by Lisa Carey
“Are the bees all gone?” Fiona asks. “The hives are so quiet.” Clodagh makes a disapproving gasp. She rarely says a word to Brigid directly, and refuses to be eased by her hands. All Brigid’s attempts have been flung off silently, like she might push her way out of an uninvited embrace. She is a woman who prefers her pain. She has shared, loudly, how mortified she is at having Brigid’s dog inside the house. Rua stays by the door, waiting for her to be done.
“They’re hibernating,” Brigid says. “They sent the drones out to die and the women will stay hunkered down till spring.” She says this before she thinks about how it will sound.
Clodagh erupts then, with an ugly laugh.
“Sound familiar?” she says. Emer looks at her like she’d like to slit her throat. This is how she looks at almost everyone but Niall, so her mother doesn’t even bother to turn her head to deflect it.
“Have you had your fill, Mammy?” Rose says, standing quickly and whisking away her plate. “I know I have.” Her expression is mild, but her voice holds a warning, and their mother darkens with a blush and says no more.
Chapter 18
Midwife
November 1959
Rose is supposed to go to the hospital a full month before the babies are due, but she keeps delaying it. She says she doesn’t want to leave the children, that she has so much more to do with Austin gone, though Brigid has silently taken care of most of it. Whenever she makes plans to go, the weather turns.
“Mind you don’t wait until it’s too late, Rose,” their mother says. The older women, the ones who still have time to sit down for tea, dip their biscuits and suck at their teeth in agreement.
“You don’t want to be having the babies here, in the middle of a storm, no doctor and nothing to ease your pain.”
Rose dislikes the hospital, Emer knows. She hates being put to sleep and not seeing the babies come out. The last time, she had checked in a week early, and said nothing to the nurses once she was in labor. She hid it for so long that by the time it came to push the young doctor was flustered and confused and forgot all about putting her under. She pushed them out so fast they shot into his trembling hands. Rose believes she can have this set all by herself and still have dinner on the table.
“Foolishness,” the other women say, whishting and dunking biscuits with disapproving vigor.
“Island women used to have their babies here,” Rose says.
“Aye. And haven’t we stones in the graveyard to thank for it?” The women cross themselves, biscuits in hand, crumbs springing about.
“We’d a midwife then,” Austin’s mother says. “And little choice. It’s pure foolishness for someone to choose to have her baby here now. You’d never forgive yourself if something went wrong.”
“Brigid’s a midwife,” Rose announces. Emer whips her head around like an animal ready to bite.
A midwife, is she? From America as well.
Surely she trained in one of those posh hospitals.
Ah you’re in good form, so.
The women are muttering as one now, slurping the last dregs of their tea, and Rose warms the pot up for them and smiles at Emer. Emer doesn’t even try to smile back this time. She can’t decide which thing she is most annoyed about. The fact that Rose seems to know everything about Brigid now, or the thoughtless confidence of her sister, who even after such tragedy, still assumes that what she wants will necessarily go as planned.
A storm hits them the last week of November. Not a day that any man would dare get in a boat, let alone a woman enormous with her fourth set of twins. When her labor starts, Rose is alarmingly chipper, moving about the house with purpose, stopping occasionally to breathe long and slow, and bend, in a way that makes all the girls stop what they are doing, bend and breathe with her. Then she straightens up again, smiles and winks at them and says, “That wasn’t such a bad one, was it now?” and proceeds with her chores.
This goes on all day, Rose’s enthusiasm waning a bit as the contractions wear on but don’t seem to get either closer or stronger. They are consistent and draining but useless, like a fire that flares and then dies, refusing to light. “I don’t understand,” she whispers once to Emer, sweat beading on her upper lip. “It’s been eight hours. I should be well finished and having a nap.” Emer mutters something dismissive. Her labor with Niall had gone on for two whole days. How like Rose to question when anything is the slightest bit different from what she desires.
Brigid calls in and takes Rose into the bedroom to check her progress, while Emer eavesdrops at the doorway. Brigid says, “Every labor is different,” and Rose says, “Not for me.” Brigid leaves her resting and comes to tell Emer that it may be a long time. Emer brings the girls over to her house, leaving them with her mother and Niall, and comes back to Rose’s to wait out the labor along with the storm.
