Authors: Donna Mabry
The pain never really goes away. It gets better, and you
finally get to a place where you aren’t thinking about
it every minute of every day. My life settled down
again to a pleasant monotony. George ran for reelection, unopposed, and as he always did, he won.
Everybody liked George.
Without the old woman to do the bulk of the
housework, I had no time for sewing other than
mending. I rose early, the way I had before, and gave
up afternoon naps. Embarrassed by the dust and
cobwebs in the corners that had accumulated while I
grieved, I cleaned the house from top to bottom. I
pestered George until he tended to the outhouse and
was even able to force him to dig a new place for it and
move it.
I enjoyed my new authority in the house. George
didn’t always do what I wanted right away, but if I
asked in the right tone, he would eventually listen. I
re-planted gardens out back, mine and George’s
mother’s. It took every minute of sunshine to cook,
clean, and take care of the house, the yard, and my son.
Bud was into everything, and I was afraid to take
my eyes off him. Left out in the yard, he was likely to
pull up half the garden. Left in the kitchen, he would
often mix the contents of the sugar and flour and other
canisters into a pile in the floor.
He was forever falling down stairs. I saved his
life one day by grabbing his shirt just as he was going
out of an upstairs window. One afternoon, I was busy
baking and didn’t hear his footsteps when he awoke.
The room that he’d shared with his grandmother was
his now. When I went upstairs to get him, he’d gotten
into a dirty diaper and spread it all over the room. After
that, I had him take his nap on a pallet in the corner of
the kitchen.
Late in the summer of 1919, I realized I was in a
family way again. There was no morning sickness this
time. I could even watch George eat his breakfast. I
was strong and well, and didn’t have to change my life
at all, except I was hungry all the time. I made huge
pots of chicken and fluffy dumplings, the way my
mother taught me when I was a girl, and ate three times
as much as I used to eat. I baked pies and cakes twice
a week and ate some every day. Missing a sweet tooth,
George ate just enough to keep from hurting my
feelings, but Bud adored the pastry and ate almost as
much as I did.
By the time I was ready to have my baby in the
spring of 1920, I’d put on an awful lot of weight and
had only two dresses I could wear. I washed one and
wore the other. I waited and waited, but the time I
thought the baby would come passed, and still I got
bigger. It was all I could do to get up out of a chair, and
I went to the outhouse to pass water forty times a day.
I knew the baby was all right. It kicked hard
every day, so I didn’t worry. I talked to the doctor
about it at church one Sunday, and he told me the same
thing my hometown doctor told Helen, “It’s like an
apple on a tree, Maude. It’ll fall when it’s ready.”
I was cooking supper one afternoon when my
water broke right in the kitchen. There wasn’t any
pain, so I just cleaned up the mess, changed my
clothes, and went back to my housework. When
George came home, and we sat to eat, I told him
between bites, “The baby is coming tonight.”
“I don’t have any pains yet, but my water broke
a while ago, so it’ll be tonight.”
“Do you want me to get the doctor?”
“No, I think I’ll just have you go get Clara. It’s
not like it was my first time.”
For the first time since we married, George
looked at me with something that looked like
admiration. “If you say so,” he said, and finished his
dinner. I was cleaning up the dishes when the first pain
started. I stopped my work, held onto the edge of the
table until it passed, then went on with what I was
doing. I was familiar with the sensation and knew I had
plenty of time. After the kitchen was clean, I went over
to Clara’s house and knocked.
When Clara opened the door, I told her, “My
water broke this afternoon, and the baby’s coming
tonight. I’ll have George come get you when it’s time.”
“I’ll come right now,” Clara said.
“No need for that. You go on about your chores.
There’s no telling how long it will be before I need
you.”
I gathered the linens and pulled up enough
buckets of water from the well to heat for the delivery.
I checked the fire in the kitchen stove to see that it
would bank well enough to keep the water hot but not
boil it all away. The spring night was quite chilly, so I
told George to build a fire in the parlor fireplace. He
kept staring at me and asking if I were all right, but I
just waved him away, saying, “I’m fine.” I had him
take Bud to bed and tuck him in for the night.
