The Amish Midwife

TWO


Dad’s house was located just outside of Aurora, a small town in northern Oregon. Founded in 1856 as a Christian communal society, it consisted of period cabins, houses, and stately white meeting halls. The commune was made up of German and Swiss immigrants, but they disbanded when their leader died nearly thirty years later.

In comparison, the Mennonites were latecomers to Oregon, not arriving until 1889. What they did have in common with the Aurora Commune was that their roots, although a bit tangled, originated in Switzerland and Germany too.

That’s what I thought about as I drove through tiny Aurora on my way to the funeral home in the larger nearby town of Canby. I was trying to distract myself from my grief, but it didn’t work. As I passed by the barbershop where Dad got his hair cut, tears filled my eyes yet again, as they had all morning.

By the time I reached the funeral home, I had managed to compose myself. Almost on autopilot, I went inside and made the arrangements. Back out in the car when I was done, I sent a text to James, telling him that it was all finished and that I had scheduled the service for the day after next. He texted back to say he’d just completed his presentation and would head down in about an hour. I responded, asking him to wait until the next day. I needed time alone. I didn’t tell him I felt as if I were moving under icy water, as if my thoughts were drowning, as if my words were bubbles floating upward to a cold and swirling surface.

I went home and put clean sheets on my parents’ bed, carefully folding the hospital corners, and then smoothed the quilt back in place. Then I sat on the end, running my hand over the cherry footboard, nicked here and there by time but still smooth.

I grasped the post of the footboard, as if the action might pull me upward, out of my underwater world, and stood, opening Dad’s top bureau drawer and running my hand over rows of cotton handkerchiefs. I closed the drawer. Dad’s comforting scent filled the room. He always smelled fresh, as clean as a bar of soap. His shaving cup and brush were still on the bureau, left by me after the last time I shaved him, three days ago now.

Next to his cup was his china coin dish. I picked through it, sorting the quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, and stacked them on the linen runner the way I had when I was little, until all that was left in the bottom of the dish was the key. It was smaller than I remembered, and tarnished. I shoved it into the pocket of my jeans and hoped the box contained a photo of me as a newborn. Or a photo of my birth mother. Or my grandmother. Maybe even a simple letter, explaining everything.

I went to the closet and started on the lower shelf, sliding the clothes on hangers to the side to make sure there wasn’t anything behind them. I saw nothing more than shoes and Dad’s work hat and dress hat. I reached with my hand to the top shelf but didn’t feel anything, so I pulled the straight-back chair from the corner of the room into the closet, wrestling it through the narrow door. I felt along the top shelf and flopped my hand around, trying to reach the far corner. Nothing. Then my fingertips hit against something. Bull’s-eye. I scooted the object forward to the front of the shelf. I felt the carving before I could see the box, but a moment later I cradled it in my hands as I stepped down from the chair.

It was about a foot long by a foot wide and six inches in height. The wood was dark and intricately carved, as Dad had said. And it was dusty.

First I brushed the box off with a towel, examining the carving as I did. Trees and rugged mountains were carved around the sides, and on the top was a grand old building with turrets, balconies, and shuttered windows with a waterfall off to the right. The box was beautiful and unlike anything I’d ever seen. I sat down at the oak table in the dining room and turned the key in the lock, but nothing happened. I wiggled it, took it out, and inserted it again. Still nothing. I ran my hands along the lid, searching for some sort of trick to open the box. Again, nothing. I tried the key one last time and felt something give. I turned it as far as it would go. The lock clicked. I opened it quickly. Dad was right. There were papers in the box. Handwritten, in German. I’d taken a year in high school but could barely remember a thing.

The document was two pages long, yellowed, with the words Die Schweiz at the top. I willed there to be a photo—something personal. There wasn’t, but from between the pages fell two locks of hair, each tied with a thin strip of black cloth. I carefully picked them up to study them. One lock was obviously the fine blond hair of a newborn. The other was thicker, longer, and darker. Mine and my mother’s? Holding a lock in each hand, I couldn’t take my eyes from the one I just knew was hers.

