Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

"Fox! Box! Boston Red Sox!"

"I was sent for the rent on the polka-dot tent!"

"I wish the fish would eat from a dish, because now there's fish food on the floor!"

Around Rollie and me he was gentle and serene; I understood on some level that he was considered a little strange by most people, but my family and the McKennas certainly didn't object to us being around him or his family. The Northeast Kingdom has always had its share of cults and communes, and Asa's little church was simply one more essentially harmless example.

On the other hand, although I never heard him preach, I imagined he was partial to what I would now call the spider-and-fly school of sermons. Sometimes he would allow himself the sort of remark in front of Rollie and me that certainly would have alarmed our parents had we shared it with them. One particularly dark night when he was about to drive the two of us home after we'd taken care of Foogie, he stood on his bluestone walk and looked up into the black sky and murmured, "Soon night shall be no more. Soon we'll need no light of lamp or sun."

On another occasion, when Mrs. Bedford was upstairs putting Foogie to bed and he saw that the only mail he had received that day were bills from the phone and gas companies, he said to the envelopes-unaware that Rollie and I were within earshot-"I am indeed happy to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, especially since I know you will all burn that second death in the lake of fire."

He had a thick southern accent, which made his sentences always sound like songs to me, even if some of those songs could be unexpectedly frightening.

Charlotte Bedford was a petite, fragile-looking woman, barely bigger than Rollie and me as our bodies approached their teens. She was not tall, and there was little meat on her bones. Her skin always seemed almost ghostly white to us, which I don't believe was a look Charlotte cultivated. (A few years after the Bedfords had passed through my family's life like a natural disaster, I was in college in Massachusetts. During my sophomore year I became friends with a proud belle from a town on Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, who did in fact strive to look as pale as paste, so I am confident I know the difference.)

But she didn't behave as though she was sickly, and that would obviously become an important issue at the trial. My mother believed there was a critical difference between fragile and sickly. She discouraged many women with histories of medical illness from having their babies at home, but those sorts of women who simply strike us all as frail when we see them in shopping malls or drugstores but do not in reality have a diagnosed, physiological problem-those sorts of women my mother was happy to help when they became pregnant. My mother believed a home birth was an extremely empowering and invigorating experience, and gave fragile women energy, confidence, and strength: They learned just what their bodies could do, and it gave them comfort.

And I know my mother figured out pretty quickly that Charlotte was not prepared for the short days, numbing cold, and endless snow of a Vermont winter. Especially a Vermont winter not far from the northern border of the state. As early as October, when Charlotte was in her second trimester and visiting my mother at the office in our home in Reddington for her monthly prenatal exam, she became frightened and morose when she talked of the weather.

"I just don't know what we're going to do up here, I just don't know how we're going to get by," I heard her telling my mother. "Asa hasn't even had time to get himself a snow shovel, and I just don't know where to begin finding proper boots. And it's all so expensive, just so frightfully expensive."

They had arrived in Vermont at the best possible time of the year to become lulled into the mistaken belief that the state has a hospitable, welcoming, and moderate climate. I can imagine her thoughts when they arrived in mid-April, just after that year's awful mud season, when the rocky hills of Vermont-hills thick with maple and pine and ash-explode overnight in color, and the days grow long and warm. She probably imagined the mythic winters were indeed just that: myths. Sure, it snowed, but the state had plows. Maybe the rain sometimes froze, maybe the driveway would get a little muddy in March… but nothing a minister and his family couldn't handle.

But her introduction to fall in Vermont was nasty and winter harsher still. There was a killing frost that year in late August, and she lost the flowers she'd planted by the bluestone walk the previous spring; there was a light snow during the second week in September, and almost nine inches were dumped on the state the Friday and Saturday of Columbus Day weekend.

Charlotte had eyes as gray as moonstone, and thin hair the color of straw. She was pretty if you didn't mind the subtle but unmistakable atmosphere of bad luck that seemed to pulse from that pale, pale skin.

Rollie and I spent the Fourth of July at the Bedfords', baby-sitting Foogie. We spent the afternoon in T-shirts and shorts, watching Foogie run back and forth under the sprinkler in his bathing suit, and then spraying the boy with the hose. He loved it. Like his mother, he had white, almost translucent skin, but he had Asa's red hair and round head. He was a sweet boy, but as ugly as they come.

Rollie was menstruating by then, but I wasn't. She was in the midst of her fourth period that weekend, a fact she shared with me with no small amount of pride: the agony of the cramps she was stoically enduring, the flow that she claimed was so strong she'd have to leave me alone with Foogie almost every hour, while she raced inside to insert a fresh tampon.

Once when Foogie wasn't within earshot, I teased Rollie by suggesting she was fabricating her period for my benefit.

"How can you say that?" she asked.

"Your white shorts," I answered. "When I get a period, there's no way I'll wear white. What if the tampon leaks?"

"Tampons don't leak," she said firmly, and in a tone that implied I didn't have the slightest idea what I was talking about. "Besides, why in the world would I want to pretend I was having my period? It's not like this is some French class I want to get out of."

I shrugged my shoulders that I didn't know, but I did. Or at least I thought I did. Rollie and I were both pretty girls, but I had something she didn't: breasts. Not so large that boys would tease me or I had ever been embarrassed about them, but apparent enough that someone like Rollie would notice. Perhaps because of my mother's candor about bodies and birth and how babies wind up in a womb in the first place, Rollie and I were aspiring tarts. We couldn't talk enough about kissing and petting and contraception-rubbers, the pill, the diaphragm, and something that struck us both as incomprehensibly horrible, called an IUD.

Standing among the dog-eared paperback mysteries Rollie's parents kept in a bookcase in their bedroom was a well-read copy of The Sensuous Man and-behind the rows of paperbacks, against a back wall of the bookcase-a hardbound copy of The Joy of Sex. Rollie and I read it together often at her house, and garnered from it what I have since discovered was a frighteningly precocious comprehension of cunnilingus, fellatio, and all manner of foreplay. We imagined our lovers someday performing the recommended exercises in the books: sticking their curled tongues deep into shot glasses, doing push-ups for hours. I had yet to see a real penis then, and I had a feeling an actual erection might scare me to death when I did, but between the anatomic details of how the male and female apparatus functioned that I'd gleaned over time from my mother, and the pleasure to be found in those organs suggested by the McKennas' books, I think I was much less squeamish in the summer between my seventh and eighth grades about sex than most girls my age. Rollie, too.