Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  By the time I staggered home shortly before midnight, the only lights on in our house were upstairs in my parents' bedroom. I assumed they were waiting up for me, and would descend upon me the moment I opened the front door. And so with the inspired logic of a stoned teenager, I wandered around to the back of our home and pulled open the storm window on the side of my mother's office. I'd always suspected by the way my father surrounded the metal edges with caulking and Mortite each fall that the storm window didn't close properly, and I was right. It was easy to open it from the outside, and easy to pull myself over the ledge and crawl into the room.

  Beside the window was my mother's desk, and in the moonlight I could see that one of her notebooks was open upon it. Earlier that evening she had apparently been writing.

  I pushed shut the door, pressing it silently into its frame so no light would escape when I switched on the desk lamp. Had I not been stoned, I like to believe I would have respected my mother's privacy and left her diary alone, but I can't say for sure that's the case. And regardless of whether drugs can or should excuse bad behavior, there's no question they can often explain it. Hunched over the desk, I started to read, and when I saw what my mother had written about March 15, I flipped back the pages a full half a year.

  In my parents' minds, I hadn't come home until two in the morning, because that was the time I finally stopped reading and decided to come upstairs. And though their room seemed silent when I started up the steps, their door opened the moment I reached the landing, and I realized they were both awake.

  Had my mother not been on trial that moment, I probably would have been grounded through Thanksgiving. But she was on trial, and as angry as my parents were at me for worrying them and behaving irresponsibly, it was clear that they attributed my behavior to the strain of the trial and the long days spent in court. They blamed themselves more than me and took some comfort in the knowledge that I'd been no farther from home the whole time than Rollie's barn, and I'd been there with a group of other kids.

  We were all cranky at breakfast the next morning from too little sleep, and only I had an appetite, but otherwise Thursday began the way the rest of the week had: My parents discussed what Stephen had said was likely to occur that day in the courthouse, and I listened and learned and worried.

  The first witness Bill Tanner put on the stand wasn't a state trooper or doctor; it wasn't the medical examiner or a midwife.

  It was a weatherman. The first person I saw testify under oath was the voice of Vermont Public Radio's twice-daily "Eye on the Sky," the principal source of weather information back then for most of us in the Northeast Kingdom. The fellow was shorter than I had imagined, but he was also much cuter. Listening to his voice in the car or some days over breakfast, I'd always envisioned a tall geeky man with glasses, when in reality he was a strong, stocky fellow with wavy blond hair and apparently perfect eyesight.

  He couldn't have testified for more than twenty minutes; he was probably gone from the courtroom by nine-thirty. I was fascinated by the way one bailiff led him into the room and another swore him in. Tanner then made sure everyone on the jury understood that this man was probably Vermont's foremost expert on weather--a meteorologist who not only forecast the weather but also taught meteorology at a college in the northern corner of the state--and he'd spent all of March 12 and 13 warning his listeners about the rains and the cold that were approaching, and the tremendous likelihood that highways would freeze.

  "Did you ever suggest that people should stay off the roads?" Tanner asked him.

  "I did," he answered. "Wednesday afternoon and all Thursday I said the storm would be nasty and there would be lots of black ice. I said the conditions would be extremely hazardous."

  Then for good measure Tanner played the weatherman's two-minute forecast from Thursday the thirteenth's lunchtime edition of the "Eye on the Sky," and we heard a taped version of the fellow saying exactly that.

  "Her body was under a sheet, and it was pulled up to her neck," said Leland Rhodes, the state trooper who to this day comes to mind whenever I see a trooper's green car fly past me on the interstate. He sat on the stand with his shoulders straight and his wide-brimmed trooper's hat in his lap. His uniform was so crisp and well ironed that the fabric looked as unbending as the clothes painted on plastic dolls. Whatever distrust people have these days for police officers was untapped in our small corner of the Kingdom in 1981, and Rhodes was a powerfully honest figure.

  Besides, as Tanner had gone to great pains to make clear to the jury, Rhodes had no reason to exaggerate or to lie.

  "You knew she was dead?" Tanner asked.

  "We knew from the radio call that she was dead before we arrived."

  "The dispatcher had informed you?"

  "That's right."

  "Describe the condition of the bedroom," Tanner said, and beside me my grandmother flinched.

  Before Rhodes could begin, however, Stephen stood to object: "Your Honor, this line of questioning is completely gratuitous."

  Judge Dorset shook his head and said he would allow it. With the help of an occasional question from the state's attorney, Rhodes then told the jury what he had seen when he arrived at the Bedfords'. His voice remained forceful but calm, even when he was recalling particularly grisly details, and he spoke for close to an hour before he finished and Stephen was allowed a cross-examination.

