These Healing Hills Read online

  “I think he will.” Fran smiled at him. She didn’t add that the Lord’s answers weren’t always what a person might want, but no time for that kind of thinking right now. Her denied prayers about Seth had nothing to do with Mr. Jackson’s.

  Rocky stuck her head out the door. “Come on, Fran.” She disappeared on the other side of the door again.

  “You go on now.” Mr. Jackson looked at the door with a mixture of longing and apprehension. He twisted his felt hat in his hands.

  She started to push through the door when he said, “You won’t let her die on me, will you?”

  Fran wanted to assure him they wouldn’t, but it was better not to make promises. Sometimes things did go wrong. She kept her smile bright. “Dr. Randall is a fine doctor and Nurse Williams is the best midwife here. It won’t be long now.”

  She scrubbed up and stepped into the delivery room. Willie looked around at her. “Thought you weren’t going to make it. The head’s crowning.”

  Willie was a short, stubby woman. She claimed that made her perfect for nursing. She didn’t have to bend over to get to her patients, and if they were tall, she could always stand on a chair. Her given name was Beulah, but the Willie nickname came from her last name, Williams. Now she moved around beside Mrs. Jackson, who was draped in sheets, and motioned to Fran. “Take over at the business end there, Nurse Howard. You’ve got to catch your first baby sometime, and Mrs. Jackson’s been asking for you, haven’t you, dearie?”

  Mrs. Jackson bobbed her head before another contraction came on and she groaned.

  “You’re doing a bang-up job, Mrs. Jackson.” Willie mopped the woman’s brow with a damp cloth. “Just a few more pushes now and the little tyke will be ready to meet his mama face-to-face.”

  Fran’s heart bounded up in her throat. She clenched her hands to hide their trembles as she moved into the midwife’s position. What if she did something wrong? But no, Willie was right beside her, and Dr. Randall standing by if needed. Everything was happening the way it should. The way a dozen other births had gone while she had assisted Willie.

  “Give us another push, dearie,” Willie said. “You’re being a real trooper here.”

  The baby’s head slipped out and Fran supported the weight of it as she maneuvered the little fellow’s shoulders. One more push and the shoulders were free. After that the baby came in a rush. And while Fran’s hands weren’t trembling now, inside she was all atremble as she held this new life. She wanted to break out in song.

  “He’s a beautiful little boy,” she said.

  Mrs. Jackson laughed and panted at the same time. “My Jim is going to be happy about that. Our other one is a sweet girl.”

  “Get on about what needs doing,” Willie reminded Fran softly.

  Fran snipped the cord and handed the baby to Rocky, who had her hands out ready. The baby let out a lusty cry that brought a smile to Fran’s face as she massaged Mrs. Jackson’s abdomen to help her pass the placenta. The baby kept crying as Rocky wrapped him in a blanket to show his mother before she began cleaning him up.

  “Let her see his fingers and toes,” Willie said. “Yes, every one perfect, dearie. You did a right fine job with this one.”

  Fran knew she was talking to Mrs. Jackson, but she couldn’t stop smiling herself.

  Willie noticed and said, “You’ll never tire of hearing that first sweet warble of life after you usher a baby into the world. Each and every time will bring that heart smile.”

  Later, after baby and mama were settled and father was by their bedside, Fran fell into her own bed. As she lay there, she remembered Woody’s question that day she met him on the mountain. You catch babies?

  Fran whispered a prayer of thanks that, yes, she did catch babies. Then she turned over and went to sleep without once thinking of Seth and his pretty English bride for the first time since she’d come to the mountains.

  4

  July 9, 1945

  “But what am I supposed to wear?” Fran asked Willie.

  Early that morning Bucket had told her Mrs. Breckinridge wanted Fran to come for tea at Wendover. And as Willie explained to Fran when she asked about skipping her duties at the hospital, if Mrs. Breckinridge wanted something, it was done. No arguments. No excuses.

