Midwives (1997) Read online

  TANNER: I'll repeat my question. Do you think you're qualified to perform this surgery?

  DANFORTH: No, and I've never said that I thought I was.

  TANNER: And yet you did. With a kitchen knife, on a living woman, you--

  DANFORTH: I would never endanger the mother to save the fetus--

  TANNER: You didn't endanger the mother, you killed--

  HASTINGS: Objection!

  Perhaps I should have been surprised that by the end of the trial my father had any hair left at all. In photographs taken the following winter, his hair looks as if it has begun to gray, but the sideburns are as prominent as ever.

  My mother's calling--to her it was never a job or even a career--meant that my father was much more involved with me as a child than the fathers of most of my friends were with them. There was always a long list of baby-sitters pressed against the refrigerator door with a magnet, and occasionally I did indeed wind up with my mother at somebody's delivery, but birth is as unpredictable as it is time-consuming, and my father often filled the Connie-care breach. After all, I was an only child and my mother would have to disappear for twelve hours, or a day, or a day and a half at a time.

  My father wasn't much of a playmate when it came to dressing dolls or banging plastic pots and skillets around my toy kitchen (actually, he wasn't very good with regular cast-iron or metal ones either), but he was creative when I needed new voices for trolls, and extremely handy when it came to building a permanent playhouse from wood, or a temporary one from card tables and bed sheets. He would usually endure whatever program I wanted to watch on television, even if it meant an irritating struggle adjusting the rabbit ears atop the television set for a full fifteen minutes before my show began. (Reception in our part of Vermont then was laughably poor. I remember a day one spring--when the baseball season had begun and the basketball and hockey seasons were in the midst of their endless play-offs--when my father was watching a basketball game through so much screen snow and fuzz that my mother sat down on the couch beside him, thumbed through a magazine for five or ten minutes, then looked up and inquired, "What sport is this?")

  My father and I also spent a fair amount of time together driving around northern Vermont in his Jeep: Often he was chauffeuring Rollie and me to the bookstore or the toy shop in distant Montpelier, the tack shop in St. Johnsbury, or to some third friend's home in Hardwick or Greensboro or Craftsbury. One September and October, it seemed, he was driving us somewhere every single day, and then working at the dining-room table in our home all night to try and keep up with the work he was missing nine to five at his office: There had been a notable baby boom in the county that fall, roughly nine months after the coldest, harshest winter in years, and my mother was busy.

  And although my father was unfailingly patient with me, and always at least feigned contentment at the prospect of another Saturday afternoon or Wednesday evening with only an eight- or a nine-year-old child for company, I know the demands of my mother's calling strained their marriage. When they fought, and I remember them fighting most when I was in elementary school and at that age when I was at once young enough to need virtually constant supervision by someone and old enough to understand on some level the dynamics of what was occurring, their arguments would filter up through the registers in the ceilings of the rooms on the first floor of our house.

  "She needs a mother, dammit!" my father would snap, or "You're never here for her!" or "I can't do this alone!" Against all experience, he continued to believe he could use me as a trump card to convince my mother to stay home. It never worked, which usually compelled him to change his tactics from guilt to threats:

  "I didn't marry you to live in this house all alone!"

  "A marriage demands two people's attention, Sibyl."

  "I will have a wife in this world, Sibyl. That's a fact."

  At the beginning of these fights, my mother always sounded more perplexed and hurt than angry, but underneath that initial sadness in her tone was a stubbornness as unyielding as Vermont granite. She could no sooner stop delivering babies than people could stop having them.

  But I also believe that my father deserves high marks for simply enduring all that he did: The husbands of most midwives don't put up with their spouses' hours for long, especially once they are fathers themselves, and most of my mother's midwife friends had been divorced at least once.

  Usually my parents' arguments ended in silence, often because my father was incredulous:

  "Wait a minute. Didn't the baby arrive at six in the evening?" I might hear my father asking.

  "Yup. Julia. Such a pretty girl."

  "It's past nine o'clock! What the hell have you been doing for the last three hours?"

  "Folding baby clothes. You know I love folding baby clothes."

  "You were folding baby clothes for three hours? I suppose the parents own a store that sells baby clothes?"

  "Oh, for God's sake, Rand. You know I didn't stay there just to fold baby clothes. I wanted to make sure everyone was okay. It is their first child, you know."

  "So how long did you spend--"

  "Thirty minutes, Rand. I probably spent thirty minutes actually folding Onesies and Julia's tiny little turtlenecks."

  "But you did hang around for three hours--"

  "Yes, I did. I made sure Julia was nursing, and Julia's mom was up and around. I made sure the family had plenty of food in the refrigerator, and the neighbors were planning to bring by casseroles for the next few days."

  "And you made sure the baby's clothes were folded."

  "You bet," my mother might say, and I could see in my mind my father shaking his head in quiet astonishment. A moment later I would hear him leave the kitchen, where they might have been bickering, and go upstairs alone to their bedroom. Sometimes, later, I'd hear them make love as they made up: To this day, I remember the noise their bed made as among the most reassuring sounds I've ever heard.

