The Birth House

  Dr. Thomas followed close behind. “Mrs. Jeffers, a word, if you please?”

  She turned, forcing her angry grimace into a pleasant smile. “Certainly, Doctor, although we’ve already taken up so much of your time today.”

  He took her hand in his. “I wanted to thank you for coming and for bringing your niece along with you. It’s a pleasure to see such thoughtfulness in a young lady, don’t you agree?”

  Aunt Fran blushed. “Why, yes, how kind of you to say so. I’m always telling Dora that she needs to speak up more, open that dear mouth of hers on occasion.”

  Dr. Thomas looked at me. “So good to see you, Miss Rare. Please give Miss Babineau my best, will you?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I certainly will.”

  Aunt Fran interrupted. “Dora, dear, you neglected to tell me that you had already made Dr. Thomas’s acquaintance.”

  Before I could insist that we’d never met, Dr. Thomas looked at me and grinned. “I imagine that Miss Rare is hiding all sorts of surprises.”

  6

  MY SATURDAY VISIT with Miss Babineau the following week was spent at Mabel Thorpe’s place. Miss B. had her birthing bag packed and was ready to go as soon as I walked through the door. “Turn yourself around. Mabel’s bornin’ her third, so we’d best get over to the house and lend a hand.” I thought of Mrs. Ketch and of baby Darcy and how I held him until his breath was gone, his body cold. In the time that had passed since his birth, my nightmares had disappeared only to be replaced with the thought that perhaps I had caused his death, that Laird Jessup had been right to blame his calf’s misfortunes on me, that my presence at any birth somehow brought on ugliness—pale misshaped bodies, weak hearts and eventually death. “I don’t think I’d be much help. Maybe I should go back home.”

  Miss B. took my hand, pulled me out of the house and started walking down the road. “It’s gonna be just fine. Don’t you worry.”

  I should know by now, once Marie Babineau’s mind’s made up, there’s no saying no.

  The walk was cold and long. By mid-December the trees are naked, the Bay has turned the colour of lead and the winds have changed, pushing the grass down, ignoring our lives as it cuts the breath short and shallow, forcing us to move from fire to fire. Mabel’s house sits along the main road where it branches off towards Cape Split, just after the shipyard and Hardy Tupper’s blacksmith shop. It’s no different than all the other Thorpe houses in the Bay, framed straight and square like a saltbox, with one chimney poking up through the middle of the roof. This is how the Thorpes are too, plain living and dependable, every last one.

  Once inside, Miss B. was quick to push Mabel’s husband, Porter, and their two small children out the door and off to stay with his sister’s family down the road. “That wife of yours has to think on this baby now. The little ones won’t know why she’s not actin’ herself, and dear Mabel can’t do what she needs to if she’s frettin’ over givin’ them a fright.”

  Her belly almost too wide between them, Mabel leaned towards her shy, quiet husband, giving him an awkward kiss on the cheek. She tousled the hair on her little girls’ heads saying, “You be some good for your auntie. Mind your daddy and say your pleases and thank-yous.” Two little strawberry-blond heads nodded together as they looked up at their mother, smiling, reaching out their hands to rub the roundness of her one last time. At four and five they are perfect stair steps, both freckle-faced and as sweet-natured as their mother. Big as a barn and nearly ready to drop, Mabel Thorpe still made motherhood look easy. Miss B. says, “It’s a mama’s faith what keeps her children right. I’m not talkin’ ’bout the churchgoin’ kind, neither. Miss Mabel’s got faith in goodness. Tell me you can’t help but believe in it too just by lookin’ at her.”

  Soon after they left, two of Mabel’s neighbours, Bertine Tupper and Sadie Loomer, arrived. Miss B. greeted them by kissing their cheeks and teasing them about the difference in their heights. “Well, if it ain’t the broom and the bucket.” Bertine’s as tall and sturdy as you’d expect a blacksmith’s wife to be, while Sadie, though wiry and rough as a sailor with her talk, isn’t much taller than my youngest brothers. They came through the door cradling baskets filled with tiny quilts, cradle blankets and baked goods. Miss B. cooed over Bertine’s knitting, smoothing the folds with her blue-lined hands. “L’amour de maman. A mother’s love.” Then she set us all to work, even Mabel. “It’s too early to be puttin’ yourself to bed, little mama. You know right well you gots to keep on movin’ so’s you can open up them bones.” Mabel didn’t argue. She busied herself with her friends, moving back and forth between sifting flour and gripping the edge of the kitchen table when her pains grew too hard.

