Outlawed - Anna North Page 0,2

for instance, that the Great Flu that had killed all eight of her great-grandparents was not, as everyone else said, a judgment from baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Mama’s teacher Sarah Hawkins, a master midwife, had taught her that the Great Flu had come to America on ships along with spices and sugar, then spread from husband to wife and mother to child and trader to trader by kisses and handshakes, cups of beer shared among friends and strangers, and the coughs and sneezes of men and women who didn’t know how sick they were and went on serving food and selling cloth and trading beaver pelts one day too long. Sarah Hawkins said the Flu was just a fever, a sickness like any other, and the only reason people put a meaning to it was that otherwise their grief would have overwhelmed them. Mama said Sarah Hawkins was the smartest person she had ever known.

But when I asked Mama about barrenness, she just shook her head.

“Nobody knows,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked. I’d never before asked Mama a question that didn’t have an answer.

“We don’t even know exactly how a baby forms in a mother’s womb,” she said. “How can we know why sometimes her womb stays empty?”

I looked down at my hands and she could tell I was disappointed.

“I know one thing,” she said. “It’s not witchcraft.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“People cry witchcraft whenever they don’t understand something,” she said. “Remember, the town ladies said a witch had put a curse on Mayor Van Duyn, and when he died the doctor found his lungs all filled up with tumors. The only curse on him was that pipe.”

“So why don’t you tell people?” I asked. “Everyone listens to you.”

Mama shook her head.

“I used to tell my patients,” she said. “Every woman worries about a curse if she’s not pregnant two months after her wedding. ‘That’s just a silly story,’ I’d say. But they didn’t believe me, and what’s more, some of them got suspicious, like maybe I had cursed them.”

Mama delivered all the babies in the Independent Town of Fairchild and cured most of the illnesses besides. She had set more bones than Dr. Carlisle and heard more confessions than Father Simon. Her reputation was so secure that even when she took to her bed after Bee was born, her patients were all but lined up at our door the day she got well. Nobody was suspicious of Mama.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why didn’t they believe you?”

“When someone believes in something,” Mama said, “you can’t just take it away. You have to give them something to replace it. And since I don’t know what makes women barren, I’ve got nothing to give.”

I didn’t get pregnant that month, or the month after. At my husband’s house my mother-in-law watched me all the time, like she might catch me in the act of witchcraft. Once she came into our bedroom while I was washing and began making small talk with me, forcing me to answer politely as I washed my underarms and private parts. I felt ashamed of my body then as I never had before, of my small breasts, stomach flat over an empty womb. She began to make me pray to baby Jesus in the mornings; we knelt together and asked him to send our family a child. My mother-in-law was not a particularly religious woman. She kept a crèche above the hearth and a copy of Burton on the shelf like everyone in Fairchild, but went to church only on holidays or when she was seized with a desire to appear pious. The fact that we were praying now—in stumbling words I imagined she half-remembered from some childhood catechism—showed me how desperate she’d become.

At night my husband would touch me only during my fertile week; he was tracking me himself now, as though he didn’t trust me to do it. When I reached for him late in the month he told me his mama had said it was better to save our energy for when it counted, and I was not surprised that he talked to his mama about such things, but I was still disgusted by it.

My meetings with Sam, strangely, became a refuge. In Mama’s house no one watched us. Afterward he did not pester me to lie still or put my legs up the way my husband did; he put his clothes on and said goodbye and left me alone so that I