Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  Witch Grass could carry both Rollie and me for long stretches on her chestnut back, although we tried to minimize the amount of time we dropped one hundred and ninety pounds onto her aging spine. One of us would sometimes walk beside her.

  It was probably during the third week in March that I first let Tom kiss me.

  Make no mistake, this wasn't one of those passionate, "we kissed" sort of moments: I was decidedly passive during my first kiss, and although Tom initiated the buss (and I was indeed a willing participant), he broke it off fast, and we were too young--and the ground too muddy--for our small part of the earth to move.

  Rollie and I planned, as we had the day before, to take turns riding Witch Grass up Gove Hill, the only spot in Reddington her mother could think of where the ground was not either asphalt or deep mud. When the horse had had a chance to stretch her legs, we would ride together across the street and past the general store to the ball field, stealing a glimpse of Tom Corts and his vaguely truant friends. We might then continue up to the Brennans' sugarhouse, since even in the center of town we could see its steam winding up from the trees like the trail of a small but hyperactive geyser.

  So Rollie took off on Witch Grass first, and I climbed over the electric fencing into the field by the barn where the horse grazed when Rollie was in school, and began shoveling the big clumps of horse turds into what Rollie and I secretly referred to as the Shit Barrow. Witch Grass wasn't my horse, but I spent so much time riding her that I tried to help with her care and feeding--which meant mostly midafternoon shoveling.

  I hadn't been at it long when I heard my mother's station wagon churning up the street toward me, with its motor's characteristically ineffectual-sounding sputter. The wagon was a giant blue woody from the late sixties, and while my parents had considered trading it in during the oil crisis in 1973--a discussion driven as much by guilt over the way the animal guzzled gasoline and oil as it was by the cost of pumping dead dinosaurs into its belly to keep it moving--my mother was unable to part with it. She had had the wagon almost as long as she had had me, it had gotten her safely to over five hundred births, and she couldn't bear to put this particular partner out to pasture.

  The field was beside one of Reddington's busier roads, the street that wound its way to Route 15--the road west to Morrisville and east to St. Johnsbury. That meant that my mother could have been on her way to practically anywhere: the grocery, the bank, a laboring mother.

  She slowed down when she saw me, came to a stop in the middle of her half of the road (she didn't dare pull off into the mud beside it), and rolled down her window. I crossed the street with the McKennas' shovel still in my hands and balanced both feet on the yellow lines in the middle of the pavement, pretending the stripes were twin tightropes.

  "Wanda Purinton's baby's coming," she said, smiling serenely the way she did whenever one of her mothers' labors had commenced.

  "Is she far along?" I asked.

  "Don't know. The contractions sound close. We'll see."

  "You won't be home for dinner, will you." I tried to hide my disappointment; I tried to present this realization as a simple fact that needed confirmation, but it didn't come out that way.

  She shook her head. "No, sweetheart. You and Daddy are on your own. Do you mind making dinner?"

  "No." But I did. And of course my mother knew it.

  "I took some chopped meat out of the freezer. Make hamburgers."

  "Uh-huh." Hamburgers were about the extent of my culinary oeuvre when I was twelve. Hamburgers and grilled cheese. As a matter of fact, until I took a two-week cooking class as a January lark in my junior year of college, they were all I was ever able to cook.

  "Maybe it will be a short labor. Wanda's a Burnham, and Burn-hams usually arrive pretty quickly."

  "And maybe you'll be there all night."

  She raised an eyebrow. "Maybe. In which case, we'll have a big breakfast together." She leaned her head partway out the car window. "A kiss, please?"

  I obeyed, a perfunctory peck on the cheek, and then watched her put the wagon in gear and head off. I wasn't exactly angry with her as much as I was frustrated: Her job and Wanda Purinton's baby meant I'd have to be home earlier than I'd planned. It wasn't that a dinner of hamburgers and canned peas took so long to prepare, but I always felt a moral obligation of sorts when my mother was gone to be home when my father returned from work. I don't know if the idea was drummed into my head by the situation comedies I watched for hours on our snowy, static-filled television, or if it was a result of my sense of how my friends' mothers behaved--women as different from each other as Mrs. McKenna from Westchester and native Vermonter Fran Hurly--but as far as I knew, with the exception of midwives, mothers were supposed to be in the house when fathers came home from wherever they worked.

  I stalked back to the field and shoveled halfheartedly for a few minutes, knowing there wouldn't be time for me to both take a ride up Gove Hill and find a pretext with the horse to watch Tom Corts smoke cigarettes. And so I perched the shovel atop a good-sized dry rock, tucked the cuffs of my jeans further into my high black boots, and decided to stroll by the ball field alone. I told myself I was actually going by the general store for chewing gum, but even that had a conspiratorial agenda: better breath if Tom or I ... better breath.