In the small house, with the wind howling and rain lashing on the windows, Rose paces and groans and begins to lose herself.
“Something’s wrong,” she says, and the next pain stops her in her tracks. She seems to forget for a minute her ritual of deep rhythmic breath and instead gulps clumsily and without success until the siege subsides.
“It’s not like the others. Something’s not right.
“Emer,” she says, after the next one. She only has time to say one thing between each pain. “Get the cloth.”
It’s a tradition she hasn’t bothered with since the first pair, the blue cloth blessed in Saint Brigid’s well, said to be the way Brigid herself eased the labor of the women who escaped to her: with pieces of her cloak. Emer gets it from a drawer in Rose’s chest, soaking it from the bottle of holy water Rose keeps on a high shelf in the press. She binds it with ribbon to her sister’s writhing belly, and Rose uses one of her fleeting breaks to smile her thanks.
It goes on, and Rose stops trying to speak, or smile. She walks, she stoops, she leans on Brigid. Brigid holds her up, rubs her lower back, murmurs words of encouragement and wisdom. None of it seems to help. A pain tears through Rose while Brigid is holding her, so massive and loud that Brigid is thrown back and away with the invisible force. Rose screams. And for the first time since she’s known her, Brigid looks to Emer as if she’s not quite sure what she is doing.
“What’s wrong?” Emer asks in a whisper, as Rose gives up pacing and tries to escape the pain by lying in a fetal position with the covers over her head.
“I don’t know,” Brigid says.
“Will you not ease her pain?” Emer says. “She’s had enough.”
“Stop asking me questions,” Brigid barks.
She tells Emer to sit behind Rose and prop her up.
“Rose,” she says loudly. “I need to put my hands inside and feel the baby.”
“No,” Rose says, trying to close her legs, but Brigid is too strong for her. “No, don’t. I can’t stand it.”
“I have to, Rose, I have to check something. You need to let me in.”
Rose screams louder than ever as Brigid pushes her hands up inside, feeling around for an answer.
“Something’s wrong,” Rose says. “What’s wrong?”
“Shush, Rose,” Brigid says, as harshly as if she were talking to Emer. “You’re all right. You need to push now.”
“I can’t. It’s not time.”
“It is time, Rose. Push.”
Emer expects a baby to shoot out after a few good grunting countdowns, but nothing comes. A hairy globe of scalp appears and retreats, over and over with each contraction, never making any progress. The pushing goes on so long that Emer can’t keep track of the time anymore. The storm rages on, so thick with clouds and rain that there is barely a difference between the black of night and the gray of morning. It takes them a long time to notice the dawn.
“I can’t, Emer,” Rose says at one point, caught in the limbo of this child who is no longer in but will not come out. “I’m going to die.”
“Stop it,” Emer says. “You’re nearly there.”
&nbs
p; Finally, Brigid pulls out an enormous baby, face up, its features squashed, ugly and covered in what looks like wax. Brigid seems barely interested in this baby, who starts screeching and turns bright red, dumping it onto Rose’s stomach, where Emer has to grab a leg to keep it from sliding away onto the bedclothes.
“Keep pushing, Rose,” Brigid says.
“Can’t I have a wee rest?” Rose murmurs, trying to look at the baby, so close to her face she can’t really focus on it.
“Not now, push. Quickly, love.”
Emer holds the slippery infant on top of her sister as Rose pushes and roars.
Another one comes out, a smaller one, the color of heather buds, purple blue and not moving and wrong. Not a baby at all, is what Emer comes close to saying out loud.
There are a lot of commands and confusion, and Emer almost loses her grip on the first baby trying to follow Brigid’s orders. She wants her to hold the thing for an instant while she quickly binds and cuts the cord, then she takes it away, closer to the fire with garbled instructions on how Emer is supposed to care for her sister’s womb. Something about massaging it for the afterbirth. Emer does nothing but watch what happens next, completely ignoring her sister and her womb and the first baby, whose cord has not even been cut.
