Margaret had planned on checking into St. Mary hospital in Astoria the week before her due date, even though she wasn’t Catholic. The universe had a different plan. She went into labor two weeks early, eighteen days after the loggers went back to work. A storm was driving straight off the Pacific, whipping the river into six-foot rollers that formed surf on the sandbars. It was impossible to get a message to Astoria for a doctor. No one was crossing the river.
John Reder could only swab Margaret’s forehead and pray. He had been doing it for twelve hours.
The house shuddered with the blasts of wind. The rain fell nearly horizontally, driving against the glass windows, spattering in liquid light from the kerosene lanterns in streaks of pale yellow against the blackness of the night.
Margaret was breathing hard. “It’s not coming, John. I don’t know how long I can keep this up.” Her face glistened with sweat. Another contraction hit, and she squeezed hard on her husband’s hand, gritting her teeth to try to contain a scream. “Something is wrong. I think the baby is upside down.”
He looked at her dumbly. “So, what happens if the legs come first?”
“I don’t know, John!” She was suddenly angry, exasperated. “I don’t know anything!” she wailed, then was hit with another contraction. “Oh, God, John. The baby could die.” She didn’t say it, but he knew. She could die, too.
John Reder looked at his hands. Years of hard labor with ax, saw, steel cable, and rigging had made them massive. He couldn’t imagine getting one of them in there.
She touched his hand. “I know, John,” Margaret said. “I know.” She took a breath. “Aino Koski’s mother is a midwife and she was teaching Aino before—” She was hit with a contraction.
“It won’t come while I’m gone?”
“It can’t come,” she said through gritted teeth. “That’s the problem.”
Armed with a mission, John Reder never faltered.
Aino wakened when she heard the pounding on Ilmari’s door and what sounded like John Reder’s voice shouting her name. She heard the scratching of a match as Ilmari lit a lantern. It could only mean Margaret’s labor wasn’t going well.
She sent a thought heavenward, not believing in any deity but still behaving as if someone was listening. Then she toughened up. No help was coming. She’d known this since childhood. She was the help. She began putting on her clothes.
Reder mounted the horse and reached for Aino’s hand, hauling her up behind him. A blast of wind sent a crack through the night as a large limb crashed to the ground. The loggers called them widow-makers. There’d be many on a night like this. She locked her arms around his waist and they moved off into the dark.
They reached Knappton at four thirty in the morning. It was clear immediately that it was going to be a breech birth.
She had watched her mother do a breech birth once. She remembered Maíjaliisa looking at her, a hand in the woman’s vagina, saying, “You have to get the baby’s arm across the body, get the shoulder right. I’m trying to find the arm. If I don’t, we’ll have to cut her open.” She pushed that from her mind. That she could not face.
Aino leaned over Margaret and felt her huge hard abdomen. She shouted to Reder for a wineglass. He came running up the stairs, a puzzled look on his face but with a wineglass in his hand. Aino put the glass on Margaret’s belly and put her ear against the base. She looked at Reder. “Baby heart beating good.”
“The baby’s heart beats well,” Margaret said through clenched teeth.
Try as she might, Aino could not get the baby to shift simply by pushing at it through Margaret’s skin.
The yellow light from the lamps that had been reflected from the driving rain moving across the windows began to mix with the gray of the Washington dawn.
Margaret was exhausted. Aino was remembering her sisu.
“I go inside,” Aino said. “This my first time.”
“Go inside!” Margaret, in labor now for over twenty hours, was pushing her feet against the bed, raising her hips and writhing. “Goddamnit, go inside!”
Aino went to the kitchen where Reder had boiled water. She carefully washed her hands with soap. “You keep fire going. Water hot. House not cold.”
Reder did not ask if Margaret was going to be all right, because he knew Aino would not know.
Aino put fresh towels underneath Margaret’s buttocks. “You ready?” Aino asked.
Margaret nodded, her eyes wide with urgency and pain.
Aino bit her lower lip, looked Margaret right in the eye and began working her hand up the birth canal.
It had never been boring, helping her mother. Not at all, but she paid attention like a teenager. If only, she repeated to herself, if only. She felt a tiny leg and looked at Margaret, whose eyes were closed.
“Mr. Reder,” Aino shouted. “More towel.”
Reder came up with two towels. “Roll one. Put it in wife mouth. She can bite.”
Without a word, Reder rolled the towel and gently as he could put it between Margaret’s teeth. Aino went in farther. Margaret’s eyes widened with pain and she bit down hard.
