Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

Sometimes my mother changed Charlotte's position. Sometimes Charlotte labored squatting. Sometimes she labored with her back upright, but lying slightly on her side.

"You can do it, you can do it, can do it, can-do-it, can-do-it, do-it, do-it, do-it, do-it!"

At ten minutes past six, in the early minutes of her fourth hour of pushing, Charlotte Fugett Bedford suffered what my mother was convinced was a ruptured cerebral aneurysm-or what she would refer to in her own mind as a stroke. She imagined that the intracranial pressure of Charlotte's exertions had caused a small vessel inside the poor woman's brain to burst.

Asa and my mother, right up until that moment, were still telling Charlotte she could do it, she could get that little baby through her and into the bedroom with them:

"My, oh my, you're great, Charlotte, the best, the best!"

"'Nother second, 'nother second, 'nother second!"

Asa had moved between his wife's legs to catch the child, while Anne and my mother were at her sides, holding her. Abruptly, while struggling in the midst of a contraction, Charlotte's chin shot up from her chest as she pushed with whatever energy she had left, she opened her eyes, and then exhaled with a small squeal. Her husband saw her eyes roll up, then close. My mother and Anne felt the body grow limp in their arms as Charlotte lost consciousness.

She seemed to go fast. Respiratory distress began almost immediately. My mother was about as well trained as the volunteers on the town rescue squad, and she tried to revive Charlotte. She knelt beside her and blew deep into the woman's lungs through her mouth, attempting to restart her breathing; she pushed down hard upon Charlotte's chest with the heels of her hands, shouting, "One and two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen!"

Fifteen compressions and two breaths. Fifteen compressions followed by two breaths.

There didn't seem to be a pulse, and my mother pleaded with Charlotte to breathe as she worked. She was crying as she counted aloud, and she begged the woman to fight for her life.

"You can do it, dammit, I know you can, you can, you can, you-can! Please!" Anne said my mother demanded of the apparently dead woman.

Did she perform at least eight or nine cycles as my mother said, or four or five as Asa recalled? That is the sort of detail that was disputable. But at some point within minutes of what my mother believed had been a stroke, after my mother concluded her cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, she screamed for Asa and Anne to find her the sharpest knife in the house.

Asa would say in court that he did as she asked without thinking, he would say he had no idea what my mother intended to do with the knife. He would say he believed at the time that my mother was going to use the knife to somehow try and save his wife's life. My mother was a midwife and he was not, my mother knew CPR and he did not. My mother was in charge. And he was not.

Perhaps he was anticipating a tracheotomy. Perhaps not. Perhaps in reality he knew. Perhaps not.

Anne would insist she went with Asa for different reasons at different times. Once it was because she couldn't bear to stay in the room with the dead woman. Once it was because she was afraid to stay in the room with my mother: My mother suddenly seemed insane to her.

For whatever the reason, Asa and Anne ran downstairs to the kitchen together, and Asa pulled from the wooden block back on the counter beyond Foogie's reach a knife that was ten inches long, six of which were a steel blade, rounded along the cutting edge like an arrowhead. The handle was wood, stained the dark green of an acorn squash to match the block that held it.

When they returned, my mother said through her tears, "I can't get a pulse, Asa. I can't bring her back."

"Can't you do more CPR?" Asa asked, dropping the knife on the foot of the bed.

"Oh, God, Asa, I could do it for days, but she'll still be gone. She's not coming back." My mother was sitting beside Charlotte, who was still flat on her back on the bed.

As Asa had much earlier that evening-the night before now, really-he knelt by the side of that bed. He rested his head on his wife's chest, and staring up at her face, he stroked her bangs, still wet from the sweat of her hard labor. He murmured her name, and my mother squeezed his shoulder once.

And then my mother moved with a suddenness that frightened both Asa and Anne.

"Let's go," she said, still sniffling, "we've got no time." With the same hand that had squeezed his shoulder only seconds before, she picked the knife up off the sheets.

What she did not do-and when the state's attorney went over this in the courtroom with Anne, her testimony made even me doubt my mother for a brief moment-was ask Asa what he wanted to do. She never asked the father if he wanted her to try and save the baby. If he had said no, she could have done it anyway, if that's what she wanted; but if he had said yes, she at least would have had complicity.

And she never placed the Fetalscope back upon Charlotte's stomach to see if there was still a fetal heartbeat. Of course, the baby would prove to be alive, but not checking one last time before she did what she did-it surprised and shocked even the novice midwife.

And from the moment Asa and Anne returned to the bedroom until the moment my mother began to cut, she never checked one last time to see if Charlotte had a pulse or a heartbeat. Maybe she had-as she said under oath-checked just before they returned with the knife. But neither the father nor the apprentice witnessed my mother make sure Charlotte was dead before she plunged a kitchen knife into the woman.

"What do you mean?" Asa asked my mother, after she said to him that they had no time. He saw her wipe her eyes, and he would say later there was something about the motion that suggested to him my mother had just had some sort of breakdown. It was a frantic gesture, as if she thought she could heave tears across a room.

"The baby's only got a few minutes, and we used most of them on Charlotte!"

"What are you going to do?"

"Save your baby!" My mother's voice was shrill, both Asa and Anne thought, and Asa said in court he wondered if she was hysterical. My mother insisted that if her voice was shrill, it was not because she was hysterical: It was because she wanted to snap Asa to attention.

"Save the baby?"

"Save your baby!"

My mother had already pushed the old nightgown in which Charlotte had been laboring up around her neck when she had been trying to restart her heart, so there were no clothes to remove before performing the cesarean section. Asa stood up and walked behind my mother as she turned on the reading lamp by the bed for the first time that night.

"Is she dead?"

"God, Asa, yes! Of course!"

Was she? We'll never know for sure. The medical examiner would be one of many state witnesses who would say it was medically possible that Charlotte Fugett Bedford's heart may have stopped for a moment, but my mother's diligent CPR had revived it-and, for a time, revived the woman. But there was no doubt in Asa's or Anne's minds that my mother believed Charlotte was dead.

When my mother said to Asa that-yes, of course!-his wife was dead, he nodded, and my mother took that motion as an assent. Certainly Asa made no effort to stop her. He lumbered slowly to the window without saying a word and looked into the sky, which seemed destined to remain dark forever.

My mother would say later that in the early-morning hours of March 14, she performed the emergency cesarean because she couldn't bear to see two people die. She just couldn't bear it. And Charlotte was dead without question.