By the time we make it back to Liberty, it’s half past three. “Where to?” Hester asks.
I shrug. “The hospital.”
The two-story brick house, Dr. Blum’s clinic, sits back from the street on a tree-lined lot, and a woman in a white uniform and a little white hat sits at a desk in the front hall. Apparently nurses no longer wear aprons.
“We’re here to see Mrs. Proudfoot,” the vet starts out. “I’m Dr. Hester, and this is Patience Murphy.” The lady looks confused. She probably wonders who Dr. Hester is, and I try to hide a smile behind the back of my hand. I’d forgotten veterinarians called themselves doctors.
The nurse scans a clipboard in front of her. She runs her finger up and down a short list. “We don’t have a patient named Proudfoot . . . There must be some mistake.”
“Maybe she’s been discharged already. Is Dr. Blum here?” Hester continues. “Can you check your discharge roster?”
“Dr. Blum’s gone. Left for Virginia four days ago. The hospital’s staffed by nurses and Dr. Holden from Delmont, when he can come.” She runs her short nails down a separate clipboard. “There’s no Proudfoot here.” She shakes her head irritably.
“It was a fall, we were told. Maybe a concussion.”
“Are you kin?” the nurse asks.
“Just friends,” I interject. “I’m sure you’d remember her, a big colored woman. Maybe you could ask the matron.”
A light goes on in the little nurse’s eyes. “A Negro woman?” We nod. “Well, she wouldn’t come here. We don’t cater to Negroes.” My stomach goes hollow.
“Come on,” says Hester, grabbing my arm. I can see he’s pissed off. It’s the way she said “We don’t cater to Negroes,” as if this were an ice cream parlor or beauty salon.
Outside, standing next to the car, Hester looks down at me. “So . . . where is she?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’d heard that Blum didn’t deliver black women at his hospital, but I didn’t think that meant he wouldn’t take care of any colored people ever, even in an emergency.”
“God damn Blum!”
“I was flustered, I’m sorry.”
“Let’s go. The son of a bitch!” We get back into his Ford, whip down the street, and pull up at his office.
Inside the white house with the sign on the front, DANIEL HESTER, DVM—DOCTOR OF ANIMALS, LARGE AND SMALL, I’m ushered to a seat in the waiting room.
“ ’Bout time you came in,” says a large, pale, corseted female sitting at a desk. Her gray hair is pulled tight away from her face, and she looks like someone even Hester would be scared of. “Mr. Rhodes called three times, and he’s really sour about it. His best milk cow won’t stand up, has lost her feed, and he wants you there pronto. You have to remember to leave me messages so I know where to find you. I’ve been trying all morning.”
“I need to use the phone, Mrs. Armstrong.” Hester grabs the receiver. “Tell Rhodes, if he calls again, I’ll be there in an hour.” Before this, it hadn’t occurred to me that the vet might be losing business by helping us. I’ve been so caught up in Katherine’s troubles, I hadn’t even thought of my own responsibilities, and in my mind I quickly run over the mothers who are close to term. They should be okay . . . I hope they are okay. I could have at least sent word to Mrs. Potts that I’d be gone. Even then, I didn’t expect it to be all night.
Hester cranks the phone. “Stenger? It’s Hester . . . William MacIntosh’s cook, Mary Proudfoot, had a fall and was taken to a physician. We checked Blum’s hospital, but she’s not there . . . The colored physician, I guess, what’s his name, Robinson?” He’s talking to the pharmacist. “Okay,” he says to the other end of the line. “Yeah, I know where it is.”
Five minutes later we’re back in the Model T motoring toward Mudtown. This is the part of Liberty where most of the blacks live, maybe a hundred of them, lowland that used to be a swamp, but I’ve never been here, not even to a birth. Crossing Main, I observe that William MacIntosh’s sedan is still parked at the Texaco station, but it’s been moved forward into the mechanics’ bay.
We bump across the tracks, and I’m surprised when we pull up at a handsome two-story white clapboard house with its own sign out front: HARPER ROBINSON, MD. I had no idea there was a black doctor in Liberty. Did Mrs. Kelly know? We were here only a year before she died and we were only delivering white babies then, so she wouldn’t have needed him.
Here in West Virginia, until I became acquainted with Bitsy and Mrs. Potts, my life was completely involved with the whites. But “involved” is not the right word. I was never involved with either blacks or whites, only an observer. Once again I see how separate the two worlds are, like a left hand and a right hand that don’t know what the other is doing.
We both jump out, but Hester warns me with a look that he wants to handle this. I collapse back onto the leather seat but leave the door open, watching a group of brown children play in the road.
The rest of the houses along the tracks are much smaller than Robinson’s and are identical except for small changes that have been made since they were constructed: a picket fence here, a porch there, shutters on some. Twenty years ago, the dwellings all belonged to the railroad and were constructed for the workers who built the M and K line for the Baltimore and Ohio. That was back when West Virginia was logged in a flurry, from 1900 to 1920. Mrs. Kelly gave me the history. I only heard her get mad three times . . . That was one.
“The whole damned state was clear-cut,” she said. “And the trees that weren’t chopped went up in smoke with the forest fires that followed.” Other than that, there was just that time when Mr. Finney beat up his pregnant wife and the other time when those street boys made fun of the crippled girl and Sophie chased them away.
The vet and a dark man of about seventy wearing a black suit, vest, and tie stand on the porch talking. They shake hands like two professionals after a consultation. The gentleman, who I take to be Dr. Robinson, adjusts his horn-rimmed glasses, looks down at the car and nods. Then Hester comes around and gets in beside me.
“What? Doesn’t he know where Mary is either?”
Hester runs his hands through his short hair and clears his throat. “Mary’s gone.”