Finally, reluctantly, I put the locks back into the box and examined the document again. It appeared to be a letter to someone named Elsbeth, dated 1877. On the last page was a fancy signature that read Abraham Sommers. Elsbeth and Abraham. Were they husband and wife? Father and daughter? Something else? Maybe my great-great-grandparents were wealthy German timber barons in Pennsylvania during the nineteenth century. That fit in nicely with what I’d concocted years ago in my mind about my birth family. But why would my grandmother have wanted me to have the box and letter? Why had she included the locks of hair?

I stretched my back. Plenty of people in Dad’s church spoke German. I would ask Sophie tomorrow. Both she and James were coming then to help me get ready for the funeral.

Scrubbing was something that brought me comfort, so I tackled the kitchen while James de-cluttered the living room and Sophie turned on the vacuum cleaner. I would go through Dad’s clothes and books later by myself. James was such a packrat that if I let him help, I knew he would cart more things to his already overcrowded studio apartment in Portland than I would be able to take to Goodwill. This issue was a sore point between us, and I had no intention of contributing to the problem.

I cleared the kitchen counters and sprinkled cleanser over the worn Formica. Dad had always kept the house spotless when I was growing up and trained me well in that, but in the years after I left he began to let things pile up. A stack of newspapers here. A tower of books there. It wasn’t as if he lived as a teenager—the dishes and laundry were always done—but it was as if he relaxed his standards a bit. As if he finally cleaned just for himself without having to worry about me. And that was a good thing.

“What’s this?”

I turned toward James as I clenched the large gritty sponge. He stood in the kitchen doorway, the carved box in his hands. I’d left the box open on the table beside Dad’s easy chair the day before.

“Oh, that.” I tossed the sponge into the sink. “I found it yesterday.” The vacuum cleaner stopped in the background, and Sophie appeared next to James.

“There’s a letter.” He held it up. “And two locks of hair.”

I nodded.

Sophie’s cap tilted a little to the left. “Who’s it from?”

“From my birth grandmother. At least that’s what Dad said.”

“The letter’s in German.” James held the document in one hand and balanced the box in his other.

“I know.” I rinsed my hands. “Do you know who could translate it for me?” I turned toward Sophie.

“Mr. Miller probably could. He used to teach German.”

“That’s right.” I’d forgotten he’d taught for years at the community college in Salem. “I’ll take it,” I said to James as I finished drying my hands. He slipped the items back into the box, carefully closed the lid, and passed it to me with a reluctant smile.

Feeling oddly vulnerable and exposed, I stashed it back in Dad’s closet, high on the shelf.

I finished the kitchen, scrubbing the decades-old appliances until they gleamed again. Dad was gone. Tears filled my eyes, and I stood up straight, brushing them away with my forearm. I’d never been one to cry easily, but now I was afraid if I started I might not stop. I slipped out the back door into the bright, cold day and stopped under the windmill next to the wooden bench that had been there as long as I could remember. It was weathered and gray. Behind me was the hazelnut orchard, all that remained of the original farm.

The back door slammed, and Sophie stepped out with the throw rug from the hallway. She shook it over the porch railing with vigor, snapping it back and forth. She was amazingly strong for such a small woman.

“Are you all right, Lexie?” she called out. I nodded and looked up at the metal blades of the windmill that were just beginning to stir in the slight breeze.

The door slammed again as Sophie went back inside.

I sat down on the bench. Sophie and her mother, Mrs. Chambers, had both been friends of Mama’s. Though Sophie had been raised Presbyterian, she switched over to the Mennonite faith during the late 1960s at the height of the Vietnam War. Sophie’s mother apparently respected her daughter’s decision, but she chose to remain Presbyterian herself. As one of Mama’s few non-Plain friends, Mrs. Chambers fascinated me. She drove a Mercedes and wore gold hoop earrings and used rouge on her cheeks. Sometimes we would visit her in her old Victorian house in Woodburn, and I would marvel at the intricate doilies and antiques and artwork that graced her fancy home.

