Midwives (1997) Read online

  Blood powered, the state's attorney would insist, by a pumping heart.

  But Anne said nothing at the time, too young to be sure of what she had seen. It would be hours before she would pick up the phone, confused, unable to sleep, and call my mother's backup physician. She would later say she could not believe blood would have spurted like that from a dead woman, but my mother's attorney said there was probably another reason she called Dr. Hewitt: Stephen Hastings always viewed Anne as a nervous rat jumping from the Titantic.

  She made that critical phone call late in the morning, while miles away in Burlington the medical examiner was in the midst of his autopsy, trying--and failing--to find a sign of the cerebral aneurysm.

  . . .

  My mother ran a fingernail in an imaginary line from Charlotte's navel to her pubic bone. Her hands were shaking.

  She remembered reading somewhere that a surgeon could pull a baby from its mother in a crisis in twenty or thirty seconds, but that didn't seem possible to her. All those layers. Cutting into a human. Not wanting to cut the fetus. It just didn't seem possible.

  Although she believed intellectually that she could do Charlotte no harm, she still moved carefully, as if she feared nicking an organ. She pretended the line she had sketched below Charlotte's navel was real and then pressed the tip of the carving knife hard into the dead woman's skin.

  Blood burst from Charlotte at the point of incision in rhythmic spurts. These were not, Anne said, the powerful geysers one would expect from a healthy, beating heart, but the little spasms one might get from a weak one. Nevertheless, the blood seemed to Anne to be pulsing through Charlotte, and pumping from her where my mother had made the cut.

  When she saw the blood spurt momentarily into the air--splattering my mother's fingers--the idea first began to form in Anne Austin's mind that my mother was performing a cesarean on a living woman.

  But Anne hadn't noticed Charlotte's body move, she hadn't seen a reflexive spasm or twitch. And quickly the pulsations stopped, and the blood merely flowed. A thin string appeared, then grew wide. My mother pressed the blade further into the woman, through skin to fat to fascia, and pushed against the layer of muscle that was the only part of Charlotte's body resisting the steel intrusion. And then she drew the knife down toward Charlotte's vagina.

  The blood rolled down the woman's belly, coating pale hips and thighs, and spilled onto the sheets on the bed to create fresh stains.

  My mother pressed a pillow onto the wound for a brief moment to soak up some of the blood so she could see inside the incision. As she held the pillow there, she said later, she decided that she hadn't actually made something that resembled a surgical incision so much as she'd made a gaping, unclosable hole in Charlotte Bedford's abdomen. It suddenly seemed gigantic to her, monstrously big, and she heard her teeth begin chattering inside her head before she actually felt and understood what the noise was. Somehow, she was sweating.

  When she pulled the pillow away, she saw the hemisphere from a salmon-pink kickball, the smooth, shining half shell of the uterus. Globular. Clean. Almost fruity. There it was, steaming amidst fat that was luminous, and meatlike strips of moist muscle. My mother wasn't squeamish, but she said the sight made her dizzy--not so much because it would be warm and slippery, but because here was life at its most visceral. Most primal. Here was life in the womb.

  She ran her fingertips over the fundus until she understood where the baby was, and then grabbed the knife off the mattress. Using its tip like a pin, she pricked the uterus like a balloon in a spot far from the fetus. There was little amniotic fluid left, and her fear that it would spout into the air and coat her arms and her face and her hands had been unfounded. She'd ruptured the membranes earlier, she remembered; there was nothing left to splatter.

  She then placed a finger into the uterus and tore it open gently with both hands, afraid to sever it with a knife: The baby was too near.

  She would recall in the courtroom that tearing the uterus was as easy as tearing damp pastry dough, but she was nevertheless finding it hard to breathe as she worked.

  When the opening was large enough for her hand, she reached deep inside and felt the baby's face. Her palm grazed its nose, and she ran her hand across its skull, its neck, its spine, until she had discovered one of its fat, pudgy thighs. She slid her hand up its leg until she had one foot, and then reached in her other hand for the child's other foot.

  She then ripped the body from its mother, and in the air of the bedroom the fetus instantly became in my mother's eyes an infant. A boy. And when she had sucked the mucus from his throat with an ear syringe and he slowly came around--gasping, then breathing, then finally howling--he became for his father a living reminder of Charlotte Fugett Bedford's life and death and unspeakable ordeal.

  *

  Part Two

  Chapter 6.

  Eleanor Snow arrived this morning, and she is the most amazingly lovely little thing. Eight pounds, one ounce, twenty inches. Her nose is a gentle little ski jump. The tiny rolls of baby fat on her arms make little bracelets at her wrists. And her hair, at least this morning, is strawberry blond.

  Her eyes are gray today, but I think someday they'll be blue.

