Midwives

Chapter 1.

I USED THE WORD vulva as a child the way some kids said butt or penis or puke. It wasn't a swear exactly, but I knew it had an edge to it that could stop adults cold in their tracks. Vulva was one of those words that in every household but ours conveyed emotion and sentiments at the same time that it suggested a simple part of the basic human anatomy for one sex or an act-like vomiting-that was a pretty basic bodily function.

I remember playing one afternoon at Rollie McKenna's, while her mother had a friend of hers visiting from Montpelier. It was one of those rare summer days in Vermont when the sky is so blue it looks almost neon-the sort of blue we get often in January on those days when the temperature won't climb above zero and the smoke from your neighbor's woodstove looks as if it will freeze when it first appears just above the tip of the chimney, but rarely in June or July.

Like Mrs. McKenna, her friend worked for the state education department. As the two adults sat around a wrought-iron table on the McKennas' brick terrace (a terrace that seemed inappropriately elegant to me even then), sipping iced tea with mint leaves from my own mother's garden, I proceeded to tell them about Cynthia Charbonneau's delivery in all the detail I could muster.

"Mrs. Charbonneau's baby was nine pounds, two ounces, but my mom was able to massage the vagina and stretch the muscles so the perineum didn't tear. Most women who have babies that are around nine pounds have to have episiotomies-that's where you cut the perineum from a lady's vagina to her anus-but not Mrs. Charbonneau. Her vulva's fine. And the placenta came right behind Norman-that's what they named the baby-by, like, two minutes. My mom says the placenta was big, too, and it's buried right now by this maple tree Mr. Charbonneau planted in their front yard. My dad says he hopes their dog doesn't dig it up, but he might. The dog, that is."

I was probably nine at the time, which meant that the McKennas had lived in Vermont for a little over a year, since they had arrived in our town from a Westchester suburb of New York City on my eighth birthday-literally, right on the day. When the moving van started chugging up the small hill in front of our house, I told my dad I expected it would turn left into our driveway and unload my presents.

My dad smiled and shook his head and said I might just as well expect the moon to drop out of the sky onto our rooftop.

I had never been to Westchester, but I had an immediate sense that the McKennas were from a town more mannered than Reddington: The terrace was a dead giveaway, but they were also a lot more stiff than those of us who had put in any time in Vermont-especially my parents' friends from the days when they hung out with the folks from the Liberation News Service and viewed love beads as a profound political statement. I liked the McKennas, but on some level I suspected from the moment Rollie introduced me to her mother that the family wasn't going to last long in our part of Vermont. They might do okay in Burlington, the state's biggest city, but not in a little village like Reddington.

I was wrong about that. The McKennas did all right here, especially Rollie. And while there were actually parents in town who would not allow their little girls to play at my house-some merely fearing their daughter would wind up at a birth if my mother was unable to find a baby-sitter, others believing that among the strange herbs and tinctures that were my mother's idea of medical intervention were marijuana, hashish, and hallucinogenic mushrooms-the McKennas didn't seem to mind that my mother was a midwife.

Telling Mrs. McKenna and her friend about Norman Charbonneau's passage through his mother's vaginal canal was as natural for me at nine as telling my parents about a test at school on which I'd done well, or how much fun I might have had on any given day in December sliding down the hill behind Sadie Demerest's house.

By the time I was fourteen and my mother was on trial, I had begun to grow tired of shocking adults with my clinical knowledge of natural delivery or my astonishing stories of home births. But I also understood that words like vulva were less endearing from a fourteen-year-old than from a younger girl.

Moreover, by the time I was fourteen and my own body was far along in its transformation from a child's to a teenager's-I had started to wear a training bra in the summer between fifth and sixth grade and begun menstruating almost a year before the county courthouse would become my second home-the whole idea of a nine-pound, two-ounce anything pushing its way through the ludicrously small opening between my legs made me queasy.

"I just don't see how anything that big will ever get through something that small!" I'd insist, after which my father would sometimes remark, shaking his head, "Bad design, isn't it?"

If my mother was present she would invariably contradict him: "It is not!" she would say. "It's a magnificent and beautiful design. It's perfect."

Because she was a midwife, I think my mother was bound to think this way. I'm not. Moreover, I'm thirty years old now, and I still cannot begin to fathom how anything as big as a baby will someday snake or wiggle or bash its way through what still looks to me like an awfully thin tunnel.

…

Although my mother would never have taken one of my little friends to a birth, just before I turned eight I began to accompany her to deliveries if a baby decided to arrive on a day or night when my father was out of town and her stable of sitters was busy on such short notice. I don't know what she did before then, but she must have always found someone when necessary, because the first birth I remember-the first time I heard my mother murmur, "She's crowning," which to this day makes me envision a baby emerging from the birth canal with a party hat on-occurred on a night when there was a tremendous thunderstorm and I was in the second grade. It was late in the school year, perhaps as close to the commencement of summer as the first or second week in June.

My mother believed babies were more likely to arrive when the sky was filled with rain clouds than when it was clear, because the barometric pressure was lower. And so when the clouds began rolling in that evening while the two of us were eating dinner on our porch, she said that when the dishes were done she might see who was available to baby-sit tonight, if it came to that. My father was on the New York side of Lake Champlain that evening, because builders were going to break ground the next day for a new math and science building he had helped to design for a college there. It wasn't his project solely-this was still three years before he would open his own firm-but my father could take credit for figuring out the details involved with building the structure into the side of a hill and making sure it didn't look like offices for the North American Strategic Air Command.

The first infant I saw delivered at home was Emily Joy Pine. E.J., as she would come to be called, was an easy birth, but it didn't look that way to me a month short of my eighth birthday. I slept through the phone call David Pine made to our house about ten in the evening, probably because my mother was still awake and answered promptly. And so Emily's birth began for me with my mother's lips kissing my forehead, and then the image of the curtains in the window near my bed billowing in toward the two of us in the breeze. The air was charged, but it had not yet begun to rain.

When we arrived, Lori Pine was sitting on the side of her bed with a light cotton blanket draped over her shoulders, but most of the other bedding-blankets and bedspread and sheets-had been removed and piled in a small mountain on the floor. There were some fat pillows at the head of the bed that looked as if they came from an old couch. The mattress was covered with a sheet with the sort of pattern that might have looked appropriate on a big, ugly shower curtain: lots of psychedelic sunflowers with teardrop-shaped petals, and suns radiating heat and light.

That sheet, I would overhear, had been baked in a brown paper grocery bag for over an hour in the couple's kitchen oven. It may have been tasteless, but it was sterile.

When my mother and I arrived, the woman who was her apprentice back then was already there. Probably twenty-four or twenty-five years old at the time, Heather Reed had already helped my mother deliver close to forty babies at home; when we walked into the bedroom, she was calmly telling Lori to imagine the view her baby had of the uterus at that moment.

My mother was nothing if not hygienic, and after she had said hello she went straight to the Pines' bathroom to wash up. She would probably spend ten full minutes scrubbing her hands and soaping her arms before she would place her palms softly upon a woman's stomach, or pull on a pair of thin rubber gloves and explore a laboring mother's cervix with her fingers.

When she emerged from the bathroom, she asked Lori to lie back so she could see how she was doing. Lori and David's two small sons had already been taken up the road to their uncle's house, while their aunt-Lori's sister-was here, rubbing Lori's shoulders through the blanket. David had just returned from the kitchen, where he had been preparing tea made from an herb called blue cohosh, which my mother believed helped to stimulate labor.

Lori lay back on the bed, and as she did her blanket fell away and I saw she was naked underneath it. I had assumed she wouldn't be sleeping in pajamas with pants like me, but it hadn't crossed my mind as I stood in the bedroom that she wouldn't be wearing a nightgown like my mother, or perhaps a big T-shirt of the sort my mother and I both slept in on hot summer nights.

Nope, not Lori Pine. Buck naked. And huge.

Lori Pine had always been a big woman in my eyes. She towered over me more than most moms when we would find ourselves standing together at the front register of the Reddington General Store, or in the crowded vestibule before or after church. Her boys were younger than I, one by two years and one by four, so I had no contact with her at school. But I did seem to find her standing near me often, and I had this fear at the time that if I ever needed to get past her in an emergency, she would plug up the entire doorway, an ample, spreading, broad-bottomed plug of a woman.

In a real emergency, I now imagine, Lori Pine would actually have used her size to whisk me up and out of danger, tossing me through an exit or doorway with the same ease with which I throw my cats outside the house in the morning.

But what struck me most when I saw Lori Pine naked on her bed was simply her pregnant belly. That's what I saw, that's what I remember: a massive fleshy pear that sat on her lap and protruded as high as her bent knees, with a small nub in the middle that reminded me of those buttons that pop from the breasts of fully cooked chickens or turkeys. I didn't know then that a pregnant belly was a pretty solid affair, and so I expected it to flatten and slip to her sides like a dollop of mayonnaise when she lay back; when it didn't, when it rose from the bed like a mountain, I stared with such wonder in my eyes that Lori rolled her face toward me and panted what I have since come to believe was the word "Condoms."

I've never figured out whether the word was meant for me as a piece of advice that I should take to heart, as in "Demand that your man always wear a condom so you don't end up trying to push a pickle through a straw," or as a warning against that particular form of contraception: "This is all the fault of a condom. There are better forms of birth control out there, and if I'd had any sense at all, I'd have used one."

Whether Lori Pine really did say the word condoms or something else or merely my name when she saw me standing there-my name is Constance, but at a young age I learned to prefer Connie-I'll never know. I like to believe she said condoms; so many other beliefs shatter when we grow up, I want to keep this one intact.

In any case, whatever she said made everyone in the room aware of the fact that I was there, leaning against the wall.

"Do you mind if she stays, Lori?" my mother asked, nodding slightly in my direction. "Tell me honestly."

Lori's husband took her hand and stroked it, adding, "She could join the boys at their uncle's, you know. I'm sure Heather wouldn't mind driving her up there."

But Lori Pine was as generous and uninhibited as she was large, and she said she didn't mind having me there at all. "What's one more pair of eyes, Sibyl?" she said to my mother, before starting to wince from a contraction, her head snapping toward me as if she'd been slapped.

And so I stayed, and got to see Lori Pine's labor and E.J. Pine's birth. My mother and I had arrived about ten-thirty in the evening, and I stayed awake through much of the night and into the next morning. I did doze in the bedding that had been tossed onto the floor, especially when the thunder that had rolled east across the Champlain Valley and the Green Mountains passed over us into New Hampshire, but they were short naps and I was awake at quarter to six in the morning when my mother had Lori begin to push, and again at seven thirty-five when E.J. ducked under the pubic bone for the last time, my mother pressing her fingers against the infant's skull to slow her down and give her mother's perineum an extra few seconds to yawn.

E.J. was born at seven thirty-seven-like the airplane. Labor was about nine and a half hours, and it was in the opinion of everyone present a breeze. Everyone but me. When I dozed, it was probably because I could no longer bear to watch Lori Pine in such pain and had shut my eyes-not solely because I was tired and my eyes had drooped shut on their own.

The room was dim, lit only by a pair of Christmas candles with red bulbs David had pulled from the attic for the event just after my mother and I had arrived. Had it not been such a windy night, they would have used real candles, but Lori wanted to labor with the windows open, and David had recommended sacrificing authenticity for safety.

Lori had started to express her disappointment when she saw David reappear with the plastic sconces instead of wax candles, but then another contraction ripped through her body and she grabbed my mother's arms with both hands and screamed through clenched teeth: a sound like a small engine with a bad starter trying to turn over.

"Breathe, Lori, breathe," my mother reminded her placidly, "breathe in deep and slow," but by the way Lori's eyes had rolled back in her head, my mother might just as well have told her to march outside and hang a new garage door, and that was the last any of us heard that night from Lori Pine about candles.

I hadn't really seen an adult in pain until then. I had seen children cry out, occasionally in what must have been agony-when Jimmy Cousino broke his collarbone when we were in the first grade, for example. Jimmy howled like a colicky baby with a six-year-old size set of lungs for speakers, and he howled without stopping until he was taken by a teacher from the playground to the hospital.

It was a whole other experience, however, to see an adult sob. My mother was great with Lori, endlessly smiling and reassuring her that she and her baby were fine, but for the life of me I couldn't understand why my mother didn't just get her the adult equivalent of the orange-flavored baby aspirin she gave me when I didn't feel well. The stuff worked miracles.

Instead my mother suggested that Lori walk around the house, especially in those first hours after we got there. My mother had her stroll through her two boys' bedrooms; she recommended that Lori take a warm shower. She asked Lori's sister to give the woman gentle backrubs and massage her shoulders. At one point, my mother had Lori and David looking at snapshots together in a photo album of the home births of their two sons-pictures that had been taken in that very bedroom.

