Martha heard padding footfalls behind her and saw Will and Joanna standing, staring wide-eyed and frightened, at the bedroom door. Behind them loomed Thomas, his body in the helpless stance of useless men, and she waved him out of the house, into the barn. She led the children back to bed, giving them each a piece of bread to suck on, and quickly built up the fire, adjusting the iron pot to boil water. She shredded into the pot lavender and chamomile, and carried back into the bedroom the slippery elm paste covered in a wet cloth. She sat on the bed with a candle, positioning herself to examine Patience, satisfying herself that the womb was beginning to open, expelling the child.
Within a few hours, though, Martha was dismayed to see her cousin beginning to tire, unwilling to bear down with the cramping pains that left her scrambling up the wall behind the bed, her arms and legs flailing, as though she could leave her distended belly behind to do its own work.
With much coaxing, Martha roused her and set Patience on her lap in a chair. She encircled Patience’s belly with her arms, pushing down whenever the pains came, whispering encouraging words over her cousin’s frantic protests that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, bear down anymore.
Dawn had fully come before Martha heard John returning with the wagon. She rushed into the yard, anxious to greet her sister, but was dismayed to see Roger climbing from the wagon as well. His eyes were veined with red and he scowled, on the back end of being in his cups, and she knew he was the reason for the delay in her sister’s arrival. Saying he had long been with a patient and needed sleep, he quickly found his way into the barn, and Martha hoped he would sleep through until Patience had been delivered.
Mary followed quickly into the bedroom and, with only the briefest of examinations, whispered for Martha to begin feeding Patience the cohosh. They dosed Patience every hour for three hours and Mary was soon satisfied that the roof of the womb was finally opening sufficiently for the head. With the birth pains coming every few minutes, Patience shrieked and cried, and Martha knew that she herself would be coming undone without the soothing presence of her sister. She watched Mary’s assured movements, admiring her calm, but Patience’s face had taken on the color of old ivory, with black bands underlying her swollen lower lids, and when Martha caught Mary’s eye, she saw the press of wary concern on her sister’s face.
Mary took up the slippery elm and applied it with gentle fingers into the birth channel, all the while encouraging Patience with how fine her son would be, how proud would be his father. Martha crawled onto the bed behind Patience, raising her up into a sitting position while Patience thrashed her head from side to side with increasing violence screaming, “No more, no more, no more…”
Mary said quietly, “Martha, we need to dose her again.”
Patience went suddenly limp and still, a look of renewed panic growing on her face. Through cracked lips, she croaked, “What’s that you say? What’s that?” She looked first at Mary and then up at Martha bending over her shoulder, and whispered with rising hysteria, “You’re poisoning me. You’re killing me! Murder! Murder!” Her eyes rolled towards the door and she pleaded, “Help me, they’re poisoning me!”
Martha followed Patience’s gaze and she saw Roger standing at the door. He said, “Christ on the cross, but you can hear her out to the barn.” He paused, regarding the women unsteadily, and offered, “She needs to be bled and heartily.”
Patience reached out to him with grasping fingers and shrilled, “Yes, let him take it. Open my veins and take this pain from my head.”
“Husband,” Mary said quietly, “you are tired. Rest more and let us do our work.”
He paused for a moment, assessing the pregnant woman on the bed, observing her pallor, her swollen limbs. He asked Martha, “How long has she labored?”
“Since yesterday morning late.” Martha wiped at her cousin’s face with a cool cloth, clenching her teeth. Roger’s answer to everything—every bruise, every pustule, every boil—was to aggressively bleed the patient until the sufferer was as white as lambs’ wool.
“She is phlegmatic…,” he began.
Martha clapped her hands over her cousin’s ears and snapped, “She is not phlegmatic, she is exhausted.”
He shrugged, but before walking away, he said to Mary, “I have brought castor oil, if it comes to that.”
Patience covered her face, sobbing into her hands, saying she would surely die, and Martha held her in a rocking embrace. Castor oil was tricky and vile; it was certain to bring on powerful labor, but too much of a surgeon’s distillation, the castor beans having been soaked in the oil for months, and the laboring woman would indeed be poisoned. Mary put her ear to Patience’s belly, listening for the sounds of life within, and when she raised her head, she said urgently to Martha, “Help me get her up.”
It took the two of them to lift Patience out of bed and they eased her down squatting onto the floor, both of them holding her arms, pleading, exhorting, bullying Patience to push and push and push again. After another few hours, Patience began a shuddering fever, her body lathered in sweat. When Patience began to rave incoherently, she was eased back onto the bed with pillows propped under her head. Beckoning for Martha to follow, Mary walked into the common room. They found the men eating a cold midday dinner of day-old porridge and meat, their faces strained from the sounds of a woman’s agony. The children sat on a bench, their hands interlocked in terrified silence.
Mary beckoned to Roger and, when he stood in front her, whispered, “She has no more strength left to labor. If the babe is not pushed out of her womb very soon, they both will die.”
He walked to his saddlebag and sorted through some bottles until he pulled out a small brown vial. Lifting the stopper out, he carefully poured a tiny measure of the syrupy oil into a cup of ale. Pausing a moment, he added a drop more. Swirling the mixture in the cup, he said, “She must drink it all at once.”
“She’ll not do it willingly,” Martha warned, wondering how they would pry open her cousin’s jaws to swallow the oily drink.
Carrying the cup, Roger followed them back to the bedroom where Patience lay panting, her hands gripping at the torn sheets, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Advising the two women to hold Patience down, he leaned over the bed, saying, “You must swallow this down, Goodwife Taylor. It will help you in your labors.” He said it pleasantly, matter-of-factly, but when she began to shake her head wildly in refusal, clamping her lips more tightly together, Roger reached out, pinching his fingers over her nose, and waited. She soon gasped for air and he poured the liquid over her tongue, quickly palming his hand over her mouth, forcing her to swallow or be drowned.
Before he left to resume his dinner, he gently stroked Patience’s hair, cooing to her that all would be well, that the babe would now soon come. Patience smiled up at him and Martha marveled that for all of Roger’s weaknesses, his passion for drink, his carelessness with his wife, he could at times show kindness. She admonished herself to have more charity where her brother-in-law’s shortcomings were concerned.
The action of the oil worked quickly and within a few hours, Patience, howling and bucking, had been delivered of a boy, his forceful passage soaked in a spill of blood and water running in rivulets over the mattress onto the floor. While Mary worked to clean up the afterbirth, washing Patience with practiced hands while she slept, Martha swaddled the infant and held him close to her breast. He was the most perfect infant Martha had ever seen, each finger, every toe creased and rounded in rosy flesh, the nails crescented and silvery. His head was gently domed, neither flattened nor marred, despite the many long hours of the labor. She examined the infant skin, looking like cream and marigolds, stroking the cheeks, full and dimpled, the lashes still dark and segmented with the fluid from his mother’s womb, the lashes that would never crimp or dampen with crying, the curved and protruding lips that would never part with laughing, for he had been born without a breath to waken him, and with never a breath he would be lowered into the ground.
CHAPTER 16
From the Private Journal of John Dixwell
Catalogue XXIII
New Haven, Connecticut, Anno 1673, 28th day of July
