The Birth House

by Ami McKay

Other voices joined in from around the room. “It’s for the best.”

  “Should’ve given it up years ago.”

  “How old do you suppose she is?”

  “Now that there’s a doctor nearby.”

  “She should.”

  “She should.”

  “She should.”

  “Yes, she should.”

  Bertine’s foot was now stomping on the floor. Miss B.’s needles were flying as she whispered a little prayer. “Dear Mary and sweet baby Jesus, bless us all.”

  Raising his voice, Dr. Thomas continued, trying his best to keep his words from stuttering. “I’m afraid, no matter how hard we might wish it weren’t so, the law no longer considers a country midwife’s care to be ‘reasonable assistance.’ It’s only a matter of time before anyone who insists on taking up the practice of obstetrics without proper authority will be held accountable by a higher court than common opinion. It’s only a matter of time before something dreadful happens.”

  Miss B. rose from her seat, standing as straight and tall as she could. “Strappin’ ladies down and tyin’ ’em up like hogs to have their babies, now that’s dreadful!”

  Aunt Fran, whose social sensibility won’t tolerate an argument, reached for the gavel that was always present at these meetings but never used. Her face flushed red as she gripped the handle. “Thank you, Miss Babineau. Please be seated.” Fran gave a thankful sigh as Miss B. returned to her seat. Placing the gavel back on the table, she announced, “We’ll be singing our closing hymn from Triumphant Songs, number one-eleven, ‘Send Me a Lifeboat,’ all three verses.” She sat on the piano stool and started pumping her feet, the harmonium wheezing as she began to sing.

  ~ April 15, 1917

  Miss B. came home and went right to bed—without complaining about Dr. Thomas, without having her afternoon tea, without saying her prayers. It seems a line has been drawn in this little place between the women who know what’s important and the women who don’t but pretend that they do.

  16

  NOT LONG AFTER (or perhaps because of ) the mess at the White Rose meeting, the Widow Bigelow invited Miss B. and me for Saturday tea. I was surprised to find Mother leaving as we arrived, the widow calling after her, “I’m sure we’ll have much more to talk about in the days to come!”

  Mother gave a cheerful wave to the widow and called back to me, “Sorry to miss you, dear, but I’d best get back to my work at home.”

  Once the widow and Miss B. were settled in the parlour, I went to the kitchen to make the tea and set out a plate of biscuits. My understanding of French may be poor, but I was certain I heard my name mentioned several times throughout their conversation, the widow’s voice sounding earnest, Miss B.’s attitude growing sour. To make matters worse, Archer wasn’t home the entire visit. I hadn’t expected him to be there, but I had hoped.

  Although he hasn’t asked to see me outside of church or called on me at Miss B.’s, Archer has become a permanent visitor in my family’s pew. After Precious’s party, he replaced Grace’s spiteful ostrich plume with a simple white dove’s feather pinned to his lapel. He wears it with a smirk and pride everywhere he goes, even to Sunday services. Grace and her court of card-party maids hiss and spit at him as he makes his way through the sanctuary. (This is likely the true reason he sits next to me.) Quite simply, unless he wants to sit next to his doting, chatty mother, he has no place else to go. I have warned him that he should be careful not to flaunt his political sentiments. While Grace may be fairly harmless in her taunting, others, like Father and the rest of the men in the Bay, may find his actions offensive.

  Instead of Archer, it was Hart who came grumbling into the kitchen, smelling of turned earth and sweat, the legs of his overalls covered in dirt and sawdust, his filthy, chapped knuckles grabbing at the biscuits.

  I slapped his hand away from the plate. “Those are for your mother and Miss B.”

  He laughed as he held my wrists together with his good hand and pinched up three biscuits with the scarred, knobby fingers of his other hand. “Aren’t we a proper little Mrs. Bigelow?”

  Miss B. came storming into the kitchen. “We’re leaving.”

  I pulled away from Hart. “But you haven’t had your tea…”

  Miss B. grumbled, already halfway out the door. “I got no patience left for that woman.”

