Magda tutted. “You both will have to learn to replace the other. It is best for knowledge to be beyond one mind.”
I saw the same pride I had in making the indigo-root decoction inmy twin’s face. She had been an exemplary midwife’s apprentice that day.
I had been a poor one.
I tried my best not to grow queasy at the bedside of a delivery. I even took on the tasks of collecting the baby from the mother’s sex and cutting the cord. I too learned to wipe off the muck of a womb from its skin. I was disgusted the entire time. It was not from any disrespect for the mother or motherhood itself. And hours after a babe was born, even wrinkled and rather ugly, I could see the beauty in new life. But this part of the work did not come naturally to me the way it did to Rowena.
“She has more compassion in her day-to-day nature,” Magda said to me once when I was—again outside the home of a delivering mother—swallowing bile and trying to breathe in fresh air.
We were standing just outside the family’s door, another sharecropper’s wife having yet another babe. Magda had lit her pipe inside from their hearth, and that pink smoke was filtering out of her nose. She sighed and leaned against the side of the house. “I’m going to let Rowena finish this one. She has the touch.”
I tried not to visibly wilt. Magda thought I had no compassion and no skill for her profession. And all of my success from the day prior, foraging for wild coriander in Nyossa, finding more of it and more quickly than Rowena, seemed to fade from my mind. We had been asked what it was for. Rowena, despite her reading the same books I had been reading, was flustered. I had proudly declared it could be chewed without preparation or distilling, calming an upset stomach or sweetening bad breath.
But there I was, barely able to keep my guts from creeping up my throat at the sight of a woman giving birth. And my mentor thought that was evidence of my lack of compassion. Yet I felt tremendous sympathy for women delivering children. It seemed like the most pain a mortal body could endure.
“Yes,” Magda said, gritting the pipe in her teeth as she often did. “Hers is a day-to-day kind of kindness. Yours is deeper. Less easy to spot, but there.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, turning to her.
“I mean your sister has a readiness to her for compassion. It comes quickly to her. She dispenses it with ease. But ask her to stay andremaincompassionate to just one or even a handful of people, and she’ll find it hard. That’s no criticism, understand. It’s how she was made. It’s why she’s better liked than you.”
I turned away from the midwife, confused and hurt.
“Now, you,” she went on, sucking at the end of her pipe, thinking aloud almost more to herself than to me. “You’ve a hard kind of love inside you. It’s a good thing, an enduring thing, but it’s difficult. It stings. It’s like nettle. You’re like nettle, Roberta.”
Hot tears formed at the back of my throat, threatening to come forth. Magda was speaking what I had always feared, what I had never let myself dwell on. Iwasa difficult girl, an unlikable thing. Here was this woman, the first person I had known outside of my own sister or Tibolt to inspire love and admiration in me. I loved my sister and I loved my old priest, but both of them had observed my shortcomings and pointed them out to me.
Could I simply have one love in my life, one love from someone free of contempt or critique?
“Like nettle,” Magda repeated. “Stings you something sore if you touch it, if you don’t respect it. But if you are cautious with it, if you wear gloves when you harvest it, if you collect it with gratitude, it’ll heal what ails. And it works very hard in the body. It makes piss come more easily. It eases a woman’s bellyaches. It can reduce the sneezing some folk have from hay and ragweed. It can make dry skin ripe and oily skin clear. It makes blood flow better and stronger.”
“And I’ve heard it can harm a pregnant woman,” I added bitterly.
Magda harrumphed, eyes on the fields that were worked by the family. “Nonsense. Nettle fortifies the blood. It’s a confusing, wondrous plant. Stupid people call it demon’s apron.” She exhaled from her nose, the smoke swirling around her haggard face. “Roberta, you are so used to hearing damnation of yourself, you cannot understand praise when it is offered up to you on a plate.”
I sniffled. My teenage heart could not weather any more of her stricture. Did no one love me without some reproof?
She had turned to me, but I refused to look at her. “Your love might be prickly, but that is why it is a powerful thing. You do not disperse it freely, as an easy thing for just anyone. That makes this life a challenge for you. But it is to you people will turn whentheyare challenged. Because of your nettle love. Prickly but useful. What is wrong with being prickly?”
I shrugged and turned my face into my lifted shoulder to rid my cheek of tears. “Scriptures say a woman is best when she smiles, happy in her lot. That’s what everyone says.”
“Whose definition of ‘best’ though?” asked Magda.
I finally turned to her. “What do you mean?”
“Your Rodwin says a woman is best when she is happy. That’shisdefinition of best,hisdefinition of happy. What about yours?”
She had flummoxed me. No one had ever asked me what I thought happiness was. I had no answer for her.
“Your belly’s being soured at a birth does not make you ill-suited to the work itself,” she went on. “You’ll get used to it. It’s just the way your senses work, the way humors are aligned in you. Same thing with your sister hating the stench of indigo. Stop fretting about yourvalue. That’s the insanity your godsdamn church does that frustrates me so.”
I balked and looked around, worried she was speaking too loudly.
“It does it to the boys too, not just the girls,” Magda rambled on, waving the stem of her pipe at me. “It makes children so convinced they are nuisances that they are afraid to be anything but polite.”
“Boys are allowed to be impolite,” I countered.
“In the name of manhood, yes,” she agreed with me. “But they are considered a nuisance if they cry or show weakness. Just like a girl is considered a nuisance if she is unpleasant or wants something forherself. It strips the child of its natural inclinations. It interferes with a child’s ability to commune with the divine.”