Over the years I had the impression that my parents owed her a great debt, and when I was old enough I found out exactly what that debt was: Mrs. Chambers had been pivotal in my adoption. She had learned of me, of a babe in Pennsylvania in need of a new family, and had thought immediately of her friends the Jaegers, an Oregon couple who very much wanted a child but couldn’t seem to have one of their own. Mama told me this startling fact herself before she died, insisting that although Mrs. Chambers had made the connection and even arranged for her lawyer to facilitate the private adoption, it was God Himself who had engineered the whole event and worked out every detail.

Sophie’s mother died more than ten years ago, and I realized now that it was a shame that when I was a teenager yearning for answers I hadn’t been resourceful enough—well, brave enough, actually—to speak to Mrs. Chambers myself and ask for details about my birth family. Because I hadn’t, she’d carried that information with her to the grave. With my father now gone too, I could feel all chances of ever learning the truth slip through my fingers and begin to float away, like a lifeline from a frozen shore.

The breeze picked up suddenly, and so did the whir of the windmill. During my high school years, when I’d obsessed about finding my birth family, I found a Pennsylvania adoption search website and perused it for any information that might be about me. I found nothing. I also read that Pennsylvania is a hard state for a search. But maybe it was easier now than it had been ten years before.

Storm clouds gathered toward the west, and the metal blades of the windmill began to spin. Mama loved the windmill. She and I used to sit on the bench in the late afternoons when the wind picked up and watch it spin, me leaning against her side and her arm holding me tightly. Ever since I could remember, I’d prayed for a baby sister, but when Mama became ill I prayed multiple times a day for her to get well—and then for a baby sister. The day before she died, we sat on the bench. I was eight. Now I knew what an effort it must have been for her to struggle down the steps and sit with me one last time.

That night I had prayed, for what seemed the millionth time, that Mama would get well, and then I told God it was okay if I didn’t get a baby sister after all, but that I really, really needed Mama to be okay. Early the next morning she died.

I turned my face toward the house. It had been half an empty shell these years since Mama’s death. Now, with Dad gone, it was completely hollow.

Staying and packing up the house felt overwhelming. So did returning to my job. Suddenly, more than anything I wanted to get away—from here, from work, from everyone and everything that was familiar.

I asked myself what was stopping me from doing just that. My father no longer needed me. The clinic would probably give me a few more weeks of family leave. Why couldn’t I simply take off for a while?

If I told James how I felt, he would say I was depressed. Maybe I was.

Or maybe I just knew that making a fast escape might be the one thing that would keep me from drowning in the icy waters of my own overwhelming loss.

As quickly as the breeze had picked up it disappeared and the windmill stopped. I stood slowly and headed for the house. My grief for Dad had stirred my grief for Mama. The combination was nearly unbearable.

That evening James returned to Portland, where he would pick up my black dress and heels at my apartment and then spend the night at his studio on the east side of town. He would be back here the next morning in time for the funeral. As I rocked in Mama’s chair, I heard a car in the driveway. I stood and headed for the back door, reaching the kitchen just as Sophie was letting herself in. She told me she had a new mother in labor.

“Hopefully the baby will come before morning,” she added. “Lord willing, I’ll be there for you tomorrow.” Sophie stepped closer and focused her eyes on mine. “You looked so sad in the yard this afternoon.”

I felt my face grow warm.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’ve been thinking that maybe I should get away. That maybe a change of scenery would do me good.”

“A vacation?”

I shrugged.

“A trip, yes, but…” I looked away. “More like a search.”

She leaned back against the counter.

“This has to do with finding that box,” she said.

“Sort of.”

She studied my face for a moment, her eyes squinting.

“I remember when you wanted to find your birth family when you were in high school.”

“Uh-huh,” I whispered, thinking that Sophie and my school librarian were the only two people I had confided in back then.

“And now you want to look for them in earnest.”

I met her eyes and then flushed with embarrassment, knowing this was all wrong. Dad had just died. He wasn’t even buried yet.

“I think you should,” she added with a confident, affirming nod.