  From three different outports in Newfoundland, Mabel, Bertine and Sadie all came to the Bay about the same time. They’re what Aunt Fran calls women from away. She says it means they couldn’t find husbands in their own villages, so they had to find a way to get “hitched” to men from somewhere else. “Newfoundland may as well be the moon the way those women act sometimes. When you’ve got no family to speak of, no one knows who you really are. I suppose that’s what they want, running off like that from home, like they’ve got something to hide.” I think they’re wonderful, and even brave, sitting together at church socials, laughing louder than Aunt Fran thinks they should. They seem more like sisters (or at least how I imagine sisters might be).

  Miss B. called to me. “Dora, go out and fetch us some fresh eggs. It’s time to make the groanin’ cake.”

  Some say the groaning cake, or kimbly, brings good fortune to the new child. These days, most people save the tradition for when the mother’s churched. The first Sunday she can get out of bed and take the baby to services, the father stands outside the church door and hands each mother in the community a little cake wrapped in brown paper and red ribbon. Mabel wanted to do it the old way, where the mother breaks the eggs and mixes the batter herself just before the baby comes. “It fills the house right up with sweetness. That’s the way my mother and all her sisters did it back home.”

  Bertine nodded in agreement. “My granny always said just the smell of it baking cuts the pain.”

  Sadie added, “As soon as you think a baby’s coming, it’s time to tie lavender to the bedposts, put an axe under the bed and a cake in the oven.”

  Miss B. smiled as she lifted the cozy off the teapot. “The scent of a good groanin’ cake, a cuppa hot Mother’s Tea and time. Most times that’s all a mama needs on the day her baby comes.” She handed Mabel a cup. “Plenty of time to do whatever she needs, tell whatever story’s on her mind, time enough to say all her prayers.”

  As the afternoon wore on, Mabel became more and more quiet, stopping every once in a while to hold her stomach and let out a groan. After her water broke all down her legs and she got to where she couldn’t hold a spoon in her hands or a smile on her face, Miss B. led her back to the bedroom. She unpacked three glass jars from her bag, sterilized scissors, scorched muslin and castor oil. She sang and prayed over them, and after that, over anything else she touched. It was getting dark now, so I lit a few lamps and brought them into the room.

  Sadie and Bertine took turns telling Mabel gossip as they pulled a clean nightdress over Mabel’s round belly.

  “And then Bertine gots her foot tappin’. You know the way she does when she thinks she’s been lied to, says, ‘well, isn’t that interesting’—an’ all that.”

  Mabel paced back and forth, trying to keep her mind from her pain.

  “I just thought it was awful interesting that Mrs. Trude Hutner would say she already knew whats how to thrum a pair of mitts when you know right well she’s never knitted a proper mitt, nor sock, nor a bloody thimble for her thumb. These women around here like to think they know it all…she wouldn’t have to stuff the Canning Register down her husband’s boots if she knew to make a proper sock.”

  Sadie’s half Bertine’s size, but it didn’t stop her from teasing. “Shut it now, Bertine, and let me tell
it right. No one wants to hear about your blessed wonderful socks…again.”

  Mabel reached for the bedpost, groaning with pain. “Here it comes.”

  Miss B. clutched at the rosary beads around her neck. “Hold on to it, don’t you go pushin’ just yet.” Sadie and Bertine rushed to their friend, holding her up on either side. With every moan Mabel let out, they did their best to comfort her, saying, “You’ll be fine, just a little while longer, you’ll be fine,” but when her pains came in waves, each one following on top of the next, they gave up their words. Miss B. closed her eyes and listened. “There’s a sound that creeps up…it’s like no other sound I ever heard. When it pulls at the hairs on the back of your neck, that’s how you knows it’s time.”

  Miss B. asked me to bring in a bowl of warm water and a clean towel. She spread blankets on the floor, making a soft nest at Mabel’s feet. “You gotta get on your knees now, dear, it’s time you gonna push.” Bertine and Sadie got down on the floor with her, giving Mabel their shoulders to hold on to. Miss B. sprinkled a few drops of castor oil in the water, prayed over the bowl, wrang out the steaming cloth and placed it against the red, bulging skin between Mabel’s legs. She looked at me and motioned to a small stool beside her bag. “Bring that stool and come hold this for me. Keep it close and warm so she don’t tear.”

