lauren pale and bundled, she went over to her and knelt down. “Are you all right, sweetling?” She took Lauren’s wrist in one of her hands, checking to make sure the heartbeat was strong and sure.

“I’m better now, Nana.”

Mama’s eyes went wide. “Listen to you,” she said.

“Mama says I’ve been asleep days, but I’m fine now. I ate custard.”

“Good girl.” Mama reached over and kissed her head, but she was watching me as she did so.

“Do you remember Herman?” I asked Lauren.

She nodded. “He came to find a new well.”

Alvin clenched and unclenched his hands so hard his knuckles popped.

“Do you remember the night

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