Midwives (7 page)

“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!”