by Anne Degrace
The girl is sitting in the grass. Her hair is up in a kerchief, her long skirt all spread out around her. She looks like she’s got a basketball in there.
“You paint your bus up for the baby?” I’m trying to be friendly. She looks kind of worried or something. “It’s just a radiator overheated. We’ll get it fixed up for you, don’t you worry.”
“Melissa’s a midwife,” the husband says, looking at the bus. “A mobile midwife.”
I guess I look a little blank.
“She does home births.”
“What happened to hospitals?” I ask, but I don’t get an answer because the husband hauls off his t-shirt and balls it up around his hand to take the radiator cap off and I yell “Whoa!” because I can see it’s going to have to cool down some before he tries something like that or I’ll be taking him to the hospital—and that’s a bit of a drive, out here in the middle of nowhere. He steps back, hands in the air like I’m going to shoot him, his right hand still all wrapped up. “You gotta give it time to cool down. Don’t be opening that now.”
Michael and Melissa, their names are. Michael looks like those pictures of Jesus, long hair and a beard. He’s wearing some kind of rawhide vest, looks homemade. Melissa’s hair is really long, brown waves right down her back to her fanny. She must be sitting on it all the time. I look at the bus, wonder how these people wash.
But they’re nice enough young people, I guess. I point to the water can, though, tell them they can keep it. Get up to head back out to the highway, back to the rig. But: “Don’t,” says Melissa. “Please. Would you stay and help us get it going? Please.”
That’s when Michael tells me Melissa thinks she’s in labour and that the midwife lives about eight miles up the road from here. Ross Creek Road is a forest service road, I tell them. There’s no houses up there.
“In a teepee,” explains Michael.
“I’ve been feeling funny all morning. I just want to get to Carole-Ann’s.” She smiles at me. “Even midwives need midwives.”
Michael looks at me, then at the steaming engine, then towards the highway. “Can’t take my rig up that road,” I tell him. “Don’t know how you were going to get that bus up there, but maybe. Thing is, I’ve been hunting up there, so I know. Can’t turn around, even, not ’til you’re practically at the top.”
There’s a CB in the rig, I can call for help, I tell them. They shake their heads. No ambulance. “We want a natural childbirth,” says Michael. Well, I don’t know, it’s all new to me, but live and let live, that’s what I say.
So I sit with them on a hunk of concrete there in the weeds, thinking things’ll cool down pretty quick and I’ll see them on their way. Melissa’s from way down in Tennessee, she tells me, learned the baby business with some sort of hippie caravan, so now she goes around helping deliver babies. That is, she tells me, when she’s not having her own. This is her first.
Michael’s from Toronto. They met at some big concert somewhere, thousands of people. “It was a trip,” says Michael, “but the biggest trip was meeting Melissa.”
We sit waiting for the rad to cool down. I keep looking at the girl, big as a house. I sure as hell don’t want to be around any baby being born, and I wish they’d let me call on the CB or just let me the hell go, but I feel like I should stick around because I don’t want it on my conscience if they don’t get the bus up and running, and wind up having the baby here in the middle of nowhere.
We sit together in a little circle, me on the berm, Melissa on the step of the bus and Michael on the ground at her feet, and they start telling me about helping babies be born, and half the time it’s more than I want to know thanks very much, but I listen anyway at first to be polite and then because I’ve just never heard the like, and I suppose I’m kind of fascinated, you know? The way you get sometimes, reading some of those Enquirer stories. Two-headed calves, aliens. It makes you feel weird, but you can’t stop reading.
Those two, they travel around in that bus and how they know about who needs them is word of mouth or some kind of hippie jungle drums, I guess. But they know where to go. They just came from helping in the delivery of a baby boy, and when they talk about it their eyes kind of glaze over.
“It was far out, man, so…”
“…wonderful, so holy, like…”
“…something spiritual, like…”
“…a miracle, this little…”
“…boy, when he turned pink, and you could actually see the blood…”
“…rushing from his chest into his arms and legs and he looked like…”
“…Krishna, his little arms and legs…”
“…weaving like a sacred dance and it was so…”
“…beautiful.”