  Rhodes began with his discovery of the way my mother's station wagon was lodged in a snowbank, and how he and his partner had to walk slowly across the yard to the front door: They had thought the grass would offer better footing than the bluestone glazed over with ice.

  No one answered the door when they knocked, but they had expected that, and they let themselves in and shouted up the stairs from the front hall. My mother called from the bedroom to join them on the second floor.

  Although Rhodes noted that his watch said seven thirty-four, the drapes were still drawn in the bedroom, and only the floor lamp in the corner was on. The room, in his opinion, was depressing and dim and quiet except for Asa Bedford's hiccuplike sobs.

  He said Anne Austin was seated in a chair against one wall, rocking the baby in her arms. He thought the baby was asleep. Asa was sitting on the bed by his wife, his body partway hunched over hers, and my mother was sitting behind him, rubbing his shoulders as he cried.

  Rhodes usually spoke directly to the jury or to Tanner. After watching other witnesses over the next week and a half, it became apparent even to me that Rhodes--like many police officers--testified often and was comfortable in the witness stand.

  "Tell us about the items you found in the room," Tanner suggested, and Rhodes obliged. He began with the basics of any home birth, the sorts of things that might just as easily have peppered the aftermath of an experience my mother would have viewed as exquisitely beautiful: A box of fresh sanitary pads, and a waste-basket filled with used ones. A rectal thermometer. A bulb syringe, still partially filled with mucus. An opened tube of a jelly lubricant. A glass of water with a straw in it. Metal clamps. A Dixie cup of orange juice. Scissors. A pie plate in which the placenta would have been received. A needle. A vial of Pitocin. Paper towels. Three brown paper grocery bags in which the Bedfords had sterilized the sheets and blankets and towels they had carried into the bedroom, and then all of those linens themselves, some folded and fresh, some dark red with dried blood.

  He said he saw a pillow that he imagined belonged on a couch downstairs, because it was such a deep crimson it didn't match anything in the bedroom, but then he realized the pillow was soggy with blood. A moment later he noticed an empty packet of sutures on the nightstand, and the blood on the sheet upon Mrs. Bedford, some of the patches so thick that Rhodes said they looked more like scabs than stains.

  "Did you see the knife?" Tanner asked.

  "Not right away."

  "Why not?"

  "It had been removed from the bedroom."

  "Do you know who removed it?"

  "Mrs. Dan
forth said she did."

  "Where did she take it?"

  "We found it in the kitchen."

  "Did she tell you why she brought it there?"

  "She said she didn't want the woman's husband to have to continue looking at it."

  "What condition was the knife in?"

  "It was completely clean. All the blood and tissue were gone from the blade, and there were still soap bubbles in the sink."

  Tanner then strolled back to his table, and his deputy handed him a clear acetate filled with handwritten papers. At the table before me Stephen reached for what I assumed was a photocopy of the same document.

  He brought the acetate forward to Rhodes and said, "Let me show you what has been marked State's seventeen for identification. Do you recognize it?"

  "I do. It's the statement Corporal Tilley and I took from Mrs. Danforth the night of the incident."

  Tanner nodded, and moved for the admission of the statement into evidence. Stephen immediately objected, arguing as he had in a motion that summer that the statement was inadmissible because it had been taken without an attorney present. But he was overruled because in the judge's opinion the issue had already been resolved, and Rhodes took the court through what my mother had told the troopers that very first night.

  "Did Anne Austin say anything to you that might have led you to believe Sibyl was responsible for Mrs. Bedford's death?" Stephen asked Rhodes shortly before lunch.

  "Do you mean the morning we got there?"

  "Yes, I mean that morning."

  "No."

  "What about Asa Bedford? Did he tell you he thought my client had done something ... wrong?"

  "No."

  "Could he have? Did he have an opportunity?"

  "I guess."

  "But he didn't."

  "No."

  "Not even when you two were alone in the kitchen around ten after eight."

  "No."

  Stephen stared at him but remained silent, and allowed the trooper's answers to linger in the room a long moment.

  Once when Leland Rhodes was testifying, as he and Stephen were arguing over whether the trooper had even viewed the Bedfords' house as a crime scene when he first arrived, Charlotte's sister began to sob. These were not unobtrusive tears, these were the sorts of whimpers that left unchecked would grow loud.

  Almost simultaneously Stephen and Tanner approached the bench, and for a short moment the judge and the lawyers whispered with their backs to us. When they were through and the lawyers had returned to their tables, Judge Dorset said to the courtroom, his eyes roaming from one side to the other, that he understood well the way trials tend to provoke strong emotions, but everyone present needed to keep their feelings to themselves, and anyone who couldn't would be asked to leave the courtroom.

  Charlotte's brother-in-law hugged his wife against his chest with one arm, and slowly she settled down. Stephen and the trooper resumed their debate, and although my mother was absolutely convinced that the idea hadn't even crossed Rhodes's mind that morning that a crime might have occurred, the trooper just kept repeating, "A woman was dead, and I knew the medical examiner would be the one to determine the cause of death."

