Chapter 1
“Pete,” Olive sighed as she closed her eyes and furrowed her brow, trying to remember his face, but she could only recall the contours from the photographs that laid framed by her bedside. Bits and pieces of him and her, ebbed and flowed, sometimes drifting away altogether. She remembered how long he had been sick, 301 days, but not where they met. She remembered the recipe for his favorite pastry crust, but forgot to wash her hair for days. Her memories, curtained by a thick abyss, stirred on a whim, illuminating flashes of her life in the otherwise the dark room of her mind. Sometimes she forgot to eat.
Olive leaned back into the pale wing chair, gazing out the bay window into the darkness, she made out the silhouettes of her favorite flowers: sweet violets, trumpet lilies, shooting stars, bleeding hearts. Her husband Pete had planted them along with the apple and pear trees that no longer bore fruit.
Rain splattered on the roof of the cottage and on the window in great waves. She pulled a thick spindle of white hair away from her pallid eyes which disappeared into the valleys of her face when she smiled. The crevices of her face suggested that she was a kind woman; a woman who would listen totally absorbed in the words and worries of another without verdict. A quality that made her quite sought out over the years. She rearranged her quilted nightgown with a frail almost translucent hand. Its knuckles knotted and swollen from years of hard work. It had birthed many babies, cooked many meals, and comforted many a child’s head. A midwife for thirty years, but never birthed a child of her own.
She had been an auntie to several of the children whom she helped bear. One of these children, Richard Avers, a dark haired boy with bright green eyes and a crooked smile, would sometimes come by to help around the house, seeing if she needed anything fixed or help with the shopping. She would make him almond cake served with coffee on white bone china inked with blue flowers. On the walnut table in the den, she would ask about his studies and inquire about his mother Ms. Avers, in turn, he would ask about her health.
Olive checked the door for the 3rd time that night. She read in the paper about a rash of robberies around town. A stalwart fear gripped her, of being a victim of violence, an absolutely ridiculous fear, as Pete would say, laying his dappled hand on her shoulder. But now, there was no one to put her fears at ease, ridiculous or not. She had other fears, some realized, Pete leaving her alone in the stone cottage that they shared for 32 years, not being able to have children which Pete so desperately wanted. She remembered that day at the doctor’s office; she sat in one of the wooden chairs with mismatched cushions lining the bare walls of Dr. Jacob’s office. He spoke in a soft voice, kind words, words he had spoken to other women, who had come with a fervid desire and who left unslaked.
Olive soothed her sorrows in the comforts she gave, swabbing the brows of women whose chests heaved in pain, bathing their bodies in Epsom and lavender, brewing herbs that hastened their labor: blue cohosh, butchers broom, red raspberry. She stretched and massaged, until they uncoiled and yielded to the pulsations that shivered through their bodies. She opined ways to care for their infants: feeding, burping, wrapping and concocted special pastes of sandalwood, rose, and castor oil to rub on the pearled stripes that adorned their stomachs and breasts. On the occasion that a baby lay blue lipped, not breathing, not shivering despite the cold, she grieved as if she had lost her own.
The house creaked, breathed, and shuttered. In the thick of the darkness, shadows danced and rustled outside. That, Olive assured herself, was just the trees, the wind, or the rain. She let the thoughts of loneliness, missed chances, and loss run through her head untouched—just watching these thoughts, she sunk into her pale chair again pulling an afghan over her papery neck, she fell to sleep.
In thirty years of midwifing, she lost one woman to child birth. When sleep subdued her, she dreamt of this nameless woman: the hours of agonizing pain, the fever, the screams, her pallid face sequined with sweat. She was too young, almost a girl, at the end too weak to scream, her dark hair matted against her small head, she birthed a beautiful healthy boy.
From the warmth and depth of sleep, Olive roused from the dream. She became aware of her body, the heaviness of it and the pain of it, a claim that only time could boast. She wanted to go back to the lightness of sleep. Before her body, before time, before pain, but her senses assaulted her quickly. She could hear the house creaking its noise, the wind, the rain, and the memories and their absence.
Olive heard a fumbling at the door. Fear ripped through her body, strengthening it, feeding it, it somehow grew ten years younger. The pain and the heaviness evaporated. She jumped up from her chair, alert, her pupils needle tipped. She slipped behind the door the kitchen door. Her palms wet with sweat, she felt her heart beat vibrate through her whole body. The door bolted opened, she heaved a cast iron skillet in the air, a hand grabbed her bony arm, a hand that she had seen before she was sure, the pan crashed to the flagged floor, her pupils grew from pinheads to saucers, a flash of recognition, relief washed over her. “You nearly gave me a heart attack!” she said grasping her chest. She took a few deep breaths and regained: her composure, the heaviness of her body, the pain, “I made some almond cake for you…How is school? How is your Mother?” He brushed a faded hand through his gray hair, stopping, wondering, if he should go along with it, as he always did.