  Unfortunately, there were also those fights that would escalate and become ugly, sometimes because my father had been drinking. He might have been drunk when my mother returned, and she might have been tired and cranky. This was a combustible mix. And while my mother would never drink to catch up--her sense of responsibility as a midwife prevented her from drinking or smoking pot whenever she was on call--when she was hurt she could lash out with a fury that was both articulate and verbally violent. I never heard my parents slap or hit each other, but powered by bad scotch and exhaustion, they'd say things as wounding as a fist. Maybe even more so. I'd hear expressions and exchanges I didn't understand at the time but that frightened me nonetheless because I knew someday I would.

  I never told Rollie the details of my parents' fights, but I told her enough that one day she gave me some advice that served me well: Every so often, replace an inch or so of the Clan MacGregor with an inch or so of tap water. Be judicious if the bottle is low, and always mark in your mind the exact spot on the label the fluid had reached--the hem of the bagpiper's kilt or the bagpipe itself, for example, or the bottom of the letters that spelled the scotch's brand name.

  She had been doing this with her own parents for years, she said, and look at how well their marriage worked.

  On those nights my father chose to smother his frustrations with scotch, my parents' fights were like powerful three A.M. thunderstorms: loud and scary, sometimes taking an agonizingly long time to blow over, but causing little apparent damage. When I would scan our yard in the morning after even an especially fierce and frightening August storm, the sunshine usually revealed only minor damage. Some of the white, late-summer blossoms from the hydrangea might be on the ground; a sickly maple might have lost a few leaves; behind our house, there might even have been a small branch from a tree in the woods, blown onto the lawn by the wind.

  But the sunshine always reassured me that the storms were never as bad as they'd sounded, and usually I felt that way after my parents' fights when we'd all have breakfast together the next day. I know my
parents never stopped loving each other--passionately, madly, chaotically--and one or the other of them was always there for me.

  Given the amount of time I spent being transported places by my father when I was growing up, it shouldn't surprise me that my first exposure to the Bedfords was with him. But of course it was through my mother that our families' fates were linked: Mrs. Bedford was one of my mother's patients and the center of the very public tragedies our two families faced.

  Mrs. Bedford--Charlotte Fugett Bedford, I would learn later in the newspapers--was from Mobile, Alabama. (It's tempting to refer to her as "one of the Mobile Fugetts," but that would imply a lineage more impressive than the generations of sharecroppers and bootleggers and petty thieves that I know were in fact her ancestry.) Her husband, the Reverend Asa Bedford, was from a tiny Alabama town, farther in from the coast, called Blood Brook. Years later, when I decided to visit the area, I stared at the small dot that marked it on an auto club map of the state for hours at a time before finally venturing there. When I arrived, I was at once frightened and surprised by the accuracy of my imagination. It was a dirt crossroad of shanties, the air thick with mosquitoes and flies, and a heat that would wilt Vermont gardens in minutes.

  In my mind there was no school in Blood Brook, and indeed there was not. I had always envisioned a church there to inspire Asa, and indeed there was. White paint peeled off its clapboards like rotting skin, and spiked grass grew tall in the cracks of its front walk: With the end of the world imminent, there was little reason to paint or weed.

  That geographic background noted and my own cattiness revealed, I should also note that I liked the Bedfords very much when I met them. Most people did: They were apocalyptic eccentrics, but she was sweet and he was kind. I know they had followers and I assume they had friends.

  When they came to Vermont, the Bedfords lived thirty minutes north of us in Lawson, and Reverend Bedford's small parish was another twenty or thirty minutes north of that, in Fallsburg. His church--a renovated Quaker meetinghouse ten miles northwest of Newport, on a two-lane state highway with nothing around it but trees--was an easy morning walk to the Canadian border. At its peak, Bedford's congregation consisted of roughly five dozen parishioners from Vermont and Quebec's Eastern Townships who believed with all their hearts that the Second Coming would occur in their lifetime.

  When the Bedfords arrived in the Green Mountains, convinced that Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom was ripe for revival, they had one child, a seven-year-old boy they named Jared, but whom Mrs. Bedford always called Foogie--a diminutive, of sorts, for her own family's name.

  Even if my mother had not been a midwife, I would have met the Bedfords, although I don't imagine I would have gotten to know them as well as I did, or that today our families' two names would be linked in so many people's minds. And although the first link between us was byzantine, it was as natural, cohesive, and inextricable as an umbilical cord. Foogie was schooled at home by his parents, which meant that my friend Rollie's mother visited the family periodically as an examiner for the state education department. It was Mrs. McKenna's responsibility to make sure that the family was adhering to the basics of the required curriculum. Perhaps because the Bedfords were new to Vermont, perhaps because Mrs. McKenna wanted to be sure that young Foogie had as much exposure as possible to the world beyond his father's church, she recommended her daughter, Rollie, as a diligent and responsible baby-sitter for the boy.

