Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

Although there is no recorded transcript of my mother's and Charlotte's conversation on the telephone, the prosecution never doubted her version. She said that Charlotte told her the contractions early that Thursday afternoon were still easily twenty minutes apart and lasting perhaps thirty or thirty-five seconds. My mother therefore decided to have the oil changed in her car as she had planned and then head north to the Bedfords'. She figured she would be there by three or three-thirty, and she was.

Nevertheless, she did phone her new apprentice and ask Anne to drop by the Bedfords' right away. She wasn't sure when Asa would return, and she wanted to be sure that Charlotte had company.

I remember getting off the school bus in Reddington that afternoon just as the skies were starting to spit a cold March rain. There was still a thick quilt of snow on the mountains, freshened perhaps every other night, but the only snow in Reddington that particular day were the drifts along the shady sides of the buildings. The temperature still hovered most afternoons in the twenties or thirties, but we knew winter was winding down and mud season would soon be upon us.

I was not surprised that my mother was gone when I walked inside our house. I didn't have to read the note she had scribbled in blue with one of the felt-tip pens that she loved, to know she was up at the Bedfords'. I had been expecting that note for days.

At about the same moment that I was returning home from school, one of Asa's parishioners stopped by the Bedford house and picked up Foogie. The Bedfords' home was small, and Foogie's parents had agreed it would be best for the boy to be someplace else when his brother or sister arrived.

The first stage of Charlotte's labor was much longer for the second child than most midwives or doctors would have expected. My mother arrived at the Bedfords' in the middle of the afternoon, and testified in court that she anticipated that Charlotte would deliver her baby soon after dinner. She said she never went into a delivery with any sort of expectations, or hourly objectives in her mind: a first stage that should last ten hours, for example, followed by ninety minutes of pushing. She said no midwife or doctor did. But when pressed by the state's attorney, she said if she had any expectations at all, she might have thought Charlotte's cervix would be fully dilated by six or seven in the evening, and the child pushed into the world by nine or ten that night-at the latest.

Fifteen minutes before midnight, when Charlotte was eight centimeters dilated and the baby's head had descended below the ischial spines to the first positive position-when there was, in my mother's mind, no longer a chance that the umbilical cord could slip past the baby's skull through the cervix, endangering the child-my mother carefully ruptured the membranes damming Charlotte's amniotic waters.

"I don't understand why you did that," Anne whispered to my mother, concerned that the intervention had been unnecessary.

"It was time," my mother answered with a shrug.

At midnight it started to rain, and the droplets turned to ice when they hit the cold ground. At that moment it was thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit at the weather station at Lyndon State College. At twelve twenty-five, the phones between Newport and Richford, between Reddington and Derby Line, went dead, brought down by the weight of the ice forming on the phone lines, and some ill-timed gusts of wind. My mother and her apprentice had no idea the phone lines were down then, but they would discover it soon.

Charlotte was fully dilated by one in the morning. Her first stage had lasted a solid thirteen hours. Charlotte's transition, that nightmarish period for many mothers just before they must begin the desperately hard business of pushing, those moments when many mothers fear with a horror that's visceral that they will not survive this ordeal, was rocky. Both my mother and Asa Bedford testified that Charlotte began sobbing through her pain, insisting that the being within her was going to rip her apart. She begged them to help her, telling them this felt different than it had with Foogie, this was killing pain, this was a torture she could not endure and she would not survive.

"I can't do this, I can't do this! God, I can't do this!" she wailed.

And, in at least one regard, Charlotte was right when she said it felt different than it had with her first child. Unlike during her first delivery, that day and night in Vermont she was experiencing the rigors of labor with a baby in the right occipitoposterior position: The child's head was pressing against the sacrum, the bone in the rear of her pelvis. Instead of the child facing down as it crowns, it was possible it would emerge sunnyside up.

But this wasn't alarming my mother. Often the baby rotates at the end of the first stage of labor or at the beginning of the second. And to increase the chances that the child would spin-and to decrease some of Charlotte's back pain-my mother had Charlotte on her feet and walking around between some of the contractions, and she had her laboring often on her hands and knees. Sometimes she asked Anne to apply hot compresses or towels to Charlotte's back; occasionally she had Charlotte squat.

Between one and one-thirty in the morning, when Charlotte was most miserable and her sobs were loud and long and filled with despair, Asa prayed. My mother said under oath that she still viewed the delivery as normal, and nothing had occurred that would have alarmed any obstetrician or midwife anywhere in the world. Charlotte's labor to this point had been hard, but it hadn't been life-threatening or dangerous for the child inside her.

Asa prayed softly at first, his voice even and calm, but as Charlotte's wails grew more plaintive and horrid, his praying grew more animated and intense.

Both my mother and Anne testified that he prayed to the Holy Father to help His child Charlotte through this ordeal, to give her the strength and the courage to endure it, and to protect her throughout it. He was most eloquent when Charlotte was most quiet: When Charlotte would open her mouth wide and yell, he was often reduced to repeating the Lord's Prayer over and over.

Sometimes Charlotte tried saying the Lord's Prayer with him, but she was never able to get through it before she would have to stop to breathe through her pain.

And my mother kept trying to reassure them both-and, as the night grew long, her own assistant as well-that back labor was hard and painful, but it wasn't fatal.

Shortly after one-thirty, not long after my mother had asked Asa to climb on the bed and sit behind his wife while she pushed, my mother noticed the blood. She told herself it was mere bloody show, but the timing of the flow and the quantity of the stream made her own heart beat in a way that made her nervous. She and Anne had just put the clean, oven-sterilized sheet on the bed on which she expected they would catch the child, and the stain spread on the white sheet like a glass of red wine toppled upon fresh table linens.

Charlotte surprised my mother by heaving her body with such force that she almost rolled off the bed, and by the time my mother had caught her and told her that she was doing fine, the blood had smeared across Charlotte's thighs and her buttocks, and the palm of her hand where she had slapped the bed in her pain.

Her suffering seemed extreme, and when my mother took her blood pressure, she saw it had fallen during the hour: The systolic reading had dropped to eighty, and the diastolic to sixty. Charlotte's pulse was up into the one-twenties, then the one-thirties, but the baby's heartbeat was as infrequent as ninety small beats per minute.

My mother decided she would not have Charlotte begin to push for another few minutes, while she monitored her. If Charlotte's blood pressure continued to fall, if she thought the woman was slipping into shock or she saw any further signs of fetal distress, she planned to call the town rescue squad and have her taken to the hospital. If for some reason they were unavailable, she would drive her there herself.