Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  "Oh, I'm sure we will, too," she said.

  "And then everything will get back to normal."

  She opened her mouth to speak, and I heard in my mind the echo--Sure, Connie, sure. Then everything will get back to normal--but no words came out, not even a whisper. Instead she nodded, but we both knew in our hearts that Charlotte's death had changed everything forever. For my mother, nothing would ever be normal again.

  Chapter 16.

  They finally finished selecting the jury this afternoon. I think the lawyers would have kept asking questions into Wednesday, but the judge had heard enough by lunchtime today, and both sides agreed at three o'clock to make their picks.

  Vermont is a small state, and Stephen was sure that a lot of the group would be excused because they knew me or Charlotte, but that only happened one time. And it wasn't like the guy really knew either of us. He'd gone to visit Asa's church one Sunday to see if it would be a good congregation for his family--he'd decided it wasn't--and he'd shaken Asa's hand when the pastor was greeting everyone as they filed out after the service.

  There are two people on the final jury who were born at home, but that's just because they're in their sixties--they were born when it was still pretty rare up here to go to a hospital to have a baby.

  There were also a couple of people in the big pool at the beginning who had had their babies at home, one who I'm pretty sure used Molly Thompson, but they were both dismissed. Behind me, I heard Rand swear under his breath when their numbers were called and they were excused, a little "Damn!" that I'm sure only Peter and I picked up, but I turned around anyway to give him a little wink that said, It's okay, it doesn't matter.

  But of course it does.

  Stephen doesn't want me turning around to wink at my family or look at the people behind us, but I still do sometimes. I can't help it, it's like a reflex. Sometimes I just have to see Connie. I winked once at her today, too. Just because.

  I wish Connie were little again. I wish she were little and I were young--maybe not newborn little, although I did love swaddling the warm and gurgling and incredibly tiny thing she once was. I wish Connie were maybe two or three again, when she was this beautifully funky little person who loved to dance and spin and climb all over the couch like it was a mountain, and was always singing words to songs with the little twists Rand and I made up:

  "Twinkle, twinkle, little moon. Won't you brighten Connie's room?"

  Connie was the best hugger when she was two. Just the best. She'd wrap her little arms around my neck and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze: "Hug, Mommy!" I loved that so much.

  And when Connie was two, all of this stuff I'm putting my family through right now was still years and years away. I wish it could be that way again. I wish my life weren't this record album someone gave me that's almost over, and only the first couple of songs were any good.

  Does that sound selfish? I'm sorry if it does, because I don't mean to sound selfish, or like I'm this pathetic victim who's been screwed by some cosmic disc jockey or record producer. I know what mistakes I've made, I know where I've screwed up.

  Sometimes this week I've turned around to look at Charlotte's family, too, at her sister and her mother. Charlotte's sister bites her nails just the way Charlotte did. She keeps her fingers straight. We made eye contact a couple of times today, and I thought she was just going to break down and sob when we did.

  Seeing her face and sitting so close to her has made me feel absolutely pregnant with guilt. I feel it growing inside me, I half-expect to touch my tummy with my left hand and feel something move. A little kick. One of those hiccups.

  Charlotte's sister despises me. Both she and her mom despise me. It's a terrible feeling to be despised, and alone in my room when the world is asleep--at least my world--it seems like I've earned this.

  And yet the weirdest thing is, Charlotte's family probably wouldn't hate me so if I hadn't tried to save Veil. The nephew of one, the grandson of the other.

  Stephen says by the time this thing is over, everyone will understand that. He says he'll make sure everyone will see that I could have let that little baby die right there inside his mother, and if I had, none of us would be here right now. He'll show them it would have been an even worse tragedy because two people would have died instead of one, and yet no one would be sitting around inside a courtroom all day long pointing fingers at everyone else.

  I haven't seen Veil since he was born. Will he, too, grow up to despise me? Will he, too, blame me for killing his mother?

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  ALL SUMMER AND INTO the fall I had been afraid that Bill Tanner could send my mother to prison and destroy my family. But it wasn't until the first Wednesday morning of the trial when I looked out the window of the courtroom and saw the gunmetal gray clouds rolling in from the northwest that I began to fear the man was sufficiently powerful to control the weather, too. The skies darkened and the room grew dim as he launched into his opening argument, and to this day the state's attorneys in Orleans County shake their heads and laugh when they tell stories of the way Bill Tanner timed his outline of the case against Sibyl Danforth to coincide with a cloudburst.

  Outside of the courtroom, of course, to the shoppers on Main Street in Newport or to the leaf peepers wandering the back roads in Jay, it was just another rainy day in autumn. It was only to those of us in the third-story courtroom with the panoramic views of lake and mountains to the north that it seemed to have unnerving supernatural significance.

  "No one is going to tell you that Sibyl Danforth is an evil person. No one is going to tell you that she is a cold-blooded murderer," Tanner said. "If anything, you're going to hear from the defense what a fine person she is ... what a remarkable person she is. For all I know, they're going to tell you she's an excellent mother, the perfect wife. Maybe she is. Maybe she isn't. For your purposes, however, none of that matters. None of it.

