The Quintland Sisters

by Shelley Wood

  I ducked my head to peer under the blanket just now. They are sleeping and still, so it’s possible to see the five of them as humans in miniature. Their similarity to one another is eerie, even with nothing but their tiny heads poking out of their blankets. All of them have black hair and long, dark eyelashes, too thick, it seems, for their sunken cheeks. The longer I watched them, the more I could see that each one of them has something distinct, something to tell her apart from her sisters. I took out my scribble book in the hopes of capturing them. The one that came first has one eyelid bigger than the other. The second has a tiny crinkle in the upper cusp of her right ear. The third has the smallest nose, and the fourth has the most hair, which seems to curl in the opposite direction from that of her sisters. The fifth and last—she has nothing that looks markedly different, but she is the only one with any wriggle in her.

  No one has bothered to give them names. Mme. Dionne has managed to swallow a few sips of broth, and M. Dionne has not yet returned. I set down my sketch and lowered my chin to the edge of the crate, close enough that I could hear, faintly, the feeble breaths of these tiny girls. I wrapped my arms around the sides of the box and dangled my fingers over the edges, hoping the babies might sense my hands and face hovering above them. I’m here, I whispered under my breath. At this very moment, I’m here. And so are you.

  May 28, 1934 (UPI Archives)

  * * *

  FIVE BABY GIRLS BORN TO CANADA FARMER’S WIFE

  NORTH BAY, Ontario—In a rude farm house five miles from here a country doctor fought tonight to keep the spark of life in five tiny baby girls. The quintuplets were born today to Mrs. Oliva Dionne, 25 years of age, who has five other living children.

  Neighbor women, acting as midwives, helped the family physician, Dr. Dafoe, at the accouchement.

  The doctor confirmed birth of the quintuplets tonight. He had little hope all of them will live.

  Total weight of the quintuplets was thirteen pounds six ounces. The first baby girl born weighed three pounds four ounces. The combined weight of the last two was only two pounds four ounces. Dr. Dafoe said so far as he knows the quintuplets are a Canadian record. He had heard of quadruplets, but never of quintuplets until today.

  Used with permission.

  May 28, 1934

  Did my parents worry when they woke this morning to find me gone? I didn’t ask. I assume the news must have scurried its way to every lane, porch, and scullery before Mother even had the opportunity to overcook Father’s breakfast. I expect they’ve pieced two and two together. There’s no telephone here or I would have tried to reach Father at the post office, but the day has galloped by and there’s been no time. I’m only now getting a moment to jot some of it down.

  The Red Cross nurse from the outpost in Bonfield, Marie Clouthier, had arrived by the time Dr. Dafoe returned midmorning. Marie-Jeanne was still with Mme. Dionne, and I was doing everything in my power not to nod off. Dr. Dafoe was, I think, astonished to see all the babies alive.

  “Have they cried much?” he asked Nurse Clouthier, who blinked at him blankly, then murmured in French to Marie-Jeanne. The midwife merely shrugged and gestured at me with her chin.

  “Surprisingly, they are noisy quite a lot,” Marie-Jeanne growled in her low voice, her accent thick. “But it is this young lady who has watched over them all the night.” She said it kindly. “Emma, they have been crying, all of them? Or just some?”

  I had stayed most of the night beside their box, one hand still draped over the edge. Nurse Clouthier, when she’d arrived, had taken over the dispensing of water to the babies and had gingerly rubbed each of them down with oil and placed them back in the basket. She scarcely acknowledged me in my chair, which I shuffled aside while she was tending to the babies, and after a while it was almost as if she didn’t know I was there. This is something I’ve managed to pull off my whole life, to make myself invisible and unremarkable—no mean task with a crimson stain covering half my face. People meeting me for the first time tend to let their eyes glance off me the instant they process what they’re seeing, and this has always worked to my advantage. Even Dr. Dafoe, who’d been the one to console my mother at the time of my delivery, so distressed was she by my appearance, seemed to do a double take when he registered my position by the stove this morning. As if he’d forgotten he’d noticed me there the night before.

