From the slope above the Long House, I see that the chimney spews gold fireworks, like a Roman candle, but so far the asphalt rolled roofing holds.
Back in the dark kitchen, I find only a half-filled bucket of half-frozen well water. “Damn!” I can hear Orion crying over the roar but I can’t help that now. I struggle with the bucket up the ladder. Calm yourself . . . there’s no smoke in the house yet. If you can put the chimney fire out, you’ll be OK.
I glance at the water, suddenly unsure. If I throw it on the stove and the metal cracks, the inferno will spread all over the floor and the house will go up like a tinderbox.
From the junk drawer of my mind comes an image of Rachel making gingerbread and a small golden cardboard box on the table. Is there any left? Back down the ladder, I kneel below the kitchen sink. It must be here somewhere! I grab what I’m looking for, race back upstairs, wrap a sock over my hand, and rip open the door to the firebox.
Flames leap into the room and I can smell hair burning on my arm but I manage to tear open the box of Arm & Hammer baking soda and spray the white powder over the blaze.
In ten minutes, I’m sitting on the cold wooden floor nursing Orion. The roar has faded and the tin pipe ticks as the metal cools. I gaze at the stove, wondering how close I came to razing the cabin or cremating the two of us.
For a long time I lie awake in the dark, back in bed, under all our covers, nursing Orion; the vision of the red-hot stovepipe is burned into my retina. The cabin reeks of cold smoke.
Assembly
Rachel clears her throat and pulls her red hair back from her face. “If that’s settled, I have more new business.” She’s sitting straight up at the end of the long oak dining table, wearing a worn green and white Dartmouth College sweatshirt.
Mara keeps minutes at the weekly communal meeting and her head whips up from her notebook. This isn’t on the agenda. We’re already worn out from our two-hour discussion of whether to build a road into the farm so that we can bring supplies into the cabins and have access to emergency services. Currently all we have is a primitive dry-weather trail that we use occasionally to haul in building materials.
The question of a road has come up before and I used to oppose it, but my perspective has changed after the chimney fire. Having a way for a fire engine or an ambulance to get into the cabins might someday be critical. And I need to be able to get out if one of my mothers, like Alexandra, goes into labor in a hurry.
In the consensus model of decision making, those willing to argue their point for the longest win. Granted, we avoid the tyranny of the majority over the minority when we make group decisions, but to get everyone in agreement takes hours, sometimes weeks, of meetings. That’s why our commune, after seven years, is still called, by other hippies and even sometimes by us, the No Name Farm. We can never agree on a name we all like.
It’s the first week of April and Tom squirms in his seat, eager to get out in the fields, haul water, clean the outhouse, anything but continue the drawn-out discussions. Both doors to the kitchen are open and the smell of earth and growing things wafts through the room. Rachel’s timing is bad. We were just about to end the meeting.
“Shit.” Benny throws a wooden spoon across the kitchen. It hits the wall and rattles on the floor. I tighten my jaw. Ben has a temper and this is not the first time we’ve seen it. The whole group is frustrated.
Rachel stubbornly continues. “My parents have given me some money and I want to build my own cabin.” We are shocked. All the dwellings on the farm are so far communal. No one responds.
The persistent woman holds out a piece of lined paper. “I’ve picked out a site, down in the woods where the wild turkeys gather, and I’ve prepared a plan. I’m hoping you all will help me.” Still no one speaks; we just stare at the hand-drawn diagram dangling from her fingers.
“I’d like to be done by August.”
Stacy takes the plan and gazes at it numbly. Ben stares over Stacy’s shoulder. Mica breaks the deadlock. He looks up from one of the sheets of numbers that he’s continually working on. He chews on his pencil and his blue eyes find Rachel’s. “I’ll help.” A child’s opinion is considered as important, on our commune, as an adult’s.
By the time we all agree to provide the considerable labor to construct Rachel’s dwelling, we’re too burnt out to consider the ramifications of a private cabin on communal land and we rush through the doorway to escape the net of our words. It’s not just this meeting we are fleeing, but all the meetings we’ve endured for the last five years. We need to get out in the sunshine, where the wind can sweep through our minds.
