Every novel needs somebody standing slightly outside it. In All God’s Kids that person is Melvin Todd, a midwife, a Catholic, a man in his forties on a farm he inherited and never farmed, who has delivered more babies than he can count and has never been anybody’s father.
Male midwives exist. People still tell him they have never heard of one. He has a courteous answer ready and has used it several thousand times.
The bridge you cross when you come to it
There is a situation every midwife of long standing has met at least once. A medical question makes it necessary to know the blood groups of both parents, and the answer that comes back is not the answer the family in the room is expecting. In Melvin’s experience this has happened several times and gone several different ways.
He goes to confession regularly, which puzzles people, because he is so obviously good. Only a Catholic would understand why that is not a contradiction.
What makes Melvin useful to the novel is that he has no stake in any of it. He is not married to anyone in this story. He is not in love with anyone in it. He gains nothing whichever way the paper falls. He is simply the person holding it, and therefore the person who has to decide what to do with a truth that will land on three families at once.
A conscience with rules in it
I had a strict Catholic upbringing, and one thing that stays with you is the machinery: sin, contrition, penance, absolution. It is a system, and like all systems it has edge cases. The confessional scene at the end of the book is one of them. A man admits he passed on information in a misleading manner. The priest, reasonably, says he must go back and put it right. The man says he cannot, because it would wreck people’s lives.
And the priest, being a working priest rather than a theologian, finds a category for it and moves on to the next penitent.
I have never been able to decide whether that scene is comic or serious, which is one of the reasons it is the last one in the book. Melvin gets off more lightly than he expected. Whether he ought to is left where I think it belongs, with the reader.