  Dottie Snow's labor was quick: Anne and I got there about six-fifteen in the morning, and Dottie was already ten centimeters dilated and ready to rock and roll. I don't think she pushed for more than half an hour, and the joy in that room as she worked was just unbelievable. Unbelievable! She had her two sisters with her, her mom, and of course Chuck was there. Chuck had also been present for the birth of his first two children, and he is just the gentlest coach. He and Dottie were smooching and hugging between each surge, and he was always rubbing her breasts and shoulders. I really get off on that kind of love.

  But what made the aura in that room so powerful was the combination of husband-wife love, sister love, and mother-daughter love. Dottie's sisters were hugging her, they were hugging each other, they were hugging Chuck. It was magnificent. I wish I could have bottled the vibes in that room and saved a little for some of the lonelier births.

  Lonely births are the saddest things in the world. They can bring me down for days.

  Charlotte Bedford's birth might be a lonely birth. At least the potential's there. Charlotte has no family anywhere near here, except Asa. And Asa is a sweet man, but he's so involved with his congregation he doesn't seem to have enough energy left for Charlotte.

  And I don't think I've met a single female friend of hers. Female or male! She's met very few people outside of her husband's congregation, she says when we talk, and they keep a certain respectful distance because she's the new preacher's wife. I may be her closest friend up here, and so her prenatal visits go on forever.

  No doubt about it, hers could be a lonely birth. And a lonely postpartum. I hope Asa's parish will look out for them. I have to believe they will, they're good people. But I wish I knew more people up in Lawson or Fallsburg.

  Maybe I'll meet some before the baby arrives. Maybe I'll make an effort and try.

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  MY MOTHER WASN'T HOME from the Bedford birth by breakfast, and as my father and I ate our toaster waffles, we discussed how it looked as though poor Charlotte was in the midst of one of those eighteen- to twenty-four-hour marathons.

  School had not been canceled that day, but the first classes had been pushed back two hours to allow the road crews time to turn the winding ice rinks throughout northeast Vermont back into roads. And so my father left for work before I left for school.

  Charlotte Fugett Bedford and her son Veil went their separate ways soon after Veil was born. Charlotte's body was rushed in the funeral director's van to Burlington after the state's attorney and the medical examiner had surveyed the bedroom, and the state police had taken the sorts of postpartum photographs that are blessedly uncommon. The medical examiner informed my mother that he would be performing an autopsy when the body and he had returne
d to Burlington, but he said it was a standard practice and nothing that should alarm her.

  My mother, Asa, and Anne actually left the Bedfords' before the men in suits and uniforms. They were still roaming around the bloody mattress and dropping items--wet rubber gloves, dry specks of herb tea, a clean syringe, a bloody washcloth--into clear plastic sandwich bags when Veil was taken to North Country Hospital in Newport, where pediatricians could examine him carefully. It was from the hospital that my mother phoned my father at his office and told him what had occurred. Her plan was to tell me in person when I returned home from school.

  Like everything else surrounding the birth of Veil Bedford, it didn't work out as my mother expected. News of accidental death, especially when it is grisly, travels fast in our corner of Vermont. Collisions involving pickup trucks and cars that result in fatalities, logging disasters with chain saws or skidders, drownings in the deep waters of the nearby gorge all encourage conversation. When people die, people talk--especially teenagers.

  Consequently, I learned of Charlotte Bedford's death during gym class, just before lunch. We had played volleyball that morning.

  When I first heard the news, the story did not include my mother. Perhaps if the strange ways in which rumor and reality are linked could ever be severed and the separate parts dissected, their histories would show that I was the individual who first incorporated Sibyl Danforth into the tale--at least in my school, at least among the teenagers in our county.

  I was changing from my gym shorts to blue jeans when Sadie Demerest told me, "That weird preacher up in Lawson lost his wife--that one from the South." Her voice was unconcerned and natural, as if she were telling me of another student's fashion faux pas--a girl with a sweater that was a tad too formal for school, or an unnatural streak of black in her hair that was just a bit too punk.

  "She died?" I asked.

  "Yup. In childbirth."

  And I murmured aloud a thought that I do not believe had yet passed through Sadie's mind, although it certainly would have soon enough. "I wonder if my mother was there," I said.

  Sadie paused on the bench before her locker, her own jeans still in her lap.

  "Your mom was her midwife?" she asked after a long moment, and I nodded. The sounds in the changing room--the water rushing in the showers a few yards away, the giggles and laughter from the other girls, the tinny thump of the metal lockers as they were opened and closed--seemed to disappear as Sadie stared at me. At that moment I did not understand the full magnitude of the way my life was about to change, but the first dark inklings were beginning to coalesce.

  I could see that the idea that my mother might have been present frightened Sadie and changed her perception of the story dramatically. Suddenly, this was no longer a tragedy with anonymous players, a horror story sufficiently distant to allow casual appreciation of its core gruesomeness. This little nightmare involved Connie Danforth's mother. Connie Danforth's mother had been with the dead woman. Connie Danforth's mother had not only been with the dead woman, she had been helping her have her baby.

