Although the valley people are slow to accept outsiders, they did not hesitate to come to me. They needed my skill.
“Nurse?” An old ruddy-faced farmer was at my door in the middle of the night. “Nurse, would you be kind enough to see to my Betsy? She’s having a bad go of it.”
I dressed and went with him to his farm to deliver what I thought was a baby. To my amazement, he drove straight past the house to the barn. Betsy was his cow, but neither of us would have been prouder of that outsized calf had it been a child.
I came to wonder if every disease of man and beast had simply waited for my arrival to invade the valley. My little house, which was also the clinic, was usually jammed, and often there was a jeep waiting at the door to take me to examine a child or a cow or a woman in labor.
The first time I saw Joseph Wojtkiewicz (what my grandmother would have done to that name!), the first time I saw him to know who he was, that is, he arrived in his jeep late one night to ask me to come and treat his son, Stephen. Like most of the valley men, he seemed ill at ease with me; his only conversation during the ride was about the boy who had a severe earache and a fever of 105, which had made his father afraid to bring him out in the cold night air to the clinic.
The Wojtkiewicz house was a neatly built log cabin with four small rooms. There were three children, the six-year-old patient, and his two sisters, Mary and Anna, who were eight and five. The mother had been dead for several years.
The county had sent me an assortment of drugs including a little penicillin, so I was able to give the child a shot. Then an alcohol rubdown to bring the fever down a bit until the drug had time to do its work, a little warm oil to soothe the ear, a word or two to commend bravery, and I was ready to go.
I had repacked my bag and was heading for the door when I realized the boy’s father had made coffee for me. It seemed rude not to drink it, so I sat opposite him at his kitchen table, my face set in my most professional smile, mouthing reassurance and unnecessary directions for the child’s care.
I became increasingly aware that the man was staring at me, not impolitely, but as though he were studying an unknown specimen. At last he said, “Where do you come from?”
“The University of Kentucky,” I said. I prided myself on never letting remarks made by patients or their families surprise me.
“No, no,” he said. “Not school. Where do you really come from?”
I began to tell him quite matter-of-factly about Rass, where it was, what it looked like, slipping into a picture of how it had been. I hadn’t returned to the island since entering nursing school except for two funerals, my grandmother’s and the Captain’s. Now as I described the marsh as it was when I was a child, I could almost feel the wind on my arms, and hear the geese baying like a pack of hounds as they flew over. No one on the mainland had ever invited me to talk about home before, and the longer I talked, the more I wanted to talk, churning with happiness and homesickness at the same time.
The little girls had come into the kitchen and were leaning on either side of their father’s chair, listening with the same dark-eyed intensity. Joseph put an arm around each of them, absently stroking the black curls of Anna who was on his right.
At last I stopped, a little shy for having talked so much. I even apologized.
“No, no,” he said. “I asked because I wanted to know. I knew there was something different about you. I kept wondering ever since you came. Why would a woman like you, who could have anything she wanted, come to a place like this? Now I understand.” He left off stroking his daughter’s hair and leaned forward, his big hands open as though he needed their help to explain his meaning. “God in heaven,”—I thought at first it was an oath, it had been so long since I’d heard the expression used in any other way—“God in heaven’s been raising you for this valley from the day you were born.”
I was furious. He didn’t know anything about me or the day I was born or he’d never say such a foolish thing, sitting there so piously at his kitchen table, sounding for all the world like a Methodist preacher.
But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz—God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable surname and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.
20
It is far simpler to be married to a Catholic than anyone from my Methodist past would believe. I am quite willing for the children, his, of course, but also ours as they come along, to be raised in the Catholic faith. The priest frets about me when we meet, but he’s only around once a month, and Joseph himself has never suggested that I ought to turn Catholic or even religious. My parents showed their approval by making the long trip from Rass to attend our schoolhouse wedding. I will always be glad that my father and Joseph met each other that once, because this year, on the second of October, my father went to sleep in his chair after a day of crabbing and never woke up.
Caroline called me from New York. I couldn’t remember ever having heard her cry aloud before, and there she was weeping for the benefit of the entire Truitt village party line. I was unreasonably irritated. She and Call were going down at once and would stay through the funeral. It seemed wrong that she should be able to go and not me. I was the child who had fished his crab floats and culled his oysters, but I was so far along in my ninth month that I knew better than anyone how crazy it would be to try such a trip; so Joseph went in my place and got back to the farm four days before our son was born.
We thought he might bring Momma back with him then, but Caroline was making her New Haven debut as Musetta in La Bohème on the twenty-first. Our parents had planned to go before my father’s death, so Caroline and Call begged her to return with them and stay on through the opening. Since she would be coming to live with us soon, it seemed the right thing for her to do. Joseph did not plead my condition. He was already learning midwifery, and I think my mother understood that he would have been disappointed not to deliver our child himself.
I suppose every mother is reduced to idiocy when describing her firstborn, but, oh, he is a beauty—large and dark like his father, but with the bright blue eyes of the Bradshaws. I swear from his cry that he will be a singer and from his huge hands that he will follow the water, which makes his father laugh aloud and tease me about our son setting sail on the trickle of a stream that crosses our pasture.
The older children adore him, and, as for the valley people, it doesn’t matter how often I explain that we named the baby for my father, they are all sure that Truitt is their namesake. Their need for me made them accept me into their lives, but now I feel that they are taking me into their hearts as well.
My work did not, could not, end with my marriage to Joseph and his children or even with the birth of Truitt. There is no one else to care for the valley. The hospital remains two hours away, and the road is impassable for much of the winter.
This year our winter came early. In November I was watching over two pregnancies, one of which I worried about. The mother is a thin, often-beaten girl of about eighteen. From the size of her, I quickly suspected twins and urged her and her husband to go to the hospital in Staunton or Harrisonburg for the delivery.
