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I feel like a fool and erous one What makes me think I can be a midith only a few years’ apprenticeship and no Mrs Kelly to guide me? On the other hand, the baby’s alive

I show Bitsy how to gently e Katherine’s womb every ten minutes so that it stays rock hard She’s a quick study and repeats everything I say Then I show her how to inspect the placenta for any h the baby in the old-fashioned hanging scale that Mrs Kelly left me

Finally I sit back in one of the satin chairs and observe the new fa When I pull up the fringedshade, the sunlight bursts into the rooer than any of us

October 30, 1929 New h in the daytiht to be dead Name: William MacIntosh the second Son of William MacIntosh the first and Katherine Ann MacIntosh Active labor, five , one minute Blood loss minimal No birth canal tears I had to breathe for the baby three puffs Also present, Mary and Bitsy Proudfoot, the MacIntosh servants, and the father, although he fell down in a faint

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Hoined myself an explorer in the Amazon or maybe an around-the-world traveler and journalist like Nellie Bly, yet here I am, a thirty-six-year-old anted by the law in two states, living alone in the inia, too old and too obstinate for courting

I drag my bicycle up on the porch steps, exhausted from little sleep, and watch as Mr MacIntosh turns his Olds around, thankful that he offered me a ride home It’s one of those crisp, clear, cloudless days of autu across the blue sky, and les tus "Hi, Sasha! Down, Emma! Miss me?"

The female, Emma, is named for the radical anarchist Emma Goldman and the male for her lover, Alexander "Sasha" Berkman Those monikers were as fao That was back when I worked with the unions in Pittsburgh Now here I hide, lost to that world

I press lad to be ho the emptiness When Mrs Kelly and I randht of coating the weathered clapboards white, but after paying two hundred dollars for the adjoining ten acres, we couldn’t afford it and decided to paint just the door I found the gallon of periwinkle marked down at Mullin’s Hardware in Liberty

As I enter the house, I reach down to ruffle Eh it’s sant as the MacIntoshes’, I like the space better and it pleasesin the rooot the desire to randmother my sense of thrift

There’s the secondhand davenport Mrs Feder gave us for helping with the birth of her daughter-in-lains I’ve covered it with a blue-and-white quilt that I oose pattern There’s a pine table I pulled out of the cellar and sanded till it looks almost new There are shelves of worn chestnut barn boards for books and a potbellied stove in the corner (The cookstove and the heater stove, an oak rocker, two iron bedsteads with feather mattresses, and the bicycle were all that we found e moved here)

Other than that, there’s just the ornate black-and-gold ht on the train froht for thirty dollars when the Mt Zion Church purchased its organ That was back when I could get work now and then and still had some cash Now the jobs have dried up, and, let’s face it, there’s notor short, I’et holance at the painting on the ashed pine wall above me

My baby’s father painted that oil portrait when I was sixteen Lawrence was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago then In the picture, a girl stands on a pier overlooking Lake Michigan with a strand of long loose auburn hair across her face Her head is thrown back and she’s laughing That girl was me, Elizabeth Snyder I adopted my alias, Patience Murphy, e left on the run fro Patience Murphy Patience the midwife

Lawrence, h he died before we could irl at the Majestic Theatre I had lied to get the job, told everyone I was eighteen, and got chosen out of a queue of girls because of lad to be rid of me One less mouth to feed

I throw some wood on the coals in the heater stove, fill the teakettle ater froht fills the rooh the two tall front s

Why didn’t my baby live? Katherine’s lived

I think I know the answer, have read about it in DeLee’s heavy text My afterbirth, or placenta, as Dr DeLee refers to it, separated too early, an obstetrical eency, and they didn’t do cesarean operations routinely then, certainly not on an orphan like me I experienced two deaths in teeks: Lawrence’s in the train wreck and then the baby’s I still don’t kno I made it, didn’t cruo on; stuffed rief in my pocket like a chunk of black coal and stumbled forward I carry it still, but over the years the luirl froo stares out across the inland sea Birth and death, so intertwined Love, birth, death, y

There’s a distant moo from the barn My animals! I had stayed for breakfast at the MacIntoshes’sausages, biscuits, and home-canned peaches withMary called it We three ate in the kitchen, Bitsy, Mary, and I, after we helped Katherine clean up and dress in a dark blue silk robe so that she and Mr MacIntosh could enjoy breakfast together

Now it’s past noon, the chickens haven’t been fed, and poor Moonlight’s udders ! The cat, Buster, is okay because I leave a bowl of milk on the stoop and he can find field les can hunt, but the critters confined to the barn this tirab a clean h black rubber boots I keep on the enclosed back porch, and curse etfulness