第3章 The Salt Cord

The first child Eudora delivered in Grithfen was born on a Friday, to a woman whose husband kept the inn on the corner of the green, and it was, by every measure she knew, an ordinary birth. The woman was young and strong and frightened in the ordinary way of first mothers. Her labour had started in the night and by the time Eudora was called across at dawn it was well under way. The room upstairs at the inn was low and warm, with a slope in the ceiling and a small window that had been opened an inch to let the smoke out. Four women of the village were already there, and Eudora noticed them the way she noticed everything, and having noticed them she could not stop noticing. They had brought salt. Each of them had a twist of paper in her apron pocket, and when Eudora asked for hot water and clean cloths they brought those too, but first they took out the salt and laid their twists along the sill of the open window, a thin white line across the wood, and then stood back. "Is that the house custom?" Eudora asked, keeping her voice easy. "It keeps the room sweet," said the oldest of the four, which was not an answer but was delivered with the weight of one. Eudora let it go, because the woman on the bed had reached the part of the labour where a midwife's opinions about salt stop mattering, and because she had spent fifteen years learning to work alongside whatever a family needed at its bedside. She knelt in and gave the woman her hand and her voice and her whole attention, and the baby came down the way babies come, slowly and then all at once, and at the end of it there was a daughter in the room, small and furious and entirely ordinary, opening her mouth to complain about the world. "Give me the cord," Eudora said. "I'll cut it." A woman passed her the knife. Another set a basin on the floor and said, quietly, not to Eudora but to the room, "Not over the water." Eudora had been reaching over the basin. She stopped with her hand in the air. The basin held water she had had brought up hot, now filmed with steam. She looked at it and then at the woman who had spoken, and the woman looked back with a mild, patient expression that said the rule was so old it no longer needed defending, only keeping. "Where, then?" Eudora asked. It was the correct question, the midwife's question, and she was pleased with herself for asking it in a level voice. "Over the salt. On the sill." So Eudora moved the baby to the sill, and moved her own hands with her, and cut the cord over the line of salt at the open window with the cold air coming in over her wrists, and the cord parted cleanly and nothing happened, no more than happens at any birth. She tied it and gave the child to her mother and stood up with her back aching and her sleeves wet and her mind already turning the thing over. Not over the water. She had cut a cord over a basin of hot water a thousand times. Every midwife in every hospital in the country cut the cord over a bowl, because the bowl is where you catch the blood, and the blood has to go somewhere. In Grithfen you did not cut the cord over the water, and you laid a line of salt on the sill of an open window in the last week of November, and the women who did it did not think of it as superstition. They thought of it the way you think of taking your boots off at the door. She washed her hands and stayed with the mother until the afterbirth was out and the woman was settled, and only when the grandmother had brought up the tea did Eudora do the last thing she did at every birth, which was to examine the child head to foot while the room talked around her. She unwrapped the swaddling and went over the small warm body with two fingers, and she was almost finished when she saw it on the left foot, on the sole, a mark. It was faint and brownish and irregular, about the size of a thumbprint, shaped roughly like a leaf or a shallow cup, and it was the sort of mark that half the babies in the world carry and that nobody would look at twice. Eudora had seen five hundred birthmarks. She would have seen this one and said nothing and forgotten it, except that when she turned the foot toward the window light, the oldest of the four women crossed herself and turned her face away, and a second woman went very still, and the mother on the bed, who had not yet held her daughter, asked the ceiling a question in a small voice. "Is it on her?" "It is a birthmark," Eudora said. "It is common. It will fade or it will not." "Is it on her foot." Eudora looked at the child, then at the mother, then at the four women arranged around the room like the posts of a bed. She understood that the mother was asking a question with two possible answers and that both of the answers were already known in the room, and that she, the midwife, the woman from outside, was the only person present who did not know which answer she had just given. "It is here," she said, and touched the mark with one finger, and the mother closed her eyes, and the room breathed out, and Eudora finished the examination and wrapped the child and put her into her mother's arms, and did not say any of the things she had been about to say. Downstairs, the innkeeper gave her a glass of something dark and a coin, and thanked her, and said, "You cut it over the salt." "I was told to." He nodded slowly, as if the fact that she had been told and had obeyed were two separate pieces of good news. "Loveday did too. At the last, she did not always." He wiped the counter with a cloth that did not need it. "You will do well here if you can keep doing that." "Keep doing what?" "Doing what you are told," he said, "and not asking what the salt is for." Eudora walked home along the raised path with the night coming down and the Skein breathing at the back of the houses, and she went in and lit her lamp and took out her own book and wrote the case down, and in the space where she usually wrote nothing but the facts she wrote the time and the weight and the cry, and then she sat for a long while with the pen in her hand and did not write anything at all. She sat there until the lamp began to gutter and the room went dim, and then she blew it out and went to bed and lay awake, and the last thing she thought before she slept was not about the salt or the cord or the mark. It was about the four women ranged along the wall like the posts of a bed, doing nothing, having been brought in to do nothing, and she understood that they had not been there for the mother. They had been there for her, the stranger with the knife, to watch what she would do at the moment of the cutting and to make sure that the parish's way of doing it was kept in a room where the parish's own daughter lay in labour. ---