Midwives by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online Page B

I watched my father pull nervously at the dark hair he allowed to grow beside his ears.
    STATE’S ATTORNEY WILLIAM TANNER : So you asked Reverend Bedford to bring you a knife?
    SIBYL DANFORTH : Yes.
    TANNER : You didn’t just ask for any knife. You asked for a sharp knife, didn’t you?
    DANFORTH : Probably I don’t think I would have asked for a dull one.
    TANNER : Both Reverend Bedford and your apprentice recall you requested “the sharpest knife in the house.” Were those your words?
    DANFORTH : Those might have been my words.
    TANNER : Is the reason you needed “the sharpest knife in the house” because you don’t carry a scalpel?
    DANFORTH : Do you mean to births?
    TANNER : That’s exactly what I mean.
    DANFORTH : No, of course I don’t. I’ve never met a midwife who does.
    TANNER : You’ve never met a midwife who carries a scalpel?
    DANFORTH : Right.
    TANNER : Is that because a midwife is not a surgeon?
    DANFORTH : Yes.
    TANNER : Do you believe surgeons possess a special expertise that you as a midwife do not?
    DANFORTH : Good Lord, don’t you think so?
    TANNER : Mrs. Danforth?
    DANFORTH : Yes, surgeons know things I don’t. So do airline pilots and kindergarten teachers.
    TANNER : Are you referring to their training?
    DANFORTH : I’ve never said I was a surgeon.
    TANNER : Is a cesarean section a surgical procedure?
    DANFORTH : Obviously
    TANNER : Do you think you’re qualified to perform this surgery?
    DANFORTH : In even my worst nightmares, I never imagined I’d have to.
    TANNER : I’ll repeat my question. Do you think you’re qualified to perform this surgery?
    DANFORTH : No, and I’ve never said that I thought I was.
    TANNER : And yet you did. With a kitchen knife, on a living woman, you—
    DANFORTH : I would never endanger the mother to save the fetus—
    TANNER : You didn’t endanger the mother, you killed—
    HASTINGS : Objection!
    Perhaps I should have been surprised that by the end of the trial my father had any hair left at all. In photographs taken the following winter, his hair looks as if it has begun to gray, but the sideburns are as prominent as ever.
    My mother’s calling—to her it was never a job or even a career—meant that my father was much more involved with me as a child than the fathers of most of my friends were with them. There was always a long list of baby-sitters pressed against the refrigerator door with a magnet, and occasionally I did indeed wind up with my mother at somebody’s delivery, but birth is as unpredictable as it is time-consuming, and my father often filled the Connie-care breach. After all, I was an only child and my mother would have to disappear for twelve hours, or a day, or a day and a half at a time.
    My father wasn’t much of a playmate when it came to dressing dolls or banging plastic pots and skillets around my toy kitchen (actually, he wasn’t very good with regular cast-iron or metal ones either), but he was creative when I needed new voices for trolls, and extremely handy when it came to building a permanent playhouse from wood, or a temporary one from card tables and bed sheets. He would usually endure whatever program I wanted to watch on television, even if it meant an irritating struggle adjusting the rabbit ears atop the television set for a full fifteen minutes before my show began. (Reception in our part of Vermont then was laughably poor. I remember a day one spring—when the baseball season had begun and the basketball and hockey seasons were in the midst of their endless play-offs—when my father was watching a basketball game through so much screen snow and fuzz that my mother sat down on the couch beside him, thumbed through a magazine for five or ten minutes, then looked up and inquired, “What sport is this?”)
    My father and I also spent a fair amount of time together driving around northern Vermont in his Jeep: Often he was chauffeuring Rollie and me to the bookstore or the toy shop in distant Montpelier, the tack shop