Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (72 page)

Clarence’s ears went straight up at the gunshot sound, and when this was succeeded at once by the high-pitched shrieking of small children, he turned around and trotted off into the forest.

“You bloody idiot!” I shouted at him. “Come back here!”

“Ifrinn!”
Jamie dived past me and ran after the mule, saving the rest of his breath for the chase.

“Who the damnation are
you
?”

I turned to see a young Cherokee man standing in the flickering light of the doorway, glaring at me. He was leaning on the doorframe, his long hair disheveled and blood on his shirt.

I took a deep breath, straightened my spine, and walked up to him.

“I, sir,” I said, “am the midwife. Do please go and sit down.” I didn’t wait to see if he obeyed this injunction; I had work to do.

My patient was sitting on a crudely made birthing chair near the hearth, collapsed forward, arms dangling and her dark-blond hair nearly black at the roots with sweat, the ends dripping over her immense belly. Two little boys, of perhaps five and three, clung to one of her legs, howling. Her legs and feet were grossly swollen.

“Come here, Billy.” Agnes, her face dead white save for the scarlet palm print on her cheek and her voice no more than a squeak, took the bigger of the boys by his collar and pulled him away. “Georgie, you come, too—
come,
I said!” The fright in her voice stirred them, and they turned and clung to her, whimpering. Agnes looked at me, her eyes huge in mute appeal.

“It will be all right,” I said to her, softly, and squeezed her arm. “Take care of the little ones. I’ll see to your mama.”

I knelt down and looked up into the woman’s face. A bloodshot blue eye stared back at me through the snarled wet hair. An eye glazed with exhaustion—but still an intelligent, conscious eye; she saw me.

“My name is Claire,” I said, and laid a hand on her belly. She was wearing a filthy shift, so transparent with sweat that her protuberant navel showed through it. “I’m a midwife. I’ll help you.”

“Jesus,” she whispered, whether in prayer or from simple astonishment, I couldn’t tell. Then her face clenched into a knot and she curled over her belly with a bestial noise.

I kept my hand on her, but bent down to one side and peered up through the hollow of the birthing stool. A narrow slice of pale crown showed for an instant as she pushed, then disappeared.

I felt the spurt of excitement that always came with imminent birth, and my hand tightened on her belly. Another spurt came, this one of sudden fear.

Something bloody
was
wrong. I couldn’t tell what, but something was very wrong. I straightened up, and as the pain released its grip, I rose and took the woman by her shoulders, helping her to sit up. There were no towels to hand; I lifted my skirt and wiped her face with my petticoat.

“How long have you been pushing?” I asked.

“Too long,” she said tersely, and grimaced. I bent and looked again, and without her shadow obstructing the situation, I saw that she was dead right. The perineum was nearly purple and very swollen. That was it: the child was stuck, the crown of its head battering with each spasm, but not able to come further.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said, and both her eyes popped open in astonishment. “Never mind,” I said. “When it lets go”—for the next pain was coming, I could see it in her face—“lean back against the wall.”

Her husband—I assumed that must be the man who’d slapped Agnes—seemed to have gone outside and was apostrophizing the night in an incoherent mix of Cherokee and English.

“Right,” I said, as calmly as possible, and put off my cloak and shawl. “Let’s just see what we have here, shall we, Susannah?”

There were splashes of blood on the dirt floor, but it was dark, with large, visible clots—just bloody show. She wasn’t hemorrhaging, though there was a slick of blood on her thighs. Her waters had broken some time earlier; it was hot and the small room smelled like a Jurassic swamp, fecund and reeking.

The contractions were coming every minute, powerful ones. I had only moments between them in which her belly relaxed enough for me to palpate it, but on the second try I thought I felt…the muscles of her belly tightened like an iron band, and I counted under my breath, hands still on her. Relaxation…I
knew
where the head was, was the child facing backward? I pressed hard on the relaxed belly, trying to find the curve of the spine…

“Ngg!”

“It will be all right. Count with me, Susannah…one, two…”

“Rrrrggh!”

I counted silently. Twenty-two seconds and the contraction eased. Spine…there was the blunt point of an elbow, and there, a curve that had to be the child’s spine…only it wasn’t.

“Bloody fucking hell,” I said, and Susannah made a noise that might have been a groan or an exhausted laugh. The rest of my attention was focused on the thing under my hand. It wasn’t the curve of a spine, nor yet of buttocks. It was the curve of another head.

