The Midwife's Confession. Diane Chamberlain

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 you don’t have to hide your light under a bushel like I do.”

      “What’s the legal way?”

      “You become a nurse first,” she said. “I never took that step. I don’t think it’s necessary. Harmful even, because they indoctrinate you with the idea that more is better when it comes to having babies. But North Carolina’s got its laws and you need to do it legally. I’m not having a daughter of mine spending time in jail.”

      Noelle thought back to Bea’s steamy little room where her mother had done nothing but good. “That Bea girl,” Noelle said. “She’s only a couple of years older than me. If I had a baby, I’d want it. I don’t understand not wanting your own baby.”

      Her mother didn’t say anything right away. “Sometimes not keeping a baby is the loving choice,” she said. “Sometimes you know you don’t have the money or the support to give a baby a good chance in life and then letting the baby go to a good family is the right thing. That girl—” her mother drew in a long breath “—she’ll have to decide for herself. The baby being black makes it harder to find adoptive parents for it, so I do hope she decides to keep it and maybe her mama can help out with it. But fifteen is just plain too young. So do me a favor and don’t get pregnant until you’re a lot older than that.”

      “Don’t worry. I don’t even want to kiss a boy, much less make a baby with one.”

      “That’ll change.” Her mother was smiling. Noelle could hear it in her voice.

      The sky was beginning to pink up with the sunrise. The dirt road was visible now beneath their feet, and ahead of them Noelle could make out the corner of their house beyond the woods.

      “There’s something I need to tell you, Noelle,” her mother said suddenly, her voice so different it might have been another woman speaking. “It’s something I should have told you long ago, but with your father leaving and everything … it just seemed like too much of a burden to give you.”

      Noelle felt the muscles tighten in her chest.

      “What, Mama?” she asked.

      “Let’s sit out in the yard while the sun comes up,” her mother said. “I’ll make some tea and we’ll have a good talk.”

      Noelle slowed her footsteps as they turned into the gravel driveway, not sure she wanted to hear whatever it was that made her mother sound so strange and different. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d left the house that night as one person, but would be returning to it as another.

      She was СКАЧАТЬ