  And people weren't supposed to die having babies, not even in our rural corner of the Kingdom. And so Sadie asked me the question that everyone in the county would ask one another for months, the question that no one was able to answer fully at the trial and no one has been able to answer conclusively ever since. In Sadie's case, it was a rhetorical question, an inquiry she had to know I could not possibly answer. But it was a question she--like everyone else--was unable to resist asking.

  Twisting the legs of her jeans in her hands, her skin growing pale before my eyes, Sadie asked, "Connie, what happened?"

  When I got home from school, my father was in the kitchen. My mother was sleeping.

  "How was school?" he asked. He was wearing the dress slacks and shirt he'd worn to work, but his necktie was gone--probably long gone by three-thirty in the afternoon. I imagined he'd been home for hours.

  "Fine."

  "Good, good," he said, his voice a numbed and distant monotone. I saw on the counter that someone had made a pot of coffee since I had left for school, but it didn't look as if anyone had touched it.

  "You'll need to be gentle with Mom for a while," he then added.

  "Because of what happened?"

  He sat back in the wooden kitchen chair and folded his arms across his chest. "What have you heard?"

  "I heard Mrs. Bedford died."

  He shook his head sadly. "Why don't you put your books down and tell me what you know. Then I'll tell you what I know."

  "The details?"

  "If you don't already know them."

  Throughout the afternoon, two notions had prevented me from hearing a word my English or history teachers had said. The first was that Foogie was now without a mother, and I couldn't imagine how the little boy would endure. At that point in my life, I had never met a child who didn't have a mother. The second was my fear that my family would suddenly become poor.

  At thirteen I did not understand the details of how malpractice insurance worked, but I knew that Vermont midwives didn't carry any: There were no companies that offered it to them in the state. And I knew this was an issue on occasion between my parents, usually after my mother would return home from what she would describe as a complicated birth.

  I think the afternoon after Charlotte Bedford died, this was my father's chief concern as well: a civil suit. I don't believe the idea that state troopers would be arriving at our home within hours had crossed his mind.

  "So what have you heard?" he asked again when I had sat in the chair beside him. "What are people saying?"

  "No one knows a whole lot. Mostly just that the southern preacher's wife died."

  "In childbirth? Do they know she died in childbirth?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Do they know your mother was attending?"

  "Yup, they do." I didn't mention the fact that I was responsible for dropping that detail into the story as it circulated through the school.

  "What else?"

  "No one knew if the baby died, too. Did it?"

  "No, the baby's alive and doing fine. They had a little boy."

  "That's good, at least."

  "It is, yes."

  "What did they name it?"

  "Reverend Bedford named him Veil," my father said, emphasizing the pronoun so that the object I'd called "it" would have a gender in my mind. "What else are people saying?"

  "Like I said, no one really knows much. All I heard was that Mrs. Bedford had died in childbirth, and it was incredibly bloody. But I know childbirth is always bloody, and no one seemed to be able to tell me why."

  "Why ..."

  "Why it was so bloody."

  He toyed with one of his sideburns and then brought his fingers back to his chest. I realized I was sitting on my hands. "Who told you?" he asked.

  "Sadie."

  "Were a lot of kids talking about it?"

  "Yup. By the end of the day, anyway."

  "On the school bus?"

  "I guess."

  "Were the kids asking you a lot of questions?"

  "No, just one. They kept asking me if Mom was there."

  "And you told them she was?"

  I nodded. "Was that okay?"

  "God, Connie, of course. Of course it was. Your mom did absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing. Sometimes women die in childbirth, just like sometimes people get sick and die. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. Mrs. Bedford just happened to have been one of those few people who dies. It's sad--very sad--but these things happen."

  "Unfortunately."

  "Yes. Unfortunately."

  He looked at the coffeepot and seemed to realize for the first time it was full. I expected him to stand and pour himself a cup, but he didn't move from his chair.

  "Was it bloody?" I finally asked.

  Resting his elbow on the table and his jaw on the palm of his hand, he nodded. "Yes, it was very bloody."

  He might have told me then that my mother ha
d performed a cesarean section, but in the hallway above us we heard footsteps. We both realized Sibyl was awake, and she was on her way downstairs. My father would leave it to her to tell me a few sketchy details of what had occurred in the Bedfords' bedroom early that morning.

  When my mother entered the kitchen, her hair was still wild with sleep, and her eyes were so red they looked painful. She was wearing her nightgown, something she rarely did in the middle of the day even when she napped after a long nighttime birth, and her feet were bare. She looked old to me, and it was not simply because she was limping or because there were dark bags under her eyes. It was not merely because she looked tired.