The Borning Room by Paul Fleischman

Author:Paul Fleischman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2014-04-07T20:48:05+00:00

4

Eighteen sixty-five was a year of comings and goings. President Lincoln left us all in April, just six days after the war ended. In May my aunt Erna joined the household. The next month Ada got married and moved to Dayton with her lawyer husband. By then it was clear that this gap in the family would shortly be filled. Mama was pregnant. Not all the newcomers walked on two legs. That summer Father brought home a McCormick reaper and cut all our wheat in two days. A few weeks later he presented Mama with a Wheeler and Wilson sewing machine. We were living in an age of wonders, he told us. Do you recollect the Nineteenth Psalm? “Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” He believed that to be a prophecy of the telegraph. The wires had been run out to Beeton that year. The railroad, people said, would soon follow. Father seemed to take a personal pride in these advances and inventions. So it was that when Mama’s condition became plain, he announced that she would no longer be aided by the unlettered, superstitious Mrs. Radtke, but by a doctor trained in modern medicine.

Dr. Roop fit the bill exactly. He’d just come from Philadelphia, where he’d studied at the medical college. Beeton had grown and was in need of another doctor besides old Dr. Cobbett, who’d simply read a few books and started in bleeding and setting bones.

In September, when Mama was in her ninth month, Dr. Roop came out to examine her. He was tall and square-jawed and wore a black broadcloth suit. He was fresh-faced and surprisingly young. I’d heard it said that he’d be needing a wife, and noticed the speed with which Lucilla fetched him a mug of cider. His “Thank you” had a refined ring to it. He followed Mama into the borning room, and I returned to my weaving.

“A man looking after your mother,” said Aunt Erna. She was spinning thread. “The notion!”

“He’s not any man—he’s a doctor,” I said.

“He’s a man just the same. And your mother is a woman, who’s clearly been coarsened by life on the farm and robbed of her last mote of modesty.”

This was not her first comment of this kind. She’d always lived in cultured Cincinnati. I held my tongue, lest I be accused of country-bred disrespect.

“I certainly had no doctors minding me.” She was older than Mama, which might explain why she felt entitled to criticize her, despite her being the wife of Father’s brother and no blood relation.

“No fancy diploma is needed to bring a baby into the world,” she stated. Her wheel halted. I could feel her green eyes fixed on me. “I’m afraid, Georgina, there’s been far too much fussing over this infant.”

I felt just the opposite. The knowledge that a new baby was coming was as stimulating as the September air, and I’d gladly helped Mama prepare. But I remembered, in the weeks before Zeb had been born, acting as Aunt Erna did now.

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