  During the walk home, Miss B. carried on, mumbling and swearing in French. Thinking that Mrs. Bigelow may have tried to use her influence as the president of the White Rose Society, I asked, “Did she tell you to give it up? Being a midwife?”

  “No, that ain’t it. She knows that’s gonna happen all on its own, sooner than later.” She went back to cursing under her breath. “Who does she think she is? Talkin’ ’bout my girl like that.”

  “I thought I overheard my name back there. Did I do something to upset Widow Bigelow? Is that why you’re so angry?”

  “No, no…you done nothin’ wrong. That’s the thing, see?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe you better go by your mama’s house for some answers. She knows more about this than me.”

  Mother had acted strange at dinner last Sunday. While spooning out the boiled dinner, she began asking all sorts of questions about Archer. Did I find him to be a nice fellow? Did I think we should invite him to Sunday dinner? Did Charlie find him to be a hard worker, a loyal companion, a fair sport?

  Charlie responded, laughing and spitting over his plate. “He’s some quick, that’s for sure.”

  Mother’s brow wrinkled and narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  He mumbled, his mouth full of food. “When you’re fast with your words, you have to be fast on your feet.” He swallowed, adding, “I’ve heard he’s fast with his hands too. Isn’t that right, Dorrie?”

  I blushed as I tried to ignore his comments.

  Mother didn’t let it go. “Dora?”

  “I suppose.” I kicked Charlie’s shin under the table. “At least as far as playing cards goes…yes, he’s very quick-witted.”

  What Mother had to say

  “This isn’t the way you were supposed to find out. I wanted Archer to be the one to tell you. The Widow Bigelow is wanting, is hoping for you and Archer to be wed. In expressing her wishes for her son, she has made a generous offer. If your father will find a spot on Grampy Rare’s land, she will pay for him to build you a house. She will pay for it all, Dora. The windows, the shingles, the timber, as well as everything in it. All the finest draperies, linens, china…”

  “And you agreed?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Archer hardly knows me. I don’t think he even cares for me, not like he does most other girls. Are you sure you heard right? If the Widow Bigelow wants to see anyone married, it’s Hart. She carries on after him all the time, reminding him that he’s well past thirty and still acting like a boy, asking him when he’s going to settle down. He can’t go off to the war, and most girls won’t look twice at him with his hand the way it is…you know what a mean tease he can be…maybe he was tired of her nagging and said, ‘Careful, Mother, or I’ll leave you and marry Dora Rare,’ and she thought he meant it. Besides, what about all the things you said to get me to leave home? What about ‘the peace and quiet of not having a husband too soon’? Who will look after Miss B.?”

  “I said those things before I knew. I never thought…”

  She never thought I’d get married, at least not until some old broken-toothed widower came over in a skiff from Advocate or Parrsboro, looking to take some new blood back to his village. That’s how Sadie Loomer got here. Wes didn’t have anybody but his cousins who’d marry him, so when he heard the news that Hardy Tupper had gotten himself a wife from Newfoundland, he set sail the next day and came back a month later with Sadie.

  What Miss B. had to say

  “It’s not that I take to feelin’ sore for myself. I can get along without you if I has to…but she thinks she got the rights t’buy you for her son, th
at’s what’s wrong with it. And I’ll tell you the truth, you should know it’s ’cause you a good girl, you a pure girl. What got me goin’ was when she asked me if I could check on you, just to be sure…like I’d need to sneak up on you in your sleep and feel for it. It’s plain to me you ain’t been run around, and don’t tell me you have: I see you blushin’, I see you bitin’ your lip when he sits too close in the pew, he ain’t had you. But that’s the ugly thing of it, see? It’s an old thought, what comes from the word of the Lord all turned wrong…that somehow a girl’s sweetness can make up for all the sour in a man. And I’m shakin’ my head over your mother. Not askin’ you before. You’re a woman now, and a woman has rights to her own person, or at least she should nowadays. But if you love him, or you think you could, now that’s another thing…”

  What Archer had to say

  “Oh, that?” He was holding his hat in his hands, one eye fat and circled with purple, green and black. “My dear brother lost control of his fist again. Nothing new there.”