And while I don't believe witnessing Lori Pine's pain frightened me in a way that scarred me, to this day I do remember some specific sounds and images very, very well: My mother cooing to Lori about bloody show, and the blood that I glimpsed on the old washcloth my mother had used to wipe the sheet. Lori's panting, and the way her husband and her sister would lean over and pant beside her, a trio of adults who seemed to be hyperventilating together. Lori Pine slamming the back of her hand into the headboard of her bed, the knuckles pounding against it as if her elbow were a spring triggered by pain, and the noise of the bone against cherry wood-it sounded to me like a bird crashing into clapboards. The desperate panic in Lori's voice when she said she couldn't do it, she couldn't do it, not this time, something was wrong, it had never, ever hurt like this before, and my mother's serene reminder that indeed it had. Twice. The times late in the labor when Lori crawled from her bed and was helped by my mother and Heather to the bathroom, her arms draped over their shoulders as if she were the sort of wounded soldier I'd seen in the movies who was helped from the battlefield by medics, good buddies, or fellows who hadn't previously been friends. The image of my mother's gloved fingers disappearing periodically inside Lori Pine's vagina, and the delighted sweetness in her voice when she'd say-words spoken in a hush barely above a whisper-"Oh my, you're doing fine. No, not fine, terrific. Your baby will be here by breakfast!"

And it was. At quarter to six in the morning when Lori Pine started to push, the sky was light although covered with clouds, but the rain had long passed to the east. No one had bothered to unplug the plastic Christmas candles, so I did: Even in 1975, even just shy of eight, I was an environmentalist concerned with renewable resources. Either that or a cheap Yankee conditioned to turn off the lights when they weren't needed.

Chapter 2.

The books say conception occurs when a sperm penetrates a female egg, and they all use that word-penetration. Every single one of them! It's as if life begins as a battle: "Let's storm the egg!" Or, maybe, as an infiltration of spies or saboteurs: "We'll sneak up on the egg, and then we'll crawl in through the kitchen window when she's asleep!" I just don't get it, I don't see why they always have to say penetrate. What's wrong with meet, or merge, or just groove together?

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

WHEN THINGS GO WRONG in obstetrics, they go wrong fast. They fall off a cliff. One minute mom and fetus are happily savoring the view from the top, and the next they're tumbling over the edge and free-falling onto the rocks and trees far below.

I would hear physicians use those sorts of analogies all the time when I was growing up. And of course virtually every ob-gyn the State paraded before the jury when my mother was on trial had his or her personalized version of the labor-as-aerial-act speech.

"Most of the time, labor is like going for a drive in the country. Nothing unusual will occur. But sometimes-sometimes-you'll hit that patch of black ice and skid off the road, or a dump truck will lose control and skid into you."

"The vast, vast majority of the time, labor doesn't demand any medical intervention. It's a natural process that women have been handling since, well, since the beginning of time. But we've lost our collective memory of the fact that although labor is natural, it's dangerous. Let's face it, there was a time when women and babies died all the time in labor."

Their point was always the same: Women should not have their babies at home with my mother. They should have them in hospitals with physicians.

"A hospital is like an infant car seat: If something unexpected should occur and there's some kind of collision, we have the tools to pull the baby out of the oven," one doctor insisted, mixing metaphors and mistaking a uterus for a kitchen appliance from Sears.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, my mother was one of a dozen independent or "lay" midwives in Vermont who delivered babies at home. Virtually no doctors did. The cost of malpractice insurance for home birth was prohibitive, and most ob-gyns really believed it was safer to bring children from womb to world in a hospital.

My mother disagreed, and she and different doctors often waged their battles with statistics. As a little girl I would hear phrases and numbers rallied back and forth like birdies on badminton courts, and I was fascinated by the grimness behind the very clean, clinical-sounding words. Maternal morbidities. Neonatal mortalities. Intrapartum fatalities.

The word stillborn fascinated me. Still born. At nine or ten, I assumed it conveyed a purgatory-like labor, a delivery that went on forever.

"Is he still being born?"

"Indeed, he is. Horrible, isn't it? They're now in their third year of labor…"

My mother believed that home birth was safe at least in part because she refused to deliver any high-risk pregnancies at home. Women with very high blood pressure, for example. Diabetes. Twins. She insisted on hospital birth for those women, even when they pleaded with her to help them have their babies at home.

And she never hesitated to transfer a laboring mother in her care to the hospital, if something was-as she once described the feeling to me-making her heart beat a little faster than she liked. Sometimes it would be due to my mother's sense that the labor hadn't progressed in hours, and her patient was exhausted. Sometimes my mother might recommend a transfer because she feared a more dangerous turn was imminent, one of those things the medical community euphemistically describes as an "unforeseen occurrence": the placenta separating from the uterine wall before the baby has arrived or such signs of fetal distress as a falling heartbeat.

In all of the years that my mother practiced, the records would reveal, just about four percent of the time she took her laboring women and went to the hospital.

There's no question in my mind that my mother and the medical community disliked each other. But she would never have let their conflicts jeopardize the health of one of her patients. That's a fact.

I could begin my mother's story with Charlotte Fugett Bedford's death, but that would mean I'd chosen to open her life with what was for her the beginning of the end. It would suggest that all that mattered in her life was the crucible that made my family a part of one tragic little footnote to history.

So I won't.

Besides, I view this as my story, too, and why I believe babies became my calling as well.

And I am convinced that our stories began in the early spring of 1980, a full eighteen months before my mother would watch her life unravel in a crowded courtroom in northern Vermont, and at least a full month before the Bedfords would even arrive in our state.

Here's what I recall: I recall that the mud was a nightmare that year, but the sugaring was amazing. That's often the case. If the mud is bad, the maple will be good, because mud and maple are meteorological cousins of a sort. The kind of weather that turns dirt roads in Vermont into quicksand in March-a frigid, snowy winter, followed by a spring with warm days and cold, cold nights-also inspires maple trees to produce sap that is sweet and plentiful and runs like the rivers swollen by melted snow and ice.

My mother's and father's families no longer sugared, and so my memories of that March revolve more around mud than maple syrup: For me, that month was largely an endless stream of brown muck. It covered my boots to my shins in the time it would take to trudge fifty yards from the edge of our once-dirt driveway to the small cubbyhole of a room between the side door and the kitchen, which earned its name as a mudroom in those days: The floors and walls would be caked with the stuff. When the mud was wet, it was the dark, rich color of tobacco; when it dried, the color grew light and resembled the powder we used then to make chocolate milk.

But wet or dry, the mud was everywhere for two weeks in the March of 1980. The dirt roads became sponges into which automobiles were constantly sinking and becoming stuck, sometimes sinking so deep that the drivers would be unable to open their doors to escape and would have to climb through the car windows to get out. Yards became bogs that slowed running dogs to a walk. Virtually every family in our town had laid down at least a few long planks or wide pieces of plywood to span the puddles of mud on their lawns or to try and link the spot of driveway on which they parked their cars with their front porches.

My mother parked her station wagon just off the paved road at the end of our driveway, as she did often in the winter and early spring, to ensure that she could get to her patients in a timely fashion. Nevertheless, there were still those occasional births when even my determined mother was unable to get there in time. The section of our old house she used as her office had one whole wall filled with photos of the newborn babies she'd delivered with their parents, and one of those snapshots features a baby crowning while the mother is attended by her sister. The sister is pressing a telephone against her ear with her shoulder while she prepares to catch the child. My mother is at the other end of that telephone, talking the sister through the delivery since a snowstorm had prevented either her or the town rescue squad from getting to the laboring woman before the baby decided it was time to arrive.

That spring, even a city with nothing but paved streets and solid sidewalks like Montpelier-the state capital-somehow developed sleek coats of mud on its miles and miles of asphalt and cement.

But the sugaring was good and the syrup crop huge. My best friend Rollie McKenna had a horse, and although the two of us were never supposed to ride her at the same time, we did often, and that March we rode up to the Brennans' sugarhouse after school at least three or four times so we could smell the sweet fog that enveloped the place as Gilbert and Doris slowly boiled the sap into syrup.

Of course, there were other reasons for riding into the hills where the Brennans had hung hundreds and hundreds of buckets on maple trees. We also rode there because the roads we took to the sugarhouse would lead us past the town ball field where Tom Corts and his friends would smoke cigarettes.

At twelve (and fast approaching thirteen), I would ride or run or walk miles out of my way to watch Tom Corts-two years older than I and therefore in the ninth grade-smoke cigarettes. I probably would have gone miles out of my way to watch Tom Corts stack wood or paint clapboards. He wore turtlenecks all the time, usually black or navy blue, and they always made him look a little dangerous. But his hair was a very light blond and his eyes a shade of green that was almost girlish, and that made the aura of delicious delinquency that surrounded him almost poetic. Tom was the first of many sensitive smokers with whom I would fall deeply in love, and while I have never taken up that habit myself, I know well the taste of smoke on my tongue.

Tom Corts smoked Marlboros from the crushproof box, and he held his cigarettes like tough-guy criminals in movies: with his thumb and forefinger. (A few years later when I, too, was in high school, one of Tom's younger disciples, a boy in my grade, would teach me to hold a joint in that fashion.) He didn't inhale much, probably no more than necessary to light the cigarette and then keep it burning; most of the time, the cigarettes just slowly disappeared between his fingers, leaving ashes on the dirt or mud of the ball field, the sidewalk, or the street.

Tom had a reputation for driving adults wild, although rarely in ways they thought they should-or could-discipline. I remember the first hunting season when he was given a gun and taken into the deep woods with the older males in his clan, he shot one of the largest bucks brought down that year in the county. The men's pride in their young kin must have shriveled, however, when they saw how Tom mugged for the camera in the picture the owner of the general store took of the boy and the buck for his annual wall of fame. Tom wrapped one arm around the dead deer's neck and pretended to sob, and with his other hand held aloft a sign on which he'd named the deer, "Innocence."

It was also widely believed in town that Tom was the ringleader behind the group that somehow acquired cans of the sizzling yellow paint the road crews used to line highways, and one Halloween coated the front wall of the new town clerk's office with the stuff. The building, a squat little eyesore that not even the selectmen could stand, was a mistake the whole town regretted, and neither the constable nor the state police worked very hard to find the vandals.

On any given day, Tom was as likely to be seen somewhere reading a paperback book of Greek mythology-unassigned in school-as a magazine on snowmobiling; he was the sort of wild card who would skip a class trip to the planetarium in St. Johnsbury, but then write an essay on black holes that would astonish the teacher.

Initially, my father disliked Tom, but not so much that he ever discouraged me from trying to get the boy's attention, or suggested that it might be a bad idea for Rollie and me to try and ingratiate ourselves into his circle. I think my father-the sort of orderly architect who would stack his change by size every single night of his adult life, so that on any given morning I could find atop his bureau small skyscrapers of quarters and nickels and dimes-thought Tom ran a little too wild. My father came from a family of achievers-a line of farmers who actually prospered in Vermont's rocky soil, followed by two generations of successful small-business men-and he thought Tom's bad pedigree might be a problem. Although he knew Tom was very smart, he still feared the boy might end up like most of the Cortses in Reddington: working by day at the messy automotive garage that looked like a rusted-out auto graveyard, while trying to buy Budweiser with food stamps at night. It probably wasn't a bad life if you kept your tetanus shots current, but it wasn't the life my father wanted for his only child.

My mother understood why I found Tom cute, but she, too, had her reservations. "There are probably worse mushrooms in this world than a boy like Tom Corts," she once warned, "but I still want you to be careful around him. Keep your head."

They had both underestimated Tom, as they'd see the next year. He was always there for me when I needed him most.

In the mud season of 1980, Rollie's horse, Witch Grass, was twenty years old, and while her best years were well behind her, she was a good horse for us. Patient. Undemanding. And slow to accelerate. This last character trait meant a lot to us (and, I have to assume, to our parents), because we had given up our formal lessons a year earlier, tired of being told to sit up straight, post, and canter.

Witch Grass could carry both Rollie and me for long stretches on her chestnut back, although we tried to minimize the amount of time we dropped one hundred and ninety pounds onto her aging spine. One of us would sometimes walk beside her.

It was probably during the third week in March that I first let Tom kiss me.

Make no mistake, this wasn't one of those passionate, "we kissed" sort of moments: I was decidedly passive during my first kiss, and although Tom initiated the buss (and I was indeed a willing participant), he broke it off fast, and we were too young-and the ground too muddy-for our small part of the earth to move.

Rollie and I planned, as we had the day before, to take turns riding Witch Grass up Gove Hill, the only spot in Reddington her mother could think of where the ground was not either asphalt or deep mud. When the horse had had a chance to stretch her legs, we would ride together across the street and past the general store to the ball field, stealing a glimpse of Tom Corts and his vaguely truant friends. We might then continue up to the Brennans' sugarhouse, since even in the center of town we could see its steam winding up from the trees like the trail of a small but hyperactive geyser.

