Chris Bohjalian: Midwives

Tom Corts did escape his family's automotive garage. He left for one of the state colleges while I was in high school, and we broke up soon after that. But our paths cross periodically as adults, because he works for a company that designs software for the medical community. He also attended my mother's funeral, a gesture that moved both my father and me.

Tom is married, I am not. Someday I hope I will be, too.

Until recently, I continued to see Stephen Hastings's name in the newspapers and his one-click-above strut on television. No more. Apparently as he has gotten older, he has chosen to do less criminal law.

For a long time my family received holiday cards from his firm every December, and for a few years they included notes that Stephen himself wrote. But then the notes diminished to a salutation, a wish, and a signature, and then the cards themselves stopped coming.

I don't believe my father missed them, but I am sure on some level my mother did.

I have never spoken to the Fugetts, but I did speak once with Asa Bedford. I went to see Mobile and the towns around it like Blood Brook, and I learned that Asa had eventually remarried and returned to the pulpit in an Alabama coastal town called Point Clear. I hadn't gone to Alabama planning to visit Asa, at least not consciously, but when I got there the desire to see him was almost overwhelming, and so I called him from a pay phone at a convenience store.

He said he was in the midst of packing for a ministerial conference upstate, but he certainly had a half hour for someone who'd come all the way from Vermont. He said he and his wife would be hurt if I didn't come by the parsonage. And so I did, and the three of us had iced coffee, and Asa and I spoke of our lives in the years since the trial.

Foogie, I learned, had recently moved to Texas so that he and his wife could be closer to her family. He was about to become a schoolteacher. And Veil, the little baby whose life my mother saved, had grown into a handsome young man, who, if he didn't exude such health and vigor and strength, would be the spitting image of his mother.

When Asa walked me to the door of the modest little house, we stood at the screen for a long moment and then he hugged me, patted my back, and wished me peace.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

March 15, 1981

The room was really quiet, it was like even the ice and snow had stopped banging against the window. For a second I was aware of this chattering and I looked around figuring that Asa and Anne must have heard it, too. But they didn't, because it was in my head. It was my teeth.

My teeth were actually chattering. The room was perfectly warm, but my teeth were still chattering. I looked down at my hands, and they were trembling so badly the knife was shaking.

And so I inhaled really slowly and then exhaled. When I cut into Charlotte, I didn't want to be shaking so much I couldn't control the knife and accidentally hurt the baby. I then made a line with my fingernail from Charlotte's navel to her pubic bone, and reminded myself that doctors did these things all the time without hurting the baby. I've seen lots of C-sections in my life, because most of the mothers who I transfer to hospitals end up having them, and never once have I seen a doctor nick the fetus. So I told myself I just had to be incredibly careful, and then I went ahead.

I just did it, I pushed the tip of the knife firmly into the skin.

I don't think anyone but me saw the body flinch. At the time I just thought it was one of those horrible postmortem reflexes that you hear about in some animals, and so I went on. I thought the same thing when there was all that blood, and it just kept flowing.

After all, I'd checked for a pulse and I'd checked for a heartbeat, and there hadn't been one. So how could she have been alive? The fact is she couldn't, I thought to myself, and she wasn't. That's what I thought as I drew the knife down, and I know I was absolutely sure of that then.

But looking back on it now-a day later, after I've gotten some sleep-I just don't know. Whenever I think of that flinch, I just don't know…