Maíjaliisa’s voice filled Aino’s head. The problem is the umbilical cord comes with the legs and then gets squeezed. The baby dies from lack of oxygen or is an idiot if it lives. Aino felt carefully, slowly, between the baby’s legs and the cervix opening. There. A lump of umbilical cord had come into the opening. She felt it, like a smooth tough tube of rubber, and slowly pushed it back inside the womb. The legs were partly out, the head back inside. When the head comes through, it molds to the opening. Sort of like poop squeezing through an asshole. Aino smiled at the memory. More than once people told her Maíjaliisa had an earthy sense of humor. So, she focused on getting the head squeezed down and then, once through, expanded back to its original shape without hurting the brain.
She guided the head into the cervix, pulling with one hand, using Margaret’s muscles to push and turn the baby, pulling the tiny arm to position the shoulder, pulling, gently squeezing, pulling, feeling, Margaret clenching her teeth on the cloth towel, daylight coming into the room, the lanterns growing dim in comparison.
Suddenly Margaret screamed. “Cut it out, Aino, cut the baby out.”
John Reder knelt beside his wife and began to pray out loud.
“No. We risking infection, bleeding.” Then she heard an inner voice saying, “You don’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to kill this baby and kill Margaret.”
Margaret screamed again. Her womb tightened around Aino’s hands and wrist, the little body twisted so the shoulder went tight and then it was through. Now the head. The womb had the head flexed against the little chest. Aino gently kept the pressure on, keeping it there. The head must not leave the chest. The chin could hang it up. The umbilical cord could get in and around the neck. Nature wants the head against the chest.
She squeezed with her hand, her long fingers grasping around the fontanelle, squeezing the head to a point, squeezing the baby’s skull to an egg shape, a hard-boiled egg without the shell. Squeezing. Then …
The miracle of birth.
After Aino had cut the umbilical cord and Reder had buried the afterbirth outside, the two sat at the kitchen table across from each other. They were sharing the pot of coffee Reder had made several hours earlier. “You all right walking back to your brother’s?” he asked. “I’d go with you, but …” He looked upstairs where Margaret was asleep with her daughter on her breast.
“Best staying with Mrs. Reder. I going OK myself.”
She went and took one more peek at Margaret asleep and breathing easy. John Reder followed and looked over her shoulder. She turned to him and whispered, “Clean. Everything very clean or bad little plant can kill mother. Mama’s milk usually make baby OK, but maybe bad little animals are making red bumps and white …” She couldn’t come up with the English for bacteria and pus. “Ugly bumps. You will see. You get doctor if little bumps.”
Reder nodded.
Rain rattled the windows, but the wind had died down. Reder helped Aino on with her coat. This gesture of politeness gave Aino a feeling of great satisfaction. Up at Reder’s Camp, John Reder was the king in his kingdom—and she was nothing. Here, for the past few hours, she had been the queen. She wondered if this was how Margaret felt all the time.
“Just a moment,” Reder said. He disappeared into the small office off the living room. When he returned, he held out a twenty-dollar gold piece to her.
“I cannot thank you enough. Please take it. You earned it.”
Aino looked at the gold piece—nearly two month’s wages. She was out of a job. He was the man who fired her. After a moment of hesitation, she said slowly, “Someday people will see save a life is different from earning wages.”
Reder tried to put the gold piece in her hand and she gently turned it away. “What is market price to save someone you love?” she asked softly. “It is all you have. How can price be fair when one side willing to pay everything?”
Reder said nothing.
“How you can make this business?” Aino said. “People not things like logs and lumber. Earnings, prices, supply, demand, they make no sense with people, only with things.”
Reder looked at her a long time, cool and steady. He put the coin in his pocket. “Margaret likes you. Now I see why. You’re a special girl, Aino Koski. You’ll always be welcome in my house.” Then his eyes revealed just the smallest twinkle “But if I ever see you up at the camp, I’ll call the sheriff and have you arrested for trespassing.”
Aino didn’t know how to respond.
Reder opened the door. A gust of wind sent rain splattering into the hallway. “Aino,” Reder said. “I will recommend you to anyone as a midwife.” He smiled at her. “Until the revolution comes, I suggest you charge ten dollars a delivery.”
When Aino reached the muddy street she suddenly felt compelled to turn around. He still stood by the door. He waved to her. She hesitated, then waved back. Tired, elated, and confused she set off in the rain for Ilmahenki.