After writing The Letter From Della (Smith) Carringer Arrives in Nebraska in August 1889, asking her mother to come help with her first baby, I asked Anthropic Claude to write the story of Abbey Smith's train trip from McCook, Nebraska to San Diego, California in 1889, based on Abbey's biography. That story is in Abbey Smith’s Journey West To San Diego In 1889.
A Carringer Son is Born
National City, California — August 31, 1889
Della
The pains had started in the night, low and dull at first, easy enough to mistake for the ordinary discomfort she'd carried the last month of this endless summer. By the time the sky had gone gray at the window she knew better, and lay very still for a while, counting, before she woke Austin at all.
"How long," he said, already half out of the bed, "how long have you been lying there not telling me?"
"Not long. Go for your mother — no, go for Mrs. Halloway first, then wake Mother, she'll only fuss less if she hears it from you and not from me hollering."
He went, and Della lay alone a few minutes in the graying light, one hand spread over the great tight mound of her belly, feeling it draw up hard and then ease, and thought, with something between terror and a strange calm she hadn't expected to feel: today, then. Today I meet you.
By the time her mother came in — hair still loose from sleep, wrapper thrown on over her nightdress, moving with a speed Della hadn't seen from her since she arrived — the pains had drawn closer together, and Della found she was glad, more glad than she could have said, simply to see her mother's face bent over her.
"There now," Abbey said, taking her hand, "there now, I've done this six times myself, you'll manage it. How close are they coming?"
"I don't — I can't rightly say. Close."
"Close enough. Good." Her mother's hand was cool and steady on her forehead. "Breathe through it, don't fight it, it does its work faster if you let it."
The morning went on that way, in a haze of pain that came and went and came again, closer each time, her mother's voice a low steady thread through all of it — breathe, there, it's easing now, rest while you can — until the words themselves stopped meaning much and became only sound, only her mother's voice, the one constant thing in a room that had otherwise narrowed down to nothing but her own body and its terrible, necessary work.
When Mrs. Halloway arrived — a broad, capable woman with graying hair and forearms like a washerwoman's, who'd midwifed half of National City by her own account — she took one look and one touch and said, with the flat certainty of long experience, "Well before noon, I'd say. This one's in a hurry."
Della, between pains, thought she might have laughed if she'd had the breath for it, and it seemed fitting enough that her own child should be in such a hurry to arrive.
By midmorning the room had narrowed to almost nothing — her mother on one side, Mrs. Halloway at the foot of the bed, low murmured instruction passing between them that Della only half heard, riding each wave as it came and finding, somewhere past the point where she'd have said she couldn't bear another one, that she bore it anyway, because there was nothing else to be done and because her mother's hand never once let go of hers.
"There's the head," Mrs. Halloway said at last, in a voice gone suddenly bright with purpose. "One more good push now, Mrs. Carringer, just the one—"
And then, all at once, the terrible tightness broke and there was a sound in the room that hadn't been there before — thin and outraged and entirely new — and Della lay back against the pillow with tears running sideways into her hair, laughing and crying at once, while her mother's face above her broke into an expression Della had not seen on it before, not once in her whole life, something unguarded and shining.
"A boy," Mrs. Halloway said, working quick and sure. "A fine big boy, and loud with it, which is only good news."
"Let me see him," Della said, or tried to say, her voice not quite her own. "Mother — let me see—"
And then he was there, red and furious and impossibly small, laid against her chest, and Della forgot the whole of the last twelve hours in the single fact of him.
Abbey
Abbey had sat at enough bedsides in her life — her own six times over, and her sisters', and neighbor women's in every county they'd ever lived — that she thought she had grown past being frightened by it. She discovered, sitting beside Della through that long morning with her daughter's hand gripped tight in her own, that this was not entirely true. There was a particular fear reserved for watching your own child labor that nothing in her own confinements had prepared her for.
"Breathe through it," she said, over and over, because it was true and because it gave her something to say besides the fear. "Don't fight it, Della, let it do its work. There now. There now."
She remembered — could not help remembering, sitting there — her own first labor, Della's own birth, twenty-seven years gone now, in Devier's father's home -- an inn -- in Rolling Prairie with her own mother sitting beside her, and a neighbor woman she'd known scarcely a year helping. She had sworn to herself then, young and frightened and far from home, that if she ever had a daughter of her own who labored, she would be there for it, whatever the distance. She had crossed near two thousand miles this past week to keep that promise, though she had not put it to herself in quite those words until this morning.
Mrs. Halloway was competent — Abbey approved of her within the first quarter hour, the particular quick, unhurried competence of a woman who had done this a great many times and did not waste effort on anything but what the moment required — and this eased something in Abbey's chest, to have a steady hand in the room besides her own.
