Instead she decides to open up. “It just looks a lot worse than it really is. Harold will join his maker soon, and a man as good as your dad is sure to be let into heaven. With Cabot, well, I still think he can make it to getting clean. He’s a son of a bitch with the drugs, but he could still pull through. Best of all, I got you and Willie, and even The Duke is being neat and nice this visit.”

She pauses. She closes her eyes. Then she opens them. “You might feel this yourself, you know. It’s the birthing life that brought me most of my joy and most of my sorrow. The beautiful new babes for the moms and dads who wanted them so bad…Nothing could have been nicer than that. But…” And she pauses again.

“You’re thinking about the babies you lost?” I suggest.

“No, not really. That’s God’s way. And, if I say so myself, I was a mighty fine midwife.”

“You were,” I say, and I do mean what I say.

“When I think about it,” she says. And she takes a moment to do exactly that. Then she reminisces for both of us. “So many nervous-making things. The Nickelson twins. They had to send one of the two boys to Children’s Hospital in Philly to figure out what his gender was. He had a whole hodgepodge of parts down there.”

“I remember that. Today they would have waited until the baby was older and let him or her decide.”

She talks about the time Larry Staubach, a farm equipment mechanic, was so drunk when Mom arrived for his child’s birth that he stood watching the four hours of labor with a bottle of Dewar’s in one hand and a pump-action hunting rifle in the other.

“I guess if I did something wrong, he was going to shoot me,” Mom says, not joking. “Good thing that little Larry came out as perfect as the Lord intended him. Course little Larry didn’t stay perfect. They got him for armed robbery of a hardware store up by Altoona.”

Mama’s memory battery is turned up real high now. She’s enjoying the talking. She remembers piecing together double boilers and goose down pillows to make an incubator until an ambulance arrived. She remembers little children helping out with the delivery when there were no adult hands available. She even remembers an encounter that was so frightening “I thought I was walking through a horror movie.”

I vaguely remember her telling me the tale once before.