For an hour, there’s no sound but the turning of soil, the shuffling of feet, and the crows cawing from the top of the pine trees. Like peasants in a Van Gogh painting, we bend low over our tasks. Across the green hills, the tops of the maples are just turning rose and the dogwood flowers are opening.
Laurel takes off her shirt and her small brown breasts wag as she hoes. Mara throws down her shovel and does a do-si-do with Mica, her ponytail bouncing.
People of the fields, people of the valleys . . . All over earth we toil, Stacy sings.
Strong hearts and hands, tending the land . . . We all join in . . . This is the joy of communal living, the singing, the working together, not the meetings, the never-ending meetings. Ben points out a red fox at the edge of the woods, then we all go back to our labor, the good sun warming our backs.
CHAPTER 8
Unexpected
I’m sitting down near the little creek in the ravine below the Long House working on a song I’ve been writing. “I have been lost before, and come into these woods to lay my body down.” The sun shines down through the new leaves, but there is little joy in me and I don’t know what’s wrong. “And you have taken me in arms of light and sung to me—rocked me gentle in the tops of trees.”
On my way back up the hill, my path crosses Mara’s. She stands with her chin up, her wavy blond hair tied back with a blue bandana. “Hey. I’ve been looking for you. I have something to tell you.”
I knew it. Now Mara is leaving. She’s been talking about her wonderful week with the Clamshell Alliance ever since she got back . . . I feel deceived; as if I’d been seduced to West Virginia by these beautiful people and now they’re all abandoning me. I stare up at the treetops, don’t even meet my friend’s eyes. Come on, get it over with, just cut out my heart.
Mara clears her throat. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure . . . but . . .” She gives me a shy smile. “Benny and I are pregnant.”
“Mara!” I instinctively throw my arms around her, and then pull back to look at her. Her oval face is pink, but it could be embarrassment. “I guess I should ask. Are you happy about this? Is this what you wanted?”
“Well, it’s not what we’d planned, but it’s OK. Ben’s thrilled. And I am, too. He figured out I was expecting before I did.” She rests her hand on her still-flat lower abdomen. “I honestly haven’t been sick or anything. I’m a little tired maybe, but that’s all. I’ve missed three periods. I guess I’m due in the fall.”
In my mind I run over the women who are due. Sue Ellen is expecting any day now. The Seventh-Day Adventist woman Laurel and I met at the co-op is due in a month, and now Mara.
I had expected the worst, my best friend leaving, but new life is bursting out everywhere. We walk toward the house, arms around each other. The creek gurgles along the bottom of the hollow. Dogwood blossoms float like small white clouds on unseen branches up on the ridge, and Mara isn’t going anywhere.
Night Ride
The phone rings insistently into the dark. “Uhhhhhhh,” I groan. By the alarm clock it’s 2:00 a.m. I stumble down to the kitchen and stub my toe on a piece of firewood that’s been left near the stove. “Hello.”
It’s Shawn, our friend from the food co-op, the former G
reen Beret who always wears a pair of white Fruit of the Loom underpants like a cap over his Mohawk. When you’ve lived through the madness of Vietnam, it probably doesn’t matter how crazy you look.
“Hi, Shawn, what’s up?” I just saw him twelve hours ago when he brought Sue Ellen to the farm for a prenatal checkup.
“Not much. What’s up with you?” I know the call has to be about Sue, but I wait for Shawn to come to the point. The man is wound a little too tight, like a grenade that could go off if you just brush the pin. You don’t want to push him.“My woman’s in labor,” he announces in a voice that sounds like gravel on the bottom of a miner’s pan.
I ask him the usual questions: “When did contractions start?” “How close are they now?”
“Her contractions are every five minutes and her water bag popped. The trouble is we’re not at home,” Shawn explains. “When Sue Ellen started leaking we stopped at our neighbor’s house. We thought it was pee at first. Can you come, Patsy? Can you come right away?”
I run my hands through my short, straight hair. Shit. Laurel, Rachel, and Mica are in Charleston at a folk dance festival. Tom is away again in Athens. Benny hitched to Cincinnati for a Peacemakers meeting. I don’t even know if I can get the jeep started. “OK. OK . . . How far away are you?”