So Rollie took off on Witch Grass first, and I climbed over the electric fencing into the field by the barn where the horse grazed when Rollie was in school, and began shoveling the big clumps of horse turds into what Rollie and I secretly referred to as the Shit Barrow. Witch Grass wasn't my horse, but I spent so much time riding her that I tried to help with her care and feeding-which meant mostly midafternoon shoveling.

I hadn't been at it long when I heard my mother's station wagon churning up the street toward me, with its motor's characteristically ineffectual-sounding sputter. The wagon was a giant blue woody from the late sixties, and while my parents had considered trading it in during the oil crisis in 1973-a discussion driven as much by guilt over the way the animal guzzled gasoline and oil as it was by the cost of pumping dead dinosaurs into its belly to keep it moving-my mother was unable to part with it. She had had the wagon almost as long as she had had me, it had gotten her safely to over five hundred births, and she couldn't bear to put this particular partner out to pasture.

The field was beside one of Reddington's busier roads, the street that wound its way to Route 15-the road west to Morrisville and east to St. Johnsbury. That meant that my mother could have been on her way to practically anywhere: the grocery, the bank, a laboring mother.

She slowed down when she saw me, came to a stop in the middle of her half of the road (she didn't dare pull off into the mud beside it), and rolled down her window. I crossed the street with the McKennas' shovel still in my hands and balanced both feet on the yellow lines in the middle of the pavement, pretending the stripes were twin tightropes.

"Wanda Purinton's baby's coming," she said, smiling serenely the way she did whenever one of her mothers' labors had commenced.

"Is she far along?" I asked.

"Don't know. The contractions sound close. We'll see."

"You won't be home for dinner, will you." I tried to hide my disappointment; I tried to present this realization as a simple fact that needed confirmation, but it didn't come out that way.

She shook her head. "No, sweetheart. You and Daddy are on your own. Do you mind making dinner?"

"No." But I did. And of course my mother knew it.

"I took some chopped meat out of the freezer. Make hamburgers."

"Uh-huh." Hamburgers were about the extent of my culinary oeuvre when I was twelve. Hamburgers and grilled cheese. As a matter of fact, until I took a two-week cooking class as a January lark in my junior year of college, they were all I was ever able to cook.

"Maybe it will be a short labor. Wanda's a Burnham, and Burn-hams usually arrive pretty quickly."

"And maybe you'll be there all night."

She raised an eyebrow. "Maybe. In which case, we'll have a big breakfast together." She leaned her head partway out the car window. "A kiss, please?"

I obeyed, a perfunctory peck on the cheek, and then watched her put the wagon in gear and head off. I wasn't exactly angry with her as much as I was frustrated: Her job and Wanda Purinton's baby meant I'd have to be home earlier than I'd planned. It wasn't that a dinner of hamburgers and canned peas took so long to prepare, but I always felt a moral obligation of sorts when my mother was gone to be home when my father returned from work. I don't know if the idea was drummed into my head by the situation comedies I watched for hours on our snowy, static-filled television, or if it was a result of my sense of how my friends' mothers behaved-women as different from each other as Mrs. McKenna from Westchester and native Vermonter Fran Hurly-but as far as I knew, with the exception of midwives, mothers were supposed to be in the house when fathers came home from wherever they worked.

I stalked back to the field and shoveled halfheartedly for a few minutes, knowing there wouldn't be time for me to both take a ride up Gove Hill and find a pretext with the horse to watch Tom Corts smoke cigarettes. And so I perched the shovel atop a good-sized dry rock, tucked the cuffs of my jeans further into my high black boots, and decided to stroll by the ball field alone. I told myself I was actually going by the general store for chewing gum, but even that had a conspiratorial agenda: better breath if Tom or I… better breath.

Tom was sitting with two older boys when I wandered by, teenagers old enough to have already decided they didn't need to finish high school to wash dishes at any of the restaurants that ringed Powder Peak, the ski resort to the south, or become journeyman carpenters, and therefore had dropped out of school. I recognized that one was an O'Gorman, but he had four years on me and I didn't know which one he was, and the other was Billy Met-calf, the sort of boy whose stubble had become strangely menacing as he had grown lanky and tall.

Had Tom been alone, I might have found the courage for a detour to the bleachers across the muck that in a month or two might become grass, but he wasn't, so I trudged straight ahead to the store. The gums and mints sat in a wire rack directly across from the wooden counter behind which John Dahrman sat day in and day out, a quiet widower with white hair and eyes as deep as Abraham Lincoln's ghostly sockets in the portraits that filled the Civil War chapter in my history textbook. Although his hair was white and his eyes exhausted, his skin was smooth and I imagined at the time that he was much younger than one might have initially suspected. He'd owned the store for at least as long as I'd been alive and aware of such things as commerce and chewing gum, assisted at the register by a seemingly endless stream of nieces and nephews as they grew up and learned how to count.

As I was paying for my gum, disappointed that I hadn't been able to get within thirty yards of the slightly wild object of my infatuation, I heard the bell on the store's front door jingle. The O'Gorman brother and Billy Metcalf were strolling toward the refrigerator case at the back of the store in which Mr. Dahrman kept the beer. They were too young to buy any, but I'd seen them stand around and stare at the six-packs behind the glass before, discussing loudly how much they could drink and which brands they would buy when they were old enough. Eventually Mr. Dahrman would either kick them out or herd them toward the aisles with beef jerky and artificial cheese puffs, products they found almost as interesting as beer and were legally allowed to purchase.

I expected Tom Corts to wander in behind them, but he didn't. I assumed this meant he had gone home, but I still held out the dim hope that he was alone at the ball field, and if I walked quickly, I might have a moment with him before O'Gorman and Metcalf returned with their cache of Slim Jims and Jax. What I would actually do with that moment was beyond my imagination, since the majority of Tom's and my exchanges up till that point had consisted of garbled hellos into our hands as we gave each other small waves.

It turned out not to matter, because Tom was gone. The bleachers on the first- and third-base sides of the infield were empty, and the only life in sight was the Cousinos' idiot golden retriever, a dog so dumb it would bark for hours at tree stumps and well caps. It was barking now at the stone barbecue pit between the right-field foul line and the river that ran beside the field. I tried to lose my disappointment in the satisfaction of well-blown bubbles and the sweet taste of the gum when I pressed it hard against the back of my teeth with my tongue, and marched back to the field I'd been shoveling. I didn't wonder where Tom had taken his scowl and his cigarettes, I just accepted the fact that he had disappeared and I'd have to wait another day to see him.

I stretched my legs over the electric wire and picked up the shovel from the rock on which I'd laid it. Leaning against the wall of the barn no more than twenty yards away was Tom Corts. He pulled his cigarette from his mouth and started toward me, oblivious-or uncaring-of the fact that with each step his sneakers sunk deep into either horse turd or mud.

I stood still, waiting with my heart in my head. When he had gotten so close I could smell the cigarettes on his breath, he stopped and asked, "They pay you for this?"

I paused, thinking, This? Then I realized: the shoveling. "No."

"Then why do you do it?"

"Because Rollie's my friend."

He nodded. "And 'cause you ride the horse."

"That, too."

He jammed the one hand he didn't need for his cigarette deep into the pocket of his blue jean jacket. "It's going to be a cold one tonight. Cold as hell for the animals. Their instincts are telling them spring is here and a cold like January is behind them. But then tonight it'll go down to twenty degrees, and 'cause they aren't expecting it, it'll feel like ten below zero to them."

I had no idea if Tom's theory had any validity, but it sounded wise that afternoon. And compassionate. It suggested to me that this boy had a soul as mysterious as his eyes were gentle.

"Your family have animals?" I asked. I knew the Cortses hadn't farmed in years, but I felt I had to ask something. "Cows or horses?"

"My grandparents-all of them-used to. Granddaddy Corts had a fifty-head herd for years, which used to be considered big. And they had some horses, too. Morgans."

"Do you ride?"

He shook his head. "Nope. Just snowmobiles. And motorcycles."

I'd seen Tom ride snowmobiles, often when my father and I would go cross-country skiing up on the natural turnpike and logging trails in North Reddington. We'd probably pulled off the trail on our skis a dozen times for Tom and his older friends and cousins. But I had a feeling he was lying about the motorcycles, and somehow that endeared him to me as much as his wisdom about animals did.

"I've never ridden a snowmobile."

"I'll take you, if you like. Maybe even this year. We'll get more snow, you know."

"Oh, I know."

"I've seen you ski. With your dad and mom."

"Just my dad. My mom doesn't like to ski."

"She's smart. Snowmobiling's more fun. You go faster, and you get plenty of exercise. More than most people realize."

"I don't think she likes to snowmobile either."

He flicked his cigarette toward his feet and ground it deep into the mud.

"You have Mrs. Purta for French, right?"

"Right."

"Like her?"

"I do. Sure."

He nodded, taking this fact in and turning it over in his mind for meaning. A signal. Confirmation, perhaps, of my maturity. Then he said something that might have been threatening to me had I not heard three of those words from my mother only a short while before, a coincidence that suggested to me a cosmic rightness. Moreover, his voice was suddenly filled with an unease that mirrored my own.

"A kiss before I go, please?" he asked, and there was a quiver in his words that transformed "please" into a two-syllable request. I stood still before him, which was about as close to an affirmation as I could offer at twelve, and after a second long enough for goose bumps to grow along my arms and dance along the skin under the sleeves of my shirt and my sweater, he leaned toward me and pressed his lips against mine. We both opened our mouths a sliver and tasted each other's breath.

It was only after he stood up straight and our bodies parted that I realized he hadn't put his tongue into my mouth. I was glad, but mostly because I wouldn't have known how to juggle Tom Corts's tongue with the large piece of bubble gum hiding somewhere at that moment in my cheek.

It would be a good eight months before Tom and I would become boyfriend and girlfriend, and a full year and a half before I would look to the back of a courtroom in Newport and see him standing there, watching. It would be a full year and a half before I would find myself crying at night in his arms.

Chapter 3.

Zygote isn't a bad word, but it's far from perfect. On the one hand, I love the word's origin-the Greek word for "joining together." That feels right to me, because that's about what has occurred. An egg and a sperm have joined together, and they're on this cool little pilgrimage to the uterus.

On the other hand, I don't like the way the word sounds when you say it out loud: Zygote! It always sounds like it needs an exclamation point. It always sounds like a curse from some angry mad scientist. Zygote! The beaker is cracked! Zygote! There's radium all over the lab!

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER WAS NAMED Sibyl after her grandmother on her mother's side. Her grandmother was born in a small village in eastern Mexico, the daughter of missionaries from Massachusetts. Those missionaries-my mother's great-grandparents-spent ten years in a little coastal town called Santiago, a decade in which they founded a Catholic church, became very good friends with a village healer named Sibella, and had two children. One of those children lived-my mother's grandmother-and one didn't.

The one who didn't was a boy they named Paul, and it was his death by drowning that destroyed that family's faith and sent them packing back to the United States. I was told Paul drowned in shallow water, which for years in my mind conjured an image of choppy Gulf surf near the beach, and a three-year-old child bobbing for moments in waves before he was pulled under for the last time. Eventually my mother told me this wasn't what she believed happened at all. The family tradition-myth or reality, who knows-is that he died in the bathtub.

When those missionaries and their daughter returned to the United States, they almost resettled as they had planned in central Massachusetts, but in their attempt to rebuild their lives they decided to start fresh in a new place, and just kept heading north until they were beyond Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in Vermont. In Reddington.

I think most people my age assume that children died so frequently in the nineteenth century that people didn't grieve as profoundly or as long as we do today. I don't believe that. The woman for whom my mother was named was born in 1889, and that woman's brother in 1891. He died in 1894: There's one marker for the boy in the Reddington cemetery, another one in that family's plot in a cemetery in the town of Worcester, Massachusetts, and a third tombstone marking the body's actual remains in a graveyard in Santiago.

No one knows who was responsible for bathing Paul when he died. That detail is lost in our family history.

In any case, when those missionaries who had once had the zeal to move to Mexico to spread God's word and build a church-literally, help construct the sandstone structure under the searing sun with their pale New England hands-finally settled in Reddington, they rarely set foot in any church, Catholic or Protestant, again.

My mother was a full-fledged, honest-to-God, no-holds-barred, Liberation News Service, peace-love-and-tie-dye hippie. This was no small accomplishment, since she grew up in a small village in northern Vermont. Villages like Reddington are buffered from cultural change by high mountains, harsh weather, bad television reception, and low population density (which might explain why she never actually tried to escape to places like San Francisco, the East Village, or Woodstock), so it probably took a certain amount of attentiveness, research, and spine to find the revolution-or even a decent peasant skirt.

