Glimpse of Strength

Glimpse of Strength

By Angela Murphy

Omer was locked in an incessant rhythm. By now he had done the same motions, so many times, he didn’t even notice. They had no value, other than distraction, for either of them. He sponged her forehead and rinsed out the cloth, while he deliberated between what he could do here, or going to get help, before it was too late. His mind and body were entwined in a rhythmic trance. The solution was simple because there was nothing he could do but leave her alone and go get the doctor. Once again she repeated, “Please. Please make it stop.” The realization came to him and put an end to the cadence. Quickly, he rose and took quilts from the trunk and he laid them upon her. Then he walked to the fireplaces and stoked them with wood that he had stacked there this morning. Iris was now begging, “Don’t go. Don’t leave me.” He told her that he had to, to be still, and to try not to worry.

He considered the wagon, but knew it was useless when the ground was frozen like this. He couldn’t risk being stranded and not being able to get back here. This was going to take at least half a day and Omer knew the snowstorm was going to make it even longer. Regardless, he was not deterred, and he saddled the horse and off he went toward town. As the cold winds blew at him, he pulled up his collar and gripped it tightly at the neckline. Flurries of snow piled up on the brim of his hat. His shoulders came up and his head sank down in between them. The horse and rider settled into the stride and then quiet enveloped them. All that remained was the squeak of the saddle and crunching of snow under horse hooves. His mind was transported to the sound of a wagon, traveling down this same road in the opposite direction. It seemed like a lifetime ago when the two of them arrived with nothing in their pockets except the dream of a homestead and a family. He was warmed by remembrance and filled up with pride, much like he felt that very first day.

It was almost ten years ago when those Arkansas pines covered almost every inch of the land that was theirs now. Omer and Iris cleared the land and pushed back the hewn lumber. They used all those logs and built a house that was just one tiny room. They went down to the creek and they picked up stones that they brought to the house where they matched and arranged them to form two fireplaces and hearths. The barn had been raised and housed livestock and hay. Their only transportation was a couple of horses and that wagon. The road leading there was hardly a trail and just wide enough for a wagon to fit. It was miles to their neighbors and ten miles into town. The trip was such an ordeal that they only went twice every year.

They preserved their own food and stored it outside, in their smokehouse. They stored beef and smoked pork to make bacon and ham. On shelves were rows of food canned in jars. Potatoes and onions sat piled in woven baskets that leaned over and spilled out onto the floor. In summer the cool water, deep in their well, became storage for milk and freshly churned butter, but not during winter, because they stayed cold inside the smokehouse. It was a lifeline for that family and held the fruits of their labor.

As the cold took a grip on him, Omer returned in his mind and repeated today’s events. He remembered, this whole ordeal started when a great winter storm had blown in and left a blanket of snow. This had been followed by ice, which postponed most of the chores. He had been taking advantage of the lapse in his tasks and was out setting traps and stretching the hides for their fur. Iris was inside preparing food for the family, which was her continuous and never-ending task. She was a very small woman, and her weight was only a measly 100 pounds, despite the fact that she was eight months pregnant. She should not have been carrying a child because the doctor had said her womb was too weak, and she would never carry another baby to term. The rest of their family were their two children. Aarel and Thelder were really still babies. Six and three years were their ages. A laborious life does take its toll, and they all were more aged than the years recorded in their family Bible.

Inside the house, Iris had just come from the smokehouse and was bent over the hearth when a pain jolted her upright. She hobbled toward bed and prayed to herself that it would pass, but this didn’t happen. She realized her third baby was going to be born. The pain was insistent and so began the premature birth just as Doc Hedrick had predicted.

Omer was outside, unaware what was happening, when he heard Aarel running towards him. They ran back to the house and when Omer burst in, he saw her. He told Aarel to fetch a cloth and some water. The sound of urgency frightened the boy, but he quickly returned with a pitcher containing cool water from that well. Omer poured the water into a bowl, wrung out the cloth tightly, and began to pat her face, thus beginning his rhythmic trance and a tumult of indecision.  He fluffed up the feather pillow and piled them behind her and around her. He knew this was much different than any birth he had witnessed. Iris was in too much pain, and besides, the baby was early, a month to the day.

