The Quintland Sisters(2)

Another lady was in the room, seated beside Mme. Dionne, rosary beads clicking through her fingers. Marie-Jeanne spoke with her in French and introduced her to me as Mme. Legros, related in some way to the woman giving birth. Mme. Legros didn’t look up or acknowledge me, just continued murmuring in rapid French to Mme. Dionne.

“You can get more water on to boil,” Marie-Jeanne told me, joining Mme. Legros. I ducked back into the kitchen, grateful to be away from the sounds Mme. Dionne was making, her face furrowed. “And get the clean towels from my bag,” the midwife barked after me.

After a minute or two, Marie-Jeanne came into the kitchen, where I was trying to fill a cast-iron pot with a pump at the sink. “Call M. Dionne back downstairs,” she told me gravely. “He must go for the doctor.”

Inside the farmhouse, the air was chill and dark. There were no electric lights and the moon was no help, having slipped behind the tall barn. The only warmth came from the kitchen stove, but it was scarcely enough to reach the adjoining room. Spring comes slowly to our corner of Ontario, especially out on these farms, the homesteads little more than blunt boxes surrounded by sprawling fields, marsh, and forest. Here, even in May, the wind racing over Lake Nipissing can still have ice on its breath and leave frost on the windows.

M. Dionne roared off in his truck, wheels spinning in the gravel. The groaning from Mme. Dionne grew even louder, her breath coming in grunts and pants. I poked my head into the room off the kitchen to see what more I could do. One oil lamp glowed sadly on a wooden dresser beside the bed. The other had been set on a spindly chair at the foot of the bed, where Marie-Jeanne now hovered, planting her big hands on the flailing shins of Mme. Dionne and talking to her sternly about breathing and pushing.

I could scarcely look at Mme. Dionne. Her lids were crimped shut as if her eyeballs might have already popped out and rolled away, and her brown hair was plastered to her skull like she’d come in from a storm. I stepped forward to try to wipe her brow, but her head was whipping back and forth so violently she looked like something possessed, hardly human—just mounds of oily flesh, juddering in pain. Mme. Legros was now kneeling by Mme. Dionne’s pillow, her head bowed, pulling the string of beads through her fingers and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. It seemed to me at that moment that Mme. Dionne probably needed something a little stronger than the word of God, but this was not the place to say it.

“Push, push, push,” Marie-Jeanne was commanding Mme. Dionne, who let loose with a bone-chilling howl as the baby arrived, the room filling with an animal smell. I’d always liked babies, or thought I did, so sweet in their prams or cooing in their mothers’ arms. But this baby was like nothing I’d ever seen—no bigger than the rats our cat Moriarty used to catch and leave on the kitchen mat to terrorize Mother.

Its eyes were closed and swollen, giving it a reptilian look but with incongruous, long lashes. Its head was enormous, almost equal in size to the rest of its body, which was slick with what looked like kerosene in the dim light. Marie-Jeanne called for me to bring her a towel, and I scurried over.

“A little girl, Mme. Dionne,” murmured Marie-Jeanne. Then she bid me crouch close beside her and set the little creature into the towel in my hands, hardly big enough to fill them, then pulled her scissors from a tray and snipped the cord. My sloshing stomach felt like its contents might lurch at any minute into my throat, but the panic of the moment kept my hands steady. The tiny thing was kicking feebly but made no sound. You could see that its face, even in the long, dancing shadows, was turning a deep, mottled blue. I feel worse than terrible for thinking it, let alone writing it down here, but I did not at that moment think of this scrap of life as precious or miraculous: it was grotesque and frightening and I wanted nothing more than to set it down and run.

Marie-Jeanne stood and took the baby from me and walked swiftly to the kitchen, throwing open the door to the woodstove and thrusting the tiny body toward the heat. For a moment, I feared her intention was to hurl the little thing into the flames, which is horrifying and serves only to explain my state of shock. But holding it facedown in the hot breath of the stove, she gently massaged its back, then turned it over, put her mouth over its lips, and blew. Just then Mme. Dionne starting lowing again, a deep, sorrowing sound I could feel, physically, like a blow. Marie-Jeanne thrust the baby into my arms and went back to Mme. Dionne. The little creature was so tiny it seemed I could have cupped it in my palms, like a butterfly. Cupped her. Then she moved and started mewing in my hands, and I couldn’t help but think of her as a hairless kitten, not a human child. Mme. Legros hurried over and took the baby from me gently and settled it into an apple crate that she set before the open door of the oven.

Back at the foot of Mme. Dionne’s bed, Marie-Jeanne ducked her head between the splayed legs and cried out, “Twins, Mme. Dionne! Push-push-push!”

Mme. Dionne’s scream would have curdled the milk for miles around, but push she did and a second baby slid from her, this one even smaller than the first. Mme. Legros hustled back to the bedside and took Mme. Dionne’s hands in hers, dipped her head, and started in on a fresh round of prayers.

Marie-Jeanne beckoned me over the same way she had before, and together we gently patted down the tiny thing, snipped the cord, and massaged its back just as we had the first, then she told me to settle the second beside her sister in front of the oven.

Suddenly the kitchen door yawned open again. It was M. Dionne returning with Dr. Allan Dafoe, the same doctor who brought me into the world seventeen years ago. He is as stout as ever, his round wire glasses nestled into the eye sockets of his large, round head and his toothbrush mustache tightly groomed, as if his nose were growing a slim beard of its own.