ischial spines and much of the pelvic outlet: It had merely to navigate the pubic bone and then it would crown.
Near four-thirty the urge to push became overwhelming, and Charlotte told my mother and her husband that she wanted to try once more. And so she did. She pushed as hard as she could, she pushed with all of the strength she could find, she pushed so hard that when she would finally exhale, she would grunt like a professional tennis player at the moment her racket is slamming ferociously into the ball on a baseline backhand.
For brief seconds at the height of Charlotte’s pushing, my mother could see tufts of the child’s dark hair, but the baby always seemed to slip back.
Did my mother consider giving up, and attempting what she knew was probably impossible—navigating the icy roads that separated them from the hospital? My mother said that she did, although she never suggested such a thing to Anne. But even Asa testified that between five and six o’clock in the morning, my mother limped to the bedroom window and pulled the gauzy drapes away to look outside.
“Was that a sand truck I heard?” she asked once in that hour, a remark that her attorney argued was proof she was daydreaming longingly of a cesarean delivery performed by a doctor in Newport.
But from the Bedfords’ bedroom window, the driveway still glistened like glass, and the rain and ice had continued to fall. My mother’s car still sat by the snowbank, a grim reminder of what the roads were like, and she had only to glance down at the cuts on the palms of her hands to remember how difficult it was to move on foot on that ground.
And, Stephen Hastings pointed out, my mother had not actually heard a sand truck: No town trucks had tried venturing onto the roads in or around Lawson between two-fifteen and six-thirty in the morning. And even at six-thirty, Lawson road crew member Graham Tuttle would testify, the roads were “just plain awful. I drove right on top of the yellow line, sanding and scraping just a single lane. I didn’t dare stay on my side of the road, or I’d have wound up in a ditch.”
Obviously Charlotte had no choice but to try and push the baby out in her bedroom, and so while my mother may have wished with all her heart that they could go to the hospital, she never suggested the idea to Asa. She never broached the idea of a cesarean section at North Country Hospital, because she knew they had no real hope of getting there.
Besides, my mother really believed Charlotte was making progress. The baby was close, she thought. It might be just one more contraction and determined push away.
And so Charlotte tried. She never pushed again for very long, she never worked through wave after wave of contractions. But as the sun was rising somewhere high above the rows of clouds bringing ice and rain to their corner of Vermont, rising somewhere so far behind the curtains of black and gray that the skies wouldn’t lighten until close to seven in the morning that day, Charlotte used all the strength she could muster to try and push her baby past the pubic bone.
Sometimes my mother changed Charlotte’s position. Sometimes Charlotte labored squatting. Sometimes she labored with her back upright, but lying slightly on her side.
“You can do it, you can do it, can do it, can-do-it, can-do-it, do-it, do-it, do-it, do-it!”
At ten minutes past six, in the early minutes of her fourth hour of pushing, Charlotte Fugett Bedford suffered what my mother was convinced was a ruptured cerebral aneurysm—or what she would refer to in her own mind as a stroke. She imagined that the intracranial pressure of Charlotte’s exertions had caused a small vessel inside the poor woman’s brain to burst.
Asa and my mother, right up until that moment, were still telling Charlotte she could do it, she could get that little baby through her and into the bedroom with them:
“My, oh my, you’re great, Charlotte, the best, the best!”
“‘Nother
Near four-thirty the urge to push became overwhelming, and Charlotte told my mother and her husband that she wanted to try once more. And so she did. She pushed as hard as she could, she pushed with all of the strength she could find, she pushed so hard that when she would finally exhale, she would grunt like a professional tennis player at the moment her racket is slamming ferociously into the ball on a baseline backhand.
For brief seconds at the height of Charlotte’s pushing, my mother could see tufts of the child’s dark hair, but the baby always seemed to slip back.
Did my mother consider giving up, and attempting what she knew was probably impossible—navigating the icy roads that separated them from the hospital? My mother said that she did, although she never suggested such a thing to Anne. But even Asa testified that between five and six o’clock in the morning, my mother limped to the bedroom window and pulled the gauzy drapes away to look outside.
“Was that a sand truck I heard?” she asked once in that hour, a remark that her attorney argued was proof she was daydreaming longingly of a cesarean delivery performed by a doctor in Newport.
But from the Bedfords’ bedroom window, the driveway still glistened like glass, and the rain and ice had continued to fall. My mother’s car still sat by the snowbank, a grim reminder of what the roads were like, and she had only to glance down at the cuts on the palms of her hands to remember how difficult it was to move on foot on that ground.
And, Stephen Hastings pointed out, my mother had not actually heard a sand truck: No town trucks had tried venturing onto the roads in or around Lawson between two-fifteen and six-thirty in the morning. And even at six-thirty, Lawson road crew member Graham Tuttle would testify, the roads were “just plain awful. I drove right on top of the yellow line, sanding and scraping just a single lane. I didn’t dare stay on my side of the road, or I’d have wound up in a ditch.”
Obviously Charlotte had no choice but to try and push the baby out in her bedroom, and so while my mother may have wished with all her heart that they could go to the hospital, she never suggested the idea to Asa. She never broached the idea of a cesarean section at North Country Hospital, because she knew they had no real hope of getting there.
Besides, my mother really believed Charlotte was making progress. The baby was close, she thought. It might be just one more contraction and determined push away.
And so Charlotte tried. She never pushed again for very long, she never worked through wave after wave of contractions. But as the sun was rising somewhere high above the rows of clouds bringing ice and rain to their corner of Vermont, rising somewhere so far behind the curtains of black and gray that the skies wouldn’t lighten until close to seven in the morning that day, Charlotte used all the strength she could muster to try and push her baby past the pubic bone.
Sometimes my mother changed Charlotte’s position. Sometimes Charlotte labored squatting. Sometimes she labored with her back upright, but lying slightly on her side.
“You can do it, you can do it, can do it, can-do-it, can-do-it, do-it, do-it, do-it, do-it!”
At ten minutes past six, in the early minutes of her fourth hour of pushing, Charlotte Fugett Bedford suffered what my mother was convinced was a ruptured cerebral aneurysm—or what she would refer to in her own mind as a stroke. She imagined that the intracranial pressure of Charlotte’s exertions had caused a small vessel inside the poor woman’s brain to burst.
Asa and my mother, right up until that moment, were still telling Charlotte she could do it, she could get that little baby through her and into the bedroom with them:
“My, oh my, you’re great, Charlotte, the best, the best!”
“‘Nother
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