  Later that day Peter Grinnell told me that as pleased as Stephen had been when Charlotte's sister finally quieted down, Bill Tanner was probably even happier: The last thing the prosecution wanted was a mistrial because some family member couldn't stop crying.

  Two weeks before the trial began, I listened to my mother on the phone with Stephen Hastings. It was late: The dinner plates were tucked in the dishwasher, my father was upstairs in bed. My mother had already taken a bath.

  "Sure, I've met male midwives," she was saying, and I wondered if she knew I was nearby. She was curled up on the couch in the den in a cotton nightgown, and I'd come downstairs for a history book I'd left on the kitchen counter.

  "No, not anymore," she continued. "I don't think there are any more right now in Vermont or New Hampshire. The few there were went on to other things."

  I might have gotten the textbook and then left, but I heard her giggle, and the sound of her laughter had become so rare that I was unable to leave without hearing more.

  "You'd be terrible, Stephen, just god-awful. You view breasts like a teenager. I hate to think of the way you'd handle a prenatal! You'd have too much fun ... Yes, but it's not that kind of fun ... Maybe someday I will, sure ... With books and pictures ... With books and pictures only ..."

  I'd seen my mother flirt lightly with the men she and my father had known for years, the male halves of the couples that formed their circle of friends, but I'd never imagined her flirting with one on the phone. Perhaps because my father was absent, perhaps because she was wearing a thin, almost transparent nightgown, this seemed more illicit to me, and I found myself frozen in something like wonder.

  "It's not an aphrodisiac, I promise. I don't think male ob-gyns go home hot and bothered, do you? ... Well, you're a pervert ... Then maybe you're all perverts! But I don't really think so. Fortunately, the kind of men who become midwives or ob-gyns don't have your uniquely weird one-track mind," she said, and for a brief moment her voice had the sparkle that once brightened most of her conversations.

  "Hold on, will you, Stephen?" she said suddenly. "Connie? Is that you, sweetie?"

  I stood perfectly still until she started speaking again. When she did, finally, I turned and tiptoed back up the stairs as fast as I could.

  Perhaps because I had a vision in my mind of how most of my mother's midwife friends dressed--the jeans and the sweaters, the big boots and the sandals, the endless number of peasant skirts that must have come from walk-in closets the size of bedrooms--I was unprepared for the two women who testified just after lunch: a midwife, followed by an ob-gyn who had once been a midwife.

  The midwife, Kimberly Martin, even looked like a doctor to me. She was wearing a woman's blue business suit, and she had short, fashionably teased hair. It was easy to see her in loose hospital scrubs.

  I also noticed she had an engagement ring on her finger but no wedding band, which surprised me as well: She was probably a good ten years older than my mother, and apparently about to be married.

  "How long have you been a certified nurse-midwife?" Tanner asked her.

  "Fourteen years."

  "Would you tell us what it means to be a certified nurse-midwife?"

  "First of all, we're all registered nurses. That's basic. We have formal medical training. Secondly, we've all graduated from one of two dozen advanced-education programs around the country that focus on women's health care and midwifery. Third, we've all passed the certification exam given by the American College of Nurse-Midwives. Finally--and personally, I believe this is very important--we all meet the requirements of the health agencies or medical boards of the state where we practice."

  "And you have still more training, don't you?"

  "Well, yes, I have a master's. From Marquette."

  "Are you a member of the American College of Nurse-Midwives?"

  "I am. This year I'm also part of the Division of Accreditation."

  Tanner smiled as if he was pleasantly surprised, and I wondered if he hadn't known this detail. "How many nurse-midwives are there in this country?" he asked.

  "About twenty-five hundred."

  "Do most nurse-midwives deliver babies at home?"

  "Oh, no, just the opposite's true. The vast, vast majority of us work in hospitals or birthing centers--almost ninety-five percent of us."

  "What about you?"

  "I have delivered babies at home, but I haven't since I was much younger. I prefer birthing rooms in hospitals."

  "Why did you stop delivering babies at home?"

  "In my opinion, it's needlessly risky."

  "Did you have a bad experience?"

  "Thank God, I didn't."

  "What made you think it was dangerous?"

  "Education. The more I learned about obstetrics, the more I realized that allowing a woma
n to have a baby at home exposed everyone--mother and infant--to completely unnecessary hazards."

  . . .

  "You said roughly ninety-five percent of nurse-midwives work in hospitals and birthing centers. So that means roughly five percent don't?" Stephen asked Kimberly Martin.

  "Yes."

  "That five percent: Do they work in homes?"

  "Yes."

  "Do they have a higher infant mortality rate than the rest of the group?"