“Three miles out Tanner’s Run at Sam Trout’s place. It’s a little white house just before you turn onto Boggs Hollow. There’s a big red barn on the side.”
“I’ll be there as quick as I can.”
Mara’s awake now and has joined me in the dark kitchen. I hang up the phone as she lights the kerosene lamp.
“What’s up?”
“That was Shawn. Sue Ellen’s in labor. They were just here this morning for a prenatal visit, but her amniotic sac broke on the way home. I gotta get going. Sounds serious; she could be five or six centimeters. Can you take care of Orion? I’ll ask Stacy to drive me. He’s good friends with Shawn and he’s been to their farm.”
Thirty minutes later, my ex-lover and I are bouncing along Tanner’s Run in our 1950 Jeep pickup, looking for the turn to Boggs Hollow.
The fog is so thick you could spoon it like soup. On the hilltops it clears. In the bottoms we smother. Back and forth we go, through mist and then stars. Windows open, craning our heads, we slow as we approach the next intersection. It’s a moonless night, pitch dark. A silent farmhouse squats at the mouth of a hollow where a creek runs under a bridge.
“This is it,” Stacy says, throwing gravel as he swings into a long drive between four towering maples. The house is lighted like a Chinese lantern and there’s a shadow of a three-story structure to the left that must be the barn. I detect the sweet smell of cow manure and hay.
A thin man with a long gray beard who looks like a guitarist from the band ZZ Top cracks the door open. “Yeah?” he asks suspiciously. For a minute I think we’ve got the wrong house. Rock-and-roll music blares into the dark.
“I’m Patsy, the midwife, and this is Stacy. Are Sue Ellen and Shawn here?”
“Well, it’s about time!” The old guy throws the door wide and the kitchen light and the voice of Meat Loaf spills out at our feet. “Get on in here. I thought I might have to deliver this baby myself! How you doin’?” He sticks out his hand to Stacy. I move on past him into the kitchen and set my birth bag on the Formica table, taking in the view. The small room with green striped wallpaper smells like fried onions and cigarettes, but it’s tidy.
“They’re in the back,” Sam indicates with a jerk of his thumb.
While the men discuss the state of the weather, I pick my way through a darkened living room, past stacks of cardboard boxes and piles of folded clothes. A small silenced TV in the corner illuminates my way, and from somewhere Bob Marley informs me in a reggae beat that “everything’s gonna be all right, everything’s gonna be all right.”
COYOTE
At the end of a narrow hall, I hear moaning and there find Sue curled on her side wearing nothing but a green plaid flannel work shirt. I’m on alert now. No self-indulgent thoughts about the dwindling commune. That’s what I love about attending births, there’s no room for mistakes, no place for spacing out. I notice a streak of bloody show on Sue Ellen’s thigh. Her long blond hair is neatly braided down her back, her face pink and shining with sweat. Shawn sits at the bedside wearing a black Grateful Dead T-shirt and, as usual, the Fruit of the Loom underpants on his head.
“Take a sip of water,” he orders. There’s a tattoo of a snake curled around his huge bicep. The young woman takes a cleansing breath, lets out her air, and tips her head back as her man gently holds a mason jar to her mouth.
“They’re really hard, Patsy. I hope it’s not much longer. I don’t know if I can make it.”
“You’re doing great,” I tell Sue Ellen, opening my bag and pulling out my fetoscope.
“Yeah, you’re doing fine, honey.” That’s Shawn.
It takes a minute to find the baby’s heartbeat and I’m surprised when I locate the sound just above the belly button, not down by the pubic bone where I’d found it this morning. I listen through a contraction and for a full minute afterward . . . one hundred and forty beats per minute with a good acceleration. “Perfect,” I tell Sue Ellen and Shawn. “The baby’s in great shape. Now I want to check you to see if we have time to get you back to your house.”
I pull out a pair of sterile gloves and ask Sue Ellen to roll on her back. Contractions are coming on top of each other, and the young woman doesn’t say much, just breathes and does what I tell her. Stacy slides into the room behind me. “Hey, man.” He and Shawn grip each other’s hands.
