Midwives by Chris Bohjalian Page B

followers and I assume they had friends.
    When they came to Vermont, the Bedfords lived thirty minutes north of us in Lawson, and Reverend Bedford’s small parish was another twenty or thirty minutes north of that, in Fallsburg. His church—a renovated Quaker meetinghouse ten miles northwest of Newport, on a two-lane state highway with nothing around it but trees—was an easy morning walk to the Canadian border. At its peak, Bedford’s congregation consisted of roughly five dozen parishioners from Vermont and Quebec’s Eastern Townships who believed with all their hearts that the Second Coming would occur in their lifetime.
    When the Bedfords arrived in the Green Mountains, convinced that Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom was ripe for revival, they had one child, a seven-year-old boy they named Jared, but whom Mrs. Bedford always called Foogie—a diminutive, of sorts, for her own family’s name.
    Even if my mother had not been a midwife, I would have met the Bedfords, although I don’t imagine I would have gotten to know them as well as I did, or that today our families’ two names would be linked in so many people’s minds. And although the first link between us was byzantine, it was as natural, cohesive, and inextricable as an umbilical cord. Foogie was schooled at home by his parents, which meant that my friend Rollie’s mother visited the family periodically as an examiner for the state education department. It was Mrs. McKenna’s responsibility to make sure that the family was adhering to the basics of the required curriculum. Perhapsbecause the Bedfords were new to Vermont, perhaps because Mrs. McKenna wanted to be sure that young Foogie had as much exposure as possible to the world beyond his father’s church, she recommended her daughter, Rollie, as a diligent and responsible baby-sitter for the boy.
    It was therefore in the capacity of friend of the baby-sitter that I first met the Bedfords, when my father drove me there late on a Saturday afternoon to keep Rollie company while she took care of Foogie that night. Rollie had been there since breakfast, while the Reverend and Mrs. Bedford were in southern New Hampshire at a Twin State Baptist conference. Although they weren’t Baptists, Asa was usually able to find a family or two at these sorts of weekend retreats who would listen with interest to his beliefs, and consider an invitation to his church.
    Their house was modest and old, and buried in deep wood at the end of a long dirt road. A century ago the woods had been meadows and farmland, my father observed the first time he drove me there, motioning out the window of the Jeep at the squat, mossy stone walls we passed as we bounced down the road. I couldn’t imagine such a thing; I couldn’t imagine someone clearing forest this thick in an era before chain saws and skidders.
    Although most Vermont hill farmers were careful to construct their homes on the peaks of their property, there were some who for one reason or another chose valleys—perhaps because a dowser had found a shallow well there. Whoever had built the Bedford place a hundred years ago was among those exceptions. I could feel myself lurching forward in the Jeep as we descended deeper into the woods, and the vehicle’s lap belt pressed against my waist.
    My first impression of the Bedford place—an impression garnered two months before my thirteenth birthday—was that someone with little money or carpentry skill was working hard to keep it tidy. The grass was high in the small lawn surrounding the house, as if it hadn’t been cut yet that spring (Memorial Day was just overa week away), but someone had laid square pieces of bluestone in a path from the dirt road to the front door so recently that I could actually see the prints from a human palm pressed flush in the dirt against the stones’ edges. Two of the windows on the first floor had long cracks sealed with white putty, but behind the panes were delicate, lacy curtains.