第4章 The Braccan House

Sibby Braccan's house stood on the north side of the green, the last house before the water-meadow, and it had a good roof and two rooms and a husband who had put down new boards in the floor when he learned he was to be a father. Dunstan Braccan was a reed-cutter, a big slow man of thirty with hands like shovels and a way of standing in a doorway as if he were thinking of an answer he would give later. When Eudora came to the house at the end of the first week, he met her at the gate, and he looked at her for a moment before he stood aside, and the look was the same one the women at the well had given her, but with the question in it less hidden. "You are the new midwife." "I am. You wrote to the parish." "My wife wrote. She is the letter-writer here." He led her in. "I saw the last one bury a child in a wet spring and I would rather not do it again." Eudora stopped on the threshold. It was the plainest thing anyone had said to her since she arrived, and she turned it over carefully. "Your wife's last child?" "Our first. A boy. He did not last the winter." Dunstan's face did not move, but his hands found each other and closed. "She thinks this one will be different." Sibby Braccan was sitting by the fire with her feet on a stool, seven months along and enormous with it, a quick dark woman with a mouth made for laughing and eyes that had forgotten how. She had the fine lines around them that come from a long grief, and she looked at Eudora the way a person looks at a rope thrown into water. "You are quick with your hands," Sibby said. "The girls at the well said so. They said you cut a cord over the salt without being told twice." "I was told once and did it." "Yes." Sibby put a hand on the great curve of herself and left it there. "There will not be a woman outside your door telling you every time. It will be me, and me alone, and you will have to know it already. So I am telling you now, while there is still time. When it comes, it will come quick. My mother was quick and her mother was quicker. He will not have time to run for the ferry and back. You will have to be in this room." "I will be in this room." "Do not promise." Sibby's voice went small and hard at the same time. "Loveday promised. Loveday sat where you are sitting and put her hand on this table and promised me the last one, and she was here, and my son is under the ground all the same." There was nothing to say to that which would have been true, so Eudora did not say it. She took out her own small notebook instead, and asked the proper questions, and wrote the answers in the proper lines — the date of the last courses, the height of the fundus, the lie of the child, whether it had quickened, whether it turned, whether there had been any bleeding. She did all of it the way she had been taught, and Sibby watched her do every part of it and answered every question and did not relax by a fraction. Then, when the examination was done and Dunstan had gone out to the shed, Sibby said, "Will you look at it." "At what?" Under the floorboard nearest the hearth there was a folded cloth, and in the cloth a book, and in the book a list. Sibby did not get up to fetch it; she only pointed with her chin. Eudora took the board up and the book out and opened it, and found in it a list of names in Sibby's own hand, two columns, the left column longer than the right. "Those are the children of this village," Sibby said. "I wrote down every one I have known since I was a girl. And the ones in the right-hand column, I wrote down where they went." Eudora read the right-hand column. It said, again and again, in Sibby's round careful letters, the same four words. Went to the water. "Mrs. Rennock says I am not to keep this," Sibby said. "She says it is not the way. But I am a woman who counts, and nobody in this house will count for me. My mother would not. My mother's mother would not. They said it was not for us to count, that counting brought the eye. But I am the one they will knock for at two in the morning. So I count." Eudora looked at the two columns for a long moment, and then she did a thing that she would think about for the rest of her time in Grithfen. She took out her own notebook and, in full view of Sibby Braccan, added the right-hand names to the list she had begun in her own book, all of them, one after another, in her small square hand, twelve names with the same four words against them. She did not know why she did it. She told herself it was because a midwife keeps a record, and a record is an honest thing, and honest things are safe. Sibby watched her write and did not stop her, and when it was finished she leaned back and put both hands on the child and said, "There now. Now there are two of us counting." Outside, the light had thinned and the water-meadow had begun to shine the way wet ground shines before dark. Eudora went to the door and looked out toward the north, where the path ran out from the village between two banks of sedge to the place the villagers called the Skein Gate, and she saw a man on that path with a pole over his shoulder and a bundle at his back, walking out, unhurried, in the failing light. She was about to say something about him — about the hour, about the ninth bell that had not rung yet but would — when the first stroke of it came across the green from the chapel tower, flat and slow, and Sibby Braccan said from her chair by the fire, without getting up, "That is Godwin Grike. He is going out to set the gate for the flood. He does it every night at this time." "He is not afraid of the water." "He knows the water." Sibby's voice had something in it that Eudora could not read. "The water knows him. That is the difference." Eudora looked at the strip of shining water-meadow and the man diminishing along the path, and she thought about the sentence and could not decide whether it was a comfort or the opposite. She closed the door and sat down with Sibby and asked her the ordinary questions a midwife asks: whether the child had turned, whether she was sleeping, whether the quickening had been regular, whether there had been any bleeding. Sibby answered every one of them patiently and truthfully, and all the while she answered she watched Eudora's face, as if the answers mattered less than how the midwife took them. ---