  Mabel cried out as the next pains began. Miss B. knelt beside me. I started to move to change places with her, but she whispered in my ear, “You stay put.” She looked up at Mabel. “Now we push, little mama, now we push.”

  It was tight and round where I held the cloth, and as I pulled my hand away, I could see the dark of the baby’s hair. As she pushed, Mabel’s body seemed to open up as wide and full as her wailing. When the baby’s head moved out into the light, I saw that its face was starting to turn blue. Miss B. whispered in my ear, her voice calm and steady. “It’s just a corded birth. You gonna get him loose so he can breathe.” I held my breath as Miss B. went on. “Feel your fingers ’round the neck. Can you slip the cord over the baby’s head?” The wet bumpy cord was taut and pulsing. There was barely a finger’s width of space to hook my fingers underneath. Not wanting to frighten Mabel, I turned my head towards Miss B. and mouthed the word no. Miss B. called out to her, “God knows you’re tired, dear, as do all the angels in heaven, so on this next push they’re gonna help you get that baby out.”

  Mabel whimpered, her body shaking and weak. “I don’t know if I can.”

  Miss B.’s voice was firm. “You ain’t got no choice…now here we go. Mother Mary, help this mama, help this baby, Mother Mary, Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of the Moon and Star of the Sea, Ave Maria Stellas…un, deux, trois…” Mabel closed her eyes and let out a long, anguished wail. Bertine and Sadie cried out loud beside her, moaning right along with her, all three women letting out heavy groans. As the baby slipped out, all milky-looking and wet, I pulled the cord free from its neck. Miss B. scooped the baby up, opening its tiny mouth with her fingers. She held her mouth to the infant’s, her cheeks puffing with gentle breaths, then made the sign of the cross over and over as the baby gave its first cry.

  It was late by the time we finished tending to Mabel and her new baby, clearing away the bloodstained sheets, spooning fennel broth between Mabel’s tired lips. Miss B. squeezed drops of watery red alder tea into the infant’s mouth “to clear the liver and cut the hives.” When mother and child were sleeping, we left them to Sadie and Bertine’s care. I recorded the day’s events in the Willow Book, still amazed at the way it felt to be the first person to bring her hands to a child’s life. While it cannot replace the sadness I feel over Darcy, it has changed me, somehow opening my heart again.

  December 8, 1916. Evening, about half-past eight.

  Mabel Thorpe has another beautiful baby girl.

  Her name is Violet.

  Not wanting to wake up my family, I stayed over at Miss B.’s cabin and slept in her rocking chair until dawn. I woke to find Miss B. standing beside the rocker, praying over me.

  She whispered, “You believe in spirits of the dead?”

  Thinking I was dreaming, I whispered back. “Yes.”

  “You know where they lives?”

  “Right here. Right where we are. Everywhere we are.”

  “How you know this?”

  “I just do.”

  7

  EACH SUNDAY AT the Union Church we recite the Apostles’ Creed. The voices of the congregation rise up together in holy-mouthed repetition, saying, “I believe in the Holy Ghost.” When my Auntie Hannah June died, she came to me in spirit. She told me she’d forgotten to do something before she left. She’d forgotten to write down her mother’s recipe for brown bread. Hannah June was always the one to make the bread, for every social and family picnic. She guarded the secret with her life and never bothered to write it down. I guess she thought it was the one thing that meant she was needed. Maybe she was right.

  At family gatherings, everyone always waited for her arrival, anticipating the basket of warm, doughy sweetness she would bring. Once, before a Women’s Institute bake sale, I saw her standing just outside an open window at the Seaside Centre, as if she was waiting for someone to say her name. No sooner had Aunt Fran said, “Where’s that Hannah June and her brown bread?” then in she came, flour still clinging in the wrinkles of her hands, smelling like yeast and molasses.

  The Sunday after she died, there in the middle of church, while everyone else was saying, “To thee all angels cry aloud; The heavens, and all the powers therein; To thee cherubim and seraphim continually do cry.” Auntie Hannah June’s ghost settled down beside me and led my pencil across the inside of the back cover of the hymnal. To my dear sister Maude, ¼ cup molasses, ½ cup oats, 2 egg yolks… I passed the book behind me to Aunt Maude. She cried, right there in the pew, trembling and dropping wet tears all over the place.