  Tom was sitting with two older boys when I wandered by, teenagers old enough to have already decided they didn't need to finish high school to wash dishes at any of the restaurants that ringed Powder Peak, the ski resort to the south, or become journeyman carpenters, and therefore had dropped out of school. I recognized that one was an O'Gorman, but he had four years on me and I didn't know which one he was, and the other was Billy Met-calf, the sort of boy whose stubble had become strangely menacing as he had grown lanky and tall.

  Had Tom been alone, I might have found the courage for a detour to the bleachers across the muck that in a month or two might become grass, but he wasn't, so I trudged straight ahead to the store. The gums and mints sat in a wire rack directly across from the wooden counter behind which John Dahrman sat day in and day out, a quiet widower with white hair and eyes as deep as Abraham Lincoln's ghostly sockets in the portraits that filled the Civil War chapter in my history textbook. Although his hair was white and his eyes exhausted, his skin was smooth and I imagined at the time that he was much younger than one might have initially suspected. He'd owned the store for at least as long as I'd been alive and aware of such things as commerce and chewing gum, assisted at the register by a seemingly endless stream of nieces and nephews as they grew up and learned how to count.

  As I was paying for my gum, disappointed that I hadn't been able to get within thirty yards of the slightly wild object of my infatuation, I heard the bell on the store's front door jingle. The O'Gorman brother and Billy Metcalf were strolling toward the refrigerator case at the back of the store in which Mr. Dahrman kept the beer. They were too young to buy any, but I'd seen them stand around and stare at the six-packs behind the glass before, discussing loudly how much they could drink and which brands they would buy when they were old enough. Eventually Mr. Dahrman would either kick them out or herd them toward the aisles with beef jerky and artificial cheese puffs, products they found almost as interesting as beer and were legally allowed to purchase.

  I expected Tom Corts to wander in behind them, but he didn't. I assumed this meant he had gone home, but I still held out the dim hope that he was alone at the ball field, and if I walked quickly, I might have a moment with him before O'Gorman and Metcalf returned with their cache of Slim Jims and Jax. What I would actually do with that moment was beyond my imagination, since the majority of Tom's and my exchanges up till that point had consisted of garbled hellos into our hands as we gave each other small waves.

  It turned out not to matter, because Tom was gone. The bleachers on the first- and third-base sides of the infield were empty, and the only life in sight was the Cousinos' idiot golden retriever, a dog so dumb it would bark for hours at
tree stumps and well caps. It was barking now at the stone barbecue pit between the right-field foul line and the river that ran beside the field. I tried to lose my disappointment in the satisfaction of well-blown bubbles and the sweet taste of the gum when I pressed it hard against the back of my teeth with my tongue, and marched back to the field I'd been shoveling. I didn't wonder where Tom had taken his scowl and his cigarettes, I just accepted the fact that he had disappeared and I'd have to wait another day to see him.

  I stretched my legs over the electric wire and picked up the shovel from the rock on which I'd laid it. Leaning against the wall of the barn no more than twenty yards away was Tom Corts. He pulled his cigarette from his mouth and started toward me, oblivious--or uncaring--of the fact that with each step his sneakers sunk deep into either horse turd or mud.

  I stood still, waiting with my heart in my head. When he had gotten so close I could smell the cigarettes on his breath, he stopped and asked, "They pay you for this?"

  I paused, thinking, This? Then I realized: the shoveling. "No."

  "Then why do you do it?"

  "Because Rollie's my friend."

  He nodded. "And 'cause you ride the horse."

  "That, too."

  He jammed the one hand he didn't need for his cigarette deep into the pocket of his blue jean jacket. "It's going to be a cold one tonight. Cold as hell for the animals. Their instincts are telling them spring is here and a cold like January is behind them. But then tonight it'll go down to twenty degrees, and 'cause they aren't expecting it, it'll feel like ten below zero to them."

  I had no idea if Tom's theory had any validity, but it sounded wise that afternoon. And compassionate. It suggested to me that this boy had a soul as mysterious as his eyes were gentle.

  "Your family have animals?" I asked. I knew the Cortses hadn't farmed in years, but I felt I had to ask something. "Cows or horses?"

  "My grandparents--all of them--used to. Granddaddy Corts had a fifty-head herd for years, which used to be considered big. And they had some horses, too. Morgans."

  "Do you ride?"

  He shook his head. "Nope. Just snowmobiles. And motorcycles."

  I'd seen Tom ride snowmobiles, often when my father and I would go cross-country skiing up on the natural turnpike and logging trails in North Reddington. We'd probably pulled off the trail on our skis a dozen times for Tom and his older friends and cousins. But I had a feeling he was lying about the motorcycles, and somehow that endeared him to me as much as his wisdom about animals did.

  "I've never ridden a snowmobile."

  "I'll take you, if you like. Maybe even this year. We'll get more snow, you know."

  "Oh, I know."

  "I've seen you ski. With your dad and mom."

  "Just my dad. My mom doesn't like to ski."

  "She's smart. Snowmobiling's more fun. You go faster, and you get plenty of exercise. More than most people realize."

  "I don't think she likes to snowmobile either."

  He flicked his cigarette toward his feet and ground it deep into the mud.

