head of the bed where the woman lay, her skin ashen, her cracked lips caked with the salt of her tears. Rose had gone to boil water, and her father stood at his patient’s side palpating her abdomen, his face grave. “She has been in labor since yesterday evening,” he said quietly. “I fear both she and the child are in distress. Daughter, can you determine how the baby is presenting?”
Lily dipped her hands in hot water, scrubbed them with soap and moved to the foot of the bed. What she saw upon examination was not reassuring. When her father raised his eyebrows in question, Lily shook her head in the negative.
As another contraction racked the whimpering woman, the surgeon made his decision. “I fear mother will not last long. We must take the infant.”
While he went to inform the father, Lily and Rose prepared the instruments and changed the bed linens. The woman watched them with large, sad eyes. “Save my baby,” she whispered. Then she added in the howl of a wounded animal, “I told Jacob I never wanted to come west.” Her tone hardened. “Never.”
Lily knew that many women died in childbirth on the trail. That, along with cholera and typhus, posed an enormous threat, not to mention possible attacks by hostile Indians. Yet so many of these wives had no choice; they were tied to their husbands and lacked alternatives. Lily vowed under her breath that she would never submit to such grim realities. If only she could wait in God’s time for deliverance from this wilderness.
Ezra reentered the room, and after that, all extraneous thoughts fled in the intensity of the procedure. Her father’s deft movements were swift, and soon he had extracted a tiny, wrinkled infant who, with Rose’s ministrations, finally managed a feeble cry. While Rose cleaned and swaddled the baby, Lily and her father worked frantically to stem the woman’s bleeding and close the incision. Lily sutured while her father listened to the mother’s heartbeat and took her pulse. “Thready” was all he said. A knowing glance passed between the two. They had done what they could, but the mother’s life hung in precarious balance.
Lily’s nimble fingers tied the last knot and she stood back, flexing her hands. Ezra seemed preoccupied. “We’ve done all we can,” he finally said. “I’ll fetch her husband.”
In her father’s absence, Lily gave the woman a drink of water and gently wiped her feverish face with a cool cloth. The woman’s eyes fluttered briefly. “My baby?”
“A boy.”
The woman’s features relaxed and she closed her eyes, her breath now coming in irregular rasps.
After a few moments, Ezra led the father into the room, followed by Rose carrying the newborn. The father rushed to his wife’s side. “Good news, Patience. We have a son.”
Rose placed the baby in his mother’s arms. She opened her eyes and gazed at the child, her limp fingers caressing his face, his hair, his tiny hands. A tear traced its way down her sunken cheek. “Beautiful,” she murmured.
Lily turned away.
The husband knelt at his wife’s side, cradling her and his son. His body language conveyed knowledge of the end, but his words spoke denial. “My love, our boy will grow into a fine young man.” He kissed her forehead.
Once more the mother examined the baby. As her son studied her in return, his little hand curled around her finger. “Alas.” The word came with an effort. “I shall not see that day, Jacob.”
His expression wild with questions, the husband looked around the room, seeking reassurance. In honesty, neither Lily, nor Rose nor Ezra could offer any. Then a strangled “No!” rose from his chest. When he looked back down at the bed, the baby kicked weakly against the lifeless body of his mother.
Lily bowed her head, struck, as always, by the random quality of death, whether it claimed her brother, her mother or this hapless woman. God, in Your mercy, bless this dear soul, her motherless baby and her grieving husband. She bit her lip and then added, And help me to accept what is so difficult to understand.
After Ezra led the father away, Lily washed and prepared the corpse while Rose went in search of a wet nurse among the women of the wagon train. This poor soul! One more poignant example of the risks women took in the isolated country they traversed.
When Lily finally left the hospital, the eastern sky was streaked with pale light. Too disturbed to go home, she instead sought refuge in the cemetery. Better than anyone, her mother would understand her tears of helplessness.
As she crossed the parade ground near the officers’ quarters, she noticed a man sitting in the shadows of the porch. Caleb. She couldn’t think about him right now. Yet standing beside her mother’s grave a few moments later, he was the person she thought of.
He, too, was a son whose mother had died in childbirth. How had that loss affected the young boy and influenced the man he had become?
Tonight’s was the first birth she’d attended that didn’t have a happy outcome, and she could not have foreseen how deeply it would affect her. She wept for the mother and father and for their baby. She wept for herself. And she wept for the motherless eight-year-old Caleb.
* * *
Caleb stood at the edge of the cemetery, not daring to interrupt what seemed to be a sacred moment. In recent days, he had rarely spoken to Lily privately. When she had emerged so early from the hospital and walked toward the cemetery, lost in her thoughts, some impulse that she not be alone seized him and he’d followed her at a distance. Yet drawn to her as he was, he hesitated, trapped in self-doubt.
He watched as she touched the headstone, much as one might dip fingers into holy water, and then, head down, walked toward him. Fearful of startling her, he spoke softly. “Miss Kellogg?”
She looked up and upon recognizing him, halted. In her piteous glance he read both exhaustion and sorrow. “Captain?”
He hastened to answer her unasked question. “I saw you walking across the parade ground at this unusually early hour. You looked sad, and I wanted to be of assistance...comfort...” He struggled to find the right note. “It is not my intent to intrude, but...”
She laid a hand on his shoulder. “No harm. You are right, I am overwhelmed with grief, frustration—and questions.”
Confused by her answer, he tucked her hand in both of his. “Pray what has happened to cause you such distress?”
She shook her head as if dispersing cobwebs. “I shall not burden you with my concerns.”
“Let us walk together.” He took her elbow and they started slowly toward the hospital. “You could never burden me. If you want to speak of whatever has happened, I will gladly listen.”
Then, more to herself than in dialogue with him, she told of the senseless death of the settler’s wife despite efforts to save her. She bit her lip in the effort, he guessed, to keep from crying when she told him about the precious little boy, now motherless. As if coming out of reverie into the harsh light of reality, she vented. “I can’t bear thinking about the travails of women, subject to the whims or ambitions of their husbands, who risk their lives and the lives of their children, for what? For some distant paradise gained only by crossing vast miles of unknown land where death waits at every turn of the trail?” She stopped again, sweeping one arm in a gesture encompassing the empty horizon. “Who leads them? God or ruthless ambition?”
Caleb knew he should be shocked by her