  “Emma,” he murmured. “It was very good of you to help out. How are they?”

  “All of them have wriggled from time to time,” I said. “They’re all breathing and making sounds. Not so much crying as whimpering.”

  Nurse Clouthier had other calls to make in the French homes of East Ferris Township, but she promised to be back. Dr. Dafoe left soon after, saying he was going to return with a nurse—a bilingual one this time—from the new nursing school at St. Joseph’s Hospital in North Bay.

  Marie-Jeanne and I remained at the farmhouse all day, as did Mme. Legros. By midafternoon, Mme. Dionne was improving somewhat, enough to take in some more broth and a cup of tea, but the babies were growing more and more quiet. There must have been too many women in the farmhouse for M. Dionne. He stayed outside, tending to the farm or conferring with his brothers and father on the porch, running his bony hand through hair made wild from the habit and rubbing at his eyes as if trying to wake from a dream.

  Other family members, several with the other Dionne children in tow, kept coming by and rapping at the door, and we’d redirect them back outside. All day long we watched people pulling up to the farmhouse in their cars and carriages, sending eddies of dust and flies into the kitchen. I managed to doze off in my chair by the fire while Nurse Clouthier and Mme. Legros were bustling about the kitchen and shooing visitors away.

  At some point late in the day, M. Dionne burst in with a photographer from the North Bay Nugget. The man’s eyes bulged out of his head when he saw the tiny girls in the crate by the oven, but he swiftly got to work and convinced Mme. Legros to lift the tiny things from their warm cocoon onto the pillow beside Mme. Dionne. Maybe it was wrong to do it, but Mme. Dionne rallied somewhat when she had her little girls around her, their heads the size of early summer apples. Had Dr. Dafoe been there, I don’t think those babies would have been moved, but I suppose M. Dionne was thinking, as we all were, that this might be the only record of his wife with five live babies, all at once. How sad. Even putting those words down in print makes me feel sick with dread.

  It was dusk when Nurse Yvonne Leroux—or Ivy, as she’s insisting I call her—arrived. I’ll never forget the moment she stepped through the front door carrying a black bag and wearing her white uniform. The farmhouse has low ceilings, and the shadows licking up the whitewashed walls must have made the kitchen and the adjoining parlor look that much shabbier.

  Even in that light, Ivy shone. Her dark hair, parted in the center, was styled in a twist at the top of her neck, a crisp white nurse’s cap perched on the crown of her head. I put her at three, maybe four years older than me, in her early twenties at most, but she has the poise and comportment of a grown woman, whereas I, a good half foot smaller, still feel like I’ll never fill out the frame I’ve been given. She has high cheekbones, a creamy complexion, large brown eyes, and a long nose, which seems to twitch to the right whenever she is trying to hold back a smile, which wasn’t very often today. She told me that the message she’d received from Sister Felicitas at St. Joseph’s was that a Frenchwoman from a farming family had had a difficult birth and was fighting to survive. No one had bothered to mention anything about five babies. Perhaps Dr. Dafoe assumed they’d be dead by the time the nurse could reach us. She’s a brand-new nurse, Ivy. Her class is the first to graduate from the new school at St. Joe’s, and this is her first assignment.

  The babies were back in the box by the fire when she arrived. I’d been given the task of reheating the bricks and stones for the basket. I’d rigged up some twine across the stove so I could drape the other blankets over top, creating a snug, warm coco
on around the basket and the stove together.

  Ivy went first to the room next door and spent several minutes with Mme. Dionne, who was sleeping peacefully after the excitement of the photograph. I heard her exchange a few words with Mme. Legros, then exclaim, “Cinq!” before she hurried back into the kitchen.

  She came forward and extended a firm hand, introducing herself as Ivy, first in French, then in English. It was the first time someone other than Marie-Jeanne and Dr. Dafoe had actually spoken to me directly, let alone looked at me without faltering. “Pleased to meet you,” I mumbled and told her my name. I was trying to think how to explain what I was doing at the farmhouse, but Ivy was already gesturing at the covered basket. “May I?”

