The Midwife and the Ebony Pinard
The midwife hurries through the devastated city, her bag pressed tightly to her chest. She has prepared for every eventuality, packing her pinard, forceps, red silk thread, scalpel, lancet, herbal medicine and several bottles of oils and tinctures, carefully wrapped in white muslin cloth. Behind her at a distance, her two faithful mastiff dogs follow, charged with safeguarding their mistress. She is shouting angrily at the sky, ‘Why are we here in the land of no return? Why have you sliced away the buildings and hacked everything down?’
………….…….……….Silence
The dogs bark, ‘WHAT IS YOURS CANNOT BE CRUSHED’
Speeding intently towards the mountain path, she has no time to lose, having less than an hour left of daylight to find what she is looking for. Curtains of smoke from the city thicken the air, reducing visibility and robbing lungs of oxygen. The light is fading and the dogs, attentive to every step, pull closer around the midwife, who, unable to proceed as fast as she would like, cries out again,
‘Our feet are filled with anxiety, your suffocating fires waft over the land’
………….…….……….Silence
The dogs bark, ‘WHAT IS YOURS CANNOT BE CRUSHED’
The path narrows and is littered with fallen trees and stones. Concentrating on her footsteps, she doesn’t immediately hear the sound of a voice in distress, shrill and penetrating, faintly echoing down the mountainside. The midwife frowns and hurries faster, half-running into the oppressive warm evening air with her dogs behind. An unexpected gentle breeze touches her brow and instinctively she looks up, grateful to see a parliament of white owls flying close above them, wings fanning. With their asymmetrical ears they will be able to triangulate the pitiful cries, pinpointing their destination. The dogs raise their noses and sniff at the air. Afraid for her companions, the dogs and the owls, the midwife cries out in frustration,
‘Why is your spirit full of hate, greed and anger? You have filled the land with venom’
………….…….……….Silence
The dogs bark, ‘WHAT IS YOURS CANNOT BE CRUSHED’
They are drawing closer to  their journey’s end and the intermittent cries of a woman in labour, life locked within her, are now very close. The owls guiding flight is leading them directly towards her, like a boat towards the quay. As they approach the shelter they have been searching for, an ominous silence falls, the midwife hesitates in the darkness and the owls alight quietly, one by one on the exposed roof beams. The dogs push past her to open the door, their claws carving deep grooves in the rotten wood, its hinges breaking.
From the threshold, the midwife’s eyes, becoming accustomed to the gloom, rest on a figure heaped over on the ground, wrapped completely in a grey muddy cloth and writhing weakly. She is lying beside the majestic trunk of an ancient oak tree that rises up into the evening sky between the four, dilapidated stone walls of the shelter, where long ago a roof had once been. The midwife approaches and folding back the cloth of her broken robe, reveals the naked and semiconscious body of a young pregnant woman. Sinking to her knees, she touches her belly, palpating gently. Hands like eyes, she searches with her fingertips, reading the tensions and forms under the skin like braille and revealing  to her mind’s eye, two heads, four arms and four legs.
Her brow furrows as her hands report something that puzzles her. She reaches into her bag for her ebony pinard horn and places the fetoscope precisely on the swollen belly, laying her ear to the hole at the top and dropping her hands, listening intently. She moves the horn to and fro over the stretched skin, repeatedly listening, breathing lightly through her mouth and counting in a low voice. She brings her hands together locking her fingers in supplication and whispers, ‘In the words of trees, in the whispers of stones, may the boat arrive safely’.
With the help of the dogs, she untangles the heavy body from the cloth and then taking a bottle of alcohol from her bag, she sterilises her hands.  Gently she moves the young women’s legs apart and checks the perineum and the vagina, noting that the cervix is almost fully dilated. Suddenly the contractions return with such an unexpected violence that it forces the young woman to consciousness, her face distorting, eyes staring as she grabs the midwife by the arms, pulling herself to her knees, blood rushing to her pale face. One of the dogs moves forwards to lick her brow and she throws her arms over its back. The other dog sits firm by her side.