She thinks at first that Brigid is going to put it in the fire. Set it on the hearth like a changeling to see if it’s real. It is not even half the size of the first one, with brittle, wrinkled arms and legs and a blue that her sister must not, Emer thinks, be let to see. “Where is it, Emer,” Rose whispers, exhausted and unable to focus her eyes in the dim room. “Where’s the other baby?”
“Whisht,” Emer hisses, as if silence might stop the horrible outcome from entering the room.
Brigid grabs a shawl from a nearby chair and lays it on the hearth, putting the baby down gently in front of the glowing heat of a turf fire that is never allowed to die. She wipes at the thing with a cloth, massaging its limbs, its tiny chest, clears the mucus from its eyes, nose and mouth with her pinky finger. Then she leans down and almost takes the thing in her mouth, covering its entire face with open lips, and blows, blows, then presses the chest with two fingers, like she is testing risen dough. She waits, blows, presses again. Just at the moment where it is surely too late comes a weak, protesting little cough. Then a thin cry.
Rose lets out a wail in response. Brigid settles the now pink baby in the waiting space in Rose’s other arm. She tends to Rose and the afterbirth, all with quick, confident hands, no sign of the panic and impotence that pulled at her face only minutes before.
Once the babies are cleaned and swaddled and introduced to their mother’s breasts, Rose can see how starkly different they are. Girls, like the rest of Rose’s babies, everyone assumed they would be, it was something of a joke how Rose’s body could make nothing but girls. One of them is plump and pretty and serene like every other baby of Rose’s, the other wizened, scowling, not quite sure what to do with her hands, her mouth, her mother’s breast. She seems to look directly at her sister latched onto a nipple and opens her little mouth to let out a wail of righteous anger. Her fists are clenched with what already seems like a lifetime of frustration.
“Oh, this one’s like you, Emer,” Rose laughs.
What Emer was thinking was that it looked not like a baby at all, but like the wizened, possessed fairy she had grown to expect as a child. As if any moment it might open its mouth and speak in the voice of the underworld.
Rose nuzzles it and pulls it closer, monster or no.
“Will it die?” Emer says to Brigid, as she washes her hands and arms at the bucket.
“It was close, but I don’t think so,” Brigid says. She lathers between her fingers. “She’s little, but strong.”
“Did you heal it?”
“That wasn’t magic, Emer. That was medicine.”
“Is it part of the curse?” It’s out of Emer’s mouth before she can stop it, and once out, she does not want to take it back. She wants Brigid to know. She wants to be forgiven.
“What curse?” Brigid says, tired, annoyed.
“The curse I set with the fairy’s stone.”
Brigid looks at her, eyes widening. “What stone?”
“It’s next to the well,” Emer says. “I . . .”
Brigid sucks her breath in with an island gasp. “You didn’t, Emer.”
“I was only trying to clear my womb,” Emer whispers. “I think I drowned the lads as well.”
Brigid looks like she is battling something ugly in her mind, fighting something that Emer hopes will never win. She shakes her head.
“It’s only a baby,” she says. “Not a curse.” But she won’t look Emer in the eye. “It has nothing to do with you.”
The way she says it, cold, final, removed. Like she’s shutting a door. When she reaches for the dishcloth to dry her hands, they are trembling.
There is a moment in every labor where, no matter how many times a woman has done it before, she thinks she will die. Without this moment, Brigid knows, the baby would never be born. It is as necessary as pushing a bucket beneath the surface of a well. Darkness doesn’t do its job if you believe, when you are inside of it, that it will ever let you go. It is not something any of them is allowed to remember. Brigid suspects even she will forget it, when her time comes.
For the first five days after the babies are born, Brigid doesn’t leave them once. The weather is desperate, the seas raging, wind so loud she can’t remember not being aware of it. “The sort of wind what leaves you deaf for a week,” Clodagh says. Brigid sleeps on the hearth bed, when she can catch a few minutes, but mostly she holds on to one baby while Rose tends to the other.
Brigid tries not to think too much about Emer’s sideways confession, she can’t. The baby inside her reacted when Emer said it, with jolting kicks that felt like panicked alarm. Whatever Emer has done, Brigid needs to stay away from it. From her.