Although Sibyl never actually moved into a school bus or commune, the photographs of her taken during the second half of the 1960s show a woman who apparently lived in bell-bottoms and shawls, love beads and medallions and sandals. Those photos reveal a woman with round blue eyes and spiraling dirty blond hair, characteristics I've inherited, although my hair is flatter by far than hers ever was.

She went to Mount Holyoke for two years, but met a slightly older man while waitressing on Cape Cod the summer between her sophomore and junior years and decided to drop out and spend the winter in a cottage with him on the ocean. It didn't last long. By Thanksgiving she was settled in Jamaica Plain in Boston, helping the Black Panthers start a breakfast program for the poor, while answering telephones for an alternative newspaper. By the spring she had had enough-not because she had grown tired of the movement with a capital M, but because she longed for the country. For Vermont. She wanted to go home, and finally she did.

She returned just before her twentieth birthday, telling her parents she'd stay through the summer and then resume her studies in the fall. My grandmother always insisted that my mother had dropped out with very good grades, all A's and B's, and Mount Holyoke would have been happy to take her back.

But I don't think returning to college was ever very likely. She had already developed what was then a popular distaste for most traditional or institutional authority, and somehow Mount Holyoke had become suspect in her eyes. Besides, by July she had fallen in with a group of self-proclaimed artists in the hills northeast of Montpelier, an assemblage of singers and painters and writers that included an illustrator who would eventually decide to become an architect instead of an album cover designer-my father. The men in the group remained in college so they wouldn't lose their draft deferments, but the women dropped out and threw pots, hooked rugs, wrote songs.

My mother became pregnant with me soon after that, and she and my father always reassured me that there was never any discussion of finding an expert in Boston or Montreal who would know how to make me go away.

Knowing my parents, I indeed believe the idea of aborting me never crossed my mother's mind, but I'm sure the thought occurred to my father. I'm positive. I have never doubted his love, and I believe he's very glad I'm here, but he has always been a tidy man, and unplanned pregnancies are usually pretty messy affairs. My conception postponed indefinitely, and then forever, any discussion of Sibyl's returning to college.

That's one of the main reasons that my mother became a lay midwife instead of a medically trained nurse midwife or perhaps even an obstetrician-gynecologist: no college degree and-over time-the conclusion that she didn't need one.

Of course, she also believed with a passion that in most cases women should have their babies at home. She thought it was healthier for both the mother and the newborn. Women, in her mind, labored most efficiently in the environment they knew best and that made them the most comfortable; likewise, it was important to greet a baby as it emerged into the world in a room that was warm, and to catch it with hands that were kind. The whole idea of salad server-like forceps and abdominal transducers irritated my mother, and-eventually, this would prove to be the cruelest irony of all-she would give a laboring woman every chance in the world to deliver vaginally. In some cases, she waited for days, always patiently, before she would take the woman to a hospital where a doctor would anesthetize her, then cut through her abdominal and uterine walls and lift the startled child into the fluorescent lights of an operating room.

My mother knew home birth wasn't for everyone, but she wanted it to remain a viable option for those who were interested. And if she had ever become a doctor or nurse-midwife, the state's Board of Medical Practice would have tried to force her to practice in a hospital.

That was how the regulations worked then; that's how they work now. If doctors and nurse-midwives deliver babies at home, they do so without malpractice insurance or state sanction. So from my mother's perspective, there was no reason to get any sort of medical degree. She knew what she was doing.

Did Sibyl Danforth dislike hospitals and what her prosecutors would describe as the medical establishment? For a time, I think she did. Was she, as they called her, a renegade? You bet. (Although when accused of being a renegade in court, she smiled and said, "I prefer to think of myself as a pioneer." Whenever I come across that exchange in the piles of court papers I've amassed, I grin.)

There was a certain humor to her anti-ob-gyn bias that never came out at the trial. In one photo of her taken in 1969, she's leaning against the back of a VW Beetle, and there by her knees are two bumper stickers: QUESTION AUTHORITY! and ONLY DUCKS SHOULD BE QUACKS. The same misgivings that she had for what she perceived to be the entrenched power of professors and college presidents, she had for physicians and hospital administrators as well.

And while she largely got over her distrust of doctors-while she never dawdled when she decided a woman needed medical intervention, while she certainly took me to pediatricians when I wasn't feeling well as a child-most doctors never learned to trust her.

…

Mine was not the first birth at which my mother was present. Mine was the third.

In the year and a half between her return from Boston and my arrival in Vermont, two other women in that circle of friends northeast of Montpelier had children, and my mother was present at the first birth by accident, and the second by choice. Appropriately, the first of those births was in a bedroom in a drafty old Vermont farmhouse, not a sterile delivery room in a hospital.

The first of those births-and my mother's baptism to midwifery-was Abigail Joy Wakefield's.

The little girl was supposed to have been born in a hospital, but she arrived two weeks early. The six adults who were present the night her mother's labor began, including the two people who would become my own parents, feared they were too stoned to try and drive any of the cars that were parked willy-nilly by the old house as though an earthquake had hit. Consequently, in a reversion to sex roles that in my opinion was part instinct, part socialized, the men agreed to run the three and a half miles up the road to the pay phone at the general store, where they could call an ambulance, and the women took the laboring mother upstairs to make her as comfortable as possible-and deliver the baby, if it came to that.

Why all three men went, including my father, has become another one of those almost mythic stories that were told and retold among my parents' friends for years. My father insisted that it was a spontaneous decision triggered by the fact that all of the men had dropped acid and simply failed to think the decision through properly. My mother and her female friends always teased him, however, that each guy had been a typical male who had wanted to get as far away from a woman in labor as humanly possible. Indeed, after traveling well over three miles in the dark, the men decided to wait by the main road for the ambulance, so they could be sure it found its way to the house.

Fortunately, neither my mother nor Abigail Joy's mother, Alexis Bell Wakefield, were tripping. That evening they'd merely been smoking pot.

Initially, my mother and Alexis were joined in the bedroom by Luna Raskin. Unlike the other two women, Luna did have all sorts of synthetic chemicals in her body, and every time Alexis sobbed, "Oh, God, it hurts, it hurts so much!" Luna would grab my mother's shirt and wail, "They're killing her, they're killing her!"

For a moment my mother assumed Luna meant Alexis's contractions. But when she elaborated, my mother realized with a combination of horror and astonishment that Luna was referring to President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whose photograph had been on the front page of the newspaper that day.

At that point my mother threw Luna out of the bedroom and delivered the baby herself.

My mother wasn't sure what delivery tools she would need, and made one of those decisions that suggested she was indeed called to be a midwife: She concluded that women had been having babies for a long, long time before someone invented delivery tools, whatever they were. She imagined the female body had a pretty good idea of what it was supposed to do, if she could simply keep Alexis calm.

Nevertheless, she did round up all of the washcloths and towels she could find, and she filled a huge lobster pot with boiling hot water. She had no idea what one should expect from a placenta, she had no comprehension of what it meant to push, and (in hind-sight this probably was for the best) she had never even heard a term like cephalo-pelvic disproportion-an infant head a couple of hat sizes too big for mom's pelvis.

She turned off the overhead light in the bedroom, assuming Alexis would be more comfortable if she wasn't staring straight up into a bright light; the lamp in the corner shed just enough light for Sibyl to see clearly all of the things she didn't understand.

Fortunately, Alexis's own mother had insisted that her daughter visit an ob-gyn, and Alexis had done some reading on her own. The woman was also blessed with a very short labor and a small-but healthy-baby. Yet no labor is easy, and while my mother never lost her belief that the process she was watching was incredibly beautiful, as the pain Alexis was feeling grew worse, Sibyl grew fearful that something was wrong. She would rub Alexis's legs and massage her back, and purr that she thought Alexis was merely experiencing what almost every woman since creation had felt. But inside, my mother had her doubts.

When the better part of an hour had passed and neither the men nor an ambulance had returned, those fears led her to wash her hands once again, this time with a thoroughness that would have impressed a heart surgeon. She took off her silver bracelets and the three different rings she wore on her fingers, including the one my father had given her after a rock concert near Walden Pond, and scrubbed her wrists and her arms up to her elbows.

When her hands were as clean as she believed possible, she placed a finger as far inside Alexis's vagina as she could, hoping to discover whether the baby was about to emerge.

"Am I dilated?" Alexis groaned, rolling her head back and forth on the pillow as if the spine in her neck were made of Jell-O.

At that point in Sibyl's life, the word dilation had always been used in the context of pupils and drugs. She had no idea that Alexis was referring to her cervix. And so my mother looked up from between Alexis's legs to scan her friend's face, but the woman had shut her eyes.

"I think so," my mother answered; although she couldn't see Alexis's pupils, she assumed that anyone who had spent as much time with her mouth around a bong as Alexis had must have eyes that were dilated.

"How far?"

"Shhhhhhh," my mother the emergency midwife said. She wiggled the tip of her forefinger inside Alexis and grazed something hard that she understood instantly was a skull. The baby's head. Briefly she rolled her finger across it, astonished by how much of it she could feel.

"Can you feel the head?" Alexis asked.

"I can feel the head," Sibyl answered, mesmerized, and slowly withdrew her finger.

Just a few minutes later Alexis screamed that she had to push, and she did.

"Go for it," my mother said. "You're doing great."

Without thinking about the logic behind her idea but assured on some primitive level that it was the right thing to do, she leaned Alexis up against the headboard of the bed and surrounded her with pillows. My mother thought if Alexis sat up, gravity would help the baby fall out.

She then kneeled on the bed between Alexis's legs and watched for a few minutes as the woman pushed and groaned and gritted her teeth, and absolutely nothing seemed to happen. The lips of her vagina may have grown more damp, but certainly no head had begun to protrude from between them.

"Relax for a minute. I think you just made a ton of progress," my mother lied. She wrapped her hands under each of the woman's knees and lifted her legs up and out, hoping to widen the opening for the baby. "Ready?" she asked Alexis, and Alexis nodded.

For the next thirty minutes Alexis would push and rest, push and rest. All the while my mother kept cheering Alexis on, telling her over and over and over that she could do this, she could push for another second, one more second, the baby was about to pop like a cork if she pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed.

A little before one in the morning my mother nearly fell back off the bed when all of that pushing suddenly worked, and the dark swatch of hair that had been teasing her behind the labial lips for what had seemed forever suddenly punched its way out, and she was staring down into a baby forehead, baby eyes, a baby nose, and a baby mouth. Lips shaped like a rose, so small they might have belonged to a doll. She cupped the head in her hands, planning to pillow its fall into the world, when a shoulder slipped out, then another, and then all of Abigail Joy and her umbilical cord. The baby was pink, and when she opened her eyes she started to howl, a long baby cry that caused Alexis to sob and smile at once, a howl so impressive that had my mother at the time had the slightest idea what an Apgar score was, she would have given the child a perfect ten.

As she was studying the two spots where the umbilical cord met mother and daughter, assuming she should snip it while wondering how, my mother heard sirens racing up the hill to the farmhouse, and she knew an ambulance was about to arrive. She was at once relieved and disappointed. She had been scared, no doubt about it, but something about the pressure of the moment had given her a high that made her giddy. This was life force she was witnessing, the miracle that is a mother's energy and body-a body that physically transforms itself before a person's very eyes-and the miracle that is the baby, a soul in a physical vessel that is tiny but strong, capable of pushing itself into the world and almost instantly breathing and squirming and crying on its own.

When Sibyl's friend Donna went into labor a few months later, she asked my mother to be with her in the hospital. I wasn't with my mother when she delivered Abigail Joy, but I was there at the second birth that she saw. I calculate I was six weeks old, perhaps as much as half an inch long, with a skeleton of cartilage and the start of a skull that would be mercifully thick. Unlike my skin.

Chapter 4.

Doctors use the word contraction and a lot of midwives use the word rush. I've never really liked either one: Contraction is too functional and rush is too vague. One is too biologic and one is too… out there. At least for me.

I'm not sure when I started using the expression aura surge, or in the midst of delivery, simply the word surge. Rand believes it was while delivering Nancy Deaver's first son, Casey, the day after we'd all stood around the statehouse in Montpelier, cheering for McGovern. Rand wasn't at the birth, of course, but Casey was born in the afternoon and it was at dinner that night that Rand noticed my using the words surge and aura surge.

Maybe he's right. I might have made some connection between the way all of us in Montpelier were tripping when McGovern spoke one day, most of us without any chemical help, and the way Nancy and I were tripping the next. I felt really good about the planet and the future both afternoons. When we were all on the statehouse lawn listening to the man, it was freezing outside, and while my cheeks were so cold my skin was stinging, I could see people's breath when they spoke and it looked like they were sharing their auras in this incredibly spiritual and meaningful and perhaps just plain healthy sort of way.

