Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

They arrived at the police station during my algebra class. As the rows of X's and Y's on the paper before me were transmogrified from variables and vectors into abstract line drawings, my mother's fingers were inked, her prints recorded, and her face photographed from the front and the side. With the tips of her fingers still blue, she was then brought to the courthouse to stand before a judge. Stephen was allowed to remain beside her, but my father had to sit in one of the rows of benches that formed two square blocks behind her.

I imagined the judge behind a desk that was not merely huge but elevated above the rest of the furniture in the courtroom with comic-book absurdity. I saw him staring down at this lawyer in a Burlington-type big-city business suit and this woman in a dress with blue irises and pearls and lipstick. At Stephen's suggestion, my mother had endeavored to look as suburban and unthreatening as possible, and so she was wearing the pearl necklace and lipstick that usually appeared only on special occasions like weddings and New Year's Eve dinner parties.

Stephen had taken great pains at dinner the night before to make it clear to us that my mother would not go to jail the next day for one single moment, so Wednesday morning I was at least saved from visions of steel bars and cell blocks. But I did hear the judge's voice as often as I heard my math teacher's, and that voice was stern: the sort of voice that can still be heard sometimes from the tall pulpits, reminding New Englanders that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry God. Sadly, I did not see the judge as a kind of impartial referee and arbitrator, someone who, it was conceivable, might actually become an ally of Sibyl Danforth's. Instead I conjured a judge who cared solely about conviction and punishment, and so when he spoke it was simply to agree with that unreasonably evil Bill Tanner, or to harangue my mother for taking the life of a patient.

The only snippet of conversation I heard in my mind that I knew reflected the reality of what was occurring in Newport was the response to the question from the bench "How do you plead?" Stephen was to speak for my mother at the arraignment, and so it was he who would answer, "Not guilty." My mother would have absolutely no lines that day in the drama of which she was the reluctant star.

At that point, I assumed, my parents and Stephen would leave the courthouse, and my father would drive my mother home.

The reality, I would learn later, had been in a small way somewhat better than my fantasies, but in one important way far worse. The small way? Judge Howard Dorset was no Jonathan Edwards-like preacher, no Calvinist voice from on high who took pains to inform my mother of the yawning, flaming pit before her. Months later when the trial was in progress, I would in fact discover that I rather liked the sound of Dorset's voice, especially the way as a native of northern Vermont he would occasionally stretch words like stairs and pairs into two syllables, or business into three.

Nevertheless, my mother had to endure one astonishing moment for which Stephen had not prepared her: the conditions of release. Stephen had made it clear that my mother would have to give up midwifery until the trial was over or the case was settled, but otherwise he had led her to believe the discussion of bail wouldn't be contentious.

In actuality, it was.

Bill Tanner argued that "a midwife by her very nature demonstrates a reckless disregard for authority, and for the established medical norms of our society. A midwife is by nature an outlaw, someone who cavalierly puts women-and babies-at risk on a daily basis for no other reason than a mindless and backward distaste for the protocols of modern medicine." My mother was a good example: an irresponsible ex-hippie in a little hill town, tooling around northern Vermont in a beat-up station wagon. A woman with no formal medical training, she nevertheless ran around with syringes and surgical silk, with drugs like Ergotrate and Pitocin, while feigning the sort of expertise it took doctors years to acquire.

"Sibyl Danforth has a long history of challenging the State, first as a war protester and now as a midwife," Tanner said. "Given that history, and given the fact that she is now facing fifteen years in prison if convicted, the State believes there is a real and significant danger of flight."

"Your Honor, we all know there's no risk of flight. None at all. My client has lived in the same house for almost a decade, and in the same town almost her entire life," Stephen said.

"Moreover, Mrs. Danforth faces the loss of her practice-such as it is," Tanner interjected.

"And let's not forget she's a mother. She has a daughter in school here in Vermont whom she loves very much. And she has a husband with an established architectural practice. This is where her life is, this is where her roots have grown deep and taken hold. Mrs. Danforth isn't going anywhere."

"She has no job, Your Honor, her career's in shambles. Her reputation has been irrevocably tarnished. There are just so many reasons for her to leave the Northeast Kingdom that we know there's a very great risk of flight. And so we'd like to see bail reflect that. The State would like to see bail set at thirty-five thousand dollars."

"That's absurd," Stephen said. "Just ridiculous."

"Not at all. Your Honor, thirty-five thousand dollars is roughly half the appraised value of the Danforths' home. We believe it's a sum sufficient to ensure that… that nothing happens to all those deep roots."

Judge Dorset, my father told me, gave Bill Tanner what my family called the hairy eyeball: a chastising look in which someone rolls his eyes up so far into his head that the eyes and the brows become almost one.

"A tragedy has brought us all here," the judge said, "and we are probably about to embark upon a long road together. I, for one, can do without such hyperbole as 'outlaw' this early into the process, especially since I expect I will witness even more grandiloquent and dramatic license later on. My sense is defense counsel is correct when he tells me Mrs. Danforth has no plans on leaving, and I see no reason to impose a monetary condition for release."

Then in a voice that suggested he did this all the time-that most of the conditions were standard and he could recite the list by rote-Dorset outlined the terms of my mother's freedom.

It was the summer of motions. My mother had been arrested and charged in the first third of April, but the wheels of justice roll slowly indeed-a snowplow going uphill in a snowstorm-and it wasn't until early July that all of Stephen's and Patty Dunlevy's activity seemed to have any direction.

In July and August, however, the State's moves and Stephen's countermoves gathered momentum, and suddenly that snowplow was barreling downhill on completely clear, dry roads. Just after the Fourth of July weekend, Stephen filed a motion to have the case dismissed, arguing that even when all of the evidence was viewed in the best possible light for the State, there was still absolutely no case. He said we would lose on this motion, which we did, but it would give him an opportunity to hear Bill Tanner's arguments and listen to some of his experts.

Two weeks after that Stephen filed a motion to have my mother's statement from the night the state troopers came to our door suppressed-that conversation the State referred to with inappropriate glee as her confession. Stephen said the odds were we would lose this one, too, but he thought there was at least a small chance we could keep her first formal recollections of Charlotte Fugett Bedford's death from becoming evidence: The troopers, he insisted, had completely dominated the atmosphere in the house, yet had failed to make it clear to my mother that she should have an attorney present before she opened her mouth.