Brigid wants to hold the smaller baby more than the other one. This wizened, cranky thing that tried to betray them. She told Emer the truth, she didn’t heal it. The first baby came out facing the sky instead of the earth, the second with the cord wrapped round her neck. Brigid used only medical knowledge she had from Matthew, and waited for the babies to emerge. She breathed into the second twin, felt the thing shudder and resist. As if it wasn’t a baby at all, but a furious changeling with no intention of giving in. She half expected it to open its eyes and speak to her. But then it cried and became merely a newborn who survived a close call.
Brigid can soothe it better than her own mother can. She knows exactly how to cradle the more precarious lives in her hands. Brigid’s baby grows quiet and content when she holds this one to her stomach, reassuring them both.
Rose names the little one after her sister, and the fat one after Brigid. They call her Bridie. There is no natural nickname for Emer, so Rose calls her Wee Emer, and somehow, given to this peeling, wrinkled baby, the name that once sounded harsh and unmusical to Brigid now feels lovely to croon. She is the first of Rose’s girls not named for a saint, which Clodagh points out with a complacency that drives Rose to shush her crossly.
Emer is doing all the outdoor chores she can manage in such weather, avoiding Rose, though she follows Brigid with her reproachful eye. She won’t hold either baby. Brigid doesn’t want to think too much about Emer right now. She feels like someone Brigid knew a long time ago, whom she is wary of, but she can’t remember why.
Wee Emer can’t eat. Whenever Rose puts her nipple in the baby’s mouth, the girl fusses and won’t latch on. Brigid checks when the baby wails—this one cries a fair amount, enough that Brigid has no doubt she will be OK—and sees that underneath, her tongue is pulled so tight she can’t extend it out of her mouth. She disinfects her pocketknife and uses it to clip the tethered membrane, which makes the grown Emer cross herself. Wee Emer stops crying instantly, as if relieved. Brigid shows Rose how to express her milk; there seems to be no end to it, it flows from h
er whether a baby is suckling or not. “I’m the Lake of Milk,” Rose jokes, telling her what happened the time Saint Brigid blessed the cows. Brigid feeds the baby with a soaked corner of a cloth until she learns to use her tongue.
Rose tells her the story of Saint Brigid’s birth while she nurses the strong baby in bed.
“Saint Brigid’s father was a chieftain, and her mother, Broisech, was his slave and mistress. A druid foretold that the child in her belly would be born at sunrise, neither in the house nor out of it, that it would belong to both worlds, and that it would be greater than any child born in Ireland. The chieftain’s wife was so jealous that she sold Broisech away to another castle. In that house a queen labored in the night but the baby was born dead. At sunrise, Broisech bore her child in the doorway, with one foot inside the house and the other outside it. This baby was brought to the Queen, offered as a replacement, but when Brigid was laid down next to the Queen’s baby she breathed it back to life. That was Brigid’s first miracle.”
“And you’re our saint,” Rose says, reaching out a hand to squeeze Brigid’s.
“That wasn’t a miracle,” Brigid says. “It happens all the time. Some babies take a minute to breathe.”
“Still, I’m grateful to you. And every baby is a miracle.”
“You’re more of a saint than I am,” Brigid laughs, and Rose gives her an intoxicated smile.
This was always Brigid’s favorite time when she and Matthew had the maternity home. All the women were encouraged to stay with their babies, even if they eventually decided to give them away. The first few hours and days stretched to an unfathomable length. They would remember it, Brigid knew, every one of them, as occupying a larger portion of their lives than certain decades. The hushed wonder of the newborn, the warmth, the insubstantial weight, the flaking skin and tiny fingernails, the butterfly flare of nostrils, the pursed buds of their mouths. The way they spring back, after they are stretched out to be cleaned, into the tightly curled form they took in the womb. The sigh that emerges when you swaddle them tight, their relief at that familiar cramp. Those first few days after birth are a limbo, a tributary between pregnancy and motherhood, between waiting for life and living it; right in the middle you can step onto a stone where they are the same.