  Not that Fran was arguing or trying to avoid going. She looked forward to the chance to talk with Mrs. Breckinridge again. She’d met her shortly after arriving in Leslie County when a young courier named Abigail had escorted Fran to Wendover. Abigail brought a horse for Fran, who felt her riding ability was being tested. Fran hadn’t been on a horse for several years, but she hadn’t forgotten how to sit in a saddle.

  When Abigail called the horse Pinafore, Fran couldn’t keep from laughing at the odd name. Abigail smiled and said Mrs. Breckinridge named all her animals, even down to her two dreadful geese, Jack and Jill.

  “They should be named Wicked and Mean. You have to watch your back every second when those nasty geese are around or they’ll take a plug out of you.” Abigail rubbed her arm and shivered. “The sly things don’t bother Mrs. B, but I’m telling you, if we didn’t know how she loved those two, we would have already had roast goose for dinner.”

  That day Fran was welcomed warmly by the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service. Mrs. Breckinridge’s house, all logs and windows, seemed to belong on the mountainside. Several other buildings were scattered on the same hillside. A barn for the horses. Quarters for the young couriers like Abigail who ran errands for the nurses, took care of the horses, or did whatever was needed. A log office building, and all the necessary shelters for chickens, cows, horses, and those geese Abigail had wanted to roast.

  Now, Fran was feeling a little like a cooked goose as she helped Willie strip and remake one of the hospital beds.

  Willie laughed at the look on Fran’s face. “Ease up, girl. You’re not being ordered to the guillotine. It’s tea. Mrs. Breckinridge has tea every day when she’s home at Wendover. The woman does love her tea. It’s one of the first things the courier girls learn to do when they get here. Steep and serve tea. And trust me, some of those girls have never served anybody before. They mostly come from families with servants to serve them.”

  “Then why are they here? I’ve heard they don’t get paid anything.”

  “Heavens, no. Bucket says they fight for the chance to volunteer. Some of the early couriers from back at the beginning in the thirties ask to sign their daughters up for the chance to follow in their footsteps while their girls are babes in the cradle. It’s quite a bragging point in some corners of society to claim time spent working with Mrs. B’s nurse-midwives here in the mountains.” Willie shook her head a little as she tucked a corner of the sheet tightly under the hospital bed mattress. “That woman could talk a queen into trading in her crown for the chance to curry some horses for a few weeks.”

  When Fran didn’t say anything, Willie pitched a pillow across the bed toward her. “Not to mention getting nurses like the two of us to come to this outpost of poverty to wear out our boots walking up mountains.”

  “Why are you here, Willie?” Fran fluffed the pillow and positioned it just so on the bed. “You’re a long way from home, and babies are born in England too.”

  “So they are.” Willie put her fists on her hips and stared out the window. “But I like to feel needed and around here we’re needed. You’ve surely seen that in the time you’ve been here.” She looked back at Fran. “Turnabout is fair play. Why are you here?”

  “To go to the midwifery school.” Fran spoke quickly. She hadn’t told any of the people here about Seth’s betrayal.

  “A fast answer and no doubt a true one.” Willie narrowed her eyes on Fran. “But why do I think there’s more to our Frannie than she wants us to see?”

  Fran started to deny Willie’s words, but Willie held up her hand to stop her. “Don’t be searching for any half-truths to tell me. None of my business and whatever brought you here, I’m glad enough for it. None of us are here by ac
cident. You’ve surely heard that time and again since being here.”

  “I have, but sometimes it’s hard to know the Lord’s true intent for your life.” A year ago Fran would have never imagined herself working in a small hospital on the side of a mountain.

  “Hard for us. Not for the good Lord. We needed more nurses, and from all appearances, you’re going to make a fine midwife once you finish your training. How many babies have you delivered now?”

  “Six, and I assisted when Dr. Randall delivered two of the more complicated births.” The necessary number was twenty, but some of those had to be out on district in the mothers’ homes and not in the hospital.

  “If I were to guess, I’d say that’s why Mrs. B wants you to come to tea. So she can determine which nursing district can use you.”

  “Oh, I hope so. I like the idea of taking care of people in their homes.”

