Midwives (1997) Read online

  "You mean Jared, don't you? No, he won't be here. At least I wouldn't think so."

  I fell back against the bench relieved. It was bad enough having to sit within ten or twelve yards of Charlotte's sister and mother; it would have been almost unendurable to watch a lonely widower with one of the two young sons he was now forced to raise on his own.

  "This is no small distinction," Bill Tanner said to the jury pool, pacing slowly between his table and the high bench behind which the judge sat. "An important part of your job will be to understand the difference between reasonable doubt and all conceivable doubt--there's a difference--and to render a verdict accordingly."

  I had no idea whether Tanner was a fly fisherman, but I knew enough adult men in Reddington who fished that I imagined at the time that he was: He walked as if he were wading through shallow water, stepping high and moving with care. He was tall and thin, and in front of a jury he spoke like a grandfather. He seemed patient and methodical, the sort of fellow who would tie a fly with meticulous care and then stand happily in a river casting his line for hours.

  I had heard Tanner's voice twice before on the television news, but that morning was the first time I heard it live, and the first time I heard him speak at length: It was hard to believe this pleasant man was capable of saying the terrible things about my mother he already had, or that he would soon say much worse.

  His hair was mostly gray, and his face deeply lined. He often held his eyeglasses by an earpiece in one hand as he spoke, exposing deep red marks along the sides of his nose where they usually rested. I guessed he was somewhere in his late fifties.

  "What about you, Mr. Goodyear? Would you feel you had to have one-hundred-percent certainty of a person's guilt before you could convict him, or would the elimination of all reasonable doubt do?" he asked.

  "Nothing in this world is a one-hundred-percent sure thing," he answered. Earlier in the morning he had mentioned he was a pressman for a printer in Newport, and his fingertips were discolored by ink.

  "Except taxes," Tanner said. Although he was holding his eyeglasses in one hand, he was holding a piece of paper with a grid on it in the other. The grid listed the possible jurors by row, so Tanner knew all of the people by name.

  "Do you have any children, Mr. Goodyear?"

  "Two boys."

  "How old are they?"

  "One's ten and one's seven. No, eight. He's about to turn eight. Next week."

  "You're married?"

  "Yup. For twelve years."

  "What does your wife do?"

  "She works two days a week at the school cafeteria. And the rest of the time she raises the boys."

  "You grow up around here?"

  "I did."

  "Lucky man," he sighed. "We have here one of the most beautiful parts of the state."

  "I think so."

  "Where were you born?"

  "Newport."

  "In this very city?"

  "Yup."

  "Hospital?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Your boys? How about that? Where were they born?"

  "Same hospital."

  "North Country?"

  "Yup."

  These days, we envision lawyers using podiums and microphones. Back then in our corner of rural Vermont, that wasn't the case. Like stage actors, the lawyers spoke loud enough to be heard, and they did it without seeming to raise their voices. They held their notes in their hands when they spoke, and if they needed a place for papers, they used their tables.

  "Were the labors easy? Hard? Somewhere in between?"

  "They were easy for me," Mr. Goodyear said. "I was at my wife's sister's house eating dinner one time, and in the waiting room with both our families at the other."

  "Were they easy for your wife?"

  "I guess they were. We got two good boys out of 'em."

  "Did you and your wife consider having the boys at home?"

  "You mean instead of a hospital?"

  "Yes. That's exactly what I mean."

  Goodyear smiled. "No, sir. I don't believe that idea even crossed our minds."

  "Let's see," Tanner said. "I haven't visited with Golner. Julia Golner. How are you this morning, Mrs. Golner?"

  "I'm fine."

  "Do you work, Mrs. Golner? Or have you retired?"

  "Oh, I stopped working seven years ago. I'm sixty-eight years old, Mr. Tanner."

  "Does your husband work?"

  "He passed away."

  "I'm sorry. Was this recent?"

  "No. Nineteen seventy-five."

  "Do you have children?"

  She beamed. "Seven. And fifteen grandchildren--my lucky number."

  "Were you born in Vermont?"

  "Yes."

  "In a hospital?"

  "No. I was born in nineteen thirteen. I was born before the World Wars. Both of them!"

  "So you were born at home?"

  "I was born in my mother and father's bedroom, in the farmhouse they lived in for years and years in Orleans."

  "How about your children? Were they born at home, too?"

  "No. Some were. But not all."

  "Would you tell me about that?"

  In a saga of live births and miscarriages that would have continued without pause for two decades had her husband not enlisted in the army in 1943, Mrs. Golner offered an informal history of labor in the Northeast Kingdom between 1932 and 1951, and its migration from home to hospital. She told the court she had had four children before the Second World War in her bedroom, and at least that many miscarriages. She had then had three children after the War, and two more "souls" who never made it through the first trimester.