With two gloved fingers under the sheet, I follow the vagina up to the cervix. My eyes widen. Seven centimeters and fully effaced already! We’re not going anywhere. In fact, we’ll have to set up right now. I glance around the room. There’s an old maple bureau I can lay my birth stuff on. I begin barking orders to the men. “We don’t have much time. This baby’s coming. Shawn, can you get some of the clutter cleared off the dresser? Stacy, help take everything that might be in the way into the living room.”
“I got to push!” Sue Ellen groans, grabbing onto the sleeve of my hooded sweatshirt.
“No, too early!” I command. “Do like this.” I puff out my cheeks like I’m blowing out candles, and then my eyes go round. My fingers are still in Sue Ellen’s vagina as her cervix opens to eight.
But something’s not right. There’s a fissure down the middle of the baby’s head. I shudder, picturing a deformed child, and then pull myself together. Fetal heartbeat high on the abdomen? Soft cleft in the presenting part? It’s not a fracture down the middle of the infant’s soft skull, but the baby’s butt crack I’m feeling!
Now my mind goes into overdrive. I’ve never delivered a breech before, never even seen a breech delivery in a childbirth movie. The books say there are so many things that could go wrong. The cord could be compressed as the body comes out. The arms could extend and get jammed between the fetal head and the pubic bone. The buttocks could come out, but the head, the larger part, get stuck.
“Shawn . . . Stacy . . . hold up. We got trouble.”
Sue Ellen starts to freak. “What? What’s wrong?” She looks up at Shawn, wild eyed.
“The baby’s fine. No problem there. Good fetal heartbeat without deceleration. But he or she is coming out breech . . . upside down . . . bottom first. I thought the head was presenting when I checked you earlier, and apparently so did Dr. Farr, but your cervix was only a fingertip dilated and we must have been wrong or maybe the baby flipped.
“The point is, things aren’t normal. I’ve never delivered a breech before and it’s more dangerous. I’d say we have to go to the hospital right now, but the hospital’s an hour away. I’m afraid you’ll give birth before we can get there and I don’t want to deliver my first breech in a car.” I
pause. Sue Ellen gives me a fierce look. “I can do it,” she says, and I believe her.
“I need a moment,” I tell Stacy, squeezing his familiar, strong hand. “Can you lay everything in my birth bag on the dresser? I guess we’re staying here . . . and don’t let Sue Ellen push.”
It’s a warm night outside in Sam Trout’s side yard and I find a tree to lean on. The vision of the breech baby that died at Tolstoy Farm pursues me and I need strength for whatever happens tonight. With my arms stretched around a great silver maple and my cheek against the smooth bark, I whisper, “Great Spirit, steady these shaking hands. Help get us through this. Protect Sue Ellen and her baby. Be my guide.” My whole body is pressed against this huge living being and when I feel the tree breathe and the leaves rustle above, I’m no longer afraid.
“Miss?” Sam Trout shouts into the dark, his head poking out the kitchen door. “Miss, Patsy. They’re callin’ for you.” I trot back to the house, wondering if I’d been seen hugging the maple. Not exactly a confidence builder, to see the midwife talking to a tree.
In the bedroom, Shawn and Stacy are holding Sue Ellen up. She has her legs open and is instinctively bearing down. The chick knows what she’s doing and a tiny butt cheek already shows. Holy shit!
“Sorry,” Shawn says. “We told her not to push, but she says she has to.”
Stacy, always calm in a crisis, has placed my sterile scissors, olive oil, two hemostats, gauze, and cord clamp on a sterile towel on the dresser. On the bed, I spread open a copy of Varney’s Midwifery to the section on breech births, then glove up and pour olive oil over the thinning perineum.
Sometimes a breech baby will poop in your hand; black gummy stuff called meconium, but Sue Ellen’s infant is too refined. Bob Marley sings in the background, “No woman, no cry. No woman, no cry.”
Shawn’s face is white. He’s removed his Fruit of the Loom cap and his Mohawk droops to one side. Stacy’s eyes are pinned to the presenting part. Sam Trout leans against the doorway, as relaxed as if he’s observing a Jersey cow give birth in his barn. I glance again at the illustrations in the medical volume.
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