Midwives by Chris Bohjalian Page A

have been tired and cranky. This was a combustible mix. And while my mother would never drink to catch up—her sense of responsibility as a midwife prevented her from drinking or smoking pot whenever she was on call—when she was hurt she could lash out with a fury that was both articulate and verbally violent. I never heard my parents slap or hit each other, but powered by bad scotch and exhaustion, they’d say things as wounding as a fist. Maybe even more so. I’d hear expressions and exchanges I didn’t understand at the time but that frightened me nonetheless because I knew someday I would.
    I never told Rollie the details of my parents’ fights, but I told her enough that one day she gave me some advice that served me well: Every so often, replace an inch or so of the Clan MacGregor with an inch or so of tap water. Be judicious if the bottle is low, and always mark in your mind the exact spot on the label the fluid had reached—the hem of the bagpiper’s kilt or the bagpipe itself, for example, or the bottom of the letters that spelled the scotch’s brand name.
    She had been doing this with her own parents for years, she said, and look at how well their marriage worked.
    On those nights my father chose to smother his frustrations with scotch, my parents’ fights were like powerful three A.M. thunderstorms: loud and scary, sometimes taking an agonizingly long time to blow over, but causing little apparent damage. When I would scan our yard in the morning after even an especially fierce andfrightening August storm, the sunshine usually revealed only minor damage. Some of the white, late-summer blossoms from the hydrangea might be on the ground; a sickly maple might have lost a few leaves; behind our house, there might even have been a small branch from a tree in the woods, blown onto the lawn by the wind.
    But the sunshine always reassured me that the storms were never as bad as they’d sounded, and usually I felt that way after my parents’ fights when we’d all have breakfast together the next day. I know my parents never stopped loving each other—passionately, madly, chaotically—and one or the other of them was always there for me.
    Given the amount of time I spent being transported places by my father when I was growing up, it shouldn’t surprise me that my first exposure to the Bedfords was with him. But of course it was through my mother that our families’ fates were linked: Mrs. Bedford was one of my mother’s patients and the center of the very public tragedies our two families faced.
    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 clapboardslike 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