  We sat at Lady’s Cove, the warmth of the day still held in the rocks, the tide lapping its way out from the shore, the sunset turning everything to gold. Archer’s voice turned quiet and sincere. “I suppose by now you know what my mother wants. I’m sorry for that. She gets it in her head what she thinks is best and expects that everyone else will agree.”

  “I figured there must have been a misunderstanding. Do you agree with it? Because you don’t have to, I mean, we don’t have to…I’d understand if you didn’t want…”

  “What do you want, Dora?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He took my hand. “I feel like I’ve been waiting all my life to get started, to find the right girl, to make a life. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days painting my mother’s house, wondering why I don’t care about the price of a barrel of herring. Mother’s got money set aside for me, for us. I’ll take dear old Captain Bigelow’s gold and invest it in the railroad, or automobiles, or maybe the electric company down in the Annapolis Valley.” He leaned his face close to mine. “Haven’t you ever thought you might like something more? More of the finer things, more from life, all the things no one ever expected you’d have, not even you? Because that’s what’s waiting for you.” Kissing me between his words, he asked again, “What do you want?”

  “Love.”

  He whispered in my ear, “Love takes care of herself. Love does what she wants.”

  What I have to say

  No one’s ever asked me what I wanted, not for Christmas, or birthdays, or for any reason at all. It never bothered me. I knew that whatever it was, no matter how small, it probably couldn’t be gotten, at least not without making hardship for someone I loved. So today, when someone finally asked, his lips begging against mine for an answer, I said the first word in my mind, a thing that costs nothing and everything to give.

  Archer’s affection and feelings are as romantic as can be for this place, I’d guess. I can spend my time wishing for the “true love” I’ve only read about, but it’s impractical at best. I’ve never seen one gesture of poetic adoration in the Bay, not one how do I love thee, or a single shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? There’s no time for sonnets or words like darling or beloved. A love affair in Scots Bay would just look foolish and somewhat sad. He, smelling of salt herring and cutting himself on brambles to gather a bouquet of simple wild roses; she, looking tired, patting the flour out of her hair, hands stained blue from dying wool. In our plain corner of the world, romance is nothing but awkward. Better to leave it between the pages of books.

  I sees a pretty little house, a fat silk purse and the strength of a hunter’s bow. That’s what Miss B. had said the night she peeled the last apple for drying. She said nothing about love. We’ll get on with the wedding and hope that Archer is right about the rest. I will marry him. I cannot refuse it.

  17

  FATHER ASKED ME to help him choose the spot for the house. It seemed as good a time as any. Everything is green now, pushing up from the ground, all of us breathing right along with the wet earth. People are glad to meet one another along the road again, spring caught in their talk, ready to make plans and promises. The first swallows of May turned and raced low, chattering over the fields as we walked to Spider Hill. From the top you can see all of the land that was passed down to my grampy…the six houses of Father and his brothers, the brooks cutting their way down the mountain, through the hollow and down to the Bay. It’s one of the prettiest spots in the Bay, in sight of North Mountain, Cape Split and the sea. There’s pieces of an old foundation here, moss-covered stones sticking out of the earth. It’s what’s left of the cabin where my grandfather Darius Rare grew up. Eventually, the empty homestead fell down around itself and rotted into the ground.

  Each year on my birthday, when I was still small enough to sit in his lap, Father would tell the story of Spider Hill.

  “Don’t know why I walked the Sunday way that morning. Maybe it was the pinch in your mother’s voice when I went out the door, saying today would be the day for a new baby, ‘some special, this baby,’ she said.

  “It was a warm morning, and the fields were wet, the sky clear. There was a heavy dew on most things, but when I looked ahead to the pasture, the hill seemed to be covered with frost. Frost in May isn’t unheard of—I’ve seen it once or twice, as a boy, but it was always in the low spots. That hill’s the first thing that sees the sun of a morning. Any frost that had settled there would have been long gone by the time I came by.”