  "You have Mrs. Purta for French, right?"

  "Right."

  "Like her?"

  "I do. Sure."

  He nodded, taking this fact in and turning it over in his mind for meaning. A signal. Confirmation, perhaps, of my maturity. Then he said something that might have been threatening to me had I not heard three of those words from my mother only a short while before, a coincidence that suggested to me a cosmic rightness. Moreover, his voice was suddenly filled with an unease that mirrored my own.

  "A kiss before I go, please?" he asked, and there was a quiver in his words that transformed "please" into a two-syllable request. I stood still before him, which was about as close to an affirmation as I could offer at twelve, and after a second long enough for goose bumps to grow along my arms and dance along the skin under the sleeves of my shirt and my sweater, he leaned toward me and pressed his lips against mine. We both opened our mouths a sliver and tasted each other's breath.

  It was only after he stood up straight and our bodies parted that I realized he hadn't put his tongue into my mouth. I was glad, but mostly because I wouldn't have known how to juggle Tom Corts's tongue with the large piece of bubble gum hiding somewhere at that moment in my cheek.

  It would be a good eight months before Tom and I would become boyfriend and girlfriend, and a full year and a half before I would look to the back of a courtroom in Newport and see him standing there, watching. It would be a full year and a half before I would find myself crying at night in his arms.

  Chapter 3.

  Zygote isn't a bad word, but it's far from perfect. On the one hand, I love the word's origin--the Greek word for "joining together." That feels right to me, because that's about what has occurred. An egg and a sperm have joined together, and they're on this cool little pilgrimage to the uterus.

  On the other hand, I don't like the way the word sounds when you say it out loud: Zygote! It always sounds like it needs an exclamation point. It always sounds like a curse from some angry mad scientist. Zygote! The beaker is cracked! Zygote! There's radium all over the lab!

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  MY MOTHER WAS NAMED Sibyl after her grandmother on her mother's side. Her grandmother was born in a small village in eastern Mexico, the daughter of missionaries from Massachusetts. Those missionaries--my mother's great-grandparents--spent ten years in a little coastal town called Santiago, a decade in which they founded a Catholic church, became very good friends with a village healer named Sibella, and had two children. One of those children lived--my mother's grandmother--and one didn't.

  The one who didn't was a boy they named Paul, and it was his death by drowning that destroyed that family's faith and sent them packing back to the United States. I was told Paul drowned in shallow water, which for years in my mind conjured an image of choppy Gulf surf near the beach, and a three-year-old child bobbing for moments in waves before he was pulled under for the last time. Eventually my mother told me this wasn't what she believed happened at all. The family tradition--myth or reality, who knows--is that he died in the bathtub.

  When those missionaries and their daughter returned to the United States, they almost resettled as they had planned in central Massachusetts, but in their attempt to rebuild their lives they decided to start fresh in a new place, and just kept heading north until they were beyond Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in Vermont. In Reddington.

  I think most people my age assume that children died so frequently in the nineteenth century that people didn't grieve as profoundly or as long as we do today. I don't believe that. The woman for whom my mother was named was born in 1889, and that woman's brother in 1891. He died in 1894: There's one marker for the boy in the Reddington cemetery, another one in that family's plot in a cemetery in the town of Worcester, Massachusetts, and a third tombstone marking the body's actual remains in a graveyard in Santiago.

  No one knows who was responsible for bathing Paul when he died. That detail is lost in our family history.

  In any case, when those missionaries who had once had the zeal to move to Mexico to spread God's word and build a church--literally, help construct the sandstone structure under the searing sun with their pale New England hands--finally settled in Reddington, they rarely set foot in any church, Catholic or Protestant, again.

  My mother was a full-fledged, honest-to-God, no-holds-barred, Liberation News Service, peace-love-and-tie-dye hippie. This was no small accomplishment, since she grew up in a small village in northern Vermont. Villages like Reddington are buffered from cultural change by high mountains, harsh weather, bad television reception, and low population density (which might explain why she never actually tried to escape to places like San Francisco, the East Village, or Woodstock), so it probably took a certain amount of attentiveness, research, and spine to find the revolution--or even a decent peasant skirt.

  Although Sibyl never actually moved into
a school bus or commune, the photographs of her taken during the second half of the 1960s show a woman who apparently lived in bell-bottoms and shawls, love beads and medallions and sandals. Those photos reveal a woman with round blue eyes and spiraling dirty blond hair, characteristics I've inherited, although my hair is flatter by far than hers ever was.

  She went to Mount Holyoke for two years, but met a slightly older man while waitressing on Cape Cod the summer between her sophomore and junior years and decided to drop out and spend the winter in a cottage with him on the ocean. It didn't last long. By Thanksgiving she was settled in Jamaica Plain in Boston, helping the Black Panthers start a breakfast program for the poor, while answering telephones for an alternative newspaper. By the spring she had had enough--not because she had grown tired of the movement with a capital M, but because she longed for the country. For Vermont. She wanted to go home, and finally she did.