Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

Sometimes I just think it's funny I've never birthed a baby banker.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

WHEN AN AIRPLANE CRASHES, usually far more than one thing has gone wrong. The safety systems on passenger planes overlap, and most of the time it demands a string of blunders and bad luck for a plane to plow into a forest outside of Pittsburgh, or skid off a La Guardia runway into Flushing Bay. A Fokker F-28 jet piloted by two competent veterans might someday dive into the historic waters of Lake Champlain seconds before it is supposed to glide to the ground at nearby Burlington Airport, killing perhaps fifty-six air travelers and a crew of four, but such a crash would in all likelihood necessitate a litany of human errors and mechanical malfunctions. A wind shear could certainly take that Fokker F-28 and abruptly press it into the earth from a height of two or three thousand feet, and someday one might, but it would probably need some help.

It might demand, for example, that the captain had been ill when he was supposed to have attended his airline's recurrent training on wind shears-when to expect one, how to pull a plane through one.

Or perhaps it had been a smooth flight from Chicago to Burlington, and although there were now rolling gray clouds and thunderstorms throughout northwest Vermont, the gentle ride east had lulled the pilots a bit, and they were ignoring the FAA's sterile cockpit rule prohibiting extraneous conversation below ten thousand feet. Perhaps the pilot was commenting on how much his children liked to hike the deep woods northeast of Burlington at the exact moment the wind shear slammed hard into the roof of the jet, his remark about woods postponing by a critical second his decision to power the engines forward and abort the landing.

Or perhaps at the exact second the cockpit's wind shear alert screamed its shrill warning and the pilot was instinctively turning the jet to the right to abort the landing, the air-traffic controller in Burlington's tower was telling him of the shear and to climb to the left; in the chaos of warnings-one mechanical, one human-there was just that half-second of indecision necessary for the gust to send a jet built in the 1970s into the waters rippling over hundreds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ferries, rowboats, and wrought-iron cannons.

I am telling you this because it was the sort of thing my mother's attorney talked about a great deal when he first agreed to defend her. He could go on this way for a long time, always coming to the same point. The shit, so to speak, had to really hit the fan for a plane to auger in.

My mother's attorney had been a ground mechanic in the air force in the Vietnam War, but had wanted desperately to be a pilot: He was both color-blind and nearsighted, however, and so his eyesight prevented him from this. As I recall, his analogies in 1981 revolved around icy wings instead of wind shears, or-a personal favorite of his-the incredible chain of events that would usually have to occur for a jet to crash because it ran out of fuel. But he loved his airplane analogies.

As he sat around our dining-room table amidst his piles of yellow legal pads or as he paced the kitchen, occasionally stopping before the window that faced the ski trails on Mount Chittenden, his point was unchanging throughout those days and nights when he first began rolling around all of the variables in his mind: It would take the same sort of string of misfortune and malfeasance for one of my mother's patients to die in childbirth as it did for an airplane to crash.

And it certainly seemed so, at least initially, in the death of Charlotte Fugett Bedford. She died in the middle of March, after a nightmarishly long labor. The black ice that fell and fell during the night had trapped my mother and her assistant alone with Asa and Charlotte: Even the sand trucks and plows were sliding like plastic sleds off the roads. The phones weren't down for particularly long on March 14, but they were down for just about four crucial hours between twelve twenty-five and four-fifteen in the morning.

And for a time Charlotte had indeed shown signs that had led my mother to fear a placental abruption: The placenta detaches itself from the uterine wall, so that the mother may slowly bleed to death. There was a moment when Charlotte bled profusely from her vagina, and the pain inside the woman seemed more serious than the more natural agony that is labor. But the bleeding slowed to a trickle, then stopped, and if there had been an abruption, apparently it had clotted and started to heal itself.

And at another point Charlotte's blood pressure had dropped, falling briefly to seventy-five over fifty, while the baby's heartbeat had slowed to between sixty and seventy beats per minute. My mother and her assistant had only been together three months that March, and Anne Austin still had a lot to learn: When she-a young woman barely twenty-two-placed the metal Fetalscope upon Charlotte's stomach and heard how slowly the baby's heart was beating, she cried out for my mother to listen, which of course led Charlotte to cry out in fear.

Clearly there was chaos in that bedroom well before the worst would occur.

Consequently, when Vietnam veteran turned Vermont litigator Stephen Hastings first agreed to represent my mother, he concluded that it must have taken a combination of inclement weather, downed phone lines, and bad luck for Charlotte Bedford to die. In his mind, had there not been black ice on the roads, my mother would have driven her patient to the hospital in Newport. Had the phones been working, she would have called the rescue squad, and they might have rushed Charlotte there. And, of course, my mother would have done everything possible had Charlotte gone into shock due to a placental abruption. My mother had been prepared to administer oxygen. She'd already instructed Anne to pull from their calico birthing bag the plastic tubing and needle and clear bag of fluid she would inject into Charlotte intravenously to keep her hydrated… but Charlotte suddenly stabilized.

No, the cause of death had not been placental abruption, as the autopsy would later confirm. And my mother understood this well before the real crisis began: what looked for all the world to her like a ruptured cerebral aneurysm somewhere deep inside Charlotte's brain.

Sometimes I would overhear my mother try and explain to Stephen that while there had been moments of turmoil and confusion that night, the chain of events that cost Charlotte Fugett Bedford her life was nothing so complex as the sort of thing that pulled planes from the sky and people to their deaths. She would try and tell him it was more cut-and-dried than all that, and he would gently remind her that it wasn't.

Or at least, he would say, it would not be in the eyes of a jury. And then once more they would discuss what had occurred in that bedroom that was indisputable.

Charlotte Fugett Bedford went into labor with her second child on Thursday, March 13, 1981. It was late morning when her contractions began coming in earnest, and Charlotte decided that her back pains had nothing to do with the way she had lifted the vacuum when she had finished cleaning the living room. At one thirty-five she phoned her husband at the office at his church and spoke to him for three minutes. At one-forty she phoned my mother, reaching her as she was leaving the house to have the oil changed in her station wagon. Charlotte and my mother spoke for six minutes.

My mother knew that Charlotte's labor had been relatively easy with Foogie, although the first stage-that period when the cervix dilates to ten centimeters, and the contractions become longer, more frequent, and more pronounced-had taken a day and a half in Alabama heat. The second stage, however, had been brief: Once Charlotte was ready to push, she had Foogie through the birth canal in twenty minutes.