Now Omer was certainly no doctor, but he had been involved in a lot of animal births and he knew that when there was a great deal of pain and the water didn’t break, this often led to disaster. Iris was in agony, and she was shifting positions, trying to find some relief, but every movement just produced another cry of unbearable pain.  She just kept praying, “Please, help. Please, make it stop. Please, God,” and the only time she wasn’t pleading was when a tide of pain would cause her to forcefully breathe inward. This was the scene as he rode away down the road, into town to get Doc Hedrick.

First, he went to the home of the midwife, Mrs. Taylor. She told Omer she would go there directly. From there he went on towards town. As he traveled he stopped, briefly, at the houses to tell all the people. In one of these houses lived his own father Caleb, and most all of the other homes were his brothers and sisters. See, Omer was the youngest of his father’s 22 children, so it didn’t take long for the news to spread over the width and the length of that valley and not much longer for a congregation, mostly family, to arrive at their homestead, to take care of Iris. The room was stuffy, and it was doubt that stifled the air. Not a single one of them believed that Iris, or much less her unborn baby, would live through the night.

They wasted no time, though, and they busied themselves with the chores and preparing food. Mostly, though, they were pacing, and their praying consumed them. The children were restless and told to keep quiet while women read aloud from the Bible and prayed, looking up to the ceiling and onward beyond toward heaven. Mrs. Taylor came in and immediately began doing midwifery.

First she examined Iris, and was taken aback when she realized that the water had still not broken, and on closer observation, Iris’s body was not ready for delivery. Mrs. Taylor knew that this meant trouble. The child could die inside the mother, while the mother struggled, in vain, trying to deliver. She didn’t alert anyone, though, and just went through the motions that made it appear to Iris, and the others, that things were just fine and there was no need to worry. Iris, however, was locked in an unproductive labor.

It was late in the evening, already past dark, when Omer returned. He was distraught and hung his head as he said that Doc Hedrick wouldn’t be coming. The ice and snow on the road were too rough and just impossible for the doctor and his surrey, but he had promised to come as soon as the storm broke. These rural mountain folk were not really surprised. They were just glad that Omer was back. They just went back and continued with preparing food and praying to heaven. When people were so ill that they needed a doctor, the family would just do what they could for the person, which was most often just getting ready for their death. It was the same for Iris that night. If the weather were good, it would have taken two days on the back of that flat bedded wagon just to get her to town. The jostle and bounce would surely have killed her. For her and this family, it was better to die at home in your bed than the back of a wagon, so those people in the room merely prepared for one funeral. Everyone knew that a mother and stillborn would be buried together.

The labor continued and it was already the next day and nothing different had happened. Iris was in pain but was exhausted so her cries came less frequently and only intermittently pierced the silence. Mrs. Taylor and the other women fussed over and around her in an effort to ease her and remove her despondence. Suddenly, Mrs. Taylor saw the water break and she made a slight twitchy motion of her hand, and all at once their actions increased. One small push is all it took and just as long as it had taken for the whole night to pass, conversely, the baby broke free and was born in an instant. A sense of relief came over Omer, but his hope was short lived.

Mrs. Taylor handed the baby to Iris and Omer looked down and saw his very tiny baby. In length, the boy was only about the size of a small Bible, but his weight was not even half of that. Iris gasped when she saw him which was surely relief, but, moreover, probably shock. Then the people bowed their heads and prayed even louder. This was followed by whispers. This baby is going to die and so is his mother. Iris began insisting, “No, it isn’t true. Put the baby nearer the fire.”

They prepared a small bed, using a dresser drawer and a pillow. His swaddling cloth was pinned to the pillow so he could not roll off. Iris just kept on insisting while she drifted in and out of a state of unconsciousness to move that bed closer and closer to the fire. In reality, the baby was so tiny that he really had no chance, and the people, in desperation, realized the child must be given his name before it was too late. In mountain lore, no child goes to heaven to meet with his maker if he dies before the forename can be decided. “Freddy Lee,” Omer said, and then the whole of the room dropped down to their knees, and they prayed in a collective to heaven.

