Midwives (6 page)

Standing among the dog-eared paperback mysteries Rollie’s parents kept in a bookcase in their bedroom was a well-read copy of
The Sensuous Man
and—behind the rows of paperbacks, against a back wall of the bookcase—a hardbound copy of
The Joy of Sex
. Rollie and I read it together often at her house, and garnered from it what I have since discovered was a frighteningly precocious comprehension of cunnilingus, fellatio, and all manner of foreplay. We imagined our lovers someday performing the recommended exercises in the books: sticking their curled tongues deep into shot glasses, doing push-ups for hours. I had yet to see a real penis then, and I had a feeling an actual erection might scare me to death when I did, but between the anatomic details of how the male and female apparatus functioned that I’d gleaned over time from my mother, and the pleasure to be found in those organs suggested by the McKennas’ books, I think I was much less squeamish in the summer between my seventh and eighth grades about sex than most girls my age. Rollie, too.

We both expected that when we returned to school in the fall, the boys would begin to notice us. We weren’t too tall, which was important, and we didn’t have pimples. We were smart, which we knew would intimidate some boys, but not the sort we were interested in: Probably nothing, we thought, scared a boy like Tom Corts, and certainly not something as harmless as an interest in books.

And, fortunately, we looked nothing like each other, which we also assumed was a good thing: It would minimize the chance that the same boy might ever be interested in both of us, or we in him. We understood from our years of riding and playing together that we were a competitive pair, and the fact that I was a blonde and she a brunette, that I had blue eyes and she had brown, would decrease the chances that a boy would ever interfere with our friendship.

Or, as Rollie explained it that Fourth of July, “Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes, tail. They can’t help but have preferences.” Her horse was a chestnut brunette, and in Rollie McKenna’s cosmology of preference, this meant she would probably always prefer chestnut horses as long as she lived. Human nature.

That afternoon Rollie helped me plot ways to maintain contact with Tom Corts until school resumed in September and we would be together in the same section of the brick Lego-like maze that someone thought was a functional design for a school. Tom had a job that summer that I interpreted as one of those signals (like, in some way, his seemingly endless wardrobe of dark turtlenecks) that he wanted more from the world than the chance to fix cars in his family’s beat-up garage, or to joust on motorcycles until the rescue squad had to rush him to the hospital with a limb dangling by a tendon. He was working for Powder Peak, the nearby ski resort, cutting the lawns around the base lodge where the company also had its offices, and assisting the maintenance crews as they tuned up the chairlifts and grooming machines. He was about to turn fifteen (just as I would soon turn thirteen), and he could have hung out at the garage with his brothers and father, he could have spent July and August smoking an endless chain of cigarettes with his brothers’ and his father’s friends, but he didn’t: He hitchhiked up to the mountain every morning and found a ride home from an adult member of the crew every evening. And while mowing lawns and oiling chairlifts isn’t neuroscience, the fact that he was doing it some miles from home suggested to me ambition.

Of course, it also kept him away from the village most of the time. And while Tom and I had kissed only once, and that one time had been three and a half months ago, I was sure we could have a future together if one of us could find a way to bring our bodies into a reasonable proximity. I was convinced that Tom hadn’t tried to kiss me again for two simple—and, in my mind, reassuring—reasons. First, he was two years my senior, and therefore feared with the gallantry of a man who was kind and wise that I was too young to kiss on a regular basis. In addition, the fact that he was two years older than I was meant our paths simply didn’t cross with any frequency—certainly from September through June, when we both attended the union high school but had a full grade between us as a buffer zone, and now in the summer as well, since he had an adult man’s commute to the ski resort.

If Rollie wasn’t as convinced as I that Tom Corts was my destiny, she at least agreed he would be a good boy to date. He was intelligent, independent, and cute. And since it would be no more likely for Tom’s and my paths to cross in the fall, when he would be in the tenth grade and I in the eighth, Rollie believed we had to attempt to move the relationship forward in the summer. In her now barely thirteen-year-old mind, this meant simply being visible before Tom so he could again take some sort of initiative.

“The creemee stand,” she suggested thoughtfully that afternoon. “You have to hang out at the creemee stand once you figure out when he goes there.”

“I’m not going to hang out at the creemee stand. I’ll get fat.”

“You don’t have to eat anything. You just have to be there.”

“No way. I think I’d get sick inhaling all the grease from the French fries.”

“You don’t inhale grease.”