Despite his bouts of drunkenness, the young husband is well-meaning. He would have taken her, I believe, had there been any money at all. But how could I urge them to make the trip when the hospital might well reject her? And without money where could they stay in the city until the babies actually came? I counted the days and measured her progress as best I could and then sent word to a doctor in Staunton that I would need help with the birth. But it snowed twenty inches the day before Essie went into labor, so when they called me, I went alone.
The first twin, a nearly six-pound boy, came fairly easily, despite Essie’s slender frame, but the second did not follow as I thought it should. I had begun to fear for it, when I realized that it was very small, but in a breach position. I reached in and turned the twi
n so that she was delivered head first, but blue as death. Before I even cut the cord, I put my mouth down and breathed into her tiny one. Her chest, smaller than my fist, shuddered, and she gave a cry, but so weak, so like a parting, that I was near despair.
“Is it all right?” Essie asked.
“Small,” I said and busied myself cutting and tying off the cord. How cold she was. It sent painful shivers up my arms. I called the grandmother, who had been taking care of the boy, to get me blankets and see to the afterbirth.
I swathed the child tightly and held her against my body. It was like cuddling a stone. I almost ran from the bedroom. What was I to do? They must give me an incubator if they expected me to care for newborn babies in this godforsaken place.
The kitchen was slightly warmer than the bedroom. I went over to the enormous iron stove. A remnant of a fire was banked in the far corner under the stove top. I put my hand on the stove and found it comfortingly warm. I grabbed an iron pot, stuffed it with all the dishrags and towels I could reach with one hand, laid the baby in it, and set it in the oven door. Then I pulled up a kitchen stool and sat there with my hand on the baby’s body and watched. It may have been hours. I was too intent to keep track, but, at length, a sort of pinkness invaded the translucent blue skin of her cheek.
“Nurse?” I jumped at the sound. The young father had come into the kitchen. “Nurse, should I go for the priest?” His eyes widened at the sight of the nurse cooking his baby in the oven, but, rather than protest, he repeated his question about fetching the priest.
“How could you on these roads?” I’m sure I sounded impatient. I wanted to be left in peace to guard my baby.
“Should I do it myself?” he asked, apparently alarmed by whatever it was he was suggesting. “Or you could.”
“Oh, do be quiet.”
“But, Nurse, it must be baptized before it dies.”
“She won’t die!”
He flinched. I’m sure he found me terrifying. “But, if it did—”
“She will not die.” But to keep him quiet and get rid of him, I poured water out of the cold teakettle onto my hand and reached into the oven, placing my hand on the blur of dark hair. “What is her name?”
He shook his head in bewilderment. Apparently, everything was left for me to do. Susan. Susan was the name of a saint, wasn’t it? Well, if not, they could have the priest fix it later. “Essie Susan,” I said, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” Under my hand the tiny head stirred.
The father crossed himself, nodded a scared-rabbit kind of thank you, and hurried out to report the sacrament to his wife. Soon the grandmother was in the kitchen.
“Thank you, Nurse. We’re grateful to you.”
“Where is the other twin?” I asked, suddenly stricken. I had forgotten him. In my anxiety for his sister, I had completely forgotten him. “Where have you put him?”
“In the basket.” She looked at me, puzzled. “He’s sleeping.”
“You should hold him,” I said. “Hold him as much as you can. Or let his mother hold him.”
She started for the door. “Nurse. Should I baptize him as well?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Baptize him and then let Essie nurse him.”
My own breasts were swollen with milk for Truitt. I knew his father would bring him to me soon, but there was plenty. I took my baby out of the oven and held her mouth to catch the milk, which began to flow of its own accord. A perfect tongue, smaller than a newborn kitten’s, reached out for the drops of milk on her lips. Then the little mouth rooted against my breast until she had found the nipple for herself.
Hours later, walking home, my boots crunching on the snow, I bent my head backward to drink in the crystal stars. And clearly, as though the voice came from just behind me, I heard a melody so sweet and pure that I had to hold myself to keep from shattering:
I wonder as I wander out under the sky…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The impetus for this book came from reading William W. Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay, Little, Brown and Company, 1976, which justly deserved the Pulitzer Prize it won the following year. Since then, there have been many people and books that have helped me learn more about life on the Chesapeake Bay. I should like especially to mention the Smith Island watermen I met at the Folk Life Festival at the Smithsonian: Mr. Harold G. Wheatley of Tangier Island, Virginia, and Dr. Varley Lang of Tunis Mills, Maryland. Dr. Lang, who is a writer and scholar as well as a Maryland waterman, was kind enough to read this manuscript. Any errors that remain are, of course, my fault and not his. His book about Maryland watermen entitled Follow the Water, John F. Blair, 1961, was also a great help to me.
About the Author
KATHERINE PATERSON was born in China, where she spent part of her childhood. After her education in China and the American South, she spent four years in Japan, the setting for her first three novels. Ms. Paterson has received numerous awards for her writing, including National Book Awards for THE MASTER PUPPETEER and THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS, as well as Newbery Medals for JACOB HAVE I LOVED and BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA. Ms. Paterson lives with her husband in Vermont. They have four grown children.
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ALSO BY KATHERINE PATERSON
Angels & Other Strangers
The Great Gilly Hopkins
Bridge to Terabithia
The Master Puppeteer
Of Nightingales That Weep
The Sign of the Chrysanthemum
The Field of the Dogs
The Same Stuff as Stars
Credits
Cover art © 2004 by Chris Sheban
Cover design by Amy Ryan
Cover © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Copyright
JACOB HAVE I LOVED. Copyright © 1980 by Katherine Paterson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader January 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-183277-2
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Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I Loved
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