Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

Had my mother raised the question of a lawyer that night in March instead of my father, we might have won; had my father brought the issue up before my mother was well into her statement, we might have won. Neither happened, and my mother's remarks became a part of the State's case.

Then Stephen filed a motion to obtain Charlotte Bedford's medical records going back to her childhood in Mobile, Alabama, and her years with Asa in Blood Brook and Tuscaloosa. This motion he won.

And he argued that we should be allowed access to the woman's correspondence that winter with her mother and her sister, as well as the audiotapes Asa made of the Sunday services at his church for the parishioners who were unable to attend due to weather or illness. After speaking to members of Asa's church, Patty had concluded that Charlotte was sicker than she had let on with my mother; Stephen wasn't sure whether this information would be relevant or, if it was, how we would use it when the time came, but it was information that mattered to him, and he wanted evidence. In those letters or in those services-as Asa or another parishioner asked for prayers for the sick or needy-might be a suggestion of the sort of frailty Charlotte hid from my mother.

Stephen won this motion as well, and Patty spent a weekend in August listening to tapes of Asa Bedford-fiery fundamentalist-and of his congregation.

And then there were the plea negotiations, although the two sides were always so far apart it never really looked as if a compromise or bargain was possible. At one point Stephen had my mother willing to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter if the State would offer a deferred sentence of five years. The idea of my mother giving up midwifery for five years astonished me, but it seemed reasonable to my father and Stephen, and they convinced her to accept it. Pressured by the medical board and emboldened by angry ob-gyns, however, the State would not offer a deferred sentence.

But, Bill suggested to Stephen, the State might listen to a mere year in jail and then a suspended sentence with probation-perhaps six more years-if my mother was willing to pay additional fines, perform community service, and never practice midwifery again.

As soon as the State reiterated its demand that my mother give up midwifery, of course, the negotiations inevitably broke down. It wasn't the specter of prison that made it impossible to settle, it was my mother's unwillingness to relinquish her calling.

"Don't you get it, Stephen, a woman's dead," our attorney told us Bill would remind him-as if he'd forgotten why they were meeting or speaking on the telephone.

"I haven't lost sight of that, Bill," Stephen said he would usually respond, "and my client is as saddened by that fact as anyone. But my client didn't kill her."

Sometimes Bill would hint to Stephen that the rage his client had heard the day she was arraigned was absolutely nothing compared to what she'd have to endure throughout a trial. And Stephen did all that he could to make sure my mother understood this.

"Doctors are a funny bunch. They just don't approve of people without medical degrees delivering babies," Stephen said a number of times that summer, always as a warm-up to his warning that the State would say astonishingly mean things about midwifery and my mother. By Labor Day his expression "Doctors are a funny bunch" had become a running joke in our household, a bit of gallows humor as the trial loomed near.

For all of us, of course, that humor veiled both fear and anger. In July I began to experience the first shooting pains up and down the left side of my back that dog me still, pains that made it excruciating to ride Witch Grass some days or swim in the river with Tom Corts on others. But given the fact that Sibyl Danforth was "that midwife who did the C-section," I didn't believe I could trust a doctor that summer, and I did not want to subject my mother to what I imagined would be the tension of having to take me to see one.

I've always liked stories that end with parents folding their children into their arms, or tucking them into sleep at the end of a day. They are many and they are varied.

I longed to be tucked in the summer I turned fourteen, an odd desire only in that I hadn't had any longings of that sort in at least half a decade before then, but a yearning wholly explicable when I contemplated the loss of my mother and the dissolution of my family.

Afternoons when I was alone in the house, I'd blast my stereo as loud as the speakers and my ears could bear. I'd cocoon inside the music, the noise and vibrations sheltering me from the worst of my fears. Rock music has never been a particularly subtle form of expression, but it's unquestionably noisy and prone to anger. That summer, in most ways, I was much closer to woman than girl; being lost below waves of anger and noise was about as close to being tucked in as I could hope to get.

I spent lots of time with Tom, much more so than during the school year. We would spend evenings together when he returned from the ski resort where he was working once again, and whole afternoons on his days off. We swam together in the river, often with Sadie Demerest and Rollie McKenna and the boys who passed through their lives that summer. A road followed the river almost exactly, builders and pavers choosing to align the asphalt path with the aqua, but the water was hidden from the road by steep banks that slid twenty feet down, and by thick walls of maple and pine and ash. On a hot day, there might be thirty of us from the high school sunning ourselves on the rocks smack in the middle of the water, or bobbing in the deep pools between the boulders. On a cool or cloudy afternoon, there might be as few as four or five of us, depending upon whether Rollie or Sadie had brought a boy with her that day.

At any given moment that summer, I was as likely to be found experimenting with eyeliner with Rollie, as with marijuana with a half-dozen girlfriends at one of the places at the edge of the forest or far corners of the fallow meadows that had become our designated places to hang out.

Tom turned sixteen early in August and started to drive, which I think terrified my parents as much as anything that summer, because that meant we could actually drive ourselves to movies or one of the diners near the ski resort. Tom didn't have a car of his own, but an advantage of coming from a family that owned an automotive garage and graveyard was that he always had one at his disposal. Some were in better shape than others, but they all ran.

If my parents had not reached a point where they pined to see Tom someday as a son-in-law, they had grown from merely tolerating him to sincerely liking him. Once we had begun going steady during the school year, well before Charlotte Bedford had died, he began coming over to our house with some frequency. Usually my mother was busy with one of her patients in the part of the house that served as her office or she was off somewhere delivering a baby, and we always had the privacy to neck and listen to records. I think it speaks well of the young Tom Corts that he continued to come around even after Charlotte Bedford died. In the spring and summer between my mother's arraignment and trial, he dropped by especially often, both because he understood I needed him and because he wanted to show his alliance with my family. I know my parents appreciated that. My mother actually baked a cake for him the night before he turned sixteen.

And showing his alliance with my family demonstrated no small amount of maturity and spine. My mother's calling had always had the capability of eliciting strange and strong reactions in people, ranging from those parents who wouldn't allow their little girls to play at my house when I was very young because they feared my mother would whisk us all off to a birth, to my teenage friends who assumed-optimistically but mistakenly-that among the alternative or New Age herbs my mother used on a regular basis were marijuana and hashish. After one of my mother's mothers had died, all of the small communities in which I lived-my village, my school, my circle of friends-were split. Some folks saw Charlotte Bedford's death as an indictment of midwifery generally, and of my mother's irresponsibility specifically: This was bound to happen, you know, their gazes said when they ran into me at the front counter of the general store, or in the locker room as I got dressed after track. Other people would go out of their way to show their support for my family as we endured what they viewed as a lynching: You're all in our thoughts and prayers, they would tell me, sometimes giving me bear hugs at the pizza parlor in St. Johnsbury or as I helped my father empty our trash at the town dump.