  "Sibyl Danforth has been charged with practicing medicine without a license, and she has been charged with involuntary manslaughter. No one is saying she murdered anybody. But she did kill someone. That's a fact, and that's what matters.

  "A young woman is dead and buried in an Alabama cemetery because of Sibyl Danforth, and a father is faced with the daunting task of raising two small boys on his own. Imagine: Little Jared Bedford only enjoyed the unique and nurturing love of his mother for seven years. Seven short years. Even worse, his baby brother, Veil--a baby who, mercifully and miraculously, survived both Mrs. Danforth's incomprehensible negligence and her cavalier use of a kitchen knife--will never, ever know the woman who should have raised him: Charlotte Fugett Bedford."

  Tanner shook his head and sighed before continuing. "Charlotte Fugett Bedford is dead because of Sibyl Danforth. Undeniably. Indisputably. Incontrovertibly. A twenty-nine-year-old woman is dead because of Sibyl Danforth's criminal recklessness. And if Mrs. Danforth is not the sort of person who would take a handgun and shoot one of you over money or drugs or ... or in a crime of passion, it is upon her shoulders that the death of Charlotte Bedford rests. Sibyl Danforth killed her. Pure and simple: Sibyl Danforth killed her. That's why we're all here right now."

  The fly fisherman looked at specific jurors as he spoke, as if he were eulogizing a river they'd once fished together that was now dry or polluted beyond use. For emphasis, he would occasionally pause and look out the window at the storm clouds, but he always seemed to turn back toward the jury when he had a particularly dramatic point he wanted to make.

  "The defense is going to try and convince you that this is a complicated case with a lot of gray in it, and they are going to parade into this courtroom a whole lot of so-called experts who have probably never set foot in Vermont before. Never. But you will soon see this case isn't so complicated.

  "We will show you that from the moment Charlotte and Asa Bedford sat down with Sibyl Danforth to discuss the notion of having their baby in their home, Mrs. Danforth behaved with the sort of g
ross irresponsibility that could only result in tragedy.

  "Should Charlotte Bedford have even been allowed to have her baby in her bedroom in the first place? We will show that other midwives--as well as probably every single reasonable physician on this planet--would have said no. The risk was too great.

  "Did Charlotte and Asa understand this risk? It is clear they did not. Either Mrs. Danforth did not appreciate the risk herself or she chose not to share her knowledge of the risk with her clients; either way, she never warned the Bedfords of the dangers of their decision.

  "On the day that Charlotte Bedford went into labor, did Sibyl Danforth even demonstrate the common sense to consider the weather? No, she did not. Did a woman born and raised right here in Vermont, a woman who must know the ... the orneriness and capriciousness and downright uncertainty of Vermont weather, discuss with the Bedfords the chance that they'd be trapped in their home in the event that something went wrong? No. She did not."

  The rain had not yet begun to drum against the wide glass windows opposite the jury box, but I noticed a few of the jurors looked past Bill Tanner at the ominous sky outside. I couldn't help but do so, too.

  "And then that night," he said, "when she realized that because of her own astonishing lack of foresight she and a woman in labor were cornered in a bedroom miles and miles from the help a hospital would have provided, what did Mrs. Danforth do? She had Charlotte push ... and push ... and push. Hours beyond what any doctor would have allowed, she had Charlotte push. Hours beyond what a healthy woman could have endured, she had her push. Without anesthesia. Without painkillers. She had her push."

  My mother moved little during the onslaught. Occasionally she turned toward the lake, and she might have been watching the whitecaps the storm had churned up, but she sat stolidly with her hands clasped before her on the table. Once in a while Stephen or Peter wrote something down, but my mother never even reached for her pen. It was as if she were anesthetized, or had grown inured to hate. Although my father and I both grew flushed with rage, she seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

  "Sibyl Danforth had the poor woman push for so long that she thought she had killed her! She actually believed she had had one of her mothers push for so long, so nightmarishly long, that the woman had finally died. Pushed to death, so to speak. The irony? Sibyl Danforth hadn't pushed her to death. She almost had. But not quite. Charlotte Bedford did not die from pushing. It took a ten-inch knife with a sparkling six-inch blade to do that.

  "You will all see--and I am sorry beyond words to say this--when we are done, that one woman is dead because the individual sitting at that table over there took a kitchen knife and brutally gouged open Charlotte Bedford's stomach in the poor woman's own bedroom, and she did so while the woman was still breathing."

  He eyed my mother and then shook his head in disgust. My mother didn't flinch, but beside me my father did. He crossed and recrossed his legs.

