The Midwife's Confession. Diane Chamberlain
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going to help you and everything’s going to be fine.”
“Not … fine!” the girl yelled. “I don’t want no baby!”
“Well, you’re going to have one in just a few minutes, regardless.” Noelle’s mother turned to her. “Find me every clean towel and piece of linen that’s in this house,” she said as she wrapped her blood pressure cuff around the girl’s thin arm. “Then wet a cloth with some of that water the boy’s heating up and bring it to me.”
Noelle nodded and began searching in the narrow bedroom closet, grabbing the neatly folded towels and sheets and pillowcases from the shelves. In the other room, she found James trembling over water-filled pots on the stove.
“I need to dip one of these in warm water.” Noelle pointed to the pots. “Which one’s warmest?”
“This one, maybe.” He nodded toward the one closest to her and she dipped the washcloth into the water, then wrung it out in the sink and carried it back to the bedroom.
Her mother partly unfolded one of the sheets and slid it under the girl’s bottom. Then she took the warm washcloth and held it to the bizarrely stretched skin that circled the baby’s head. Noelle leaned down to whisper in her mother’s ear, “Is this normal?” She pointed between the girl’s legs and her mother brushed her hand away.
“Completely normal,” her mother said out loud, and Noelle knew she was trying to reassure the girl at the same time she answered the question. “Why don’t you go help the boy?” she suggested.
Noelle shook her head. “I want to stay here.”
“Then get a chair.” She nodded toward the girl. “Let her hold your hand.”
Noelle dragged a straight-backed chair from the living room to the side of the bed. The girl was gripping the edge of the mattress with her fist, and Noelle awkwardly pried her fingers loose and then pressed them around her own hand. The girl squeezed her fingers hard. Tears ran down the sides of her face and tiny dots of perspiration covered her forehead. Her skin was lighter than James’s, and even with her face contorted with pain, Noelle could see how pretty she was. And how scared.
She reached forward, wiping the girl’s tears away with her fingertips. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Bea,” the girl whispered. “I’m dyin', ain’t I? This baby goin’ kill me?”
Noelle shook her head. “No,” she said. “My mother—”
Bea interrupted her with another scream. “I’m splittin’ apart!” she yelled.
“No woman’s ever split apart, darlin',” Noelle’s mother said, “and you’re stretching just like you’re meant to do.”
“My thing’s burnin’ up!” Bea said. She let go of Noelle’s hand to reach between her legs. Her eyes widened as she touched whatever was down there out of Noelle’s line of sight. “Lord Jesus!” Bea said. “Lord Jesus, save me!”
“Yes, Lord Jesus,” Noelle’s Jewish-Lumbee-Dutch mother said with a laugh, probably using those words together for the first time in her life. “Your Lord Jesus is right here with you, darlin', if you need him to be.” She lifted her head. “Noelle, you want to see this baby come into the world?”
Noelle stood and walked to the end of the bed. The dark circle had grown even larger and she held her breath, wondering how her mother was going to get that baby out of skinny little Bea. All of a sudden, Bea let out a yelp and the dark haired, dusky-skinned head popped from her body.
Noelle gasped with amazement.
“Beautiful!” her mother said. “You’re doing beautifully.” She held her hands above and below the baby’s head, not touching it, not touching Bea, just holding her hands there as if supporting the head in midair by magic. The baby’s head turned to the side and Noelle could see its tiny face, all scrunched up as if this being-born business was as much work for him or her as it was for Bea. Suddenly, the little squinty eyes and blood-streaked lips blurred in front of Noelle’s face and she realized that for no reason she could name she was crying.
All at once, the baby slipped from Bea’s body into her mother’s hands.
“A precious boy!” Her mother wrapped the squawking infant in a towel and rested him on Bea’s belly, the movement so quick and easy that Noelle knew she’d done it hundreds of times before.
“I don’t want this baby,” Bea moaned, but she was lifting the corner of the towel, touching the damp hair of her son.
“We’ll see about that,” her mother said. “Right now we have a little more work to do down here.”
Noelle watched as her mother cut the cord and delivered the placenta, answering her questions and explaining everything she was doing. Her mother was not the same woman who made their dinner each night, who cleaned their house and fed the chickens and grew tomatoes and mowed their scrawny lawn. In that room filled with animal cries and sweat and blood and air too thick to breathe, her mother became someone else—someone mysterious, part sage, part magician. She was beautiful. Every line in her face. Every gray thread in her hair. Every swollen knuckle in the hands that had brought the baby into the world with such ease and grace. Noelle knew in that moment that she wanted to be like her. She wanted to be exactly like her.
The rescue squad came way too late to be of much use, and the atmosphere suddenly shifted in the little house. There were pointed questions. Shiny medical equipment. Sharp needles and bags of liquid hanging from poles. A stretcher on wheels.
Bea was afraid. “Don’t be.” Noelle’s mother squeezed her hand as two of the men in uniforms moved her from the bed to the stretcher. “You did a perfect job. You’ll be fine.”
“You deliver the baby?” one of the men asked her mother.
“She a midwife,” James said, and the rescuer raised his eyebrows.
“Just a neighbor, helping out,” Noelle’s mother said quickly. A few years earlier, she’d spent several days in jail for midwifing and Noelle knew she didn’t plan to go again. Daddy’s girlfriend, Doreen, had stayed over while her mother was gone. Doreen was a maid, her father had explained to her. Noelle might have been only nine years old but she wasn’t stupid. Her father eventually divorced her mother and married Doreen. Noelle hated that woman. Doreen had stolen her father. Stolen her mother’s husband. “Don’t ever hurt another woman the way Doreen hurt me,” her mother said to her later. “Just don’t ever.” And Noelle swore up and down that she never would and she thought for sure that she was telling the truth.
* * *
It was nearly dawn by the time they walked home. Their pace was slow and easy, and for a while neither of them spoke. The buzz of the cicadas had given way to a peaceful quiet that enveloped them in the darkness. Every once in a while, Noelle could hear the call of a bird from deep in the woods. She loved that sound. She’d hear that same bird sometimes when she wandered outside in the middle of the night.
They turned from the lane onto the dirt road that led to their house. “How did you know how to do all that?” Noelle asked.
“My mama,” her mother said. “And she learned it all from her mama. There’s no big mystery to it, Noelle. Doctors today would like you to think that there is. They make you think you need drugs and C-sections—that’s surgery that cuts the baby out of you—and all sorts of sophisticated interventions to have a baby. And sometimes you do. A good midwife needs to know when it’s safe for a woman to have a baby at home and when it’s not. But it’s not rocket science.”
“I want to do it.”
“Do what? Have a baby?”
“Be a midwife. Like you.”
Her mother put her arm around Noelle’s shoulders and hugged her close. “Then I want you to do it the right way,” she said. “The legal way, so