The contractions now rack her tiny frame, they are longer and stronger and closer together. The birth is imminent, and the midwife places her hands on the mother’s shoulders, encouraging her in a gentle voice, ‘untie the knots, loosen the limbs, and break the seals’. Groaning and on all fours, the woman is straining, pushing down with the little energy she has left. Supporting herself on the dogs shoulders, one on either side, her body is functioning by instinct alone; pituitary gland releasing oxytocin, uterine muscle contracting. Without the dogs support she would surely collapse to the ground.
A long, low, loud growl comes from deep within her as the baby’s head finally emerges, and in an instant, its entire body spirals down and into the midwife’s waiting hands. No sooner has she caught the newborn baby, she sees another head becoming visible between the legs of its mother, a second birth is about to happen. Clasping the first-born with her left arm, she reaches for the second, managing to grab it just in time as it slips into the world. Only then does she look closely, for the first time, at the babes in her arms and recognises what her ebony pinard had already told her, that the racing heart rates she had counted at 400 beats per minute were avian.
The two perfectly formed bodies have zygodactyl feet and small wings that are just beginning to show underneath the skin as smooth bumps between their shoulder blades. The midwife’s mouth is dry as she stares in awe at the exhausted mother. She carefully lays her two progeny on her fragile body, skin to skin. Their tiny sharp claws scratch at her bloated belly, leaving a network of red lines on her abdomen as they flail instinctually, still swimming in the watery womb. Their mother, too tired to interact, manages to wrap her arms around them to keep them from falling.
Their twin umbilical cords lie pulsating serpentine between the three of them and the midwife who has been kneeling on the floor in a daze suddenly remembers that the placenta has still not been delivered. Taking the new mother’s hand in hers, she gently presses her cold fingers and instinctively her body takes over again, the muscles of her abdomen tightening, her out-breath held in. This time it is easier and after a few minutes the placenta of the first baby is out and the midwife lays it carefully on the white muslin cloth. The dogs salivate at the smell and get to their feet. The second placenta is already in the midwives hands. She places it next to the first. Taking a small bottle of shepherd’s purse tincture from her bag she drips some into the woman’s open mouth to prevent her from haemorrhaging.
She hesitates, unsure about which cord she must cut first, then quickly searches for the thread in her bag. She cuts four lengths of the red silk, using it to tie two knots on each umbilical cord. She then reaches into her bag for her scalpel, but the two dogs have read her mind and are already on their feet. In a flash they each have an umbilical cord in their mouth and are delicately grinding their teeth to cut them through. The midwife gathers up the severed cord and catches the curative blood running from them in a blue, glass medicine bottle, stashing it carefully in her bag. The dogs have begun to clean the babies, licking them until they are free from all the birth residues, their raspy tongues on velvet skin quickly putting the siblings to sleep.
………….…….……….Silence
The owls cry, ‘ACCEPT NO OFFERINGS OR GIFTS’
Worried for the tiny babies survival, the midwife is concentrating on attaching mouth to nipple, precious colostrum dripping onto the babies lips and down their chins as she squeezes it into their mouths to encourage them to start sucking. They are quick learners and soon feed greedily. Exhaustion is overcoming their mother who lies half covered by the cloth, her arms slipping to her side, each baby attached to a breast as she too falls into a deep sleep.
………….…….……….Silence
The owls cry, ‘ACCEPT NO OFFERINGS OR GIFTS’
The midwife takes a small flask of rum from her bag and lying down between the dogs she takes a long draft. The alcohol softens the tension in her body and she stares up through the leaves of the oak tree, watching Orion’s Belt move slowly towards the west. She closes her eyes and slips into sleep. The owls fly above her immobile body as they take to the sky to hunt for their supper, returning from their forays with small grey rabbits that they tear at with their beaks and swallow hungrily, spitting out the fur and bones in small hard pellets that drop to the floor beside the dormant midwife.
………….…….……….Silence
The owls cry, ‘ LOOK HIM IN THE EYE AND WEEP, BUT ACCEPT NO OFFERINGS OR GIFTS’
