Entry Island

It was full of people. All women, except for my father. Annag clutched my arm, tiny fingers bruising my flesh. ‘The midwife came ten minutes ago,’ she whispered, and paused. Then, ‘What’s a midwife?’

There had been enough births in my short life that I knew the midwife was the woman who came to help with the delivery. But, actually, she was just one of our neighbours.

‘She’s come to take the baby from mamaidh’s belly,’ I told her. And I saw her bent over the prone figure of my mother in the box bed at the far side of the room.

I am not quite sure now how I could tell, because there was no outward sign of it, but there was panic in the fire room. Silent panic that you could feel, even if you couldn’t hear or see it. Water was boiling in a pot hung from the chain above the burning peats. The other women were busy washing bloody rags and my father stood looking on helplessly. I had never seen him so powerless. He had a word for every occasion, my father. But right then he had nothing to say.

I heard the midwife urging, ‘Push, Peigi, push!’ And my mother screamed.

One of the neighbours gasped, ‘It’s coming out the wrong way.’

I had attended many animal births and knew that the head should come first, and straining my eyes through the smoke and shadows I could see the baby’s arse between my mother’s legs, as if it were trying to climb in and not out.

One at a time the midwife carefully freed the baby’s legs, then turned and twisted to release first one arm, then the other. It was a girl. A big baby, but her head was still inside my mother, and there had been a dreadful tearing of the flesh. I could see blood on my mother’s legs and on the hands of the midwife. I could see it soaking into the sheets. There was sweat glistening on the face of the birthing woman as she tilted the baby up, one hand searching for its upturned face, trying to ease it free. But still the head wouldn’t come.

My mother was gasping and crying, and the neighbours were holding her hands and softly urging her to be calm. But everyone in the room knew that if the baby’s head were not freed quickly, the newborn would suffocate.

Suddenly the midwife leaned over, cradling the baby’s body in one arm, her free hand feeling across my mother’s belly for the head inside of her. She seemed to find it, and took a deep breath before pushing down hard. And, ‘Push!’ she shouted at the top of her voice.

My mother’s scream brought soot dust tumbling from the rafters and turned my blood cold. But in the same moment, my new little sister’s head popped out, and with a sharp smack on her bloodied arse she drew breath and echoed her mother’s cry.

But my mother was still in distress, and the baby was taken quickly away, wrapped in blankets. Fresh sheeting was brought to try to stop my mother’s bleeding. The midwife caught my father’s arm and he dipped his head to hear her whispered advice. Her face had the white pallor of the dead.

My father’s eyes burned like coals and he came running for the door, almost falling over Annag and me as we tried to scramble out of his way. He yelled out and grabbed me by the collar of my threadbare tweed jacket, and I thought I was in trouble for being where I shouldn’t. But he brought his big whiskery face down next to mine and said, ‘I want you to go for the doctor, son. If we can’t stop the bleeding your mother’s going to die.’

Fear shot through me like a bolt from a crossbow. ‘I don’t know where the doctor lives.’

‘Go to the castle at Ard Mor,’ my father said, and I heard the anxiety that choked back the words in his throat. ‘They’ll get him quicker than any of us. Tell them your mother’ll die if he doesn’t come fast.’ And he turned me around and pushed me out, blinking, into the daylight, charged with the saving of my mother’s life.

Propelled by a mixture of fear and self-importance, I ran pell-mell up the slope between the blackhouses and on to the path cut into the hillside. I knew that if I followed it far enough, it would take me to the road that led to the castle, and although I’d never been there I had seen it from a distance and knew how to find it. But it was a long way. Two miles, maybe more.

The wind hit me as I crested the hilltop and nearly knocked me off my feet. I felt the rain spitting in my face, as if God was contemptuous of the efforts of one small boy to save his mother. That, after all, was His business.

There was no way I could keep up that pace, but I knew that time was of the essence, so I slowed to a trot that would eke out my reserves of energy and at least get me there. I tried hard not to think as I ran, switching my focus between the path ahead and the bleakness of the rocky, treeless hills that rose around me. Low clouds bumped and bruised the land, and the wind whipped through my clothes, tugging at the nails I used as buttons to keep my jacket shut.