Midwives Read Online Free Page B

could find atop his bureau small skyscrapers of quarters and nickels and dimes—thought Tom ran a little too wild. My father came from a family of achievers—a line of farmers who actually prospered in Vermont’s rocky soil, followed by two generations of successful small-business men—and he thought Tom’s bad pedigree might be a problem. Although he knew Tom was very smart, he still feared the boy might end up like most of the Cortses in Reddington: working by day at the messy automotive garage that looked like a rusted-out auto graveyard, while trying to buy Budweiser with food stamps at night. It probably wasn’t a bad life if you kept your tetanus shots current, but it wasn’t the life my father wanted for his only child.
    My mother understood why I found Tom cute, but she, too, had her reservations. “There are probably worse mushrooms in this world than a boy like Tom Corts,” she once warned, “but I still want you to be careful around him. Keep your head.”
    They had both underestimated Tom, as they’d see the next year. He was always there for me when I needed him most.
    In the mud season of 1980, Rollie’s horse, Witch Grass, was twenty years old, and while her best years were well behind her, she was a good horse for us. Patient. Undemanding. And slow to accelerate. This last character trait meant a lot to us (and, I have to assume, to our parents), because we had given up our formal lessons a year earlier, tired of being told to sit up straight, post, and canter.
    Witch Grass could carry both Rollie and me for long stretches on her chestnut back, although we tried to minimize the amount of time we dropped one hundred and ninety pounds onto her aging spine. One of us would sometimes walk beside her.
    It was probably during the third week in March that I first let Tom kiss me.
    Make no mistake, this wasn’t one of those passionate, “we kissed” sort of moments: I was decidedly passive during my first kiss, and although Tom initiated the buss (and I was indeed a willing participant), he broke it off fast, and we were too young—and the ground too muddy—for our small part of the earth to move.
    Rollie and I planned, as we had the day before, to take turns riding Witch Grass up Gove Hill, the only spot in Reddington her mother could think of where the ground was not either asphalt or deep mud. When the horse had had a chance to stretch her legs, we would ride together across the street and past the general store to the ball field, stealing a glimpse of Tom Corts and his vaguely truant friends. We might then continue up to the Brennans’ sugarhouse, since even in the center of town we could see its steam winding up from the trees like the trail of a small but hyperactive geyser.
    So Rollie took off on Witch Grass first, and I climbed over the electric fencing into the field by the barn where the horse grazed when Rollie was in school, and began shoveling the big clumps of horse turds into what Rollie and I secretly referred to as the Shit Barrow. Witch Grass wasn’t my horse, but I spent so much time riding her that I tried to help with her care and feeding—which meant mostly midafternoon shoveling.
    I hadn’t been at it long when I heard my mother’s station wagon churning up the street toward me, with its motor’s characteristically ineffectual-sounding sputter. The wagon was a giant blue woody from the late sixties, and while my parents had considered trading it in during the oil crisis in 1973—a discussion driven as much by guilt over the way the animal guzzled gasoline and oil as it was by the cost of pumping dead dinosaurs into its belly to keep it moving—my mother was unable to part with it. She had had the wagon almost as long as she had had me, it had gotten her safely to over five hundred births, and she couldn’t bear to put this particular partner out to pasture.
    The field was beside one of Reddington’s busier roads, the street that wound its way to Route 15—the road west