“And I’d wind up with pimples.”

“You probably will anyway as soon as you get your period.”

“You didn’t!”

“I wash my face seven or eight times a day. Every two hours.”

“Then I will, too. What do you think I am, a slob?”

“I think you’re making excuses not to run into Tom because you’re shy.”

“I don’t see you going after anyone special.”

“There aren’t any boys I’m interested in right now.”

I shook my head, as Foogie aimed the sprinkler at a vacant hornet’s nest near the awning of the house. “I am not going to hang out at the creemee stand, it’s that simple.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“The general store, maybe. He has to buy his cigarettes before he goes to the mountain.”

“Or when he gets home.”

“Right.”

“You can’t just hang out at the general store, you know.”

“But I can be there when he is.”

And so it went for most of the day. We were still outside, sitting on the front steps and awaiting the Bedfords’ return, as the afternoon slowly gave way to evening. Through the living-room window we could hear Foogie watching reruns of old situation comedies on television, while crashing a plastic flying saucer over and over again into the plush pillows on the couch.

The stories that the attorneys and newspaper reporters would choose to tell—although in my mind, certainly not my mother’s story—began that afternoon. The Bedfords arrived just before six, well after most barbecues in Vermont had begun to smoke but hours before the night sky would be lit by the glowing, spidery tendrils of fireworks. As the Reverend Bedford was paying Rollie (a fee she would share that day with me, although she was the official Foogie-sitter), Mrs. Bedford pulled me into the kitchen.

In a voice that was whispery and soft, in a tone that suggested she was discussing a vaguely forbidden subject, she inquired, “Your mother, Connie: Is she truly a midwife?”

I’ve helped birth the sons and daughters of two bakers, but no bankers
.

My mothers have been painters and sculptors and photographers, and all sorts of people blessed with really amazing talents. Three of my mothers have been incredibly gifted fiber artists, and two hooked the most magical rugs I’ve ever seen in my life. When parents have been artistic but poor, I’ve been paid with quilts they’ve made themselves, and paintings and carvings and stained glass. Our house is beautiful because of barter
.

And there have been lots of musicians among both my mothers and my fathers, including Banjo Stan. And Sunny Starker. And the Tullys
.

There have been young people who farm, carpenters—probably enough in number to have built Rome in a day—wives of men who run printing presses, women who make jewelry, throw pots, roll candles from beeswax. If I look back through my records, I can find a few schoolteachers, a newspaper editor, journeyman electricians, a woman who grooms dogs, a man who cuts hair, the wives of auto mechanics, the husbands of laboring waitresses, a couple of ski instructors, chimney sweeps, roofers, pastors, loggers, welders, excavators, a masseuse, machinists, crane operators, a female professor, and the state’s first female commissioner for travel and tourism
.

But no bankers. No lawyers. And no doctors
.

No people who make ads for a living, or fill cavities, or do other people’s taxes
.

No people, like Rand, who design houses or office buildings or college science centers
.

Those sorts of people usually prefer hospitals to home births, and obstetricians to … to people like me. That’s cool. They think it’s safer, and while the statistics show that most of the time a home birth is no more risky than a hospital one, they need to do what’s right for them. That’s totally fine with me
.

Sometimes I just think it’s funny I’ve never birthed a baby banker
.

—
from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

WHEN AN AIRPLANE CRASHES, usually far more than one thing has gone wrong. The safety systems on passenger planes overlap, and most of the time it demands a string of blunders and bad luck for a plane to plow into a forest outside of Pittsburgh, or skid off a La Guardia runway into Flushing Bay. A Fokker F-28 jet piloted by two competent veterans might someday dive into the historic waters of Lake Champlain seconds before it is supposed to glide to the ground at nearby Burlington Airport, killing perhaps fifty-six air travelers and a crew of four, but such a crash would in all likelihood necessitate a litany of human errors and mechanical malfunctions. A wind shear could certainly take that Fokker F-28 and abruptly press it into the earth from a height of two or three thousand feet, and someday one might, but it would probably need some help.

It might demand, for example, that the captain had been ill when he was supposed to have attended his airline’s recurrent training on wind shears—when to expect one, how to pull a plane through one.