  I nodded and lifted off the blanket. Ivy’s eyes widened ever so slightly.

  “Gosh,” she breathed and bent down to peer at them more closely, her hands rising instinctively as if to reach inside, then dropping again to her sides. All the babies were sleeping. The bigger girls were snuggled tightly together in the upper right corner of the box. The third had been placed in the bottom right corner and was curled at the feet of her big sister. The tiniest ones were back to back, their chins tucked toward their scrawny chests. I’d been watching them through the night and most of the day. I still found them astonishing, but less grotesque than they’d seemed last night.

  Finally Ivy straightened up and indicated that I could place the blanket back over top. She must have seen the anxiety in my eyes as I lifted them to meet her gaze.

  “You’re doing an excellent job,” she said. “You must be exhausted.”

  Then she did something unexpected—she lifted her hand and placed it on my right cheek, the good one, and gently turned my face to the light of the oil lamp, studying my left side intently but not unkindly.

  “Nevus flammeus,” she murmured in the manner of a student dredging up something memorized. “Port-wine stain.” Then she must have noticed my face blushing on the right side to match the left, because she stroked the cheek she was touching and said: “Makes you special, doesn’t it.” Then she grinned so that I saw for the first time that while her front teeth were perfectly straight, the teeth farther back were small and slightly crooked, making her look like she might know a thing or two about mischief. I couldn’t help but return her smile.

  She turned back to the basket and its blankets, her eyes roving over my cords and sheets. It must have looked, I realized, like a child’s play fort. She nodded, appraisingly, then set about making a few adjustments.

  “What we’re aiming for is as little change in temperature as possible,” she explained. “The front door to the kitchen must remain closed, when we can see to it, and we’ll put this to use right away,” she added, taking a ceramic hot-water crock from her bag.

  “I’m sure you’re tired,” she said, turning to give me her full attention, “but can you stay a bit longer?”

  Marie-Jeanne caught a lift home with Dr. Dafoe after his last visit of the day and promised she’d stop in on my parents and let them know my whereabouts. Ivy and I took turns dozing fitfully while the other watched the babies and checked in on Mme. Dionne. M. Dionne had come inside after dusk, the day’s work done, but seemed to still be buzzing in bursts of nervous energy. Sometimes he stood absolutely still, only to dart off in a blur for another corner of the little house like a lizard, or a ghost. We wouldn’t see him for a while, then he’d slip down the stairs and we’d find him at Mme. Dionne’s bedside muttering softly to her in French while both Ivy and I were with the babies in the kitchen. The rest of his brood, it seems, have been dispatched to stay with aunts and uncles elsewhere in the hamlet.

  At one point, long after night had fallen, he asked permission to see the babies, which struck me as strange, because they were his children, after all. I watched his face as he stood over them—he looks older than his years, a workingman’s face, heavy-lidded, weathered by seasons of hard labor out-of-doors. Even his earlobes seemed to be sagging away from his skull. As he gazed at his daughters, his twitching features didn’t so much soften as grow still. I could tell, these tiny creatures were provoking in him something closer to amazement than affection. And it’s true, they are so tiny and strange. The largest, according to a set of scales Ivy had brought, now weighed just 3 pounds, while the smallest weighed just 1.8.

  “Will they live?” he asked Ivy. It was impossible to read his expression. She looked at him steadily and said in a firm voice that it was too soon to say.

  Ivy is fast asleep now with her head cradled in her arms on the kitchen table, her knot of hair loose on her white throat. Mme. Dionne is snoring, deep in sleep at last. And so, too, are the babies—asleep and alive. I will put away my pen now, but I will let Ivy rest and keep watch a little longer on my own.

  May 29, 1934

  NEITHER IVY NOR I managed more than a few hours’ sleep, straining to listen to the faint cries from the babies over the thrumming of toads in the fields and the surprised warbles of whip-poor-wills hunting in the high grass. M. Dionne swept silently downstairs at dawn, nodded at us through the doorway, then turned to sit with the mountain of rumpled sheets and nightgown that was Mme. Dionne. After a few minutes, he stood from his wife’s bed and clumped into the kitchen, his boots leaving a trail of dried mud on the pine-plank floor.

