Midwives (24 page)

The only condition that really bothers me—no, it doesn’t bother me, it pisses me off and scares the hell out of me at the same time—is the midwifery one. I’m not allowed to practice my craft until this trial is over. That’s the one that hurts. I’m not allowed to birth any babies, I’m not allowed to tend to any mothers
.

So today instead of learning if May O’Brien had felt her little one kick or Peg Prescott’s cervix had begun to thin, I did the grocery shopping. I bought beets. I looked at bottles of salad dressing. I picked out sodas with sugar for Rand, and sodas without sugar for Connie
.

And I guess I did it all at the pace of a dead person
.

—from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER WAS CHARGED with involuntary manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license on Wednesday, April 9, a little over a week after the medical examiner had filed the final autopsy report. We knew on Tuesday night she’d be arrested the next day, and I spent all of French class and most of algebra on Wednesday morning envisioning what was occurring at that moment at my home—as well as in a police cruiser, and at the courthouse to the north in Newport.

Stephen had come to our house again on Tuesday, arriving this time at the end of the day and staying through dinner. My father seemed less concerned with the idea that the lawyer’s meter was running than he had been the week before, given Stephen’s reason for coming to Reddington and the gravity of his news. Moreover, that night he was able to walk us all step-by-step through the process my mother would endure the next day, and make it seem like a series of tedious but commonplace formalities, rather than a series of increasing indignities that could lead eventually to jail.

Nevertheless, the idea that my mother was being arrested fueled the darkest parts of my adolescent imagination, at the same time that it absolutely terrified the part of me that was still a little girl. One moment I saw my mother subjected to the sort of violent police brutality I had glimpsed on the news, and the next I saw myself as a motherless child, a lonely latchkey kid stretched tall in a teenager’s body.

As the daughter of a midwife, of course, I had spent long hours and afternoons alone, so the idea of an absentee mother shouldn’t have terrified me. But that morning in school it did, especially since my mother had adamantly refused to allow either Stephen or my father to drive her to Newport so she could discreetly turn herself in. Despite Stephen’s assurances that turning herself in in no way implied guilt or culpability, she insisted that the State would have to come to Reddington to get her.

“If they want to arrest me, they’ll have to come here,” she had said Tuesday night, without looking up from the plate of food in which she had no interest.

Consequently, to prevent the worst visions from completely clouding my mind Wednesday morning, over and over I ran through the scenario Stephen had presented, trying to focus on the sheer banality of what my mother was experiencing at that moment.

A Vermont state police cruiser from the barracks in Derby was driving to our home in Reddington, twisting along Route 14 through Coventry, Irasburg, and Albany. The rack of lights on the roof was flashing, but the siren was silent. It was passing the cars that were sailing along at the fifty-mile-per-hour speed limit, and flying past the pickups and milk tankers lurching along at thirty-five. It slowed as it passed the general store and the church in the center of Reddington, and then turned into our long dirt driveway. It coasted to a stop behind my mother’s station wagon and beside my father’s small Jeep. Two green-uniformed officers climbed from their cruiser and walked up the path to our front door, perhaps the very same two fellows who had appeared at our home the month before: Leland Rhodes and Richard Tilley. Politely they explained to my mother exactly why she was being arrested, citing specific dates and formal charges.

For brief moments I would see my French teacher and the blackboard behind him, but he would quickly disappear as my mind drifted back to the events occurring at my house. One of the two officers was placing my mother in handcuffs, and the other was leading her into the backseat of the cruiser. My father and Stephen Hastings were not allowed to sit with her on the drive north to Newport and had to follow the police car in their own vehicles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In actuality, it was.

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

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

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

“Moreover, Mrs. Danforth faces the loss of her practice—such as it is,” Tanner interjected.

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

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

“That’s absurd,” Stephen said. “Just ridiculous.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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