Bone House_ A Novel - Betsy Tobin [1]
I saw it later, a dirty spray of ink across the snow.
I was five when she first came to the village. She was great-bellied even then, but she carried her burden easily, not in an ungainly way as so many of the village women do. One day at market I was scrambling in the dirt while my mother haggled over the price of carp. Thinking I would hide, I crawled under the fishwife’s car. A length I heard my mother calling me, her voice impatient. I did not go at first, but kept my place and listened to her calling. I remember hearing her voice climb and swell, like birdsong when it builds at dusk. It made my pulse race as it became more shrill; the sound of her fear pleased me. But when she finally screamed my name my stomach lurched, and I scrambled out from under the cart, only to collide headfirst with Dora’s rock-hard abdomen.
She did not even flinch, but reached down and lifted me high. And as I scaled the heights of her body, I found myself staring straight into her eyes, pale blue, with speckled flecks of brown, like pigeon eggs. She said not a word, only handed me to my mother, whose face by now was tight with fear. My mother gave a brief nod of thanks and took me from her, squeezing me so hard that I burst into tears. Then Dora laid her own hand gently on my mother’s arm, and in an instant I saw the fear and anger ebb from my mother’s eyes, as if Dora had siphoned it away through her outstretched fingers. Suddenly I felt my mother’s grip release. I stopped crying and we stood, the three of us, for a moment. Then Dora let go of my mother’s arm.
“They say you are a midwife,” she addressed us haltingly. My mother nodded, her eyes dipping for an instant to the woman’s swollen belly. “I am in need of you,” she continued. Her voice was low and thick, and her accent strange. She spoke slowly and with care, as if plucking fruit from a tree. My mother nodded, her own voice failing her at first.
“Come to me at dusk,” my mother said finally. Then Dora smiled and turned away, and I watched her disappear with long strides through the market crowds.
When she came to us that evening I was already in bed, but I watched from behind the curtain as my mother kneeled in front of her and spanned her belly with her hands. I saw her chest rise and fall and heard the sound of her breathing, hard and regular, like a horse’s. The air was heavy as my mother worked her hands around the globe of her abdomen, turning her palms at different angles, pressing and probing, then smoothing the taut skin beneath them. She leaned forward and pressed an ear to her belly, her outstretched hands resting gently on each side of the sphere. At length she rocked back on her heels.
“It will be soon,” she said.
Dora nodded.
“This is not the first,” my mother ventured, looking up at her.
“No.”
“The others?” she asked cautiously. Dora gave a brief shake of her head. My mother acknowledged this with a circumspect nod. If she taught me one thing as a child, it was the importance of discretion where women’s secrets were concerned.
“You will be staying in the village?” said my mother.
“Yes,” she replied decisively. “Here I will live.”
Dora moved into the miller’s cottage. He had died of cholera only weeks before, as had his wife and only son before him, and the cottage remained empty. She cleared it out, burning his furniture and woolens in a huge pyre of flames, a gesture of extravagance that many thought unnecessary. She then proceeded to make her own, hauling timber herself from the forest. She had arrived on horseback laden with her belongings, and within a few weeks she had sold the horse and built or purchased the few remaining things she needed. It was clear from the beginning that she had come to stay, and after a short time, no one questioned her presence.
I do not know when she began to trade her body, or how it happened, or indeed whether she had planned it so. Only that it seemed both right and natural. As a child I used to play outside her cottage. Men came and went, and always they