One week to the day passed, and most all of the people that had been there left because there was nothing more they could do. The door slowly opened, and everyone sighed in relief when they realized Doc Hedrick had finally arrived. Then silence fell over the room and everyone waited and listened. He walked over and just stared at the baby. He opened his leather bag and pulled out a stethoscope made of wood and put his ear down to listen. When he finally raised his head, he whispered, “This baby is having a very hard time breathing.” Next he pulled out a scale, a tiny handheld one, which he attached to the cloth. He upheld the baby and said, “This baby barely weighs a pound.” He shook his head as he laid down the baby and began to examine the mother. Downheartedly, Doc Hedrick announced that Iris was no better off. He said aloud, “They will both be dead soon.”

Bleakness settled there in the onlookers’ shoulders and laid a great weight upon them so they visibly shrank where they stood. Gasps and whispers rang out from women tending the hearth. They wrung the worry from their hands, and they prayed even louder up into the air. What he meant was unmistakable. Despite all their efforts, this beautiful mother and her baby are going to be placed in a coffin. But the strength of that family was greater than that. Iris just maintained her insistence that Doc Hedrick was wrong, but she thought the same thing when he predicted, with accuracy, this premature birth. Iris just went on once again persisting that Freddy  be moved closer to the fire. “Closer. Even closer. Keep him close to that fire.”

After a few days more, Iris was still sick, but managed to get herself out of her bed, for the strength of that woman would not allow her to stay there. Most of her chores were neglected as she spent all her time keeping her terminally ill baby near to that fire to keep his soul from being smothered. That fire was another lifeline for those in that family. Without that lifeline of food in the smokehouse and the lifeline of fire in those fireplaces everyone of that small family would have perished long before that winter. Eventually, her own strength improved. Six months and summer’s heat were upon them before she really had faith that her baby boy would survive after all.

Indeed, he survived, yet on his December 23^rd birthday, at one year of age, his weight was only up to 13 pounds. That is one pound per month, plus the one which was his weight at birth. Despite this, he grew older and bigger. He worked in the fields, cut firewood, and tended the livestock, just the same as his brothers. When Freddy was a young teenager, Omer and Aarel both lost their lives to TB. The tuberculosis took a lot of the world’s population in that great pandemic, but that tiny baby Freddy did not even get sick. He was deemed strong enough to enter the Navy. He served his country as an honorable soldier in the war in Korea.

When he came home from the war, he went to trade school and became a barber. He didn’t move away from that valley though. He moved back with his mother and opened a shop with an electric, red and white striped barber pole mounted outside. It was just downstairs from the place that Omer had come to in the snow on that day. It was Doc Hedrick’s office. Everyone in the town knew the story about a tiny baby and his mother that had barely pulled through. Freddy cut all their hair in his barbershop, and the stories started. How could he be that same baby? Then they would finish and say that what happened and what they were witnessing now was just nothing short of miracle. They told Freddy that his mother, Iris, had shown them a glimpse of strength that none of them had seen since.

I imagine that Iris didn’t feel strong on that day or for that very long year that followed. I know this because on a cold, frozen day in December I was in a hospital bed in Virginia, having been in labor for over a day, and the doctors had told me that I had to have surgery. He said, “In the old days you would have both died,” and I, like Omer, was transported back to that homestead. I gasped in relief at the sight of my tiny baby. The nurse asked me, “What will you name her?” “April Iris,” I said and pride warmed me. There was no fire to put her beside, but she was placed inside a warm incubator. “Closer to the fire. Closer.” That’s what she said while she laid in her bed and fretted from a far, but she was completely amazed, as she worried and fretted some 54 years later, because all the while I was bed-ridden in an unproductive labor, it was her, Grandma Iris, along with my Daddy, Freddy Lee, who were doing the pacing and praying over me.