It vanished with a new contraction, but I kept my hand doggedly on the spot, and as soon as the spasm waned, I felt frantically, to and fro. My first panicked thought—a memory of a double-headed infant, seen in a jar of spirits of wine—disappeared, succeeded by something that was partly relief, partly new alarm.

“It’s twins,” I said to Susannah. “Did you know that?”

She shook her head to and fro, slow as an ox.

“Thought…maybe. You…sure?”

“
Oh,
yes,” I said, in a tone that made her laugh again, though the sound was cut off abruptly by the next contraction.

The relief caused by the thought that we probably weren’t dealing with a gross deformity was fading fast, replaced by the next thought—if the first baby wasn’t moving, it was perhaps caught in an umbilical cord, possibly dead, or entangled with its twin in some fashion.

Further palpations, pushing when I thought I had an idea what I was pushing on, groping for a mental picture of what might be going on inside…but even the best midwife can tell only so much, and the only thing I was reasonably sure about was that the placenta—
one placenta, or two? If it was one, it might rip loose with the first birth and then we’ll have an abruption that will kill the mother
—hadn’t yet detached, though given the position of the baby’s head, there could easily be gallons of blood backed up behind the infant…. No. I looked up at Susannah’s face. No, if she were hemorrhaging, she’d be white and losing consciousness. As it was, she was bright red and clearly still fighting.

But we didn’t have much time. Two umbilical cords, either of which could be wrapped around a neck, or slip down between the child and the pelvic bones and be crushed with a contraction, starving one child of oxygen…and that was the least of it…

My mind ran rapidly down the list of potential problems—some I could dismiss on the grounds of what I could see and feel, some (like the faint horror of its being conjoined twins) I could dismiss on grounds of high odds against, others, on grounds that I couldn’t do a thing about them, even if I knew what was going on. That still left a few to be worried about.

And the child was not moving. It was alive; I could feel a pulse when I got my fingertips briefly on the head. And it was oriented properly, facedown; I could feel the biparietal sutures in the skull. But it wasn’t moving!

My shoulders ached, and so did my hips and knees, from kneeling on the dirt floor so long, but I felt it dimly, an irrelevant observation. I had one hand in her vagina, the other on her belly, probing through the wall of skin and muscle, feeling for some pattern in the tangle of tiny limbs. Susannah’s sweat was slick and hot under my hands—that was good, the wetness helped me feel movements…. The contraction came on with a force that smashed my fingers between skull and pelvis and made Susannah scream and me bite my lip not to.

Such force, in a woman who’d already given birth three times, should have shot the baby out like a greased pig. It hadn’t, and now I was sure what was wrong.

“The twins are tangled together,” I said, as calmly as I could. I pressed her stomach and felt movement—one twin, at least, was still alive. I was drenched with sweat and my mouth was dry. Someone had set a cup of water near me; I hadn’t noticed. I picked it up and drank, to get enough moisture to say what had to be said next.

“Susannah,” I said, leaning forward to look into her eyes. “The babies can’t get out. I can’t
get
them out. If we keep doing this, they’ll die—and you might die, too.” Easily. I took a deep breath; her hand had come down to rest on mine, atop her rigid belly.

“Wait,” she whispered, and clenched my hand as we all rode the next contraction. When it relaxed, she was panting, but squeezed my hand lightly and let go. “What…else?” she said, between gasps.

“I can cut you open and take the babies out,” I said. “It will be awful and it will be painful, but—”

“It can’t be worse’n
this,
” she said, and then did laugh, hoarse as a crow. I lowered my head and rested my forehead for a moment against her belly, controlling my own emotions, preparing myself. “Will I die, then?” she said, her voice quite matter-of-fact.

“Very likely,” I said, straightening up and matching her tone. I wiped a sleeve across my face and shoved the loose hair out of my eyes. “But it might save the babies. I’ll do my best.”

She nodded, and clutched my shoulder fiercely as the next contraction came on.

“Save ’em,” she said, as soon as it passed, and dropped her head, breathing like a winded horse.

The energy of emergency flooded me and I stood up, looking about the cabin for the first time. It was tiny and sparsely furnished, with one bedstead and a pallet rolled up at the foot. A table and benches—and a cauldron on the fire, steaming, thank God. And much to my surprise, Jamie, calmly unrolling the bundle that held my surgical knives on the table.

