The Frozen River

by Ariel Lawhon

A woman is never more vulnerable than while in labor. Nor is she ever stronger. Like a wounded animal, cornered and desperate, she spends her travail alternately curled in upon herself or lashing out. It ought to kill a woman, this process of having her body turned inside out. By rights, no one should survive such a thing. And yet, miraculously, they do, time and again.

Labor renders every woman a novice. Every time is the first time, and the only expertise comes from those assembled to help.

Listening is a skill acquired by the doing. By many long years spent sitting at bedsides and in birthing rooms, waiting as women share the secret deeds that bring them to labor. I know these secrets come in waves. The first, horrible admission, and then the smaller, deeper acts that came before. A stolen glance. A secret, erotic touch. Moments of passion and lost control.

Men and death: either culprits or cowards.

Like all mothers, I have long since mastered the art of nursing joy at one breast and grief at the other.

Memory is a wicked thing that warps and twists. But paper and ink receive the truth without emotion, and they read it back without partiality. That, I believe, is why so few women are taught to read and write. God only knows what they would do with the power of pen and ink at their disposal.

When an unwed woman gives birth, it is my duty before the law to ask and record the name of the father while the woman is in travail. The legal presumption is that, under such physical duress, a woman cannot lie. Clearly the writers of the law know little about women and nothing about childbirth. I could give them endless examples of the lies that have been spoken to me through gritted teeth as women heave their children into the world. Regardless, the law, passed four years ago by the Massachusetts General Assembly, is bluntly titled “An Act for the Punishment of Fornication, and for the Maintenance of Bastard Children.” It was designed to make sure that unwed mothers had a means of providing for their children, but in practice it is little more than a ritual of public shaming. Of all the responsibilities required by my profession, this is my least favorite. Should a girl refuse to name her child’s father, she will be fined and possibly jailed for twenty-four hours. Should she cooperate, the girl will still be fined but will not face the indignity of a night spent in the clink. Repeat offenders find themselves subject to higher fines and longer sentences. Yet the men involved in these cases escape both forms of punishment—there is no law pertaining to male fornication—unless one considers being forced to provide for one’s own child a punishment.

Cyrus Ballard is thirty-three years old, and he will never marry or have children of his own. He will never work away from the mill or go to sea—though it is his greatest desire. He will never explore the vast wilds of this untamed continent. Cyrus is thirty-three years old, and he is mute. He was robbed of speech at the age of twelve, and the loss has marked his life in irreparable ways. There is no flaw in his intellect, or physical ability. He is tall and strong and handsome. He can read and write, and can communicate with his hands when necessary. It is a form of speech we have adopted, motions instead of words. But outside of our family, he is often pitied. Thought dimwitted. An illiterate population cares little for a man with beautiful handwriting, and—without speech, he cannot make them understand.

I will never understand why men think that women work so hard to destroy them. In my experience it is usually the opposite.

“I will not take your body tonight, Martha. I will not do it until you ask me to. No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not until you beg me to. I will take nothing from you that is not freely given. Do you understand?” My answer was but a ghost of speech. “Yes.”

Ephraim pulled me to his chest and tucked his legs behind mine. If we were vertical, I would be sitting in his lap. But we were not vertical. We were lying in bed, not consummating our marriage. And yet it was the most intimate thing I had ever done.

Every midwife I have ever known has cautioned that an abundance of male births for multiple years in a row means looming war. One of them—old, bitter, and widowed—had buried every child of her own and, in the calcification of her grief, would refer to such boys as “the cannon fodder of kings.”

As of last week, there are one thousand, one hundred, ninety-nine residents in Hallowell. Families number one hundred eighty-four, and, of those, twelve are black. All free. There are no slaves in Hallowell, the Supreme Judicial Court having effectively abolished the practice in Massachusetts nine years ago by their ruling in the Mum Bett Case.

“Every woman wants a man to whisper soft words in the darkness,” Ephraim told me once, when I was lamenting Cyrus’s lack of prospects. There was no malice in the statement, only heartbreak. And I have never forgotten it because it is true.

The fining of unwed mothers is a cruel system, meant to humiliate women, and therefore dissuade them from carnal activity. But given that women do not conceive children on their own, and there is no law that fines men for their participation, it is the worst kind of hypocrisy as well. The minimum and maximum fines are set by law, but the amounts in between are up to the whim of each individual judge and can range from inconvenient on one end to crippling on the other. The law—grossly titled An Act for the Punishment of Fornication, and for the Maintenance of Bastard Children—states that any woman who commits fornication shall be fined no less than six shillings for the first offense and no more than three pounds. Every offense after that ranges between twelve shillings and six pounds. If a woman is unable to pay the fine, she is committed to the jail yard for a minimum of forty-eight hours, but the court can extend it to thirty days. Joseph North decides the cases in this county and is not typically known for his leniency. But for Sarah, he’d handed down the minimum fine—no doubt because I had offered to pay it myself, that day, as Sarah had not a shilling to her name. It has taken her six months to earn the money.

Labor may render every woman a novice, but pregnancy renders every woman a child. Scared. Vulnerable. Ill. Exhausted. Frail. A pregnant woman is, in most ways, a helpless woman.

“I did not take you for the kind of woman who would punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty.”

I follow him to a table at the back and sink onto the bench with a groan. This is a new thing I’ve discovered about myself in recent years. The noises. Stand and groan. Sit and grunt. Some days it seems that I can hardly take a step without some part of my body creaking or cracking and this—even more than the gray hairs and the crow’s-feet at my eyes—makes me feel as though I am racing down the final stretch of middle age.

This is the part no one talks about anymore. Not in civilized company at least. When a war is over, you stop discussing the cost. The reality. The blood-soaked soil or the grave markers or the collateral damage. The ways we kill our enemies in order to claim victory. History is written by the men who live. Not the ones who die.

“The English weren’t innocent of that either,” I say. “No. They weren’t. Much to their shame. But to them, the taking and selling of a human scalp was optional. Yet that option made Joseph North a very wealthy man. By the time war was officially declared in 1756, an Indian male scalp was worth one hundred and thirty pounds to the English. A female, less. Always worth less, the women.” I cannot tell whether that last bit is an apology or an observation. “They fetched fifty pounds. And how do you think Joseph North built that fancy house on the hill? How do you think he hands out loans like candy?” Coleman asks and looks me dead in the eye. “Like I said. Lost his soul.”

Though you never think it possible, you can celebrate and grieve in the same breath. It is a holy abomination.

No one will believe you. It’s the line spoken by every man who has ever used a woman in this way. The trouble is that so often they are right.