"You're doing well," she told Della, again and again, smoothing the damp hair back from her daughter's forehead. "You are doing just exactly as you ought."
When the child finally came — quick, as these things went, Mrs. Halloway said, though it had not felt quick sitting through it — and that thin outraged cry filled the room, Abbey felt something break open in her own chest that she had not expected, a rush of feeling too large and too many-sided to properly name. Relief, first and foremost, that Della had come through it well. Joy, plain and uncomplicated, at the sound of a new voice in the world. And underneath both of those, something else — the sudden, vivid memory of holding this same daughter as a newborn herself, in a different house, a different life ago, and the strange doubled feeling of watching that circle close.
"A grandson," she said, and found her voice was not quite steady. "Della, look what you've done."
Austin
Austin had been banished from the room entirely — Mrs. Halloway's doing, firm and immovable on the point, and Abbey had backed her without hesitation — and so he spent the morning doing the only thing left to a man in his situation, which was to wear a groove in the boards of his own front porch and listen, with his stomach in a knot the whole while, to the sounds coming from the bedroom.
He had known, in an abstract way, that childbirth was hard on a woman. He had not understood, until he stood outside that closed door hearing Della's voice go from ordinary to strained to something he'd never heard from her before, what that abstraction actually meant, and he found himself, more than once that morning, gripping the porch rail hard enough that his knuckles went white, praying in a rough, wordless way to a God he did not often trouble in the ordinary run of things.
His neighbor Tom Hargrove came by midmorning, saw the state of him, and had the good sense to simply sit down on the porch step beside him without much conversation, which Austin was grateful for in a way he didn't have words to express at the time.
"First one's always the longest wait," Tom said eventually. "Mine took the better part of two days, my Sarah. You've nothing to complain of yet."
"I'm not complaining," Austin said, though his voice came out tighter than he meant it. "I just don't know what a man's meant to do with himself, sitting out here."
"Nothing to be done. That's the whole of it. Nothing to be done but wait and let the women get on with it, same as they always have."
The waiting stretched on, each hour longer than the last, until somewhere near noon the sounds from within changed again — a rising urgency he could hear even through the closed door and the thin walls — and Austin came up off the porch step without quite deciding to, standing at the door with his heart going hard in his chest, not knowing whether to knock or simply wait.
And then he heard it: a new sound, thin and sharp and utterly unlike anything that had come before, and every hair on his arms stood up at once.
He did not remember crossing the porch or opening the door, only that he was suddenly in the doorway of the bedroom, and Mrs. Halloway was saying something about giving them just a moment more, and Abbey was turning toward him with tears standing plain in her eyes and something in her face he had never seen there before, and past her, in the bed, Della was looking up at him with an expression of such pure, exhausted joy that it undid him entirely.
"Austin." Her voice was hoarse but steady. "Come see your son."
He crossed the room on legs that did not feel entirely his own, and looked down at the small red furious face against Della's chest, and felt something in his own chest simply give way.
"Devier David," Della said, watching his face. "For your father, and for mine. Is that — will that suit?"
Austin could not, for a moment, manage any words at all. He knelt by the bed instead and put his hand, very carefully, against the impossibly small curl of his son's fist, and felt the tiny fingers close around one of his own with a grip that seemed, absurdly, already strong.
"That suits," he finally managed, his voice not entirely steady either. "That suits just fine."
Behind him, in the doorway, Abbey stood watching the three of them — her daughter, her son-in-law, and the newest small stranger who carried both grandfathers' names into a family that had crossed half a continent to be gathered, for this one morning, all in a single room — and thought that whatever else this long westward journey had cost the family over the years, it had brought them, at last, to this.
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Author’s Note: This is a work of historical fiction imagining the birth, grounded in the documented fact of Devier David Carringer's birth on August 31, 1889, and the family's presence in National City at that time. The specifics of the labor, the midwife, and the conversations are invented, as no firsthand account survives.
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The AI Google NotebookLM Video Overview of this story is in (and on my YouTube channel):
This is historical fiction based on known events in the lives of my ancestors -- it might have been this way. Abigail (Vaux) Smith is my 2nd great-grandmother through her daughter Della (Smith) Carringer (1862-1944), and I have significant information about this family from the available records, but I know nothing about their day-to-day lives.
As always, I am amazed at what life was like in any place over 130 years ago. This description of the birth of Devier David Carringer in National City in 1889 is interesting and so different from our current daily activities.
After I read these types of social history summaries, I wish that I could be a time traveler for one day to visit this Carringer family in 1889 San Diego and witness their daily lives. I'm glad that the general lifestyles and occupations are known from historical records and witness accounts.
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