Well, it doesn’t sound very medical to me and I tell them so. “Whatever happened to hospitals?” I ask them. “You know, doctors.”
Michael shakes his head. “That’s no way to have a baby, man.”
Melissa describes the lady in labour, with the father, brothers and sisters, friends all around, like it’s some big party. Seems a little personal to me, should be private. Not a place a man should be, somehow. Makes me think of a Stanley Cup party, like this spring when everyone jammed into our little living room to watch the Habs win. Imagine having a baby in the middle of something that.
The wind has died again but the rad’s still hot so we sit for a while together and I decide I don’t mind them so much. So they dress funny. So what?
“My mama was a midwife,” Melissa tilts her head, picks a daisy and twirls it in her fingers. Her voice is singsong, that funny accent from the South. “And my grandma, too, although later she changed her specialty, you could say. I was born at home, and my brothers and sisters, too. We lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains on a small farm. I was the youngest, so I never saw any siblings born, and Mama didn’t ever take me to births because I had all the older ones to look after me, and I suppose it was just easier for her. I only ever went on a visit with her once and I had to play outside the whole time, but that was okay with me because I saw a litter of puppies being born in the barn and I remember being disappointed when later Mama told me that the lady had had only one baby, and that was hard enough. I thought it would be better to have puppies, and then you could play with them right away.
“Then Papa died and Mama started midwifing more for the money and the trade goods. My sisters got married off and my brothers took the farming part on and so I started going with Grandma on her visits. While Mama specialized in births, well, Grandma, by then, she specialized in deaths.”
Melissa peers around to the front of the bus. “Think that’s cool enough yet?” she asks me. “I think we should get on the road.” Michael and I look at the front of the bus. I can see the heat rising in waves, making the trees behind look like they’re melting. “Don’t think so,” I tell her. “Few more minutes, we’ll give it a try.”
“You okay?” Michael’s hand is on her belly again.
“Think so. I’m not getting real contractions yet. I just feel like I…I just want to be there, you know?” There’s a tremor in her voice. She looks at me, eyes all soft. “Can you stay a little longer?” She’s agitated, and I tell her sure, I can stay a little longer, get things fixed up.
To distract her and pass the time, “Tell me about your grandma,” I say. She takes a big breath, lets it out, and goes on, hands clasped tightly around the daisy.
“Grandma would go help someone who was about to die. She organized everything: say it was an old auntie, she got the relatives who hadn’t spoken for years talking to her and to each other. She could mend a rift in a family like it was an old shirt just needed a button. If people were too grief-stricken to make the arrangements, she did that. She knew when the dying wanted their kin around them and when they wanted to be left alone; even if they couldn’t talk anymore, she knew. She knew when there were days left, when there were only minutes. And when the person finally went, the first thing she’d do is open all
the windows to let the spirit out of the room. To set it free on its journey.”
The wind, which had died for a bit, has come up again, and I think: that’s good. Things’ll cool down faster, now. I want to get going, because some old gal letting spirits fly out of windows is just a little—well, just a little too hippie, I’m thinking, ’til I remember Melissa’s a little girl in this story and her grandma an old lady, and this was way before hippies and psychedelic painted buses were all over the place.
“Where were you born?” Melissa asks me. Wood’s Harbour I tell her, and then I realize that’s not what she means. I realize I don’t know if I was born at home or in a hospital. Not something we ever talked about, and I certainly don’t remember, but the more I think about it, the more I think I probably was born at the house. Like her, I was the last born. Doris must be fifty-nine this year, Betty fifty-eight, and me come along almost ten years later. Never said anything about it, though they must have had some recollection of the event. Most likely they were sent to a neighbour’s, I figure, or Aunt Maddie’s when the time came. Never thought to ask, and that’s what I told her.
