It was cold that morning, with the wind blowing down from the north, and there were spits of rain in it with a hint of sleet. The winter could be wicked sometimes, and mild at others. My teacher said it was the Gulf Stream that stopped us from being under permanent frost, and I had a picture in my mind of a hot stream bubbling through the sea to melt the ice of the northern oceans.
I heard a voice carried on the wind. It was my sister, Annag. She was just over a year younger than me, and I turned to see her running down between the blackhouses. She wore a pale-blue cotton skirt beneath a woollen jumper that my mother had knitted. Her legs and feet were bare like mine. Shoes were for Sundays. And our feet were like leather on the soles.
‘Sime! Sime!’ Her little face was pink with exertion, her eyes wide with alarm. ‘It’s happening. It’s happening now!’
Old Calum found my wrist and held it firm as I stood up. ‘I’ll say a prayer for her, boy,’ he said.
Annag grabbed my hand. ‘Come on, come on!’
And we ran together, hand in hand, up between the black-houses, past our stack yard and into the barn at the back. We were both still wee and didn’t have to stoop to enter the house, unlike my father, who had to duck every time or crack his head on the lintel.
It was dark in here, and it took a moment for our eyes to grow accustomed to the light. The floor was rough-cobbled with big stones, hay stacked high at one end, and the potato store boxed off in almost total darkness at the other. We ran through into the tiny space between the fire room and the byre, startling the hens. There were two cows in the byre at that time, and one of them turned to low mournfully in our direction.
We crouched down behind the chicken wire at the door and peered into the fire room. The iron lamps that hung from the rafters gave off the stink of fish liver oil, cutting through the acrid peat smoke that rose from the fire in the centre of the room.
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.