Faith And Betrayal A Pioneer Woman's Passage in the American West

Chapter One "Worth a Long Walk to See" September 23, 1873. Jean Rio delivers the Ayer baby girl at five-fifteen p.m., after a relatively easy labor, and the mother sleeps quietly for the next several hours. "Had a good night," Jean Rio records in her midwife's notebook. ("The baby grows nicely [and] all seemed to enjoy themselves," she notes nearly a month later, after the mother brings the newborn and the rest of her children to pay a visit.) It is not always as easy as it might seem. Even the uncomplicated births like Mrs. Ayer's are trials, the mother usually moaning and screaming in desperation through a long, painful labor to the final agony and then the sudden release of delivery. Often there are tests and horrors Jean Rio must face and somehow cope with, using only her hands and her self-taught skills, experience, and inherent fortitudehemorrhaging or mortally ill mothers; distressed, deformed, or stillborn babiesa bloody life-and-death struggle no less of a test than any battle faced by a man. When she cleans up afterward, changing one plain dressnow stainedfor another, washing the blood and afterbirth from her hands and arms, she removes her rings, a fine gold band and an exquisite small sapphire set in platinum. They are hardly the rings of a hardworking midwife on the raw California frontier of the late nineteenth century. She might seem a plain, even ordinary, woman of her time and place. But the unexpected grace and beauty of the rings match her own dignity and gentility. The rings signal that she is something other than an ordinary woman. In her diary entry for October 23, she allows herself one of the rare references these days to the past that the rings echo. "Clear and lovely as a spring morning in England," she writes. "This summer was worth a long walk to see." How long a walk it has been, what a dramatic journey full of trust and betrayal, faith and disillusion, defeat and triumph, loss and gain! None of her new friends and neighbors in this rural hamlet can imagine it. Only the rings and her obvious refinement and intellect, partially obscured by her unpretentious bearing, give a hint of the stark contrast between her past and present. Once she wore the finest gowns of European couturea wardrobe so vast it had taken nearly an entire wagon to transport. Here she dresses in homespun. Once she performed the classics of song on the stages of Paris and London. Now she performs the exhausting rites of life and death, work no woman of her former station would have deigned to do. Most dramatically, once she was a prize convert to a powerful faith. Now she lives as a discreet fugitive from the betrayal of all that brought her here. Chapter Two A Wine Cask on the Channel Tumbrils filled with entire families rolled along the cobblestone streets of Paris toward the guillotine amid howls and screams. All day, every day during 1792, the killing device was busy, corpses piling up faster than they could be disposed of. More than forty thousand people went to their deaths in those small carts. The decapitation was swift, taking less than half a second from the blade drop to the rolling headthe guillotine was "an instrument adopted by the Revolutionists for the more scientific and humane beheading of the condemned." Almost all the members of the Rio family from Lamballe, Brittanyrenamed Cotes-du-Nord by the revolutionary governmentwere among them. "Hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victimsold men, young women, tiny childrenuntil the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen," as one fiDenton, Sally is the author of 'Faith And Betrayal A Pioneer Woman's Passage in the American West', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400034734 and ISBN 1400034736.