  The morning after Mabel’s birth, Miss B. had gone on about her thoughts of the dead, sitting down in a chair next to me in her kitchen, clutching my hand. “Wherever them spirits lives, up or down or in the treetops, hidin’ behind gravestones or under my bed, I’m goin’ there soon. Goin’ to meet with Mary and the angels, my maman and my grandpapa Louis Faire.” She opened her eyes wide and stuck her face in front of mine. “See? The brown of my skin and the bright of my eyes is all muddy with clouds…my knittin’ needles been playin’ waltzes instead of jigs.”

  I started to speak, but she put her finger to my lips. “Shh…I gots to give it up and it’s you that’s got to follow.” She pulled at the tangle of beads around her neck, her bony fingers tugging apart the strands of pearl, jet, coral and wood. A single black strand came away from the rest, weighted with a silver crucifix, a long brass key and a small leather pouch. “Keeps the gris-gris, the evil eye and the voodoo away.” She held the rosary beads to her lips. “I remember the day you arrived.”

  “The day I was born?”

  “Oh no, long before that…I’m talkin’ about the day your spirit came down and started flutterin’ around in your mama’s belly like a pair of butterfly’s wings.”

  She slipped the beads through her fingers, one after another, as she spoke. “Your mama had come to me crying, convinced that the baby in her belly was dead. She’d had a dream, a vision of a beautiful lady with hair as dark as night and sparklin’ green eyes. She done thought it were an angel from God, come to tell her that the baby had gone to heaven.”

  “I just knew that weren’t the way it was, so I sat her down, brewed her some raspberry tea and began talkin’ to her belly. It wasn’t but a minute later that she felt you beginnin’ to move.” Miss B. laughed. “I told your mama not to worry, that her dream was showin’ her that she was gonna have a fine baby girl. Oh, she could hardly believe it, the wife of a Rare man havin’ a girl. But after you started kickin’ her in the ribs, she trusted me, she knew it was true, not like your father…he wouldn’t hear it, no matter how many times I grabbed him after church and swore on the reverend’s Protestant
excuse for a Bible. Why your daddy almost went and fainted when you didn’t have a piddler danglin’ between your legs.” She placed the crucifix, key and pouch in the palm of her hand, the beads trailing down in her lap. “I knew from the start who you was, Dora Rare. You’s what I call lagniappe, a little something extra.”

  “Miss B., I’m not sure what you mean by all this.”

  She went on, stroking the crucifix as she spoke. “I know most folks think what I do ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of witchery, but everything gots a reason, I promise you that.” She looked up at me. “It’s the things they can’t see, the things they’re afraid to get an understandin’ of that I gots to pass on to you.” She laid the strand of beads in my lap. “It’s time I gave this to you.” She put her finger to the pouch and made the sign of the cross. “This holds the veil, the caul that covered your eyes at your birth.” She untied the ribbon that held the pouch shut and gently fished out the contents. It was a homely little thing, unremarkable, looking much like the withered red bits of Irish moss I often find in the twins’ coat pockets. Once considered a treasure, now forgotten and left behind.

  “Seein’ how he couldn’t brag you was a boy, your daddy bragged over that caul. As any good sailor knows, a caul’s as good as any blessing of St. Christopher, it brings fair wind and plenty of it, and it’ll save ’em from drownin’ too. You weren’t even a day old, and the men were all fightin’ over it. A letter even come from as far away as Halifax, offerin’ great sums of money, but your maman thought better of it and give it to me to keep safe. It couldn’t get no safer than hangin’ ’round my neck, burnin’ next to my heart while I whispered to it, day on day, night on night. I give it all the words of Louis Faire, all the secrets of the simples, all my prayers to Mother Mary, all what’s written in the Willow Book. This is how I knows that you are my follow, the next traiteur.” She hung the strand of beads around my neck, her hands shaking, her eyes pleading and haunted. “You have to take it from me, Dora, take the prayers, the secrets. If you don’t, they’ll be lost, and I’ll never have a moment’s peace on the other side. Stay with me ’til I cross over. It won’t be long; the grave’s not too far off now. I know I won’t see another winter.”