George and I went to bed at the usual time. He
fell asleep right away. I lay awake in the dark. When
the pain reached a point where I knew I needed help, I
poked George awake and sent him for Clara. It was
after midnight, but Clara came in fully dressed only a
few minutes later. She pulled the chair up next to the
bed. George went down to the kitchen to make coffee
and wait.
I was relieved to see her. “How did you get here
so fast? It’s the middle of the night.”
“I left my dress on and lay down on the divan in
the parlor. I didn’t want to waste any time when you
called me.”
Gritting my teeth to ride out a pain, I tried to
laugh. “We have time, but not much. It ought to be any
minute now. I can feel it.”
I sat up and pushed, then relaxed, then in just a
minute did it again. After a half-hour of pushing I
didn’t feel any different. “Clara, take a look and see
what’s happening down there.”
Clara pulled back the covers, and I saw her
forehead crease.
“What is it, Clara?”
“I can see a foot sticking out, Maude. It’s going
to be breech.”
“Tell George to go get the doctor, and tell him to
hurry.”
Clara ran downstairs, and in a few minutes, Clara
and I heard Pawnee galloping out of the yard. The
pains kept on with Clara watching, hoping for
progress. None came. My stomach shifted, and the
foot that had been sticking out disappeared back up
inside. I felt as if my body were being ripped apart.
It seemed like a long time, but finally, the doctor
came. He rushed into the room. Clara told him what
had happened so far. He did a fast examination,
pressing my stomach here and there and told me, “I’m
going to try to turn it around so it can come out the
right way, Maude, but it’s an awfully big baby. We
might have to take it Caesarian.” I’d heard of that, but
never knew anyone who had a baby that way.
The doctor pushed around on my stomach,
pressing hard this way and then the other. After a few
minutes, he shook his head, “This isn’t going to work.”
He pulled the covers all the way off the bed and
reached for his bag. Another pain grabbed me, and I
couldn’t help but push again. “Look,” Clara cried. “A
foot is sticking out.”
The doctor grabbed hold of it and pulled a little.
Clara said, “Hold on, Maude, the rest of the leg came
out and I can see a little bottom. One leg is out but the
other is folded up inside.”
The doctor worked to free the baby, and after a
little while, he had it out of my body. It was a boy. He
rubbed it and slapped its fanny, but it didn’t cry. He
held it up in the air and slapped it some more. Still no
cry. He held it up to his face and tried breathing into
its mouth. Nothing. Clara and I were both crying.
He held the baby out to Clara. “Put him
somewhere out of the way, Clara. We can’t do
anything for him. Maude’s torn up bad and bleeding,
and she needs us to take care of her now.”
Clara wrapped a cloth around the baby and laid
it on the floor under the bed. The doctor massaged my
abdomen and delivered the afterbirth. When he was
satisfied the bleeding had stopped, he made the
necessary stitches, packed his things and picked up his
bag to leave. “I’m sorry, Maude. I wish I could have
done better.”
Clara cleaned up the bed and cleaned up me,
both of us still crying, but now not so hard. Clara
leaned over me before she left and kissed my forehead.
“We’ll bury him tomorrow, Maude. Please try to get
some rest for now. You need your strength. I’ll tell
George. He can sleep in another room for tonight.”
I cried for a while and then drifted off to sleep. I
don’t know how long I had been sleeping when a
sound woke me. At first I thought it was one of the cats
in the back yard, or that I’d imagined it. Then the night
air was split by the scream of a hungry, cold baby. I sat
bolt upright in the bed.
I must be sleeping and having a nightmare, I
thought, but the screaming continued. I got out of the
bed and looked underneath. Squirming and kicking,
my baby was demanding attention. I picked him up
and wrapped a blanket around him, then got back into
the bed. I held him to my breast and looked down at
him as he had his first meal. A wave of powerful
emotion swept over me. It was a familiar feeling, and
I gave thanks to God for it, for the same rush of love
that I’d felt the first time I held Lulu.