  “You’ll see some sights. That’s a sure thing.” Willie folded a blanket and laid it over the foot of the bed. “Some sorry sights. I worked the Possum Creek district for a while and I like it better here at the hospital where they have to come to us.”

  “Don’t you like the mountain people, Willie?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether I like them or not, as long as I fix what’s broken or sick. I’m a nurse. Not their best friend.”

  “Can’t we be both?”

  Willie frowned a little. “I don’t think so. I don’t even think they want us to be both. They appreciate our nursing. I have no doubt of that, and you won’t have to worry about anybody bothering you out on district as long as you have on your Frontier Nursing outfit. But we come from one way of living and they have totally different ways.”

  “Different? But aren’t people mostly the same no matter where they are from?” Fran scooped up the dirty linens and followed Willie out of the room. “I mean, below the surface in our minds and hearts where it matters.”

  “I can see you want to think that, but no. These people aren’t the same as us. They’re mountain. They have a hard life, but they seem tied to it. To embrace it even. Whatever happens. Sickness. Death. Poverty. They accept it all as what the Lord meant to be.” Willie looked back over her shoulder at Fran. “How they can think the Lord intended them to shoot one another for some reason nobody can remember, I cannot understand.”

  “Do they do that?” Fran dropped the dirty linens in the bin for the laundry woman to collect later.

  “That and more. You’ll see.”

  Willie’s words sounded like an ominous warning. One Fran didn’t want to hear. But Willie should know. She’d been in the mountains for years, while Fran had only been there a few weeks. What did she really know about the people? She hadn’t even known Seth. She thought he was loyal, a man who kept his word.

  Often when she lay down after a shift at the hospital, the thought ran through her mind of what she was doing in such a foreign place. But then when she got up and peered out her window, something about the sight of the mountains settled her worries. It might be different when she was working in a district and climbing up to the mountain cabins to take care of people. Then she might see what Willie saw.

  “Don’t be getting on the judgment train.” Her grandma’s words echoed in her head. “The good Lord is the only one fit to take it down the tracks. Worry about your own doings. Not that of others.”

  Grandma Howard’s words had been popping up in Fran’s head often since she got to Hyden. Her grandmother would like this place, with the lavish blooms on the mountainsides and the people who had few pretensions. She would understand how the steep ground would make hard living. Fran could almost hear her grandmother telling her she didn’t have to know everything about the mountain people. She wasn’t there to study them. She was a nurse and soon would be a midwife to help with their babies and everyday ills.

  That was why she was here. To close the door on her life in Cincinnati and find a new way to live. If, at times, that felt frightening, she would pray for more courage. It wasn’t the Lord who had deserted her and not kept his promises. It was Seth.

  Seth hadn’t shown up in Cincinnati with his English bride as yet. At least not before the last letter from home. Her mother didn’t believe there was an English bride. She told Fran she’d thrown away her chances by running away. Her mother dismissed Seth’s letter breaking off their engagement as something Fran misunderstood, in spite of his words on the paper, plain as day.

  She blamed Fran instead of Seth for cheating her out of the chance for grandchildren. That had always been her mother’s way. She saw her own injury in everything, without considering the sorrow others might be feeling.

  Fran shook away thoughts of her mother as she pulled on the blue riding trousers and white shirt to go to Wendover for Mrs. B’s tea. It didn’t seem the best outfit for tea, but it was what Bucket told her to wear. The matching vest and tie had no feminine frills, but nurses didn’t need frills. Nurses needed to be all business. The boots went up to Fran’s knees. Not only necessary for riding, but good protection against snakes. That’s what Bucket had told her the day she gave Fran the Frontier Nursing outfit to wear when working out in the districts instead of the hospital.

  “Snakes?” Fran had shivered and looked behind her, as though expecting snakes to be creeping toward her in the hospital hallway.

  Bucket laughed. “One slithers in on occasion, but the boots are for when you’re on the trails. Most snakes are harmless enough, but you’ll see a few copperheads and rattlers up in the hills.”

  Fran shivered yet again. “I don’t like snakes. Of any kind.”

