I couldn’t be angry with him for his absence. He may not have detested our separations as much as I did, but neither did he relish them. This time he’d promised to return in less than a month, well before my time came. He couldn’t have known the child would come in this precipitous way. He would be distraught he wasn’t here.
Rolling onto my side, I pushed to my knees, then my feet, reaching for the wall to brace myself as the birth waters broke onto my legs. I began to shake, first my hands, then my shoulders and thighs, the uncontrollable palsy of fear.
I lit the lamp and made my way to the storeroom. “Aunt, wake up,” I cried. “Aunt! The baby is coming.” She didn’t pause for her sandals, but hurried to me in the flickering dark, slinging the midwife bag over her arm. She was fifty-two now, stooped, her face a drawn pouch. She took my face in her hands and measured my apprehension. “Don’t fear; the baby will live or it will not. We must let life be life.”
No assurance, no platitude, no promise of God’s mercy. Just a stark reminder that death was part of life. She offered me nothing but a way to accept whatever came—Let life be life. There was a quiet relinquishment in the words.
As Yaltha led me back to my room, she paused to rap on Mary’s door.
Jesus’s mother shared her room with Salome, and I heard them behind the door, lighting lamps and speaking in low tones. I’d been careful to specify who I wished to attend me. Not Judith, not Berenice. Not the horrid, toothless midwife. Salome, Mary, and Yaltha—this trinity alone would be at my side.
When I was born, my mother had sat on a resplendent chair with an opening in the seat, but I would squat over a crude hole dug in the dirt floor of a mud-walled room. Yaltha had scooped it out the day Jesus left, as if she knew it would be needed early. As I sat before it now on a low stool, pain coiling about my torso, I wished for my mother to be here. I’d seen or heard nothing of her since my marriage and I’d hardly cared, but now . . .
Mary and Salome entered bearing vessels of water, wine, and oil, while Yaltha laid out the contents of the midwife pouch on a piece of flax. Salt, swaddling strips, a snipping knife, a sea sponge, a bowl for the afterbirth, herbs to stop the bleeding, a biting stick, and finally a pillow covered with undyed gray wool on which to lay the newborn.
Mary made an altar, laying an old plank of oak within my view. She stacked three stones on it, one on top of the other. No one acknowledged it—it was simply done whenever women labored to bring forth a life. An offering to Mother God. I watched as she drizzled a libation of Delilah’s goat milk over the stones.
As the hours passed, the early summer heat rose and the moon in my belly waxed and waned. The women hovered—Mary, a ballast at my back; Salome, the angel at my side; and Yaltha, the sentinel between my legs. It came to me then that my mother wouldn’t want to be here, and even if she did, she would never set foot in such a lowly abode. Yaltha, Mary, Salome—here were my mothers.
No one spoke of the cloud that hung everywhere in the room, the knowledge that the baby was arriving too soon. I heard them droning prayers but the words were far away. There were violent seizures of pain and the short, winded respites between them, and that was all there was.
Nearing the ninth hour, squatting over the hole, I pushed the baby from my body. She slipped soundlessly into my aunt’s hands. I watched Yaltha turn her upside down and gently thump her back. She repeated the action once, twice, three times, four times. The baby didn’t move or cry or draw a breath. My aunt slid her finger into the tiny mouth to clear it of mucus. She blew air into her face. She held her by the feet and thumped her harder,