When George came to see me in the morning, he
was speechless. I was sitting up in bed, holding the
baby in my arms and singing to it. He had straight,
dark-brown hair like mine and my daddy’s, and he was
the biggest newborn I’d ever seen. His fat cheeks hung
down on his chest, and his arms and legs were round
and pink.
I smiled up at George. “His name is ‘Charles
Eugene Foley,’after my daddy,” I told him, “and we’re
going to call him Gene.”
George shook his head. “I’ve not been thinking
of any names other than George, Junior, for a boy, but
I never said anything to you about it, and I can tell that
“Charles Eugene” is a done deal. I guess it’s right that
you get to name this one.”
“Go get Clara for me, George. I can’t wait for
her to see him.”
George fetched Clara, who was thrilled with the
news that the baby we thought was lost was doing just
fine.
I wouldn’t let him out of my sight, so Clara laid
him on a towel on the bed and cleaned him up. Clara
brought the Bible to me, and I wrote the name under
William’s.
I was too weak to do much for a few days, so
Clara took care of Bud during the day and made our
meals, and George did what he could for me at night.
Little Gene was always hungry. When he was a
month old, we made our first trip to church, stopping
by the feed store on the way home to weigh him on the
scale there. At four weeks old, he weighed eighteen
pounds.
If Bud was George’s boy, Gene was mine. I
seldom left a room without taking him with me. I made
a sling out of a piece of cloth and carried him around
the way the Indians did. Happily, Bud was fond of his
little brother, and I saw no signs of jealousy. George
gave all his attention to Bud and hardly any to Gene,
and that seemed to prevent what sibling rivalry would
have normally been expected.
Bud was still the captain of mischief, even
though I spanked him and told his father when he
misbehaved. George didn’t spank, didn’t rebuke and,
in fact, sometimes laughed at the trouble Bud would
get into. That only served to encourage him. He looked
for ways to make his father laugh, and he succeeded.
He put my church hats on the cow, stuck string
beans up his nose and pretended he was a walrus that
he’d read about in school. He chased the rooster
around the yard until it turned on him and spurred his
back. He tried to ride the goats and only laughed when
they threw him off. He tied paper bags on the dogs’
feet and laughed at them as they walked. The only
animals he never touched were George’s horse and the
cats. Pawnee was too important to his father. Bud
knew that aggravating the horse was a line he dared
not cross, and he left the cats alone because cats have
claws.
Woodrow Wilson was still president in 1920 when the
amendment giving women the right to vote was
passed. An election was coming up soon. Warren G.
Harding, a Republican, was running against James
Cox, the Democrat, who had Franklin D. Roosevelt as
his vice-presidential candidate. I wasn’t sure what it
was all about, so I decided to investigate. I began
reading the newspaper regularly for the first time in
my life.
I asked George several times to bring the paper
home with him, but he forgot more often than not. On
the days I walked into town, I would buy one and put
it in with my groceries. At home, when I finished my
housework, I would sit in the light from my bedroom
window and read it from front to back, then go sit with
Clara and talk about what I’d learned.
On Election Day, I dressed the children and
myself in our church clothes. I came downstairs
carrying Gene. George was standing at the stove,
frying his bacon. Through the screen door, I could see
Bud sitting on the porch with the mop laid down the
brown dog’s back. He was singing and tying the
strings around the dog’s head to make a wig. The dog
wagged his tail and licked at the child’s face.
After George’s mother died, he took to making
his own breakfast every morning, saying that I didn’t
do it right. When he saw me with my hat on, George
looked at me in surprise. “What’s the occasion? There
a church meeting this morning?”
“No, I want you to hitch up the wagon. I’m going
to ride into town with you so I can vote.”
George stopped poking at the bacon with his fork
and shook his head. “You can’t do that, Maude,” he
said in a voice so low I could hardly understand him.
“What do you mean, I can’t do that? The new
law says I can.”
“It isn’t fitting for women to try to vote. You
won’t know what you’re doing.”
I got so mad my face must have turned purple. I
planted my feet and put one hand on my hip. “I
suppose you think you DO know what you’re doing?”
“Of course, I do. I’m voting for Cox.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s the best man, that’s why.”
