Women’s Work

The origins of “Wonderful Words of Life” in The Plain Sense of Things by Pamela Carter Joern

                              

Several years ago I sat with my mother and my Aunt Fern at Fern’s kitchen table. We drank tea and ate oatmeal cookies. Fern was my father’s sister, and though she and my mother lived in the same town until Fern died, they were different people. Fern loved opera which my mother considered overly highbrow. Fern was a staunch Democrat, while the only Democrat my mother ever voted for was FDR. Still, they shared a lot of history, a love of family, and a deep reliance on faith. By then, when both of them were in their 70’s, they had gone to the same Baptist Church all of their adult lives.

I was the out of town visitor. I had lived away so long that there was little to talk about except the past, which is how we ventured into talking about forgotten people of the church. A woman’s name came up—I’ll call her Mrs. Foster, as I did in the story I eventually wrote about her. She had a baby girl the same age as me.
    “Did she have a husband?” Aunt Fern asked.
    “She had someone,” Mom said. “People said they weren’t married. He traveled.”
    “Gambled, I heard.”
    “Could be.”
    “I didn’t know her.”
    “They weren’t here long. I did keep her children one time.”
    “You did?” I prodded.
    “She asked me after church. Said she had something to do, and would I mind keeping them for a day? Well, what could I say?”
    “So?”
    “She brought them all the way out to our house. That man was with her. She said she’d be back by evening, only she wasn’t. Not the next day either. Your dad was fit to be tied. He thought she dumped those three kids on us.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I took care of them. And the three of you. I went into town to ask some of her relation, but they didn’t know anything. She showed up on the third day.”
    “What’d she say?”
    Mom shifted in her chair, passed a conspiratorial glance at my Aunt Fern. “I’ll always think she had an abortion. I don’t know that. But that’s what I think.”
    “It’s terrible,” my aunt said.
    I felt my feminist political hackles rise. But then Mom said,  “Poor thing.”
    “What else could she do?” Aunt Fern said.
    We sat there, three modern women, two of a generation that came of age long before Roe vs. Wade, and I got a glimpse of how it used to be, how it still is in many places in the world. An underworld of women helps other women who find themselves in desperate situations. They do not forget, and years later, perhaps over tea and cookies, they remember their names.
    I wanted to write about that glimpse, and so I did, in a short story titled “Wonderful Words of Life” that eventually found its way into The Plain Sense of Things.   

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Buy Pamela Carter Joern’s The Plain Sense of Things, available September 15th by the University of Nebraska Press