And while I've always understood the biologic rationale for the medical establishment's use of the word contraction, based both on Connie's birth and all of the births I've attended, the idea of a surge reflects both the baby's desire for progress and the mother's unbelievable power. Surge may also be more spiritually accurate, especially if it's called an aura surge.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

AS LATE AS THE FALL OF 1981-the autumn of my mother's trial-my father, Rand, was still wearing sideburns. They didn't crawl across his face to the corners of his mouth the way they had in the late 1960s and early '70s, but I remember looking up at his cheeks as we sat together in the courtroom and noting how his sideburns fell like horseshoes around his ears, descending to just below each lobe.

When the testimony was especially damaging to my mother, or when my mother was being cross-examined by the state's attorney, I watched my father pull nervously at the dark hair he allowed to grow beside his ears.

STATE'S ATTORNEY WILLIAM TANNER: So you asked Reverend Bedford to bring you a knife?

SIBYL DANFORTH: Yes.

TANNER: You didn't just ask for any knife. You asked for a sharp knife, didn't you?

DANFORTH: Probably I don't think I would have asked for a dull one.

TANNER: Both Reverend Bedford and your apprentice recall you requested "the sharpest knife in the house." Were those your words?

DANFORTH: Those might have been my words.

TANNER: Is the reason you needed "the sharpest knife in the house" because you don't carry a scalpel?

DANFORTH: Do you mean to births?

TANNER: That's exactly what I mean.

DANFORTH: No, of course I don't. I've never met a midwife who does.

TANNER: You've never met a midwife who carries a scalpel?

DANFORTH: Right.

TANNER: Is that because a midwife is not a surgeon?

DANFORTH: Yes.

TANNER: Do you believe surgeons possess a special expertise that you as a midwife do not?

DANFORTH: Good Lord, don't you think so?

TANNER: Mrs. Danforth?

DANFORTH: Yes, surgeons know things I don't. So do airline pilots and kindergarten teachers.

TANNER: Are you referring to their training?

DANFORTH: I've never said I was a surgeon.

TANNER: Is a cesarean section a surgical procedure?

DANFORTH: Obviously

TANNER: Do you think you're qualified to perform this surgery?

DANFORTH: In even my worst nightmares, I never imagined I'd have to.

TANNER: I'll repeat my question. Do you think you're qualified to perform this surgery?

DANFORTH: No, and I've never said that I thought I was.

TANNER: And yet you did. With a kitchen knife, on a living woman, you-

DANFORTH: I would never endanger the mother to save the fetus-

TANNER: You didn't endanger the mother, you killed-

HASTINGS: Objection!

Perhaps I should have been surprised that by the end of the trial my father had any hair left at all. In photographs taken the following winter, his hair looks as if it has begun to gray, but the sideburns are as prominent as ever.

My mother's calling-to her it was never a job or even a career-meant that my father was much more involved with me as a child than the fathers of most of my friends were with them. There was always a long list of baby-sitters pressed against the refrigerator door with a magnet, and occasionally I did indeed wind up with my mother at somebody's delivery, but birth is as unpredictable as it is time-consuming, and my father often filled the Connie-care breach. After all, I was an only child and my mother would have to disappear for twelve hours, or a day, or a day and a half at a time.

My father wasn't much of a playmate when it came to dressing dolls or banging plastic pots and skillets around my toy kitchen (actually, he wasn't very good with regular cast-iron or metal ones either), but he was creative when I needed new voices for trolls, and extremely handy when it came to building a permanent playhouse from wood, or a temporary one from card tables and bed sheets. He would usually endure whatever program I wanted to watch on television, even if it meant an irritating struggle adjusting the rabbit ears atop the television set for a full fifteen minutes before my show began. (Reception in our part of Vermont then was laughably poor. I remember a day one spring-when the baseball season had begun and the basketball and hockey seasons were in the midst of their endless play-offs-when my father was watching a basketball game through so much screen snow and fuzz that my mother sat down on the couch beside him, thumbed through a magazine for five or ten minutes, then looked up and inquired, "What sport is this?")

My father and I also spent a fair amount of time together driving around northern Vermont in his Jeep: Often he was chauffeuring Rollie and me to the bookstore or the toy shop in distant Montpelier, the tack shop in St. Johnsbury, or to some third friend's home in Hardwick or Greensboro or Craftsbury. One September and October, it seemed, he was driving us somewhere every single day, and then working at the dining-room table in our home all night to try and keep up with the work he was missing nine to five at his office: There had been a notable baby boom in the county that fall, roughly nine months after the coldest, harshest winter in years, and my mother was busy.

And although my father was unfailingly patient with me, and always at least feigned contentment at the prospect of another Saturday afternoon or Wednesday evening with only an eight- or a nine-year-old child for company, I know the demands of my mother's calling strained their marriage. When they fought, and I remember them fighting most when I was in elementary school and at that age when I was at once young enough to need virtually constant supervision by someone and old enough to understand on some level the dynamics of what was occurring, their arguments would filter up through the registers in the ceilings of the rooms on the first floor of our house.

"She needs a mother, dammit!" my father would snap, or "You're never here for her!" or "I can't do this alone!" Against all experience, he continued to believe he could use me as a trump card to convince my mother to stay home. It never worked, which usually compelled him to change his tactics from guilt to threats:

"I didn't marry you to live in this house all alone!"

"A marriage demands two people's attention, Sibyl."

"I will have a wife in this world, Sibyl. That's a fact."

At the beginning of these fights, my mother always sounded more perplexed and hurt than angry, but underneath that initial sadness in her tone was a stubbornness as unyielding as Vermont granite. She could no sooner stop delivering babies than people could stop having them.

But I also believe that my father deserves high marks for simply enduring all that he did: The husbands of most midwives don't put up with their spouses' hours for long, especially once they are fathers themselves, and most of my mother's midwife friends had been divorced at least once.

Usually my parents' arguments ended in silence, often because my father was incredulous:

"Wait a minute. Didn't the baby arrive at six in the evening?" I might hear my father asking.

"Yup. Julia. Such a pretty girl."

"It's past nine o'clock! What the hell have you been doing for the last three hours?"

"Folding baby clothes. You know I love folding baby clothes."

"You were folding baby clothes for three hours? I suppose the parents own a store that sells baby clothes?"

"Oh, for God's sake, Rand. You know I didn't stay there just to fold baby clothes. I wanted to make sure everyone was okay. It is their first child, you know."

"So how long did you spend-"

"Thirty minutes, Rand. I probably spent thirty minutes actually folding Onesies and Julia's tiny little turtlenecks."

"But you did hang around for three hours-"

"Yes, I did. I made sure Julia was nursing, and Julia's mom was up and around. I made sure the family had plenty of food in the refrigerator, and the neighbors were planning to bring by casseroles for the next few days."

"And you made sure the baby's clothes were folded."

"You bet," my mother might say, and I could see in my mind my father shaking his head in quiet astonishment. A moment later I would hear him leave the kitchen, where they might have been bickering, and go upstairs alone to their bedroom. Sometimes, later, I'd hear them make love as they made up: To this day, I remember the noise their bed made as among the most reassuring sounds I've ever heard.

Unfortunately, there were also those fights that would escalate and become ugly, sometimes because my father had been drinking. He might have been drunk when my mother returned, and she might have been tired and cranky. This was a combustible mix. And while my mother would never drink to catch up-her sense of responsibility as a midwife prevented her from drinking or smoking pot whenever she was on call-when she was hurt she could lash out with a fury that was both articulate and verbally violent. I never heard my parents slap or hit each other, but powered by bad scotch and exhaustion, they'd say things as wounding as a fist. Maybe even more so. I'd hear expressions and exchanges I didn't understand at the time but that frightened me nonetheless because I knew someday I would.

I never told Rollie the details of my parents' fights, but I told her enough that one day she gave me some advice that served me well: Every so often, replace an inch or so of the Clan MacGregor with an inch or so of tap water. Be judicious if the bottle is low, and always mark in your mind the exact spot on the label the fluid had reached-the hem of the bagpiper's kilt or the bagpipe itself, for example, or the bottom of the letters that spelled the scotch's brand name.

She had been doing this with her own parents for years, she said, and look at how well their marriage worked.

On those nights my father chose to smother his frustrations with scotch, my parents' fights were like powerful three A.M. thunderstorms: loud and scary, sometimes taking an agonizingly long time to blow over, but causing little apparent damage. When I would scan our yard in the morning after even an especially fierce and frightening August storm, the sunshine usually revealed only minor damage. Some of the white, late-summer blossoms from the hydrangea might be on the ground; a sickly maple might have lost a few leaves; behind our house, there might even have been a small branch from a tree in the woods, blown onto the lawn by the wind.

But the sunshine always reassured me that the storms were never as bad as they'd sounded, and usually I felt that way after my parents' fights when we'd all have breakfast together the next day. I know my parents never stopped loving each other-passionately, madly, chaotically-and one or the other of them was always there for me.

Given the amount of time I spent being transported places by my father when I was growing up, it shouldn't surprise me that my first exposure to the Bedfords was with him. But of course it was through my mother that our families' fates were linked: Mrs. Bedford was one of my mother's patients and the center of the very public tragedies our two families faced.

Mrs. Bedford-Charlotte Fugett Bedford, I would learn later in the newspapers-was from Mobile, Alabama. (It's tempting to refer to her as "one of the Mobile Fugetts," but that would imply a lineage more impressive than the generations of sharecroppers and bootleggers and petty thieves that I know were in fact her ancestry.) Her husband, the Reverend Asa Bedford, was from a tiny Alabama town, farther in from the coast, called Blood Brook. Years later, when I decided to visit the area, I stared at the small dot that marked it on an auto club map of the state for hours at a time before finally venturing there. When I arrived, I was at once frightened and surprised by the accuracy of my imagination. It was a dirt crossroad of shanties, the air thick with mosquitoes and flies, and a heat that would wilt Vermont gardens in minutes.

In my mind there was no school in Blood Brook, and indeed there was not. I had always envisioned a church there to inspire Asa, and indeed there was. White paint peeled off its clapboards like rotting skin, and spiked grass grew tall in the cracks of its front walk: With the end of the world imminent, there was little reason to paint or weed.

That geographic background noted and my own cattiness revealed, I should also note that I liked the Bedfords very much when I met them. Most people did: They were apocalyptic eccentrics, but she was sweet and he was kind. I know they had followers and I assume they had friends.

When they came to Vermont, the Bedfords lived thirty minutes north of us in Lawson, and Reverend Bedford's small parish was another twenty or thirty minutes north of that, in Fallsburg. His church-a renovated Quaker meetinghouse ten miles northwest of Newport, on a two-lane state highway with nothing around it but trees-was an easy morning walk to the Canadian border. At its peak, Bedford's congregation consisted of roughly five dozen parishioners from Vermont and Quebec's Eastern Townships who believed with all their hearts that the Second Coming would occur in their lifetime.

When the Bedfords arrived in the Green Mountains, convinced that Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom was ripe for revival, they had one child, a seven-year-old boy they named Jared, but whom Mrs. Bedford always called Foogie-a diminutive, of sorts, for her own family's name.

Even if my mother had not been a midwife, I would have met the Bedfords, although I don't imagine I would have gotten to know them as well as I did, or that today our families' two names would be linked in so many people's minds. And although the first link between us was byzantine, it was as natural, cohesive, and inextricable as an umbilical cord. Foogie was schooled at home by his parents, which meant that my friend Rollie's mother visited the family periodically as an examiner for the state education department. It was Mrs. McKenna's responsibility to make sure that the family was adhering to the basics of the required curriculum. Perhaps because the Bedfords were new to Vermont, perhaps because Mrs. McKenna wanted to be sure that young Foogie had as much exposure as possible to the world beyond his father's church, she recommended her daughter, Rollie, as a diligent and responsible baby-sitter for the boy.

It was therefore in the capacity of friend of the baby-sitter that I first met the Bedfords, when my father drove me there late on a Saturday afternoon to keep Rollie company while she took care of Foogie that night. Rollie had been there since breakfast, while the Reverend and Mrs. Bedford were in southern New Hampshire at a Twin State Baptist conference. Although they weren't Baptists, Asa was usually able to find a family or two at these sorts of weekend retreats who would listen with interest to his beliefs, and consider an invitation to his church.

Their house was modest and old, and buried in deep wood at the end of a long dirt road. A century ago the woods had been meadows and farmland, my father observed the first time he drove me there, motioning out the window of the Jeep at the squat, mossy stone walls we passed as we bounced down the road. I couldn't imagine such a thing; I couldn't imagine someone clearing forest this thick in an era before chain saws and skidders.

Although most Vermont hill farmers were careful to construct their homes on the peaks of their property, there were some who for one reason or another chose valleys-perhaps because a dowser had found a shallow well there. Whoever had built the Bedford place a hundred years ago was among those exceptions. I could feel myself lurching forward in the Jeep as we descended deeper into the woods, and the vehicle's lap belt pressed against my waist.

