Midwives (5 page)

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.