  “But when you got there, you saw different…”

  “Now stop your wiggling and let me tell it, birthday girl.”

  “When you got there…”

  “I could see it wasn’t frost at all. Thousands on thousands of spiderwebs were covering the hill, all worked together like patches of a quilt. The fence posts were buried so thick I had to cut through the webs with a pocketknife. I could throw rocks in the middle of the thing and they bounced right back like they was India rubber. Everything, three acres of your grampy’s land in all, was covered with the busy work of those little brown-backed spiders. The same ones that crawl into the corners of your room to say that winter’s not far off.”

  “I’m not scared of them.”

  “I know, Dora. You’re a brave little girl.”

  “What made them do it, Daddy?”

  “No one had ever seen such a thing, so no one could say for certain. Some said the spiders sailed in on a warm south wind, others said they came up from the ground, from all the bones that rest up there, from your grampy putting the remains of his butchering out for the fishers, the coyotes, ravens and crows. He’d send us boys to drag them up there. You give the scavengers a little something from time to time and they’ll leave the rest alone. People came from all around to see it. They even sent some smart professor over from Wolfville. After looking at them all over and writing lots of things down, he still couldn’t figure those little crawlers out.”

  “I know why they did it.”

  “You do?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “I can’t, Daddy. It’s a secret.”

  After a couple of years of starting, Don’t know why I walked the Sunday way that morning…and me rolling my eyes at him, saying, “I know it already,” he gave up. Standing there, it seemed like he should tell it again, but I knew he wouldn’t. I couldn’t ask. I didn’t want to see the years of my “acting smart” in his disappointed blue eyes. I don’t know what he thinks of any of this, of Archer, the wedding. It’s another thing he won’t say and I won’t ask, both of us satisfied with knowing that the house is a gift neither one of us can afford to turn away.

  He pointed out a place near the church, but I felt it was too near to the road, and it bordered on the burial ground. He pointed out another, with an open, rolling meadow, but it was too near Aunt Fran’s for my taste. The longer we stayed on the hill, the more I realized there was no better pla
ce for me to make a home than right where I was standing.

  Spider Hill has always been my high ground, my safe corner of the Bay. Only once had anyone, outside of Charlie, dared to follow me there. When I was ten, a handful of girls had chased me from the schoolyard, throwing rocks and calling me names. I ran to the top of the hill, Grace Hutner close behind. She grabbed my braids and held tight, threatening to drag me back down the hill and to blacken both my eyes. In our tussle I managed to grab a handful of dirt and throw it in her face. She let go of my hair and began to shriek, tugging at her dress and pulling at her hair. She was crawling with spiders. (Or at least that’s what she was convinced of…I never did see a single one.) She hurried away, waving her arms in the air, crying, “Witch, witch, Dora’s a witch!”

  Across the other side of North Mountain is Cape Blomidon, the great throne of the Mi’kmaq god, Glooscap. Cape Split is what’s left of his jewelled hand, scarred and torn by the thrashing tail of a giant beaver. Isle Haute, distant and floating out in the Bay, was once a moose, born from the beaver’s dam at Cape Chignecto and chased into the Bay by Glooscap’s hungry dogs. Although I have never read it anywhere, and have never been told as much, I’ve often imagined that Spider Hill is Glooscap’s eye, and that if he were to come alive again and crane his neck up from this spot, he could see the entire Bay of Fundy from all sides. On summer evenings I’d climb to the top of the tallest spruce tree on the hill and pretend I was Glooscap’s watcher, a little brown-backed spider, studying the lives of the people below. I’d stay there for hours as the men made their way across the mudflats, following the retreating tide to gather fish from the seine, as children circled the schoolhouse playing tag, as their mothers pulled clothing and sheets into baskets, as the moon rose opposite the last pink breath of the sun.

  “Here,” I said, as I held my eyes from blinking so I wouldn’t miss the sun disappearing under the edge of the Bay. “I want the house to be here.”