The Quintland Sisters(4)
I ducked my head to peer under the blanket just now. They are sleeping and still, so it’s possible to see the five of them as humans in miniature. Their similarity to one another is eerie, even with nothing but their tiny heads poking out of their blankets. All of them have black hair and long, dark eyelashes, too thick, it seems, for their sunken cheeks. The longer I watched them, the more I could see that each one of them has something distinct, something to tell her apart from her sisters. I took out my scribble book in the hopes of capturing them. The one that came first has one eyelid bigger than the other. The second has a tiny crinkle in the upper cusp of her right ear. The third has the smallest nose, and the fourth has the most hair, which seems to curl in the opposite direction from that of her sisters. The fifth and last—she has nothing that looks markedly different, but she is the only one with any wriggle in her.
No one has bothered to give them names. Mme. Dionne has managed to swallow a few sips of broth, and M. Dionne has not yet returned. I set down my sketch and lowered my chin to the edge of the crate, close enough that I could hear, faintly, the feeble breaths of these tiny girls. I wrapped my arms around the sides of the box and dangled my fingers over the edges, hoping the babies might sense my hands and face hovering above them. I’m here, I whispered under my breath. At this very moment, I’m here. And so are you.
May 28, 1934 (UPI Archives)
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FIVE BABY GIRLS BORN TO CANADA FARMER’S WIFE
NORTH BAY, Ontario—In a rude farm house five miles from here a country doctor fought tonight to keep the spark of life in five tiny baby girls. The quintuplets were born today to Mrs. Oliva Dionne, 25 years of age, who has five other living children.
Neighbor women, acting as midwives, helped the family physician, Dr. Dafoe, at the accouchement.
The doctor confirmed birth of the quintuplets tonight. He had little hope all of them will live.
Total weight of the quintuplets was thirteen pounds six ounces. The first baby girl born weighed three pounds four ounces. The combined weight of the last two was only two pounds four ounces. Dr. Dafoe said so far as he knows the quintuplets are a Canadian record. He had heard of quadruplets, but never of quintuplets until today.
Used with permission.
May 28, 1934
Did my parents worry when they woke this morning to find me gone? I didn’t ask. I assume the news must have scurried its way to every lane, porch, and scullery before Mother even had the opportunity to overcook Father’s breakfast. I expect they’ve pieced two and two together. There’s no telephone here or I would have tried to reach Father at the post office, but the day has galloped by and there’s been no time. I’m only now getting a moment to jot some of it down.
The Red Cross nurse from the outpost in Bonfield, Marie Clouthier, had arrived by the time Dr. Dafoe returned midmorning. Marie-Jeanne was still with Mme. Dionne, and I was doing everything in my power not to nod off. Dr. Dafoe was, I think, astonished to see all the babies alive.
“Have they cried much?” he asked Nurse Clouthier, who blinked at him blankly, then murmured in French to Marie-Jeanne. The midwife merely shrugged and gestured at me with her chin.
“Surprisingly, they are noisy quite a lot,” Marie-Jeanne growled in her low voice, her accent thick. “But it is this young lady who has watched over them all the night.” She said it kindly. “Emma, they have been crying, all of them? Or just some?”
I had stayed most of the night beside their box, one hand still draped over the edge. Nurse Clouthier, when she’d arrived, had taken over the dispensing of water to the babies and had gingerly rubbed each of them down with oil and placed them back in the basket. She scarcely acknowledged me in my chair, which I shuffled aside while she was tending to the babies, and after a while it was almost as if she didn’t know I was there. This is something I’ve managed to pull off my whole life, to make myself invisible and unremarkable—no mean task with a crimson stain covering half my face. People meeting me for the first time tend to let their eyes glance off me the instant they process what they’re seeing, and this has always worked to my advantage. Even Dr. Dafoe, who’d been the one to console my mother at the time of my delivery, so distressed was she by my appearance, seemed to do a double take when he registered my position by the stove this morning. As if he’d forgotten he’d noticed me there the night before.
“Emma,” he murmured. “It was very good of you to help out. How are they?”
“All of them have wriggled from time to time,” I said. “They’re all breathing and making sounds. Not so much crying as whimpering.”
Nurse Clouthier had other calls to make in the French homes of East Ferris Township, but she promised to be back. Dr. Dafoe left soon after, saying he was going to return with a nurse—a bilingual one this time—from the new nursing school at St. Joseph’s Hospital in North Bay.
Marie-Jeanne and I remained at the farmhouse all day, as did Mme. Legros. By midafternoon, Mme. Dionne was improving somewhat, enough to take in some more broth and a cup of tea, but the babies were growing more and more quiet. There must have been too many women in the farmhouse for M. Dionne. He stayed outside, tending to the farm or conferring with his brothers and father on the porch, running his bony hand through hair made wild from the habit and rubbing at his eyes as if trying to wake from a dream.