第5章 The Reading

The chapel was cold and smelled of lime and old prayer, and by the time Eudora arrived on the first Sunday of December it was full to the doors. She had not been told she was expected. She had been told, by the girl Cuddy Ossel, that there would be a Reading, and that the midwife always stood at the Reading, and that if she did not come the village would come and fetch her, which she believed. So she put on her good coat and walked up the street in the dark of a winter morning and took her place at the back, and watched the people of Grithfen fill the benches, and found that every bench had its own salt line along the top rail, thin and white, the same as the sill of the inn. Reverend Harrower preached a short sermon about the sowing and the harvest and did not once mention the water. He was a small worried man with a chapped face who read the lesson as if it were a bill he was afraid to open. He prayed for the parish. He prayed for those at sea. He prayed, in a careful phrase, for those who slept in wet ground, which Eudora took to mean the drowned, and the congregation said Amen with a weight that made the beams ring. Then he stepped down and Drusilla Rennock came up. She carried the green ledger and a second book, thin and black, and she stood at the little reading desk under the window and opened the thin one first. Everything in the chapel went quiet, the way the village had gone quiet at the ninth bell. Even the children stopped. Even the wind seemed to stand still in the reeds outside. "This is the year's roll of this parish," Drusilla said, "as given to me by the midwife and by the mothers and by no one else." And then she read the names of the children born in Grithfen in the past year, in a flat unhurried voice, the way a clerk reads a list of the dead. Sixteen names. Eudora heard her own cases in there — the innkeeper's granddaughter first, born to a first mother on a Friday at dawn, and now at last given her name, spoken aloud into the cold air of the chapel for the first time in her life. Eudora understood, sitting on the hard bench with her hands in her lap, that for twelve days that child had been only the babe, and that the name she had been carrying around in her own head since the birth had been, in this village, a thing not to be spoken until this hour. She had broken a rule without knowing it. She had called the child a name, once, in her notebook, and twice aloud to the mother. Nobody had corrected her. That was how it worked: the rules were kept by everyone and explained by no one, so that the stranger could break them only by luck. When the sixteen names were read, Drusilla closed the thin book and opened the green ledger to a page marked with a strip of reed. She did not read the marked column aloud. She read only the names again, the same sixteen, and after each name she paused, and after some of the names the pause was longer, and she looked up over the heads of the congregation to the north wall of the chapel and said, quietly, "Kept." For eight of the sixteen she said Kept, and for the other eight she said nothing at all, and Eudora, doing the arithmetic of a midwife in a cold chapel, made it eight and eight. Then Drusilla said, "The parish midwife." Eudora did not move. The whole chapel turned in its benches, slowly, like water going down a drain, and looked at her, and Reverend Harrower held out the ledger and a pen over it. She walked up the aisle in a silence so complete that she could hear the reed that marked the page moving in the draft. The page was ruled in three columns. At the foot of the third column, under the names of the children, there was a short list of a different kind, five lines, and each line was a woman's name and a date and a single word after it. Midwife. Five midwives before her, going back more than a hundred years, and beside each name the year she had stopped, and beside two of those years, faintly, in the ink of a different hand, a small cross that might have been a clerk's private mark. "Your name and the year," Drusilla said. "It is how the parish knows whose hands a child came through." Eudora took the pen. She was a woman who had signed her name to hospital forms a thousand times, and there was nothing in this that should have frightened her, and she was aware that she was frightened, and that the fear was not in her mind but in the small cold spot between her shoulder blades where the children's counting-rhyme had touched her at the well. Two things were true at once: that signing the ledger was a parish formality about record-keeping, and that every person in the chapel believed she was signing something else, something whose terms nobody would say out loud. She signed her name and the year, and put the pen down, and Drusilla said, "The midwife." And the whole chapel said, in one voice, "Kept." Eudora stood in the cold aisle while the benches emptied around her and did not sit down again. She watched the congregation file out under the salt lines on the top rails, and she watched Loveday Fenwright's signature on the page above hers, and beside Loveday's name, in the year she had gone to the water, there was a small cross in the clerk's ink, exactly like the others. Out on the green afterward, the flock of children had started the counting-rhyme again, and the reeds at the north of the village were moving though there was no wind, and Eudora stood a long time looking at the reed strip that Drusilla had kept her place in and thinking that she had just written her own name into another woman's book, and that a book you sign is a book that can be read back to you. She walked home slowly along the street, and she was aware of the village watching her the way it watched the water and the reeds, and she understood that something had changed in the arrangement between them. Before the Reading she had been a woman hired from outside to do a job. After it she was the parish midwife, which in Grithfen was a different thing entirely: a person with a name in a book, standing in a line of names that went back past anyone's memory, and the line did not end at her and had never ended at any of the women in it. She stopped at her own door with her hand on the latch and looked back once at the chapel, small and grey in the cold light with its green door shut, and thought about all the other women who had stood where she had stood that morning with a pen in their hands and the same question they had been too polite to ask, and about how every one of them had signed anyway, and about what that said about what a parish can do to a person who comes into it meaning well. She went in and made tea and did not answer any of the questions she had asked herself. ---