My first impression of the Bedford place-an impression garnered two months before my thirteenth birthday-was that someone with little money or carpentry skill was working hard to keep it tidy. The grass was high in the small lawn surrounding the house, as if it hadn't been cut yet that spring (Memorial Day was just over a week away), but someone had laid square pieces of bluestone in a path from the dirt road to the front door so recently that I could actually see the prints from a human palm pressed flush in the dirt against the stones' edges. Two of the windows on the first floor had long cracks sealed with white putty, but behind the panes were delicate, lacy curtains. Many of the clapboards were rotting, but the nails that were slammed through them to keep them attached to the exterior walls were so new that the sides of the house were sprinkled with small silver dots.

The place was a compact two-story box, its roof's angle wide and gentle, its walls the yellow of daffodils. The paint had begun to flake, but it was still bright enough that when the Reverend Bedford started up his car to drive Rollie and me home that night, the beams from his headlights gave the house a sulfurous glow.

The Saturday I met the three Bedfords-Foogie in late afternoon and the Reverend and his wife close to ten o'clock at night-the cluster of cells that would become Veil (spelled with an e for reasons I imagine only Asa fully understood) did not yet exist, but would be formed very soon.

Whatever fears of or enthusiasms for the apocalypse Asa harbored inside him were not usually apparent in his appearance. His face was almost as round as his eyeglasses, and his hair had receded back far on his head; what hair he had, however, was thick and reddish brown. Most of the times that I saw him he was wearing crisp, well-ironed white shirts, fully buttoned. He was, like my father, a man who I assumed had been quite thin when he was young, but was now growing wide and heavyset around the middle.

He looked like the sort of rural businessman I might observe in St. Johnsbury or Montpelier: not as sophisticated, in my eyes anyway, as the executives I'd see on television or, of course, my own father.

He was also one of those rare and special adults who was capable of being every bit as silly as children. And Foogie adored him for it. I saw Asa pretend to be a mule and walk the lawn on his hands and knees, snorting and neighing and carrying his delighted son on his back. I witnessed the preacher waddling like a duck for Foogie, and making up rhymes to teach the boy how to spell certain sounds:

"Fox! Box! Boston Red Sox!"

"I was sent for the rent on the polka-dot tent!"

"I wish the fish would eat from a dish, because now there's fish food on the floor!"

Around Rollie and me he was gentle and serene; I understood on some level that he was considered a little strange by most people, but my family and the McKennas certainly didn't object to us being around him or his family. The Northeast Kingdom has always had its share of cults and communes, and Asa's little church was simply one more essentially harmless example.

On the other hand, although I never heard him preach, I imagined he was partial to what I would now call the spider-and-fly school of sermons. Sometimes he would allow himself the sort of remark in front of Rollie and me that certainly would have alarmed our parents had we shared it with them. One particularly dark night when he was about to drive the two of us home after we'd taken care of Foogie, he stood on his bluestone walk and looked up into the black sky and murmured, "Soon night shall be no more. Soon we'll need no light of lamp or sun."

On another occasion, when Mrs. Bedford was upstairs putting Foogie to bed and he saw that the only mail he had received that day were bills from the phone and gas companies, he said to the envelopes-unaware that Rollie and I were within earshot-"I am indeed happy to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, especially since I know you will all burn that second death in the lake of fire."

He had a thick southern accent, which made his sentences always sound like songs to me, even if some of those songs could be unexpectedly frightening.

Charlotte Bedford was a petite, fragile-looking woman, barely bigger than Rollie and me as our bodies approached their teens. She was not tall, and there was little meat on her bones. Her skin always seemed almost ghostly white to us, which I don't believe was a look Charlotte cultivated. (A few years after the Bedfords had passed through my family's life like a natural disaster, I was in college in Massachusetts. During my sophomore year I became friends with a proud belle from a town on Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, who did in fact strive to look as pale as paste, so I am confident I know the difference.)

But she didn't behave as though she was sickly, and that would obviously become an important issue at the trial. My mother believed there was a critical difference between fragile and sickly. She discouraged many women with histories of medical illness from having their babies at home, but those sorts of women who simply strike us all as frail when we see them in shopping malls or drugstores but do not in reality have a diagnosed, physiological problem-those sorts of women my mother was happy to help when they became pregnant. My mother believed a home birth was an extremely empowering and invigorating experience, and gave fragile women energy, confidence, and strength: They learned just what their bodies could do, and it gave them comfort.

And I know my mother figured out pretty quickly that Charlotte was not prepared for the short days, numbing cold, and endless snow of a Vermont winter. Especially a Vermont winter not far from the northern border of the state. As early as October, when Charlotte was in her second trimester and visiting my mother at the office in our home in Reddington for her monthly prenatal exam, she became frightened and morose when she talked of the weather.

"I just don't know what we're going to do up here, I just don't know how we're going to get by," I heard her telling my mother. "Asa hasn't even had time to get himself a snow shovel, and I just don't know where to begin finding proper boots. And it's all so expensive, just so frightfully expensive."

They had arrived in Vermont at the best possible time of the year to become lulled into the mistaken belief that the state has a hospitable, welcoming, and moderate climate. I can imagine her thoughts when they arrived in mid-April, just after that year's awful mud season, when the rocky hills of Vermont-hills thick with maple and pine and ash-explode overnight in color, and the days grow long and warm. She probably imagined the mythic winters were indeed just that: myths. Sure, it snowed, but the state had plows. Maybe the rain sometimes froze, maybe the driveway would get a little muddy in March… but nothing a minister and his family couldn't handle.

But her introduction to fall in Vermont was nasty and winter harsher still. There was a killing frost that year in late August, and she lost the flowers she'd planted by the bluestone walk the previous spring; there was a light snow during the second week in September, and almost nine inches were dumped on the state the Friday and Saturday of Columbus Day weekend.

Charlotte had eyes as gray as moonstone, and thin hair the color of straw. She was pretty if you didn't mind the subtle but unmistakable atmosphere of bad luck that seemed to pulse from that pale, pale skin.

Rollie and I spent the Fourth of July at the Bedfords', baby-sitting Foogie. We spent the afternoon in T-shirts and shorts, watching Foogie run back and forth under the sprinkler in his bathing suit, and then spraying the boy with the hose. He loved it. Like his mother, he had white, almost translucent skin, but he had Asa's red hair and round head. He was a sweet boy, but as ugly as they come.

Rollie was menstruating by then, but I wasn't. She was in the midst of her fourth period that weekend, a fact she shared with me with no small amount of pride: the agony of the cramps she was stoically enduring, the flow that she claimed was so strong she'd have to leave me alone with Foogie almost every hour, while she raced inside to insert a fresh tampon.

Once when Foogie wasn't within earshot, I teased Rollie by suggesting she was fabricating her period for my benefit.

"How can you say that?" she asked.

"Your white shorts," I answered. "When I get a period, there's no way I'll wear white. What if the tampon leaks?"

"Tampons don't leak," she said firmly, and in a tone that implied I didn't have the slightest idea what I was talking about. "Besides, why in the world would I want to pretend I was having my period? It's not like this is some French class I want to get out of."

I shrugged my shoulders that I didn't know, but I did. Or at least I thought I did. Rollie and I were both pretty girls, but I had something she didn't: breasts. Not so large that boys would tease me or I had ever been embarrassed about them, but apparent enough that someone like Rollie would notice. Perhaps because of my mother's candor about bodies and birth and how babies wind up in a womb in the first place, Rollie and I were aspiring tarts. We couldn't talk enough about kissing and petting and contraception-rubbers, the pill, the diaphragm, and something that struck us both as incomprehensibly horrible, called an IUD.

Standing among the dog-eared paperback mysteries Rollie's parents kept in a bookcase in their bedroom was a well-read copy of The Sensuous Man and-behind the rows of paperbacks, against a back wall of the bookcase-a hardbound copy of The Joy of Sex. Rollie and I read it together often at her house, and garnered from it what I have since discovered was a frighteningly precocious comprehension of cunnilingus, fellatio, and all manner of foreplay. We imagined our lovers someday performing the recommended exercises in the books: sticking their curled tongues deep into shot glasses, doing push-ups for hours. I had yet to see a real penis then, and I had a feeling an actual erection might scare me to death when I did, but between the anatomic details of how the male and female apparatus functioned that I'd gleaned over time from my mother, and the pleasure to be found in those organs suggested by the McKennas' books, I think I was much less squeamish in the summer between my seventh and eighth grades about sex than most girls my age. Rollie, too.

We both expected that when we returned to school in the fall, the boys would begin to notice us. We weren't too tall, which was important, and we didn't have pimples. We were smart, which we knew would intimidate some boys, but not the sort we were interested in: Probably nothing, we thought, scared a boy like Tom Corts, and certainly not something as harmless as an interest in books.

And, fortunately, we looked nothing like each other, which we also assumed was a good thing: It would minimize the chance that the same boy might ever be interested in both of us, or we in him. We understood from our years of riding and playing together that we were a competitive pair, and the fact that I was a blonde and she a brunette, that I had blue eyes and she had brown, would decrease the chances that a boy would ever interfere with our friendship.

Or, as Rollie explained it that Fourth of July, "Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes, tail. They can't help but have preferences." Her horse was a chestnut brunette, and in Rollie McKenna's cosmology of preference, this meant she would probably always prefer chestnut horses as long as she lived. Human nature.

That afternoon Rollie helped me plot ways to maintain contact with Tom Corts until school resumed in September and we would be together in the same section of the brick Lego-like maze that someone thought was a functional design for a school. Tom had a job that summer that I interpreted as one of those signals (like, in some way, his seemingly endless wardrobe of dark turtlenecks) that he wanted more from the world than the chance to fix cars in his family's beat-up garage, or to joust on motorcycles until the rescue squad had to rush him to the hospital with a limb dangling by a tendon. He was working for Powder Peak, the nearby ski resort, cutting the lawns around the base lodge where the company also had its offices, and assisting the maintenance crews as they tuned up the chairlifts and grooming machines. He was about to turn fifteen (just as I would soon turn thirteen), and he could have hung out at the garage with his brothers and father, he could have spent July and August smoking an endless chain of cigarettes with his brothers' and his father's friends, but he didn't: He hitchhiked up to the mountain every morning and found a ride home from an adult member of the crew every evening. And while mowing lawns and oiling chairlifts isn't neuroscience, the fact that he was doing it some miles from home suggested to me ambition.

Of course, it also kept him away from the village most of the time. And while Tom and I had kissed only once, and that one time had been three and a half months ago, I was sure we could have a future together if one of us could find a way to bring our bodies into a reasonable proximity. I was convinced that Tom hadn't tried to kiss me again for two simple-and, in my mind, reassuring-reasons. First, he was two years my senior, and therefore feared with the gallantry of a man who was kind and wise that I was too young to kiss on a regular basis. In addition, the fact that he was two years older than I was meant our paths simply didn't cross with any frequency-certainly from September through June, when we both attended the union high school but had a full grade between us as a buffer zone, and now in the summer as well, since he had an adult man's commute to the ski resort.

If Rollie wasn't as convinced as I that Tom Corts was my destiny, she at least agreed he would be a good boy to date. He was intelligent, independent, and cute. And since it would be no more likely for Tom's and my paths to cross in the fall, when he would be in the tenth grade and I in the eighth, Rollie believed we had to attempt to move the relationship forward in the summer. In her now barely thirteen-year-old mind, this meant simply being visible before Tom so he could again take some sort of initiative.

"The creemee stand," she suggested thoughtfully that afternoon. "You have to hang out at the creemee stand once you figure out when he goes there."

"I'm not going to hang out at the creemee stand. I'll get fat."

"You don't have to eat anything. You just have to be there."

"No way. I think I'd get sick inhaling all the grease from the French fries."

"You don't inhale grease."

"And I'd wind up with pimples."

"You probably will anyway as soon as you get your period."

"You didn't!"

"I wash my face seven or eight times a day. Every two hours."

"Then I will, too. What do you think I am, a slob?"

"I think you're making excuses not to run into Tom because you're shy."

"I don't see you going after anyone special."

"There aren't any boys I'm interested in right now."

I shook my head, as Foogie aimed the sprinkler at a vacant hornet's nest near the awning of the house. "I am not going to hang out at the creemee stand, it's that simple."

"Do you have a better idea?"

"The general store, maybe. He has to buy his cigarettes before he goes to the mountain."

"Or when he gets home."

"Right."

"You can't just hang out at the general store, you know."

"But I can be there when he is."

And so it went for most of the day. We were still outside, sitting on the front steps and awaiting the Bedfords' return, as the afternoon slowly gave way to evening. Through the living-room window we could hear Foogie watching reruns of old situation comedies on television, while crashing a plastic flying saucer over and over again into the plush pillows on the couch.