“How a baby is born, and where, and who is there to greet the baby, and what those first moments are like,” explains Michael, “That’s the most important thing. The first thing a baby knows affects how it sees the world from then on in. If the first thing is a bunch of strangers and bright lights and a slap, if the mother’s all doped up, can’t even relate to her baby at the beginning when it’s most important, well, it’s not much of a first impression of the world, is it?”
“What if something goes wrong?”
“It did, once,” says Melissa quietly. She begins plucking petals off the daisy. “I had just started apprenticing. Laura tried everything. It was a Christian family, everybody praying and praying, the mama losing energy and blood and getting weaker and weaker so she couldn’t push anymore but then finally she found the energy—I don’t know where but I guess they were praying for it—but by then the baby was dead. I’ll never forget the way that mama wailed, and then the family praying in the next room started wailing too, still praying: ‘Lord Jesus Save his Soul,’ and the grandma saying ‘Get the priest, we need to baptize him.’ Laura just trying to get the placenta delivered so we wouldn’t lose the mama, too. And then I did what I knew how to do, which was open the windows to let the spirit out, like I’d been taught.
“The grandma shouted: ‘What are you doing?’ because there was a real storm happening outside, wind and rain and even hail, and I explained I was letting the baby’s spirit out. ‘Get that witch out of here,’ the grandma hissed and Laura nodded I’d better go, and I guessed the storm outside was better than the storm inside at that moment. I went out and stood in the rain and cried, listening to the sound of the windows being shut up tight.”
The daisy is in pieces, Melissa’s lap full of petals. She brushes them off and picks another one. Michael leans against the side of the bus, eyes closed, one hand resting gently on Melissa’s bare foot. “Cool enough yet?” she asks, looking at the hood of the bus. I take Michael’s t-shirt and walk over. When I turn the radiator cap I jump back just in time to miss the hissing steam that shoots out. “Pretty soon,” I say.
Then, when I come back to the bus I see water dripping off the bottom step and I think can’t be the radiator all the way over here and then I realize it’s come from the girl. The daisy is on the ground, and she’s breathing heavily, hand on her belly. Michael’s on his feet, then he’s helping her into the bus while I stand outside, grasshoppers going off in the long grass and a can of water at my feet and now the radiator is quiet and probably cooled enough to open up but I don’t think we’re going anywhere because from inside the bus comes a wail that makes every hair on my arms stand straight up.
A second later and Michael’s at the door. “You gotta try it now! ” he yells and when I crack the radiator cap I have to jump back for the arc of hot water comes spitting out but after that it’s just a quiet hiss and I get the water in it, wait ’til it settles, put some more in and all the time these low groans coming from the bus.
“Okay!” I call, and Michael yells: “Key’s in the ignition!” and there’s nothing to do but climb in and try to start the thing.
But it doesn’t start. I crank and crank her but it’s not catching, the motor groaning and Melissa groaning, and me groaning with the frustration of it, all of us groaning. After a while the engine’s not even turning over, and there’s sweat running down my face and I know I’ve run the battery down on top of everything else. I realize I’ve been cranking the thing for twenty minutes at least.
There’s no time for a boost. The sounds coming from the back are big, bigger than anything, and over them I hear Michael calling for me to come. I sit with my two hands on the steering wheel and look out at the day. The wind has whipped up something fierce and it’s blowing all around us. I see the daisy Melissa picked fly by. Michael calls again, and there is nothing to do but go.
It’s dim in the back. In the front part of the bus there is a small stove and sink with a pump faucet and a bucket beneath. Banged-together cupboards, their knobs tied together with big elastic bands. Most of the back is taken up with a bed. Michael has a sheet spread out between Melissa’s open legs. She’s naked, and I don’t know where to look. “It’s not supposed to be this fast,” she’s gasping, and Michaels reminds her to breathe. “Don’t you tell me what to do!” she shouts, like she’s a whole different person than she was a half-hour ago, and Michael jumps back like he’s been burned.
His hands are trembling and he holds them up as if to show me how scared he is, but “She says to wash them” he tells me. “You need to get me a bowl of water and the soap and a towel—over there.”