“Why is he the best man? What does he want to
do that’s better than what Harding wants to do?”
George’s mouth dropped open, and he
stammered, “Why—uh…”
When he didn’t answer me, I tilted my head.
“What do you think about the League of Nations? Is it
a good thing, or should we just get out of it and mind
our own business? What do you think about
Prohibition, or letting them teach the children in
school that we came from monkeys?”
George had no answers for me. He turned his
bacon again and then said, “Who do you expect to vote
for, Maude?”
I met his eyes with a steady gaze. “That’s none
of your business, George.”
He stared down at the pan of bacon for a minute,
then picked it up and put it on the sideboard. “I guess
I’ve lost my appetite,” he said. He went out and headed
to the barn. I poured myself a cup of his thick coffee.
I’d got used to it over time and could drink it now
without loading it with sugar or watering it down. I sat
to wait for him to bring the wagon around. A few
minutes later, he galloped by on Pawnee.
I took Bud’s hand and pulled him behind me as I
went to see if Clara had left yet for the store. It was
one of the days Clara would normally have gone in to
do the books and ordering.
Clara was expecting me. She held the back door
open. “I kind of thought you might want a ride into
town. Yesterday, I heard the men talking out in the
front of the store when they didn’t see me in the office.
A lot of men are forbidding their wives to vote or
telling them who they have to vote for.”
I nodded. “It’s a good thing it’s private. They can
just vote for who they want and tell their husbands
what they want to hear. I’m not surprised, though. At
least George didn’t try to forbid me.”
“What would you have done if he had?”
I smiled at her. “I guess I’d of had to turn him in
to the U.S. Marshall for breaking the law. After all, it’s
his job to see that we get to vote just like anyone else.”
Both of us just about fell down laughing. I went
out to the barn with Clara and helped her hitch the
horse to the buggy. Clara called to Maggie that she was
ready to go, and I got Bud and Gene. The five of us
rode into town. We dropped Maggie off at school. It
was closed for the election, but the teen-agers had
gathered there, and Maggie wanted to wait with her
friends.
We went on to the courthouse. George was there
to keep order, standing behind a line of men who were
jeering at each woman who walked up the steps. I
glared at him, then jutted out my jaw in determination.
Some of the men turned to George and called out.
“Look out, George, next thing you know she’ll be
wearing your pants and wanting to be a deputy.”
George took the ribbing with a smile, but I could
tell he wasn’t enjoying it much. He let on like it was
all right. We marched past the men and into the
courthouse, signed the book, and were given slips of
paper and pointed to a curtain. Clara and I stood in the
line behind three men and another woman. All the
time, the men murmured back and forth and scowled
at us.
When it was my turn to vote, I handed Gene to
Clara, stepped into the cubicle with Bud in tow and
pulled the curtain closed behind myself. I made my
marks on the paper, folded it over, took it back to the
table, and dropped it in the box. Then I took Gene from
Clara’s arms so Clara could take her turn. Bud could
tell that something important was happening, and he
stood quietly beside me, well behaved for one of the
few times in his life. Clara finished a few minutes later,
and we went back outside. The men standing around
started up loud complaining about uppity women
again. Clara took my elbow. “Let’s go home, Maude.”
I shook my head. “No, I can walk. I know you
have work to do at the store.”
“Not today. I told the boys yesterday that the
store would be closed for Election Day.”
We climbed into the buggy, and Clara slapped
the reins on her horse’s back. We chatted about
different things until we neared the outskirts of town,
and I got to thinking about what we’d done and
stopped talking. Clara looked over at me and saw that
there were tears running down my cheeks. “What’s
wrong, Maude?”
I shook my head. “Nothing is wrong, Clara. You
and I just voted. It’s the first time in my life I felt like
I mattered, that I had some say about what was going
on. Things couldn’t be more right.”
I was aggravated with George that he tried to
forbid me to vote, but later on, I came to appreciate
him. I heard that more than one woman in our little
town was kept home by force, and some of them were
even beaten. George was sometimes slothful, but in all
the years we spent together, he never laid a finger on
me to harm me.