The stories that the attorneys and newspaper reporters would choose to tell-although in my mind, certainly not my mother's story-began that afternoon. The Bedfords arrived just before six, well after most barbecues in Vermont had begun to smoke but hours before the night sky would be lit by the glowing, spidery tendrils of fireworks. As the Reverend Bedford was paying Rollie (a fee she would share that day with me, although she was the official Foogie-sitter), Mrs. Bedford pulled me into the kitchen.

In a voice that was whispery and soft, in a tone that suggested she was discussing a vaguely forbidden subject, she inquired, "Your mother, Connie: Is she truly a midwife?"

Chapter 5.

I've helped birth the sons and daughters of two bakers, but no bankers.

My mothers have been painters and sculptors and photographers, and all sorts of people blessed with really amazing talents. Three of my mothers have been incredibly gifted fiber artists, and two hooked the most magical rugs I've ever seen in my life. When parents have been artistic but poor, I've been paid with quilts they've made themselves, and paintings and carvings and stained glass. Our house is beautiful because of barter.

And there have been lots of musicians among both my mothers and my fathers, including Banjo Stan. And Sunny Starker. And the Tullys.

There have been young people who farm, carpenters-probably enough in number to have built Rome in a day-wives of men who run printing presses, women who make jewelry, throw pots, roll candles from beeswax. If I look back through my records, I can find a few schoolteachers, a newspaper editor, journeyman electricians, a woman who grooms dogs, a man who cuts hair, the wives of auto mechanics, the husbands of laboring waitresses, a couple of ski instructors, chimney sweeps, roofers, pastors, loggers, welders, excavators, a masseuse, machinists, crane operators, a female professor, and the state's first female commissioner for travel and tourism.

But no bankers. No lawyers. And no doctors.

No people who make ads for a living, or fill cavities, or do other people's taxes.

No people, like Rand, who design houses or office buildings or college science centers.

Those sorts of people usually prefer hospitals to home births, and obstetricians to… to people like me. That's cool. They think it's safer, and while the statistics show that most of the time a home birth is no more risky than a hospital one, they need to do what's right for them. That's totally fine with me.

Sometimes I just think it's funny I've never birthed a baby banker.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

WHEN AN AIRPLANE CRASHES, usually far more than one thing has gone wrong. The safety systems on passenger planes overlap, and most of the time it demands a string of blunders and bad luck for a plane to plow into a forest outside of Pittsburgh, or skid off a La Guardia runway into Flushing Bay. A Fokker F-28 jet piloted by two competent veterans might someday dive into the historic waters of Lake Champlain seconds before it is supposed to glide to the ground at nearby Burlington Airport, killing perhaps fifty-six air travelers and a crew of four, but such a crash would in all likelihood necessitate a litany of human errors and mechanical malfunctions. A wind shear could certainly take that Fokker F-28 and abruptly press it into the earth from a height of two or three thousand feet, and someday one might, but it would probably need some help.

It might demand, for example, that the captain had been ill when he was supposed to have attended his airline's recurrent training on wind shears-when to expect one, how to pull a plane through one.

Or perhaps it had been a smooth flight from Chicago to Burlington, and although there were now rolling gray clouds and thunderstorms throughout northwest Vermont, the gentle ride east had lulled the pilots a bit, and they were ignoring the FAA's sterile cockpit rule prohibiting extraneous conversation below ten thousand feet. Perhaps the pilot was commenting on how much his children liked to hike the deep woods northeast of Burlington at the exact moment the wind shear slammed hard into the roof of the jet, his remark about woods postponing by a critical second his decision to power the engines forward and abort the landing.

Or perhaps at the exact second the cockpit's wind shear alert screamed its shrill warning and the pilot was instinctively turning the jet to the right to abort the landing, the air-traffic controller in Burlington's tower was telling him of the shear and to climb to the left; in the chaos of warnings-one mechanical, one human-there was just that half-second of indecision necessary for the gust to send a jet built in the 1970s into the waters rippling over hundreds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ferries, rowboats, and wrought-iron cannons.

I am telling you this because it was the sort of thing my mother's attorney talked about a great deal when he first agreed to defend her. He could go on this way for a long time, always coming to the same point. The shit, so to speak, had to really hit the fan for a plane to auger in.

My mother's attorney had been a ground mechanic in the air force in the Vietnam War, but had wanted desperately to be a pilot: He was both color-blind and nearsighted, however, and so his eyesight prevented him from this. As I recall, his analogies in 1981 revolved around icy wings instead of wind shears, or-a personal favorite of his-the incredible chain of events that would usually have to occur for a jet to crash because it ran out of fuel. But he loved his airplane analogies.

As he sat around our dining-room table amidst his piles of yellow legal pads or as he paced the kitchen, occasionally stopping before the window that faced the ski trails on Mount Chittenden, his point was unchanging throughout those days and nights when he first began rolling around all of the variables in his mind: It would take the same sort of string of misfortune and malfeasance for one of my mother's patients to die in childbirth as it did for an airplane to crash.

And it certainly seemed so, at least initially, in the death of Charlotte Fugett Bedford. She died in the middle of March, after a nightmarishly long labor. The black ice that fell and fell during the night had trapped my mother and her assistant alone with Asa and Charlotte: Even the sand trucks and plows were sliding like plastic sleds off the roads. The phones weren't down for particularly long on March 14, but they were down for just about four crucial hours between twelve twenty-five and four-fifteen in the morning.

And for a time Charlotte had indeed shown signs that had led my mother to fear a placental abruption: The placenta detaches itself from the uterine wall, so that the mother may slowly bleed to death. There was a moment when Charlotte bled profusely from her vagina, and the pain inside the woman seemed more serious than the more natural agony that is labor. But the bleeding slowed to a trickle, then stopped, and if there had been an abruption, apparently it had clotted and started to heal itself.

And at another point Charlotte's blood pressure had dropped, falling briefly to seventy-five over fifty, while the baby's heartbeat had slowed to between sixty and seventy beats per minute. My mother and her assistant had only been together three months that March, and Anne Austin still had a lot to learn: When she-a young woman barely twenty-two-placed the metal Fetalscope upon Charlotte's stomach and heard how slowly the baby's heart was beating, she cried out for my mother to listen, which of course led Charlotte to cry out in fear.

Clearly there was chaos in that bedroom well before the worst would occur.

Consequently, when Vietnam veteran turned Vermont litigator Stephen Hastings first agreed to represent my mother, he concluded that it must have taken a combination of inclement weather, downed phone lines, and bad luck for Charlotte Bedford to die. In his mind, had there not been black ice on the roads, my mother would have driven her patient to the hospital in Newport. Had the phones been working, she would have called the rescue squad, and they might have rushed Charlotte there. And, of course, my mother would have done everything possible had Charlotte gone into shock due to a placental abruption. My mother had been prepared to administer oxygen. She'd already instructed Anne to pull from their calico birthing bag the plastic tubing and needle and clear bag of fluid she would inject into Charlotte intravenously to keep her hydrated… but Charlotte suddenly stabilized.

No, the cause of death had not been placental abruption, as the autopsy would later confirm. And my mother understood this well before the real crisis began: what looked for all the world to her like a ruptured cerebral aneurysm somewhere deep inside Charlotte's brain.

Sometimes I would overhear my mother try and explain to Stephen that while there had been moments of turmoil and confusion that night, the chain of events that cost Charlotte Fugett Bedford her life was nothing so complex as the sort of thing that pulled planes from the sky and people to their deaths. She would try and tell him it was more cut-and-dried than all that, and he would gently remind her that it wasn't.

Or at least, he would say, it would not be in the eyes of a jury. And then once more they would discuss what had occurred in that bedroom that was indisputable.

Charlotte Fugett Bedford went into labor with her second child on Thursday, March 13, 1981. It was late morning when her contractions began coming in earnest, and Charlotte decided that her back pains had nothing to do with the way she had lifted the vacuum when she had finished cleaning the living room. At one thirty-five she phoned her husband at the office at his church and spoke to him for three minutes. At one-forty she phoned my mother, reaching her as she was leaving the house to have the oil changed in her station wagon. Charlotte and my mother spoke for six minutes.

My mother knew that Charlotte's labor had been relatively easy with Foogie, although the first stage-that period when the cervix dilates to ten centimeters, and the contractions become longer, more frequent, and more pronounced-had taken a day and a half in Alabama heat. The second stage, however, had been brief: Once Charlotte was ready to push, she had Foogie through the birth canal in twenty minutes.

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.

Three minutes later Charlotte's blood pressure had slipped to seventy-five over fifty, and the baby's heartbeat had slowed to sixty or seventy beats per minute. The vaginal bleeding had become a small, almost imperceptible trickle, and then stopped completely… but the wet sheets were a reminder of the size of the earlier wave. And so my mother said to the two parents in the room with her that it would be in both Charlotte's interest and the child's interest to have the baby in a hospital. She said-and apparently her words were at once appropriately dispassionate and concerned-there was a chance the placenta was detaching itself from the wall of the uterus. This meant, she explained, both that their little baby wasn't getting the sustenance it needed, and Charlotte might be bleeding inside.

My mother never came quickly or lightly to the decision that one of her patients should go to a hospital, but she also never hesitated to have a woman in the midst of dangerous complications deliver her baby with modern medicine's extensive safety net unfurled below her. For one reason or another, Sibyl Danforth took roughly one out of every twenty-five mothers to the hospital before March 14, 1981.

Both she and Asa later testified that had the phones been working that night, things might have ended differently. Unlike some parents who would plead with my mother to let them keep trying, parents who either loved the idea of a home birth so much or hated hospitals with such extreme loathing that they would labor for hours despite the danger, the Bedfords readily agreed they would venture to the mechanized, metal-railed birthing beds and sterile operating rooms of the North Country Hospital in Newport.

My mother picked up the phone in the bedroom to dial the rescue squad (and back then most phones in the Northeast Kingdom indeed demanded that one literally dial them) and discovered there was no purring tone. Reflexively she pressed the twin buttons in the receiver's cradle and she checked the connections: the connection of the cord to the telephone itself and the jack near the base of the wall. When she saw that both were attached, she suggested that Anne test the phone in the kitchen downstairs. A moment later Anne called up the stairs to inform my mother that the phone on the first floor wasn't working either.

"It's gone, too!" she cried up to them, and both my mother and Asa detected panic in the young woman's voice, panic they hoped Charlotte hadn't heard. Clearly, however, she had.

Rain and hard crystals of ice had been rapping against the bedroom windows for well over an hour now, although my mother said she had only become aware of the sound immediately after Anne yelled the bad news from the small entryway at the foot of the stairs. After the apprentice had discovered conclusively that the phones were down, Charlotte grew quiet with fear, and the insistent rain and ice against the glass sounded, my mother would say on the witness stand, "like someone was heaving handfuls of gravel as hard as they could, as if they were trying to shatter the glass."

My mother called Anne back to the bedroom to keep Charlotte and Asa company while she went outside to warm up her car: Her station wagon was bigger than the Bedfords' little Sunbird or Anne's tiny Maverick, and Charlotte would be most comfortable in it.

How slippery had the ground become? My mother's struggle across the bluestone walk Asa had built and across fifteen yards of driveway to the spot where she had parked her car would have been comical if it hadn't been so painful. Three days later, on Monday, her attorney had the bruises-still black and blue and ugly-along both of my mother's legs photographed. They also took pictures of the long cuts along the insides of her hands, and the sprained and swollen ankle around which she would wear an Ace bandage for weeks and weeks.

She fell four times, she said, before she crawled on her hands and knees to her automobile, and then pulled herself to her feet by holding on to the front door's metal handle. Yet she still planned on driving Charlotte to the hospital, and began by attempting to bring the car right up to the front steps of the house-yard and bluestone be damned-so Charlotte wouldn't have to walk along the ice rink that had overtaken the Bedford property. As she pressed her foot down slowly upon the accelerator, the car's tires spun in place like immobile carnival wheels, before abruptly pushing the automobile forward and then twisting it almost three hundred and sixty degrees. It slid into the remains of an ice-covered snowbank one of Asa's parishioners had built while plowing the driveway throughout the winter. And although my mother's car wasn't damaged, she knew it would be impossible to drive to the hospital.

If my mother cried-and it seemed to me that she had every right to as she pushed open the car door and rolled onto the ground to begin her return to the Bedfords' house-she had stopped by the time she rejoined Charlotte and Asa and Anne. But she said later she'd cried. She had birthed dead babies before, little stillborn things whose souls, in her mind, had gone to heaven before their flesh had known a world bigger than a womb, but experience didn't make the ordeal any less sad. She said she always cried for those babies and for their parents, and she feared now that the baby inside Charlotte would die, and the Bedfords would lose their second child. (Later, the State's investigation would reveal that babies had died three times in my mother's care prior to March 14, 1981, or almost exactly as often as it happened to women in the care of obstetricians.)