“Where did you come from?” I said. And added, glancing round the cabin, “Where’s Mr. Cloudtree?”

“Cold as a dead trout,” he said, nodding toward the half-open door. “Drunk, I mean.” I caught a glimpse of a small white face through the gap—Agnes, eyes huge with fear. “Mind your brothers, lass,” he said calmly to her. “It will be all right.”

I made what I hoped was a smile toward Agnes and stepped closer to the table. I started pulling things out of my kit as fast as I could.

“Did you hear what I said to her?” I asked, low-voiced, with a nod at Mrs. Cloudtree’s grunting form.

“I did,” he said, equally low-voiced, “and so did the wee lass.” He glanced at the door; Agnes was still there. When she saw me looking, she sidled in.

“The boys are asleep with Pa in the shed,” she said in a rush. “I can help, please let me help!”

“Agnes?” said Susannah faintly, raising her head. Before I could say anything, Agnes had shot to her mother’s side and was hugging her round the shoulders. Tears were pouring down her face, but she was saying, “It’ll be all right, Ma, Mr. Fraser says so.”

Susannah raised one arm as though it weighed a ton and slowly pushed back her sopping hair with her wrist to fix an eye on Jamie.

“You say so, Mr….Fraser?”

“Aye, I do,” he said.

She went purple and bit her lip, breathing heavily through her nose, head hanging. When the pain let go, she raised it as though it were as heavy as the big iron cauldron.

“Your wife says…I’m gonna die.”

“Aye, well, I’ve got more faith in her than she does, but I suppose it’s your choice who to believe.” He glanced at me, hands half-curled for action. “What d’ye want to do, Sassenach?”

“She needs to be lying down.” My mind was made up and I already had what I needed laid out on the bench. “Can you get her onto the bed? Quickly.”

Susannah had been panting, eyes closed. At this, her eyes sprang open and she straightened, clutching her belly.

“Not the bed! You ain’t gonna spoil my good featherbed!
Gaaaarrg!
” She curled up like a shrimp again. Agnes was breathing so hard I thought she might faint, but no time to worry about it.

“The floor, then,” I said briefly. “Hurry. Stand back, Agnes!”

Between us, Jamie and I heaved her up, turned her, and laid her down as carefully as we could. She was tremendously heavy, very ungainly, and slick with sweat, though, and came down on the pounded dirt with a solid bump, at which she uttered a wild cry and Jamie said something very blasphemous in Gaelic.

“Bloody hell,” I said, under my breath, and reaching for the bottle of dilute alcohol, I pushed the soggy folds of her shift up and sloshed it over the huge belly, fish white and striped with purple-red stretch marks.

“All right,” I said, and snatched the heaviest of my surgical scalpels. “Jamie, hold her—oh, you’ve got her, good.” Muttering “Jesus, Mary, and Bride, bloody
help
me…” I laid the blade at the base of her navel.

But before I could make the incision, she screamed as though the touch of cold metal had been a cattle prod, jerked her knees up, then drove her heels down into the dirt, arched her back, thumped down again, and…

“What the devil’s
that
?” Jamie said, trying to look over the obstruction of Mrs. Cloudtree’s belly.

“It’s a head,” I said. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.
Push,
Susannah!”

She hadn’t waited for instructions. With a ferocious noise, she pushed, and the baby
did
shoot out like a greased pig. I caught him—was it a him? Yes, it was—in my apron. I thumbed his nose and mouth clear, turned him over, and thumped his wet back lightly. The tiny buttocks squeezed together in protest, relaxed and let out a small spurt of dark fecal matter, but he was making regular huffing noises, sounding much like his mother, though not nearly as loud.

“Agnes!” I shouted. She was already at my shoulder as I turned and I detached my apron, wrapped it hastily round the infant, and thrust him into her arms.

“Shall I cut the cord, Sassenach?” Jamie was squatting by my other side,
sgian dubh
in hand.

“Yes,” I said breathlessly, and forgot about it, thrusting my hand into the birth canal, hoping for another head.

No such luck. Limbs everywhere, in the tight, slippery dark. I closed my eyes to see better, feeling urgently for a foot.
Just one,
I prayed.
Just one foot…
And then a powerful contraction came on, quite different, like an ocean wave rolling through Susannah’s body, but slowly enough that I managed to get my hand out of the way. And there it was. A tiny foot, its limp toes tinged with unearthly blue.