  Those postwar babies had arrived in hospitals: "I don't know why that was," she said. "I guess we all just decided after the War it was better that way. Safer, I guess."

  "I spent three years in the Pacific. I fought on Iwo Jima."

  "Wounded?"

  "Nope. I was lucky," Mr. Patterson told the state's attorney. A burly man in a turtleneck and a blue sweater that clung to his bulk like a second skin, he sat with his arms folded defiantly across his chest.

  "Your time in the Pacific: Is that why you say you have little ... patience with people who opposed the war in Vietnam?"

  "No. Even if I hadn't been given the opportunity to serve my country, I would expect others to step forward when asked. And we both know a lot didn't."

  "Step forward."

  "That's right."

  "In the sixties and early seventies."

  "Yes."

  "Suppose there was a witness you didn't like, Mr. Patterson. Personally. Could you be fair?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, let's say one side or the other has someone testifying who rubs you the wrong way. Would you listen to their testimony with an open mind?"

  "Yes. It seems to me I would have to. It would be my duty," Mr. Patterson said, but before he had even finished speaking I knew Stephen would draw a line through the fellow's name.

  When we left the courtroom for lunch, we passed by a row of women in the back bench who were starting to nurse their babies. The littlest ones had not been delivered by my mother, since she had stopped practicing almost six months earlier. But there were two babies there my mother had caught in the weeks or months before Charlotte Bedford died, bigger infants between six and nine months old. I watched them at their mothers' breasts for a moment before I saw something infinitely more interesting to me: Some of the reporters, even the female ones, were trying desperately to talk to members of the group during the recess without allowing their eyes to fall below the nursing mothers' foreheads. It was as if they were trying to interview the wall behind them.

  My mother had cinnamon toast and hot chocolate for lunch in a diner, and insisted we stop by the florist on Main Street to look at the fall wreaths on display. When she spoke, she talked of the foliage that year, and the lines of cars with out-of-state plates parked in some spots along the country roads. She thought the maples were a more
vibrant red than usual, and clearly this pleased her.

  Stephen and his little staff never left the courthouse, with the exception of the law clerk named Laurel. She stayed with us when we went to lunch, and it seemed to me her principal responsibility was to help us push by the reporters and tell them with a smile that we had nothing to say.

  "I think you're all doing very well," she told us as we stood for a moment on the sidewalk outside the flower shop's glass window. "I think you make a very good presentation as a family."

  My grandmother beamed and my mother nodded, as if she found great meaning in Laurel's observation. She gave the clerk that smile she had developed like new wrinkles over the past half-year--a smile that was part incredulity and part patience. "Well, you know," she said, her voice completely serious, "we've had a lot of years to get that look just right."

  Once, weeks earlier, I'd peeked out my parents' bedroom window to watch my mother greeting Stephen as he arrived at our house at the end of the day. I had heard a car pulling into our driveway, and so I'd put my homework aside and crossed the house to one of the rooms that faced the front of our home. At breakfast my father had said he wouldn't return until seven or seven-thirty that night, and I'd wanted to see who was stopping by at five in the afternoon.

  It was Stephen. By the time I got to the window, my mother was already outside, strolling down the walk to greet him. She was moving slowly, with the gait of a sleepwalker, or someone preoccupied beyond reason. But I was nevertheless struck by the fact that she had left the house to meet his car: She may have lacked the giddy stride of a young girl in love, she may have been worn down by the wait for the trial, but she still had some desire to give air to those few pleasant sparks life would yet drop before her.

  When Stephen emerged from his car, my mother was already there. She let him take both of her hands in his, and they stood there for a moment with the car door open, the proximity of their legs curtained from me by gray steel.

  . . .

  "Who has the burden of proof?" Stephen asked Lenore Rice, a young woman who worked at the Grand Union in Barton. Lenore was probably six or seven years older than I was, but she didn't look it: She was a small person with petite, barely pubescent features.

  "I don't know what that is," she answered.

  "Burden of proof is a legal term," Stephen began slowly, but without condescension. "We have two sides in this courtroom, the defense and the State. I represent the defense, and sitting over there, Mr. Tanner represents the State. One of us will have to prove something inside these walls over the next few weeks, and one of us won't. Am I the one who has to prove something?"

  "Why, yes," she said. "Of course."

  "And what would that be?"

  "That your person is innocent."

  Stephen nodded, and sat for a moment at the edge of the defense table. Peter handed him the grid listing by row the prospective jurors before he requested it.