  “I’m going to bring Father Routhier again,” he said in French. Ivy was stooped over the pump at the sink, filling the kettle, and I looked up to see M. Dionne watching her. His eyes drifted wearily upward as she straightened to standing. He’s a funny-looking man: compact and wiry with protruding eyes and large, irregular ears that look to have been an afterthought, inexpertly attached to his head. “The babies will be christened today, just in case,” he said, and he headed out to his truck.

  “He didn’t even stop to look at them,” I whispered. Ivy made a face and put the kettle on the stove.

  If anything, the babies seemed even smaller that morning. Dr. Dafoe arrived bearing blankets, clothes, and diapers that were far too large and once again shook his round head at the sight of the tiny things.

  “I’ve organized for breast milk to be shipped from Chicago and Toronto on the evening train. In the meantime we will make do with a mix of boiled water, cow’s milk, and corn syrup.”

  Ivy and Dr. Dafoe mixed these ingredients according to a formula the doctor had devised. The air in the kitchen was thick and warm from the fire we’d been steadily feeding with wood through the night. By midmorning, you could already feel that the day had plenty more heat in store, but we couldn’t open the windows and door for any length of time without inviting in the flies, mosquitoes, dust, and curious faces of neighbors and children.

  Once the milk had cooled, Ivy lifted the babies out of their nest one by one, holding each in the crook of her arm while Dr. Dafoe filled the dropper from the pot on the stove. Tired to the point of collapse, I took out my scribble book and tried to capture Ivy giving this mixture to one of the little ones, but either because I was too weary or because the proportions, in life, were so out of scale with normal, my drawing was terrible. We laughed over it afterward, Ivy and I: she brandishing a dropper the size of a sword, the tin of syrup as big as a grain silo, the babies, by contrast, small blossoms on a bend in a branch.

  Midmorning, all the babies were asleep again and we were sweltering with them, the heat making me dozy. To keep ourselves from drifting off, Ivy and I told each other about ourselves. She is of French stock, her family having lived in the area for generations, and the youngest of five, with two brothers and two sisters. Her mother has passed on now, and Ivy had been living in the hospital dormitory at St. Joe’s for the past three years while she completed her nursing degree in North Bay. Her father, who works at the only mill left in town, moved to Callander after her mother died. All the other millworkers, like almost everyone else in these parts, are on government relief, particularly after the Payette Mill burned down in ’32. The J. B. Smith Mill was supposed to reopen next month, but i
t, too, went up in a blaze just last week, the flames leaping so high we could see them from our front lawn.

  “I’m very lucky to have been given this assignment directly out of school,” Ivy said earnestly. She says she plans to work as long as she can and is in no rush to get married. “Married couples can’t qualify for relief, if they need it,” she said. I didn’t know that.

  I myself have no intention of marrying. Boys have never shown much of an interest in me—my horrible birthmark—so I’ve never imagined my future might include a husband and children, a white clapboard house plunked alongside a stretch of pasture, cows that need milking, chickens to be plucked. That’s why Mother worries. And it’s no doubt why she spoke with Marie-Jeanne Lebel about taking me on as an apprentice. But I didn’t say that to Ivy.

  “What does your father do?” she asked.

  “He’s the Callander postmaster now. He worked for many years as a classics professor at Carleton University, which is where he met my mother. She’s French, from Hull. Father lost his position at the university a few years ago and, through some family connections, managed to secure the position in Callander when the post office was rebuilt after the fire of ’thirty-two.”

  Ivy nodded. I can imagine what she was thinking. A government job is a rarity in these hard times. She would know that we’re getting along better than most.

  “No brothers or sisters?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I think they made a point of being careful after they had me,” I said, pointing at my cheek. I’ve never said anything like that before, but Ivy had made a point of commenting on my birthmark. She had held my face in her hand.