Chapter 2 The Roster

Eudora slept badly and woke before the light to the sound of water moving under the floor. It was not water in the room. It was the tidal channel the villagers called the Skein, which ran along the back of the houses and filled and emptied twice a day with a sigh that came up through the boards. She lay and listened to it for a while, and then got up and dressed and went to see what sort of parish she had agreed to serve. What she found, under the lamp, was Loveday Fenwright's ledger. It was on the shelf with the bottles, bound in green cloth gone grey at the spine and heavy for its size. Eudora had expected a daybook of visits — who was due, who was nursing, who owed for a bottle of iron tonic — and it was that, and it was something else as well. Every page was ruled in three columns. The first gave a date and a name. The second gave the particulars a midwife writes down: the hours of the labour, the presentation, whether the cord was round the neck, whether the mother tore, whether the child cried at once or after a pause. The third column held one or two words, and nothing more, and in the middle of the book those one or two words began to repeat. Titled. Titled. Not this one. Titled. Eudora turned the pages slowly, the way she had been taught to turn the pages of another woman's notes, looking for the shape of a practice rather than the gossip of it. Loveday had attended twenty-two births in her last year. Eleven of them were marked in the third column. In the year before that, nine of nineteen. The year before that, six. She went back to the first page and read it properly, and found what she had half expected to find: a page pasted in at the front, in a hand older than Loveday's, a column of dates running back through the middle of the last century in a fine brown ink faded to the colour of weak tea. The same three columns. The same one or two words in the third. For a hundred and some years the midwives of Grithfen had kept the same book, and in that book roughly half of the children born in the village had been written down as something other than ordinary, and none of them had been written down as anything Eudora could name. She was still at the table when the first knock came. It was a pair of women with a boy between them, the boy holding his arm stiff against his chest in the particular way that means a green-stick fracture. Eudora set the ledger face down and went to work, and for an hour she was only a nurse with a splint and a strip of calico, and the morning took on the ordinary smell of liniment and peat smoke. Word of the new midwife had clearly gone round, because by the time she had finished with the boy there were three more at the door: an old man with a chest that rattled, a woman with a whitlow on her thumb, a girl with a rash she had got from the lye at the wash-house. None of them asked her, directly, about the ledger. Several of them looked at the shelf where it sat. Two of them looked at her hands. At noon she walked down to the well, because she wanted to see the village in daylight and because a midwife who does not walk her parish is a midwife who has already half-decided the parish is not hers. The well stood on the green with a roof over it on four posts, and beside it the village children were doing what village children do anywhere, which is to make a game out of whatever is at hand. They had a rope and a stone and a line scratched in the dust, and they were counting something, touching each child on the shoulder in turn, and Eudora caught the shape of it before she caught the words — it was a counting-out game, a rhyme for choosing who is it, and the words were local and strange. She stood at the edge of it and listened. The rhyme gave each child a name and each name a number and each number a place, and the places were the Skein, the Gate, the hollow boat, the reeds, the drowned ground, the chapel floor, and at the end of the list a place she had never heard a child use for a game. At the end of the list, the rhyme said, the children go back into the water, and the one who is counted last is the one who goes. The children finished the rhyme and shrieked and ran, and the boy who had been counted last ran with them and was not frightened, and that, Eudora thought, was the part she would remember. He was not frightened because he had done it a hundred times. It was only a game at the well on a bright cold morning. "Mrs. Rennock says you are to count the living and leave the rest." The voice was behind her, small and wry. Eudora turned. A girl of about ten stood with her hands full of rushes, watching her the way the older women at the well watched the water. "Does she." "She says the midwife counts the living. She says the dead count themselves." The girl shifted the rushes in her arms. "I am Cuddy Ossel. My father is on the boat. You are the new one." "I am the new one." "They will not say it in front of you." Cuddy shrugged, which set the rushes nodding. "Nobody says it in front of the midwife. But the children always know. You are to have the lying-in of Sibby Braccan, most likely. She is the only one far along." The girl said this with the cheerful finality of someone delivering a piece of news that had been decided elsewhere, and Eudora understood, standing at the well in the flat noon light, that she had not been consulted about her first proper case and that this was the way it would be here. The village would bring her the work it wanted her to do. That evening she took out a fresh notebook from her trunk — her own book, the one that would go back with her to the city whenever she left — and began the record she had kept at every post in her working life: dates, names, cases, a careful line for every woman and child under her hands. She copied the day's cases in her small square hand, and then, because she was a woman who liked to know what she was standing on before she built, she copied down the names from the old ledger's last two pages as well, and the words against them, and the mark in the third column, titled, which she told herself meant a thing about the parish register and not a thing about the child. She wrote it down because it was a fact of the parish and she was the midwife of the parish. She told herself that. She underlined it once, lightly, and closed the book. Then she sat back and looked at the shelf and at the row of cloth bags on their hooks, each with its little paper tag, and thought that she had come to a village where a woman kept a book of children and another woman kept a bag of secrets above her own hearth, and that both of them had been the same woman, and that the parish had written her a line in a column and a cross in the margin and a name that nobody now would say. ---