Or perhaps it had been a smooth flight from Chicago to Burlington, and although there were now rolling gray clouds and thunderstorms throughout northwest Vermont, the gentle ride east had lulled the pilots a bit, and they were ignoring the FAA’s sterile cockpit rule prohibiting extraneous conversation below ten thousand feet. Perhaps the pilot was commenting on how much his children liked to hike the deep woods northeast of Burlington at the exact moment the wind shear slammed hard into the roof of the jet, his remark about woods postponing by a critical second his decision to power the engines forward and abort the landing.

Or perhaps at the exact second the cockpit’s wind shear alert screamed its shrill warning and the pilot was instinctively turning the jet to the right to abort the landing, the air-traffic controller in Burlington’s tower was telling him of the shear and to climb to the left; in the chaos of warnings—one mechanical, one human—there was just that half-second of indecision necessary for the gust to send a jet built in the 1970s into the waters rippling over hundreds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ferries, rowboats, and wrought-iron cannons.

I am telling you this because it was the sort of thing my mother’s attorney talked about a great deal when he first agreed to defend her. He could go on this way for a long time, always coming to the same point. The shit, so to speak, had to really hit the fan for a plane to auger in.

My mother’s attorney had been a ground mechanic in the air force in the Vietnam War, but had wanted desperately to be a pilot: He was both color-blind and nearsighted, however, and so his eyesight prevented him from this. As I recall, his analogies in 1981 revolved around icy wings instead of wind shears, or—a personal favorite of his—the incredible chain of events that would usually have to occur for a jet to crash because it ran out of fuel. But he loved his airplane analogies.

As he sat around our dining-room table amidst his piles of yellow legal pads or as he paced the kitchen, occasionally stopping before the window that faced the ski trails on Mount Chittenden, his point was unchanging throughout those days and nights when he first began rolling around all of the variables in his mind: It would take the same sort of string of misfortune and malfeasance for one of my mother’s patients to die in childbirth as it did for an airplane to crash.

And it certainly seemed so, at least initially, in the death of Charlotte Fugett Bedford. She died in the middle of March, after a nightmarishly long labor. The black ice that fell and fell during the night had trapped my mother and her assistant alone with Asa and Charlotte: Even the sand trucks and plows were sliding like plastic sleds off the roads. The phones weren’t down for particularly long on March 14, but they were down for just about four crucial hours between twelve twenty-five and four-fifteen in the morning.

And for a time Charlotte had indeed shown signs that had led my mother to fear a placental abruption: The placenta detaches itself from the uterine wall, so that the mother may slowly bleed to death. There was a moment when Charlotte bled profusely from her vagina, and the pain inside the woman seemed more serious than the more natural agony that is labor. But the bleeding slowed to a trickle, then stopped, and if there had been an abruption, apparently it had clotted and started to heal itself.

And at another point Charlotte’s blood pressure had dropped, falling briefly to seventy-five over fifty, while the baby’s heartbeat had slowed to between sixty and seventy beats per minute. My mother and her assistant had only been together three months that March, and Anne Austin still had a lot to learn: When she—a young woman barely twenty-two—placed the metal Fetalscope upon Charlotte’s stomach and heard how slowly the baby’s heart was beating, she cried out for my mother to listen, which of course led Charlotte to cry out in fear.

Clearly there was chaos in that bedroom well before the worst would occur.

Consequently, when Vietnam veteran turned Vermont litigator Stephen Hastings first agreed to represent my mother, he concluded that it must have taken a combination of inclement weather, downed phone lines, and bad luck for Charlotte Bedford to die. In his mind, had there not been black ice on the roads, my mother would have driven her patient to the hospital in Newport. Had the phones been working, she would have called the rescue squad, and they might have rushed Charlotte there. And, of course, my mother would have done everything possible had Charlotte gone into shock due to a placental abruption. My mother had been prepared to administer oxygen. She’d already instructed Anne to pull from their calico birthing bag the plastic tubing and needle and clear bag of fluid she would inject into Charlotte intravenously to keep her hydrated … but Charlotte suddenly stabilized.

No, the cause of death had not been placental abruption, as the autopsy would later confirm. And my mother understood this well before the real crisis began: what looked for all the world to her like a ruptured cerebral aneurysm somewhere deep inside Charlotte’s brain.

Sometimes I would overhear my mother try and explain to Stephen that while there had been moments of turmoil and confusion that night, the chain of events that cost Charlotte Fugett Bedford her life was nothing so complex as the sort of thing that pulled planes from the sky and people to their deaths. She would try and tell him it was more cut-and-dried than all that, and he would gently remind her that it wasn’t.