I think you should. Rolling those words around in my head, I wanted to take her advice, but I couldn’t get past the image of my father, still alive, taking my hand in his and struggling to tell me about the box. This stuff had always been so hard for him to talk about. I couldn’t imagine what he would think about what I was considering now.

“I can’t do that to him,” I whispered. “Not so soon.”

“It would be okay, Lexie. He wouldn’t mind. Your mother wouldn’t either.”

If anyone would know, it would be Sophie.

“We’ll see.”

“All right. Let’s discuss it later,” she said, hugging me. “Gotta run for now.”

She turned and opened the back door. It had begun to rain, a torrential Oregon downpour. The string of sunny winter days had come to an end. Sophie hurried to her car in the darkness. I was alone again.

I remembered when men and women sat on opposite sides of our country church when I was little, but that ended nearly two decades ago. We were quite modern now at Faith Mennonite, located a few miles west of Aurora, just minutes from Dad’s filbert farm. Although the older women still wore head coverings, their dresses were made of floral patterns and store bought, unlike the dark-colored caped dresses of years ago. Changes in Mennonite fashion are what I thought of so I wouldn’t think about Dad in the pine box.

James held my hand. I knew we made a handsome couple, both of us tall, he with his curly golden hair, green eyes, and kind face, me with my long blond hair, brown eyes, and thick eyelashes. He wore a suit and navy tie, and I was in a black dress and wool coat.

Just before the service began, Sophie bustled down the middle aisle of the church, sat beside me, and took my other hand. Obviously, her first-time mother had safely delivered. James and I were the youngest people at the service by far. Even Sophie, at age sixty-two, was young, relatively speaking; everyone else there was much older.

At the burial, I stood between Sophie and James so the oldest of the mourners could sit in the folding chairs provided by the funeral home. Old-growth Douglas firs towered above us, and the melody of the creek that ran along the far side of the cemetery played along with the notes of the breeze high in the treetops. The overcast morning grew darker as we gathered in a semicircle around the pastor. During the moment of finality, when he said “dust to dust,” I slipped out of my denial long enough to register the coffin in front of me, my mother’s grave to the side, and the gaping hole waiting for my father’s body. The sky opened up just then, and the rain began, pummeling the canopy over our heads, running in rivers down the sides to the ground.

I sobbed, showing my lack of acceptance of the ways of God and displaying my lack of faith for all to see. Sophie and James stood close on each side. When the service was over, they kept me on my feet and supported me over the soft ground, out from under the shelter and into the rain, around the modest gravestones made of ancient lime and crumbling concrete, and toward James’s old Malibu car. The whole way, the people around us huddled under umbrellas, men and women who had loved me since I was a baby, looked on with concern. I knew they had stashed casseroles, hams, salads, fresh rolls, pickled beets, and desserts in their cars before the funeral, and that they would all follow me back to Dad’s house.

I willed myself to pull it together. I could have a good cry later, after everyone had gone on home.

“Hurry,” I whispered to James, dabbing at the streaks of tears and rain that had soaked my face. “I need a couple of minutes before everyone arrives.” A cold washcloth against my eyes might help.

It took James only a few minutes to get to the house, and Sophie was the next to arrive. When she entered the kitchen, he was setting up folding chairs in the living room, and I was running cold water over a cloth.

“How are you?” she asked, patting me gently on the back.

“Okay,” I lied, turning off the faucet and wringing out the cloth over the sink.

“I know this is bad timing on my part,” she said, dropping her hand and lowering her voice, “but I want to touch base with you before the others arrive. It’s about last night’s discussion.”

I turned toward her, trying to recall which conversation she meant.

“About you getting away,” she added.

Oh, that. I tilted my head back, closed my eyes, and laid the cloth across them.

“I was talking nonsense last night,” I said, grateful for the coolness against my swollen eyelids. “I have to get back to work, not to mention I need to figure out what to do with the house and land. I’ll be so busy—”

“Sounds pretty convenient to me,” Sophie interrupted.

“What do you mean?”

“I know you, Lexie. You’re the kind of person who makes things happen. You would figure out a way to do this if you really wanted to.”