  "This crime is appalling on many levels, but you will find two especially galling: Charlotte Bedford would not have died in a hospital. This is clear. And Charlotte Bedford would not have died had she been cared for throughout her pregnancy by a physician. Obviously, Sibyl Danforth is not a doctor. She is a midwife. And while the women who call themselves midwives claim to have all sorts of arcane knowledge, while they claim to be able to deliver babies, in reality they know little more about medicine than you or I. Sibyl Danforth has never been to medical school. She has never been to nursing school. She does not have a license to practice medicine. In fact, she has so little medical training of any kind that between six and six-thirty on the morning of March fourteenth, she couldn't even tell the difference between a living woman and a dead one! Let's face it, Sibyl Danforth is no more certified to deliver babies than the woman at the stationery store who sold me my newspaper this morning, or the teenage boy who filled my car with gasoline!"

  Tanner paused to let the vision grow real in the jurors' minds: a teenage boy with acne and a baseball cap and grubby hands delivering a baby.

  In the momentary silence, however, I heard the sound of a baby about to nurse in the back of the courtroom, and I was glad. An adolescent grease monkey was a powerful image, but it seemed to me it paled before a nursing newborn. The little thing behind us cried briefly with hunger, then cooed when her mother opened her blouse and she saw the breast from which she was about to eat.

  When Tanner resumed, he stood up straight and rested one hand on the rail of the witness stand, then empty. "The defense might insist that this trial is about the way the medical profession has stolen the process of birth from the women to whom it rightly belongs," he said, his voice growing more animated as he approached what I assumed would be a crescendo of sorts. "Well, that's hogwash. They might argue that this trial is about the right of pregnant women to choose to have their children at home. That's hogwash, too.

  "This trial is about one thing, and one thing only: Sibyl Dan-forth's pattern of irresponsibility and misjudgment, a pattern that led inevitably to the mistake that cost Charlotte Bedford her life. The definition of involuntary manslaughter in Vermont is clear--you have heard it from the judge--and the case before you is a horrifying but altogether perfect example: Sibyl Danforth was grossly negligent. Sibyl Danforth engaged in conduct which involved a high degree of risk of death. And on the morning of March fourteenth, 1981, she indeed caused the death of Charlotte Fugett Bedford--as the statute says, 'another human being.'"

  Tanner might have been about to say more, but the storm spared him the effort: Almost on cue, perhaps a second after quoting the statute, a gust of wind slammed the first sheet of rain into the picture windows behind him with such force that it sounded like thunder and shook the glass.

  I was only one of many women and men in the courtroom who gasped.

  At my high school, we were allowed to miss study hall up to three times a quarter if we had a valid excuse like a doctor's appointment or--apparently--the involuntary manslaughter trial of one's girlfriend's mother. By passing on the study hall before lunch and skipping the history class that came after, Tom was able to string together almost three consecutive hours to drive up to Newport and surprise the Danforth family as we emerged from the courthouse. My parents invited Tom to join us at a restaurant, but he had brought with him sandwiches and soda and a vision of an autumn picnic for two, and they let us go our own way for an hour.

  "Just don't talk to any reporters," Stephen said to us as we left the adults. "Please. In fact, don't talk to anyone ... please."

  It was still pouring, so Tom and I ate our sandwiches in the front seat of the rusty Sunbird his older brother had finished repairing but would not be picked up by its owner until the end of the week. He had double-parked beside the Newport Library, an austere brick, almost imposing monolith across Main Street from the courthouse.

  During most of our lunch we didn't speak of the trial, although I don't believe either of us was explicitly or consciously avoiding the subject. He'd asked how it was going as soon as we were seated in the automobile, and I'd told him what a mean son of a bitch Bill Tanner was, but then we'd moved on to other subjects: The fact that Sadie Demerest was going to break up with Roger Stearns. The fear we had that our football team would lose its first game that Friday night to St. Johnsbury, a much bigger school with, we had to assume, a much bigger and better team. The idea that Chip Reynolds was experimenting with the little tabs of acid his older brother was always bringing back from Montreal, and our firm belief that he was headed for trouble.

  The rainstorm I'd watched that morning in the courtroom had come in from the north, and Tom told me of the armies of Canadian geese he'd seen flying south before it: I imagined great honking gray Vs in the sky, and in my mind I saw them flying overhead in wave after wave. He told me his uncle had gotten his first partridge of the year that day, a quick shot up on Gary Road just before breakfast, and he laughed at his uncle's pride in shooting a bird that "probably weighed about as much as a Snickers bar."


  Before we parted, as I pushed the wax paper I'd crumpled into a ball into the bottom of my brown bag, I asked him if people in school were talking about the trial.

  "I know one class, senior humanities, talked about it for a good forty-five minutes this morning. Made a lot of us wish we were a year older."

  "You mean in class? They talked about it in class?"

  "Honest to God. Garrett Atwood told me," he said, referring to a senior basketball player who was dating my precocious friend Rollie.

  "And they were talking about the trial?"

  "Not so much the trial," he said, pressing the smoldering tip of his cigarette into the ashtray, "as the way it's all so ... so tragic. Mrs. Bedford being married to a minister and all."

  I don't believe the word irony was a part of either of our working vocabularies back then, but I knew exactly what he meant.

  "Did Garrett tell you how it ended?"

  "I don't think the discussion really went anywhere, except a couple of girls ended up crying."