Or at least, he would say, it would not be in the eyes of a jury. And then once more they would discuss what had occurred in that bedroom that was indisputable.

Charlotte Fugett Bedford went into labor with her second child on Thursday, March 13, 1981. It was late morning when her contractions began coming in earnest, and Charlotte decided that her back pains had nothing to do with the way she had lifted the vacuum when she had finished cleaning the living room. At one thirty-five she phoned her husband at the office at his church and spoke to him for three minutes. At one-forty she phoned my mother, reaching her as she was leaving the house to have the oil changed in her station wagon. Charlotte and my mother spoke for six minutes.

My mother knew that Charlotte’s labor had been relatively easy with Foogie, although the first stage—that period when the cervix dilates to ten centimeters, and the contractions become longer, more frequent, and more pronounced—had taken a day and a half in Alabama heat. The second stage, however, had been brief: Once Charlotte was ready to push, she had Foogie through the birth canal in twenty minutes.

Although there is no recorded transcript of my mother’s and Charlotte’s conversation on the telephone, the prosecution never doubted her version. She said that Charlotte told her the contractions early that Thursday afternoon were still easily twenty minutes apart and lasting perhaps thirty or thirty-five seconds. My mother therefore decided to have the oil changed in her car as she had planned and then head north to the Bedfords’. She figured she would be there by three or three-thirty, and she was.

Nevertheless, she did phone her new apprentice and ask Anne to drop by the Bedfords’ right away. She wasn’t sure when Asa would return, and she wanted to be sure that Charlotte had company.

I remember getting off the school bus in Reddington that afternoon just as the skies were starting to spit a cold March rain. There was still a thick quilt of snow on the mountains, freshened perhaps every other night, but the only snow in Reddington that particular day were the drifts along the shady sides of the buildings. The temperature still hovered most afternoons in the twenties or thirties, but we knew winter was winding down and mud season would soon be upon us.

I was not surprised that my mother was gone when I walked inside our house. I didn’t have to read the note she had scribbled in blue with one of the felt-tip pens that she loved, to know she was up at the Bedfords’. I had been expecting that note for days.

At about the same moment that I was returning home from school, one of Asa’s parishioners stopped by the Bedford house and picked up Foogie. The Bedfords’ home was small, and Foogie’s parents had agreed it would be best for the boy to be someplace else when his brother or sister arrived.

The first stage of Charlotte’s labor was much longer for the second child than most midwives or doctors would have expected. My mother arrived at the Bedfords’ in the middle of the afternoon, and testified in court that she anticipated that Charlotte would deliver her baby soon after dinner. She said she never went into a delivery with any sort of expectations, or hourly objectives in her mind: a first stage that should last ten hours, for example, followed by ninety minutes of pushing. She said no midwife or doctor did. But when pressed by the state’s attorney, she said if she had any expectations at all, she might have thought Charlotte’s cervix would be fully dilated by six or seven in the evening, and the child pushed into the world by nine or ten that night—at the latest.

Fifteen minutes before midnight, when Charlotte was eight centimeters dilated and the baby’s head had descended below the ischial spines to the first positive position—when there was, in my mother’s mind, no longer a chance that the umbilical cord could slip past the baby’s skull through the cervix, endangering the child—my mother carefully ruptured the membranes damming Charlotte’s amniotic waters.

“I don’t understand why you did that,” Anne whispered to my mother, concerned that the intervention had been unnecessary.

“It was time,” my mother answered with a shrug.

At midnight it started to rain, and the droplets turned to ice when they hit the cold ground. At that moment it was thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit at the weather station at Lyndon State College. At twelve twenty-five, the phones between Newport and Richford, between Reddington and Derby Line, went dead, brought down by the weight of the ice forming on the phone lines, and some ill-timed gusts of wind. My mother and her apprentice had no idea the phone lines were down then, but they would discover it soon.

Charlotte was fully dilated by one in the morning. Her first stage had lasted a solid thirteen hours. Charlotte’s transition, that nightmarish period for many mothers just before they must begin the desperately hard business of pushing, those moments when many mothers fear with a horror that’s visceral that they will not survive this ordeal, was rocky. Both my mother and Asa Bedford testified that Charlotte began sobbing through her pain, insisting that the being within her was going to rip her apart. She begged them to help her, telling them this felt different than it had with Foogie, this was killing pain, this was a torture she could not endure and she would not survive.