Free Midwives by Chris Bohjalian Page A

sky would be lit by the glowing, spidery tendrils of fireworks. As the Reverend Bedford was paying Rollie (a fee she would share that day with me, although she was the official Foogie-sitter), Mrs. Bedford pulled me into the kitchen.
    In a voice that was whispery and soft, in a tone that suggested she was discussing a vaguely forbidden subject, she inquired, “Your mother, Connie: Is she truly a midwife?”

5

    I’ve helped birth the sons and daughters of two bakers, but no bankers
.
    My mothers have been painters and sculptors and photographers, and all sorts of people blessed with really amazing talents. Three of my mothers have been incredibly gifted fiber artists, and two hooked the most magical rugs I’ve ever seen in my life. When parents have been artistic but poor, I’ve been paid with quilts they’ve made themselves, and paintings and carvings and stained glass. Our house is beautiful because of barter
.
    And there have been lots of musicians among both my mothers and my fathers, including Banjo Stan. And Sunny Starker. And the Tullys
.
    There have been young people who farm, carpenters—probably enough in number to have built Rome in a day—wives of men who run printing presses, women who make jewelry, throw pots, roll candles from beeswax. If I look back through my records, I can find a few schoolteachers, a newspaper editor, journeyman electricians, a woman who grooms dogs, a man who cuts hair, the wives of auto mechanics, the husbands of laboring waitresses, a couple of ski instructors, chimney sweeps, roofers, pastors, loggers, welders, excavators, a masseuse, machinists, crane operators, a female professor, and the state’s first female commissioner for travel and tourism
.
    But no bankers. No lawyers. And no doctors
.
    No people who make ads for a living, or fill cavities, or do other people’s taxes
.
    No people, like Rand, who design houses or office buildings or college science centers
.
    Those sorts of people usually prefer hospitals to home births, and obstetricians to … to people like me. That’s cool. They think it’s safer, and while the statistics show that most of the time a home birth is no more risky than a hospital one, they need to do what’s right for them. That’s totally fine with me
.
    Sometimes I just think it’s funny I’ve never birthed a baby banker
.
    —
from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife
    W HEN AN AIRPLANE CRASHES , usually far more than one thing has gone wrong. The safety systems on passenger planes overlap, and most of the time it demands a string of blunders and bad luck for a plane to plow into a forest outside of Pittsburgh, or skid off a La Guardia runway into Flushing Bay. A Fokker F-28 jet piloted by two competent veterans might someday dive into the historic waters of Lake Champlain seconds before it is supposed to glide to the ground at nearby Burlington Airport, killing perhaps fifty-six air travelers and a crew of four, but such a crash would in all likelihood necessitate a litany of human errors and mechanical malfunctions. A wind shear could certainly take that Fokker F-28 and abruptly press it into the earth from a height of two or three thousand feet, and someday one might, but it would probably need some help.
    It might demand, for example, that the captain had been ill when he was supposed to have attended his airline’s recurrent training on wind shears—when to expect one, how to pull a plane through one.
    Or perhaps it had been a smooth flight from Chicago to Burlington, and although there were now rolling gray clouds and thunderstormsthroughout northwest Vermont, the gentle ride east had lulled the pilots a bit, and they were ignoring the FAA’s sterile cockpit rule prohibiting extraneous conversation below ten thousand feet. Perhaps the pilot was commenting on how much his children liked to hike the deep woods northeast of Burlington at the exact moment the wind shear slammed hard into the roof of the jet, his remark about woods