“Do what, exactly?”

“Why, go east and pursue the matter of your birth family, of course. Try and find them. That is what you want, isn’t it?”

She was speaking so emphatically that I pulled off the cloth and looked at her.

“Sophie, you and I both know I wasn’t thinking clearly when I brought that stuff up last night,” I said, lowering my voice, not wanting James to overhear our conversation. “Even if I had vacation time left, which I don’t, a search like that would take too long, certainly more than a couple of days.”

She leaned back against the opposite counter, a sudden twinkle in her eyes.

“Extend your leave of absence. Then you could take as long as you needed without having to worry about your job.”

“Yeah, right. And what do I live on in the meantime as I’m doing this big search? My good looks? That and a quarter won’t even get me a cup of coffee.”

“You could get a temporary position in Pennsylvania.”

I titled my head, blinking.

“A temporary position? Like through an agency? One of those traveling nurse places?”

“Well, actually I was thinking of something a little less involved. I got a phone call this morning about a friend of a friend who is in trouble, a lay-midwife who might need help. Of course, thanks to our conversation last night, I thought of you immediately.”

“Why me?”

“Because of where this woman just happens to live,” she said. “Pennsylvania.”

Not wanting her to see the sudden surge of hope in my eyes, I again tilted my head back and replaced the cool, damp cloth across my brow, asking what kind of trouble the woman was in and why she needed help.

“It’s complicated and I don’t have all the details,” Sophie replied, “but if you’re interested I’ll make another phone call.”

Was I interested? I wasn’t sure. Certainly, I wouldn’t rule it out—not yet, anyway. Sophie hurried on, adding, “I think it would be a good experience for you. She has an excellent reputation.”

I valued Sophie’s skills, and the home birth scene had taught me a lot, but I was strictly a hospital provider now. I reminded her of that.

“But you’re so gifted,” Sophie said. “Spending some time doing home births again might be just what you need as you work through your grief and pursue your past. Pennsylvania, Lexie. Think about it. Seems almost providential to me.”

For a moment it did to me as well. But then I hesitated, wondering what part of the state this midwife lived in, if it were even anywhere near Philadelphia. Again taking the cloth from my eyes, I looked at Sophie and asked if she knew.

“She’s in Lancaster County. That’s near Philadelphia, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sort of,” I said, thinking of my story, of the quilt I had been wrapped in when I had been given to my parents at the airport. “Lancaster County is what’s considered Amish country.”

“Well, that makes sense then, because this woman is a midwife to the Old Order Amish.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. I didn’t know all that much about the Amish except that they were so conservative they made most Mennonites look positively liberal.

“Well?” Sophie prodded.

I pursed my lips, thinking. The thought of actually going to Pennsylvania was tempting, yes, but I was iffy on the arrangement Sophie was proposing. Better to go the more “involved” route, as she put it, and sign on with a traveling nurse agency instead.

Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

“What about a license?” I asked, still playing devil’s advocate. “You know I’m not licensed to practice in any state but this one.”

“Apply for one right away. It should only take a few weeks. That would give you time to finish here and take care of things at work. By then we should know what’s going on with this midwife and what her needs are. She really does need help, Lexie.”

A part of me wanted to laugh. It was so Mennonite to plan a getaway around doing some kind of service. I knew of families who spent all of their vacations in places like Bolivia and South Africa and East L.A. Even vacations had to have a purpose.

“And you think I could leave, just like that?” I asked, glancing toward the doorway to the dining room.

Following my gaze, she said, “If you talk it through with James, I think he’ll understand.” Moving closer, she put a warm hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I know there’s something inside of you, something incomplete. When you were a teenager—”

“I wanted my story,” I blurted, tears filling my eyes again. “I still do.”

She nodded. “Maybe God is whispering to you now.”

“Oh yeah? What’s He saying?” I asked, wiping my tears on my sleeve and thinking I hadn’t heard from God—or He from me—in a very long time.

Sophie smiled, her eyes again twinkling.

“Maybe He’s saying, ‘It’s time.’”