Midwives by Chris Bohjalian Page A

second, ‘nother second, ‘nother second!”
    Asa had moved between his wife’s legs to catch the child, while Anne and my mother were at her sides, holding her. Abruptly, while struggling in the midst of a contraction, Charlotte’s chin shot up from her chest as she pushed with whatever energy she had left, she opened her eyes, and then exhaled with a small squeal. Her husband saw her eyes roll up, then close. My mother and Anne felt the body grow limp in their arms as Charlotte lost consciousness.
    She seemed to go fast. Respiratory distress began almost immediately. My mother was about as well trained as the volunteers on the town rescue squad, and she tried to revive Charlotte. She knelt beside her and blew deep into the woman’s lungs through her mouth, attempting to restart her breathing; she pushed down hard upon Charlotte’s chest with the heels of her hands, shouting, “One and two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen !”
    Fifteen compressions and two breaths. Fifteen compressions followed by two breaths.
    There didn’t seem to be a pulse, and my mother pleaded with Charlotte to breathe as she worked. She was crying as she counted aloud, and she begged the woman to fight for her life.
    “You can do it, dammit, I know you can, you can, you can, you-can! Please!” Anne said my mother demanded of the apparently dead woman.
    Did she perform at least eight or nine cycles as my mother said, or four or five as Asa recalled? That is the sort of detail that was disputable. But at some point within minutes of what my mother believed had been a stroke, after my mother concluded her cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, she screamed for Asa and Anne to find her the sharpest knife in the house.
    Asa would say in court that he did as she asked without thinking, he would say he had no idea what my mother intended to do with the knife. He would say he believed at the time that my mother was going to use the knife to somehow try and save his wife’s life. My mother was a midwife and he was not, my mother knew CPR and he did not. My mother was in charge. And he was not.
    Perhaps he was anticipating a tracheotomy. Perhaps not. Perhaps in reality he knew. Perhaps not.
    Anne would insist she went with Asa for different reasons at different times. Once it was because she couldn’t bear to stay in the room with the dead woman. Once it was because she was afraid to stay in the room with my mother: My mother suddenly seemed insane to her.
    For whatever the reason, Asa and Anne ran downstairs to the kitchen together, and Asa pulled from the wooden block back on the counter beyond Foogie’s reach a knife that was ten inches long, six of which were a steel blade, rounded along the cutting edge like an arrowhead. The handle was wood, stained the dark green of an acorn squash to match the block that held it.
    When they returned, my mother said through her tears, “I can’t get a pulse, Asa. I can’t bring her back.”
    “Can’t you do more CPR?” Asa asked, dropping the knife on the foot of the bed.
    “Oh, God, Asa, I could do it for days, but she’ll still be gone. She’s not coming back.” My mother was sitting beside Charlotte, who was still flat on her back on the bed.
    As Asa had much earlier that evening—the night before now, really—he knelt by the side of that bed. He rested his head on his wife’s chest, and staring up at her face, he stroked her bangs, still wet from the sweat of her hard labor. He murmured her name, and my mother squeezed his shoulder once.
    And then my mother moved with a suddenness that frightened both Asa and Anne.
    “Let’s go,” she said, still sniffling, “we’ve got no time.” With the same hand that had squeezed his shoulder only seconds before, she picked the knife up off the sheets.
    What she did not do—and when the state’s attorney went over