  It was therefore in the capacity of friend of the baby-sitter that I first met the Bedfords, when my father drove me there late on a Saturday afternoon to keep Rollie company while she took care of Foogie that night. Rollie had been there since breakfast, while the Reverend and Mrs. Bedford were in southern New Hampshire at a Twin State Baptist conference. Although they weren't Baptists, Asa was usually able to find a family or two at these sorts of weekend retreats who would listen with interest to his beliefs, and consider an invitation to his church.

  Their house was modest and old, and buried in deep wood at the end of a long dirt road. A century ago the woods had been meadows and farmland, my father observed the first time he drove me there, motioning out the window of the Jeep at the squat, mossy stone walls we passed as we bounced down the road. I couldn't imagine such a thing; I couldn't imagine someone clearing forest this thick in an era before chain saws and skidders.

  Although most Vermont hill farmers were careful to construct their homes on the peaks of their property, there were some who for one reason or another chose valleys--perhaps because a dowser had found a shallow well there. Whoever had built the Bedford place a hundred years ago was among those exceptions. I could feel myself lurching forward in the Jeep as we descended deeper into the woods, and the vehicle's lap belt pressed against my waist.

  My first impression of the Bedford place--an impression garnered two months before my thirteenth birthday--was that someone with little money or carpentry skill was working hard to keep it tidy. The grass was high in the small lawn surrounding the house, as if it hadn't been cut yet that spring (Memorial Day was just over a week away), but someone had laid square pieces of bluestone in a path from the dirt road to the front door so recently that I could actually see the prints from a human palm pressed flush in the dirt against the stones' edges. Two of the windows on the first floor had long cracks sealed with white putty, but behind the panes were delicate, lacy curtains. Many of the clapboards were rotting, but the nails that were slammed through them to keep them attached to the exterior walls were so new that the sides of the house were sprinkled with small silver dots.

  The place was a compact two-story box, its roof's angle wide and gentle, its walls the yellow of daffodils. The paint had begun to flake, but it was still bright enough that when the Reverend Bedford started up his car to drive Rollie and me home that night, the beams from his headlights gave the house a sulfurous glow.

  The Saturday I met the three Bedfords--Foogie in late afternoon and the Reverend and his wife close to ten o'clock at night--the cluster of cells that would become Veil (spelled with an e for reasons I imagine only Asa fully understood) did not yet exist, but would be formed very soon.

  Whatever fears of or enthusiasms for the apocalypse Asa harbored inside him were not usually apparent in his appearance. His face was almost as round as his eyeglasses, and his hair had receded back far on his head; what hair he had, however, was thick and reddish brown. Most of the times that I saw him he was wearing crisp, well-ironed white shirts, fully buttoned. He was, like my father, a man who I assumed had been quite thin when he was young, but was now growing wide and heavyset around the middle.

  He looked like the sort of rural businessman I might observe in St. Johnsbury or Montpelier: not as sophisticated, in my eyes anyway, as the executives I'd see on television or, of course, my own father.

  He was also one of those rare and special adults who was capable of being every bit as silly as children. And Foogie adored him for it. I saw Asa pretend to be a mule and walk the lawn on his hands and knees, snorting and neighing and carrying his delighted son on his back. I witnessed the preacher waddling like a duck for Foogie, and making up rhymes to teach the boy how to spell certain sounds:

  "Fox! Box! Boston Red Sox!"

  "I was sent for the rent on the polka-dot tent!"

  "I wish the fish would eat from a dish, because now there's fish food on the floor!"

  Around Rollie and me he was gentle and serene; I understood on some level that he was considered a little strange by most people, but my family and the McKennas certainly didn't object to us being around him or his family. The Northeast Kingdom has always had its share of cults and communes, and Asa's little church was simply one more essentially harmless example.

  On the other hand, although I never heard him preach, I imagined he was partial to what I would now call the spider-and-fly school of sermons. Sometimes he would allow himself the sort of remark in front of Rollie and me that certainly would have alarmed our parents had we share
d it with them. One particularly dark night when he was about to drive the two of us home after we'd taken care of Foogie, he stood on his bluestone walk and looked up into the black sky and murmured, "Soon night shall be no more. Soon we'll need no light of lamp or sun."

  On another occasion, when Mrs. Bedford was upstairs putting Foogie to bed and he saw that the only mail he had received that day were bills from the phone and gas companies, he said to the envelopes--unaware that Rollie and I were within earshot--"I am indeed happy to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, especially since I know you will all burn that second death in the lake of fire."

  He had a thick southern accent, which made his sentences always sound like songs to me, even if some of those songs could be unexpectedly frightening.

  Charlotte Bedford was a petite, fragile-looking woman, barely bigger than Rollie and me as our bodies approached their teens. She was not tall, and there was little meat on her bones. Her skin always seemed almost ghostly white to us, which I don't believe was a look Charlotte cultivated. (A few years after the Bedfords had passed through my family's life like a natural disaster, I was in college in Massachusetts. During my sophomore year I became friends with a proud belle from a town on Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, who did in fact strive to look as pale as paste, so I am confident I know the difference.)