I pump the water but of course it’s cold. I can hear Melissa giving Michael directions when she’s not moaning or panting and I bring over a bucket of water and the Sunlight soap and have to turn around in the small space and reach back for the towel, kicking the bucket with my foot and spilling some. My own hands are shaking.
The wind’s blowing all around us but inside it feels like the outside doesn’t exist. There’s Melissa, propped upright on a bunch of pillows with a bunch of sheets under her, her legs almost underneath her, now. Her chest is hanging right out there. Huge nipples. Different situation, I’d feel differently about seeing something like that. There’s Michael, right in front, and he’s rubbing her legs up and down and saying things like: you’re doing great, baby, while she breathes and pants and pauses and starts breathing again. And there’s me, pressed up against the sink and wanting to leave and wanting to see this in that twisted way you do like wanting to see a crash at a stock car race. I can see her belly tighten all over like a drum, and I can see between her legs, everything, and I don’t even think about sex, not once. And this all goes on for what could be a day or could be a minute, I can’t tell anymore.
“It’s coming. It’s coming too fast. Melissa! Is it supposed to come so fast?” Michael’s voice is high, like a girl’s.
Over his voice comes Melissa’s, and I think: that’s courage. That’s real courage, because she’s somehow got ahold of herself and she’s actually calming him down, giving him instructions: “Support underneath, where it’s bulging,” she gasps. “With your fingers. Okay, I’m gonna push, now.”
The sound is animal. There is nothing human about it. It goes on, and on. I look away. I don’t want to see this, and I might throw up. I feel dizzy, and at the same time I feel embarrassed for being sick and dizzy. The sound stops, and there is heavy breathing. Then: “Hold my hand,” she commands, and I do what I’m told, moving up towards her in the cramped space, so now I’m right beside Michael, my legs losing their circulation under me, the bulk of me taking up what feels like way too much space. I look at our hands, where she’s cutting the circulation faster than my own feet are going to sleep. My fingernails are dirty. In a moment, the ends of my fingers are white from the pressure.
/> “I can see the head! Oh, Melissa. I can see the head!” says Michael, then: “It’s going back in.”
“S’okay. I’m going to push again in a minute. You have to feel for the cord.”
“What?”
“The cord,” she gasps. “You have to put your fingers right up inside. See if the cord’s around the neck.”
“But—”
There’s that sound again, that animal sound.
“I don’t know. I can feel the neck I think. I can’t tell. There’s no cord. I can’t feel a cord. I think it’s okay. But it’s all blue. Melissa. Everything’s blue.”
She takes her other hand, the hand that’s not holding mine, and she reaches down and touches the top of the baby’s head, a blue bulge in all that red. “Okay,” she gasps. “You’re sure? Okay.”
The sound begins again, the longest yet, getting louder towards the end. She reaches down and touches again. The bulge is bigger.
“Okay Michael, listen. You have to gently take the head when it comes out and feel for the shoulders. Then you have to ease the shoulders through. You have to turn them a little, you—”
Another animal sound, and sweet Jesus there’s the head, all misshapen and awful like something out of the Enquirer, slimy and bloody and the wrong colour, and then the shoulders and the sound of hard breathing and—then there is a wet sound, like nothing I have ever heard.
“A girl! It’s a girl!”
“Let me see.” Melissa’s voice is husky, like someone else, but I’m not looking at her, I’m looking at the thing in Michael’s hands. It’s horrible, ugly, not human. It’s covered in white slime and underneath it’s blue and there’s a bulbous twisted thing coming out of its belly.
“Michael, you have to clear her nose. Suck on her nose and mouth.”
I feel my stomach flip.
“She’s still blue. She’s not breathing. Melissa.”
“Mouth to mouth. You know how. Rub her chest.” She is the only one in control, here. I do believe I am going to faint. I lean against the wall of the bus, eye to eye with a Grateful Dead poster, wanting to be anywhere, anywhere else. Michael does what she says, I can hear him breathing, little puffs, listening. Is it a minute, or an hour?