  "Mr. Anderson, do you agree with Miss Rice?" Stephen asked after glancing at the sheet of paper. "Do you agree that I have to prove something in these proceedings?"

  "Nope."

  "Why not?"

  "A person is innocent until proven guilty."

  "Indeed," Stephen said, standing and walking toward the first row of the panel. "That's exactly right. What do you do, Mr. Anderson?"

  "I'm an electrician."

  "Thank you. Don't go anywhere, we'll talk some more in a moment. Miss Rice, what do you think of what Mr. Anderson has just said? Have you changed your mind?"

  "About what?"

  "About whether I have to prove my client is innocent."

  "Well, he says you don't."

  "Actually, it's not Mr. Anderson who says I don't, it's our entire philosophy of jurisprudence. Our system of justice. In this country, a person is innocent--absolutely innocent--until proven guilty. If you are a juror, you need to begin this trial with the presumption that the defendant is innocent. Are you okay with that, Miss Rice? Can you do that?"

  She looked down into her lap. "I don't know," she mumbled.

  "You don't know?"

  "It seems to me someone wouldn't be here if he didn't do something wrong."

  Stephen turned to Judge Dorset. "Your Honor, may I approach the bench?"

  The judge nodded, and both Stephen and Bill Tanner stood before the high wooden barricade and whispered with Dorset for a long moment. When they were finished, the judge murmured something to the bailiff. Tanner then retreated to his seat, and Stephen returned to the edge of his table.

  "Miss Rice, you are excused. The court thanks you very much for your willingness to spend the day with us," Judge Dorset said.

  The young woman stood, looking more recalcitrant than relieved, and the bailiff called juror number thirty-two to come forward from one of the rear benches to take her place. Lenore Rice was the fourth person either Stephen or Bill Tanner had not wanted to see among the final fourteen jurors, and had managed to have excused for cause.

  "It's made from organic soybeans," Nancy Hallock said.

  "And you use it instead of milk?" Stephen asked.

  "Yes. We don't have any animal products or by-products in our house."

  "No meat?"

  The woman shivered. "Yuck. God, no."

  "Your family are all strict vegetarians?"

  "Well, my husband and I are. We don't have any children."

  "May I ask how old you are?"

  "You may. I'm forty-one."

  "Do you plan on having children?"

  "I think there are enough people on this planet, don't you? If we decide to have any children, we'll adopt them."

  When I wandered into my mother's office to kiss her good night after the first day of jury selection, she was scribbling in her personal diary at her desk. She had never hidden the fact that she'd been keeping a journal for years, and the loose-leaf binders she used--thick three-ring notebooks covered with thin layers of blue fabric, just like mine--filled the lowest shelf of a bookcase behind the desk. She trusted my father and me to respect her privacy.

  "Do you want more hot water before I go upstairs?" I asked, and motioned toward her half-filled mug of tea.

  "No, I'm okay," she said, and she put down her pen and sat back in her chair. "You were so quiet at dinner tonight. Everything okay?"

  I shrugged. "Guess so."

  "What did you think of your mom's first day in court? Pretty dull stuff, isn't it?" she said, hoping to downplay the significance of what I was witnessing.

  "I thought it was pretty cool."

  She smiled. "At your age, you're only supposed to think rock concerts and cute boys are cool."

  "They are, too."

  "Have you spoken to Tom tonight?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Did you tell him about today?"

  "Only the things Stephen said it was okay to discuss," I lied. In actuality, I had told Tom every detail I could remember.

  "Glad you're there?"

  "Yeah, I am."

  She put down her pen and stretched her arms over her head and behind her back, and her fingertips grazed the bookcase. In addition to her personal notebooks, the bookcase was filled with treatises on birth--books with titles like Spiritual Midwifery and Heart and Hands--and the journals in which my mother kept the medical records of her patients. I knew there were even more records in the wooden filing cabinet beside the bookcase, many of which had been taken by subpoena by the State.

  "I'll bet it makes you want to be a lawyer when you grow up," she said, and she rolled her eyes.

  "Or a midwife."

  "Right. Or a midwife."

  From where I stood I could see the lines and lines of blue ink that rolled over the white pages like waves. She wrote on the front and back of each sheet, so when the notebook was opened flat the effect was vaguely reminiscent of a very large book.

  "Think this will be over soon?" I asked.

  "Oh, I think so, sweetheart," my mother said, her voice tinged with concern for me. I
nstantly I regretted my question. "Stephen says the trial should only last two weeks."

  "And I'm sure we'll win," I said, hoping to give her the impression I was so confident that--on top of everything else--she needn't worry about her fourteen-year-old daughter.