Chapter 9
Calder came for her on a Tuesday evening at the end of May, when Clara had been a married woman a month.
"Petersen's wife. Out the north road." She had not got down off the horse. "Her fourth. Boots, and a clean apron if you own one that's dry."
Clara got her boots.
"I'd not have taken you a month back," Calder said on the road.
"An unmarried girl in a house where a woman's laboring is a nuisance to everybody in it.
A married woman is a pair of hands." She said it with no weight on it at all.
"A fourth is a kind one to start you on.
You'll do as I tell you and nothing I don't tell you. "
Mrs. Petersen was a broad, calm, exhausted woman who had done this three times before and knew more about it than Clara ever would.
There were four hours of it. Clara held a hand that gripped hers hard enough to leave marks, and kept the water hot, and did as she was told, and the child was a boy and came out squalling.
It was after that Calder taught her.
"Now." Calder had her palm spread flat and low on the woman's belly, above the bone. "Put your hand where mine is. Feel that."
Clara put her hand there.
"Hard as a green apple. That's what you want and that's what it has to stay.
" Calder's own hand did not shift. "The minute it softens under you, you rub it up hard again, and you keep on until it answers.
And you keep a hand on her the whole hour after, whatever else is happening in that room.
If somebody wants you for something you tell them no. "
"Why the hour after?"
"Because it isn't the birth that kills them," Calder said. "It's the hour after."
Later, in the Petersen kitchen, she spread the afterbirth on a newspaper and bent over it with the lamp, and made Clara bend over it too.
"Whole," Calder said. "Every piece of it, and the skin not broken anywhere. You look at it every single time, even when you're dead on your feet — especially then. If a scrap of it stops behind, she'll bleed, and go on bleeding, and there is not one thing in that bag of mine that will stop her."
She folded the paper over and stood up.
Clara had watched a small brown bottle come out of the bag that night and go back into it unopened.
"What's in the bottle?"
"Ergot." Calder buckled the strap. "It makes the womb bear down and shut. When nothing else is answering, that is what there is." She looked at Clara across the lamp. "Which is why I'm no use at all to a woman on the wrong side of a river."
In the other room the Petersen baby had found his mother and gone quiet against her.
Calder glanced through the door. "Good. Get them on early, always. It fetches the milk down." She was pulling on her coat. "And it draws the womb down after it, which is worth a great deal more than the milk."
They rode home at first light with the mist standing in the low ground. Clara did not talk. She was too tired, and there was nothing she wanted to put over the top of it.
Calder let her be for two miles.
"You've steady hands and a strong stomach," she said at last, "and you do what you're told without wanting to be admired for it. There's nothing else to the trade." She clicked to the horse. "Come Thursday. There's lint to roll."
Clara went out with her twice more before the sickness came.
The Henderson baby went first, and for two days the town let itself believe it was only the baby.
Babies died. Everyone knew a baby could go in a night off a bad throat, and nothing to be done for it.
It was a grief and not a warning. The town carried the Hendersons their pies and told itself so.
Then Sally Henderson took to her bed with the same throat, and the Ott boys' little sister the day after, and a child out past the Otts' that nobody had thought to count, and the town stopped telling itself anything.
Calder said the word once, flatly, in her own kitchen, to Clara and nobody else. Diphtheria. She said it like something she had decided not to be afraid of out loud, and then she rolled her sleeves and did not say it again.
"You've had the sore throats of it as a child and lived, or you haven't," she said.
"I have. That's why it's my hands going in at the worst of it and yours staying back at the kettle till I say different.
You'll do what I tell you the day long, and we'll quarrel about it after — when there's an after.
" She looked at Clara across the table, frank as a woman pricing a horse, the same look Clara had first met over a boy's bloody nose in the spring.
"You keep your head when a room's coming apart.
I've watched you do it twice now. There's not six pairs of hands in this county I'd say that of, and I need every one of them. Are you mine for it?"
"I'm yours for it," Clara said.
She did not think of Lydia when she said it. That came after, and it came hard.
They had steam going in three houses by Sunday.
Calder taught her at a run, over her shoulder, hands never still.
Keep the air wet — the wet air was half the medicine, so the kettle never went dry and the door stayed shut to hold the steam in the room.
Watch the throat, not the fever; the fever lied.
When Calder swabbed she wanted the lamp held close, the basin near, Clara's steady hand flat on the child's forehead.
And Clara learned to hold a frightened head both still and gentle at once, which are not the same thing and do not come easily together.
Lime went down the privies and carbolic on the door-latches and anything else a hand touched moving from the sick rooms to the rest of the house.
Every rag that touched a sick child went into the wash-boiler and came out and went in again, boiled between each use, until Clara's hands were raw to the wrist and she stopped noticing.
Cole had the church stripped of its pews down one side and pallets laid for the families too far out to nurse at home.
He ran the well and the wood, the boiling and the hauling of what the sick could not haul themselves.
He learned, the same as Clara, how to keep a steam-kettle going close enough to do good and not so close it scalded, and how to carry a pallet without waking the child on it.
Between them and Calder the town had three pairs of hands where it wanted thirty, and they made the three do.
It was that shortage that took Clara off the kettle.
Calder had meant to keep her back from the worst of it, not being sure Clara had the safety of a childhood bout behind her — but a rule that spared Clara was a rule that left children lying untended, and there were too many children and too little of Calder to hold to it.
Within the week she waved Clara in to the close work, the swabbing and the breath of it, same as herself.
"It's on you now, the same as me," was all she said, and there was no softening it, because there was no softer way it could be.
Clara went in. What it might cost her she did not stop to add up — not until the road to the Holt place added it for her.
They fell into it without arranging it. She would put her hand out for clean swabs and the swabs would be there.
He would come through the church door with an armload of split wood at the hour the box ran low — not because she had asked, because he had counted.
Twice a day their paths crossed at the wash-boiler and one took the paddle from the other with no word about whose turn it had been.
Once, reaching past her for the lye, he put his hand flat on her back to move her a step sideways out of the steam, as you'd move anyone, and took it away, and neither of them marked it, and she found some hours later that she had not forgotten the weight of it.
There was no time to be careful. She noticed on the third day that the carefulness was gone, and did not miss it.
There was a night the church filled past its pallets — three carried in after dark — and a choice to make about which families could be nursed at home and which could not.
They settled it together at the door in the lamplight, low and quick.
She knew which families had hands enough to nurse their own; he knew which places were too far out or too cut off to leave anyone there alone.
Between the two of them the list sorted itself, and it was done before either of them thought to notice they had not once disagreed.
In April they had weighed every word that passed between them.
There was no weight to spare now, and the words came easy and landed true, and that was all there was time to know about it.
On the fourth day she started for the Holt place.
She had not seen Lydia in a week. It came over her of a sudden at the wash-line — that she wanted her sister, wanted the warm kitchen and the even voice and Nathan quiet in his corner, wanted one hour in a house where nobody was sick and nobody needed her hands.
She dried them on her apron and started down the road before she had properly decided to, the June dust warm through her shoes and the river loud off to the north, and she was most of the way to the Holt turning before she stopped.
She stopped in the middle of the road.
She had swabbed two throats that morning.
The sickness lived in the breath, Calder said, in the wet of a cough, and it went hardest for the young and the small.
Lydia was carrying, well on now. Whatever she had been breathing in those sickrooms was on her hands now, in her hair, down the front of her dress, if it was anywhere at all — and she could not carry it up Lydia's swept walk and into that kitchen and set it down beside a baby that could not fight it, because she wanted comforting.
She could keep every other person in the county safer than she could keep the one she most wanted to see.