Read Online Midwives by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online

Many of the clapboards were rotting, but the nails that were slammed through them to keep them attached to the exterior walls were so new that the sides of the house were sprinkled with small silver dots.
    The place was a compact two-story box, its roof’s angle wide and gentle, its walls the yellow of daffodils. The paint had begun to flake, but it was still bright enough that when the Reverend Bedford started up his car to drive Rollie and me home that night, the beams from his headlights gave the house a sulfurous glow.
    The Saturday I met the three Bedfords—Foogie in late afternoon and the Reverend and his wife close to ten o’clock at night—the cluster of cells that would become Veil (spelled with an
e
for reasons I imagine only Asa fully understood) did not yet exist, but would be formed very soon.
    Whatever fears of or enthusiasms for the apocalypse Asa harbored inside him were not usually apparent in his appearance. His face was almost as round as his eyeglasses, and his hair had receded back far on his head; what hair he had, however, was thick and reddish brown. Most of the times that I saw him he was wearing crisp, well-ironed white shirts, fully buttoned. He was, like my father, a man who I assumed had been quite thin when he was young, but was now growing wide and heavyset around the middle.
    He looked like the sort of rural businessman I might observe in St. Johnsbury or Montpelier: not as sophisticated, in my eyes anyway, as the executives I’d see on television or, of course, my own father.
    He was also one of those rare and special adults who was capable of being every bit as silly as children. And Foogie adored him for it. I saw Asa pretend to be a mule and walk the lawn on his hands and knees, snorting and neighing and carrying his delighted son on his back. I witnessed the preacher waddling like a duck for Foogie, and making up rhymes to teach the boy how to spell certain sounds:
    “Fox! Box! Boston Red Sox!”
    “I was sent for the rent on the polka-dot tent!”
    “I wish the fish would eat from a dish, because now there’s fish food on the floor!”
    Around Rollie and me he was gentle and serene; I understood on some level that he was considered a little strange by most people, but my family and the McKennas certainly didn’t object to us being around him or his family. The Northeast Kingdom has always had its share of cults and communes, and Asa’s little church was simply one more essentially harmless example.
    On the other hand, although I never heard him preach, I imagined he was partial to what I would now call the spider-and-fly school of sermons. Sometimes he would allow himself the sort of remark in front of Rollie and me that certainly would have alarmed our parents had we shared it with them. One particularly dark night when he was about to drive the two of us home after we’d taken care of Foogie, he stood on his bluestone walk and looked up into the black sky and murmured, “Soon night shall be no more. Soon we’ll need no light of lamp or sun.”
    On another occasion, when Mrs. Bedford was upstairs putting Foogie to bed and he saw that the only mail he had received that day were bills from the phone and gas companies, he said to the envelopes—unaware that Rollie and I were within earshot—“I am indeed happy to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, especially since I know you will all burn that second death in the lake of fire.”
    He had a thick southern accent, which made his sentences always sound like songs to me, even if some of those songs could be unexpectedly frightening.
    Charlotte Bedford was a petite, fragile-looking woman, barely bigger than Rollie and me as our bodies approached their teens. She was not tall, and there was little meat on her bones. Her skin always seemed almost ghostly white to us, which I don’t believe was a look Charlotte cultivated. (A few years after the Bedfords had passed through my family’s life like a natural disaster, I was in