  “Nor do I, but you get used to them.” Bucket patted Fran’s shoulder. “I’ve found you can overcome a great many imagined dangers in this world. Generally while we’re imagining one thing, a real difficulty we haven’t even considered pops out at us.”

  “Like a snake in the grass?”

  “True.” Bucket laughed. “That can be a difficulty to a number of the nurses here. And not only them, but their horses as well. I’ve had my horse run all the way to the next mountain when a snake rattles at him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Held on. What else?” Bucket gave her another pat. “That’s all you need to do, Fran. Just hold on. You’ll learn the mountain ways.”

  That might be easier than knotting the fetched tie required with the outfit. Fran always looped something wrong and ended up with a strangling knot. She’d watched her father put on his ties at times, but that wasn’t a skill she’d thought to ever need. She gave it one more try in front of the small square mirror on the wall in her cramped sleeping room with barely space for the narrow bed, chest, and chair. The room was for sleeping, and by the time Fran finished her duties at the hospital, that’s all she wanted to do. The gathering room was for socializing and eating.

  She tightened the uneven knot. It wasn’t right, but it would have to do. She refused to chase Willie down at the hospital to retie it. Best to smooth it down flat against her shirt and head toward Wendover. She hadn’t been assigned a horse yet, and no courier had come for her the way Abigail had on her former trip. This time she’d have to walk the four miles, so she needed to get started. She didn’t want to be late.

  The July day was hot, with a few white clouds floating by that looked close enough to touch. When a storm would settle on the mountain, Fran felt as though she were in the midst of the lightning and thunder and not below it. But the same was true when the sun came out and made the world sparkle.

  Weather mattered more here than back in Cincinnati. Rains could turn creeks into torrents of water funneling down out of the hills to flood the Middle Fork River. But in the hot summer months like now, floods weren’t as much a worry as getting enough rain for the gardens and crops the people depended on for food.

  Fran passed a cabin next to the road where a woman sat on the porch, hulling beans. A couple of children played on the porch beside her.

  “Afternoon, Nurse Howard. Come sit a spell.
”

  Fran didn’t know how the woman knew her name. As far as she could remember, Fran hadn’t seen her at the hospital. But she’d been told the mountain grapevine worked better than telephones back in the city for spreading the news. And a new brought-in woman was news.

  The two children stopped their play and stared at Fran. She wasn’t sure if they wanted her to stop or were afraid she might. Nurses sometimes brought needles with them. “Wishing I could, but I’m on the way to Wendover to see Mrs. B. Maybe next time I pass this way.”

  Bucket had told her to always be neighborly, whether she felt like a neighbor or not. But the longer she was in the mountains, the more she wanted to feel like a neighbor. To belong here, where the earth met the sky.

  5

  The sight of the bridge swinging in the air over the river unnerved Fran. Bridges were supposed to have sturdy pilings down deep into the ground. Those bridges didn’t sway and tremble in the breeze.

  When she’d ridden the horse named Pinafore to Wendover, they went a different way and rode right through the river. Part of the test, Fran thought at the time, since the horses had to swim through the deep middle. The young courier had lifted her feet out of the stirrups to balance precariously in the saddle with her boots out of the water. She had grinned back at Fran as though daring her to do the same. Instead, Fran leaned forward in the saddle with her feet high behind her. She had to look something like a frog ready to hop, but she hadn’t fallen off and her boots stayed dry.

  The swinging bridge was different. Down below was the river. Fran wasn’t afraid of the river. She could wade through it and swim if it got too deep. But she would have to backtrack a ways to go down to the river. The bridge was right in front of her. People walked across it all the time. All the time.

  “One step, then another,” she whispered. But to her nervous eyes, the bridge looked a mile long. That was a lot of steps.

  She gingerly put one foot on the bridge and then forced the other foot to follow. The bridge felt even less substantial than she’d imagined. Fran clutched the rope side and tried not to look down. But she couldn’t help herself. Several men paused in their fishing to peer up at her. One of them yelled something, but she couldn’t make it out. Probably something about being a brought-in coward.