My mother testified that although the ground was slick with ice, there was a dusting of snow sticking to the grass, and when she saw it she imagined the vernix covering the body of the Bedfords' spiritless, unbreathing little baby. She imagined that baby was a boy.

But although my mother feared they would lose the baby, she said it never crossed her mind that Charlotte Fugett Bedford would die. She knew she could stop the bleeding once she had delivered the baby (dead or alive), and surely the phone lines would be quickly fixed. She reminded herself that the woman would have to lose six or seven or even eight pints of blood before cardiac arrest would occur, and that, in my mother's view, was a lot of blood.

And she knew in her birthing bag she had syringes, and glass vials of Pitocin and Ergotrate-drugs that caused the uterus to contract hard, and could sometimes control internal bleeding. Of course, it was illegal for her to have these regulated substances in her possession, but every midwife carried them. My mother wasn't unique.

Nevertheless, the image of Sibyl Danforth running around northern Vermont with a big bag full of illegal drugs and syringes wasn't a helpful one in a court of law.

Ironically, when my mother returned to the Bedfords' bedroom, Charlotte seemed better. Her blood pressure was returning to normal, as was her baby's heartbeat: one hundred, one-ten, then a reassuring one hundred and twenty little thumps per minute. Charlotte had stopped bleeding, and she certainly wasn't showing any symptoms of shock. Her skin wasn't clammy, her complexion seemed fine, her attitude was good. There would be no need, after all, for oxygen or an intravenous drip. There would be no need for Pitocin.

"I believe I am fine now, Sibyl," she said, the weariness in her voice tinged with hope.

Charlotte may have meant to convey nothing more with this statement than the idea that her pain, for the moment, had become tolerable. Bearable. Endurable. But in Charlotte's tone my mother had heard more. In Charlotte's voice my mother had heard a loving testimony to the power of prayer: As my mother had been slipping so badly outside among the falling drops of cold water and ice that each step since had caused her an excruciating splinter of pain, Asa and Charlotte and even Anne had prayed. Asa had knelt by the side of his wife's bed, her long, pallid fingers wrapped in his hands, and together they had prayed for her bleeding to cease and her pain to subside; they had prayed that the baby inside her would live, and their lives would be blessed by its presence.

Anne said at the trial she had never heard as much love in a man's voice as she did in Asa Bedford's that early morning.

My mother was at once comforted and moved. She no longer feared placental abruption. "Well," she said simply, "let's get that little baby out of you." It was, according to the note that she scribbled, three minutes after two in the morning.

My mother sat Charlotte up on the bed between Asa's legs and had her lean against him once more: Her back was against his chest, and his back, in turn, was against the headboard. Asa's arms could reach the inside of his wife's thighs and hold her legs apart as she pushed, so the baby would have room to descend. Charlotte's head and neck and spine were aligned, and she sat upon a firm throw pillow my mother had recently purchased at a tag sale, then washed, so her bottom was a couple of inches above the mattress.

My mother did not believe the baby had spun during its descent. Consequently, she anticipated the child would emerge facing the ceiling, instead of the ground, and the back of its head would continue causing Charlotte pain as it made its final journey through her pelvis.

Charlotte had labored once before and she had attended some of my mother's birthing classes, so she knew how to breathe and push. She knew how to ride a second-stage contraction, and make the most of each one. She knew when to hold air inside her and push, and when to relax and take shallow, light breaths.

For an hour Charlotte pushed through each contraction, with my mother and Asa and Anne encouraging her to push an extra second or two each time:

"You can do it, a little more, a little more, a little more, a little more!"

"You're doing fine, just fine! Perfect!"

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

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

"You can do this, you're doin' great, doin' great, doin' great. Doing great!"

"Come on, come on, come on, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon!"

I saw my mother deliver enough babies to know she was an inspiring coach and a mesmerizingly energetic cheerleader. And I also saw the way a majority of fathers would allow my mother to provide most of the verbal confidence. My mother was just so good at it.

But who said what between two A.M. and six A.M. would matter greatly to the State, and they insisted-and my mother and her attorney never denied-that Asa and Anne said most of the "You're doing fines," while my mother said most of the "Little mores" and "'Nother seconds."

Charlotte would close her eyes and clench her teeth as she pushed, and the lines on her face extending out to her temples would grow sharp. Like all mothers about to deliver a baby, Charlotte strained and struggled and no doubt worked as hard as she possibly could. Sometimes her face grew blue when my mother pressed her to bear down even harder.

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

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

After Charlotte had been pushing for almost a full hour, my mother had her rest for twenty minutes. Charlotte was again experiencing the fear that she wasn't going to be able to push this baby out, and she was scared. My mother reassured her that the baby was doing fine, and so was she.

The baby's head, my mother said in court, had made progress during that hour, although the autopsy would be inconclusive. The medical examiner could never be sure how far the baby had descended, and it was certainly impossible for him to say with confidence where it had been at three or four or five in the morning.

At three-fifteen, Charlotte resumed pushing. With her jaw locked tight but her lips parted, she continued trying to push her baby into the world. Sometimes her head would be back against Asa's shoulder, and sometimes her chin would fall down toward her own chest.

"You can do it, a little more, a little more, a little more, a little more!"

"You're doing fine, just fine! Perfect!"

She tried, my mother said, as hard as any woman she had ever seen. The surges sweeping through Charlotte's body were long, and my mother persuaded her to make the most of each peak.

And between them Charlotte would catch her breath, and then she would try again.

"Come on, come on, come on, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon!"

A few minutes past four in the morning, my mother had Charlotte rest a second time. She could see Charlotte was exhausted, and she could see Charlotte's confidence was failing.

There are two general medical definitions for prolonged second-stage labor: a second stage that has lasted two and a half hours, and a second stage that has continued a full hour without further descent of the head.

My mother insisted that the baby had indeed descended during Charlotte's second effort. By four in the morning, she said later, the child had negotiated the ischial spines and much of the pelvic outlet: It had merely to navigate the pubic bone and then it would crown.

Near four-thirty the urge to push became overwhelming, and Charlotte told my mother and her husband that she wanted to try once more. And so she did. She pushed as hard as she could, she pushed with all of the strength she could find, she pushed so hard that when she would finally exhale, she would grunt like a professional tennis player at the moment her racket is slamming ferociously into the ball on a baseline backhand.

For brief seconds at the height of Charlotte's pushing, my mother could see tufts of the child's dark hair, but the baby always seemed to slip back.

Did my mother consider giving up, and attempting what she knew was probably impossible-navigating the icy roads that separated them from the hospital? My mother said that she did, although she never suggested such a thing to Anne. But even Asa testified that between five and six o'clock in the morning, my mother limped to the bedroom window and pulled the gauzy drapes away to look outside.

"Was that a sand truck I heard?" she asked once in that hour, a remark that her attorney argued was proof she was daydreaming longingly of a cesarean delivery performed by a doctor in Newport.

But from the Bedfords' bedroom window, the driveway still glistened like glass, and the rain and ice had continued to fall. My mother's car still sat by the snowbank, a grim reminder of what the roads were like, and she had only to glance down at the cuts on the palms of her hands to remember how difficult it was to move on foot on that ground.

And, Stephen Hastings pointed out, my mother had not actually heard a sand truck: No town trucks had tried venturing onto the roads in or around Lawson between two-fifteen and six-thirty in the morning. And even at six-thirty, Lawson road crew member Graham Tuttle would testify, the roads were "just plain awful. I drove right on top of the yellow line, sanding and scraping just a single lane. I didn't dare stay on my side of the road, or I'd have wound up in a ditch."

Obviously Charlotte had no choice but to try and push the baby out in her bedroom, and so while my mother may have wished with all her heart that they could go to the hospital, she never suggested the idea to Asa. She never broached the idea of a cesarean section at North Country Hospital, because she knew they had no real hope of getting there.

Besides, my mother really believed Charlotte was making progress. The baby was close, she thought. It might be just one more contraction and determined push away.

And so Charlotte tried. She never pushed again for very long, she never worked through wave after wave of contractions. But as the sun was rising somewhere high above the rows of clouds bringing ice and rain to their corner of Vermont, rising somewhere so far behind the curtains of black and gray that the skies wouldn't lighten until close to seven in the morning that day, Charlotte used all the strength she could muster to try and push her baby past the pubic bone.

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.

Was my mother wrong? Anne thought so, just as the medical examiner certainly believed there was room for doubt. Asa was standing by the window when my mother made the first cut, but he said later that-like Anne-he saw blood spurt.

Blood powered, the state's attorney would insist, by a pumping heart.

But Anne said nothing at the time, too young to be sure of what she had seen. It would be hours before she would pick up the phone, confused, unable to sleep, and call my mother's backup physician. She would later say she could not believe blood would have spurted like that from a dead woman, but my mother's attorney said there was probably another reason she called Dr. Hewitt: Stephen Hastings always viewed Anne as a nervous rat jumping from the Titantic.

She made that critical phone call late in the morning, while miles away in Burlington the medical examiner was in the midst of his autopsy, trying-and failing-to find a sign of the cerebral aneurysm.

…

My mother ran a fingernail in an imaginary line from Charlotte's navel to her pubic bone. Her hands were shaking.

She remembered reading somewhere that a surgeon could pull a baby from its mother in a crisis in twenty or thirty seconds, but that didn't seem possible to her. All those layers. Cutting into a human. Not wanting to cut the fetus. It just didn't seem possible.

Although she believed intellectually that she could do Charlotte no harm, she still moved carefully, as if she feared nicking an organ. She pretended the line she had sketched below Charlotte's navel was real and then pressed the tip of the carving knife hard into the dead woman's skin.

Blood burst from Charlotte at the point of incision in rhythmic spurts. These were not, Anne said, the powerful geysers one would expect from a healthy, beating heart, but the little spasms one might get from a weak one. Nevertheless, the blood seemed to Anne to be pulsing through Charlotte, and pumping from her where my mother had made the cut.

When she saw the blood spurt momentarily into the air-splattering my mother's fingers-the idea first began to form in Anne Austin's mind that my mother was performing a cesarean on a living woman.

But Anne hadn't noticed Charlotte's body move, she hadn't seen a reflexive spasm or twitch. And quickly the pulsations stopped, and the blood merely flowed. A thin string appeared, then grew wide. My mother pressed the blade further into the woman, through skin to fat to fascia, and pushed against the layer of muscle that was the only part of Charlotte's body resisting the steel intrusion. And then she drew the knife down toward Charlotte's vagina.

The blood rolled down the woman's belly, coating pale hips and thighs, and spilled onto the sheets on the bed to create fresh stains.

My mother pressed a pillow onto the wound for a brief moment to soak up some of the blood so she could see inside the incision. As she held the pillow there, she said later, she decided that she hadn't actually made something that resembled a surgical incision so much as she'd made a gaping, unclosable hole in Charlotte Bedford's abdomen. It suddenly seemed gigantic to her, monstrously big, and she heard her teeth begin chattering inside her head before she actually felt and understood what the noise was. Somehow, she was sweating.

When she pulled the pillow away, she saw the hemisphere from a salmon-pink kickball, the smooth, shining half shell of the uterus. Globular. Clean. Almost fruity. There it was, steaming amidst fat that was luminous, and meatlike strips of moist muscle. My mother wasn't squeamish, but she said the sight made her dizzy-not so much because it would be warm and slippery, but because here was life at its most visceral. Most primal. Here was life in the womb.

She ran her fingertips over the fundus until she understood where the baby was, and then grabbed the knife off the mattress. Using its tip like a pin, she pricked the uterus like a balloon in a spot far from the fetus. There was little amniotic fluid left, and her fear that it would spout into the air and coat her arms and her face and her hands had been unfounded. She'd ruptured the membranes earlier, she remembered; there was nothing left to splatter.

She then placed a finger into the uterus and tore it open gently with both hands, afraid to sever it with a knife: The baby was too near.

She would recall in the courtroom that tearing the uterus was as easy as tearing damp pastry dough, but she was nevertheless finding it hard to breathe as she worked.

When the opening was large enough for her hand, she reached deep inside and felt the baby's face. Her palm grazed its nose, and she ran her hand across its skull, its neck, its spine, until she had discovered one of its fat, pudgy thighs. She slid her hand up its leg until she had one foot, and then reached in her other hand for the child's other foot.

She then ripped the body from its mother, and in the air of the bedroom the fetus instantly became in my mother's eyes an infant. A boy. And when she had sucked the mucus from his throat with an ear syringe and he slowly came around-gasping, then breathing, then finally howling-he became for his father a living reminder of Charlotte Fugett Bedford's life and death and unspeakable ordeal.