A History of Wild Places(17)

At the house, we scramble through the screen door just as the rain reaches the edge of the porch. I drop the basket of hazelnuts onto the dining room table—nuts that will later be ground down into a butter, to be spread on toast and eaten by the spoonful. A second later, the ping ping ping of raindrops on the metal roof echoes through the house. “We stayed too long in the field,” I say, out of breath.

Bee walks to the kitchen sink and turns on the tap, fresh well-water spilling over her dirt-crusted hands. “We got to the house in time.”

Some in the community don’t think we should fear the rain, that it couldn’t possibly bring the rot over our borders, but even a molecule of sickness carried in by a storm—a drop of infected rain against the skin—could be enough to force the lungs to stop breathing. Many years ago, Liam Garza was out repairing fence posts along the eastern edge of the crop fields, it was autumn—the harvest finished—when a late season rainstorm blew over the valley. But Liam didn’t gather his tools and hurry inside, he stayed out in the rain for another hour, finishing the last of his work. Two days later, he became sick, confined to his bed: a deep, awful cough and pale skin and eyes turning an acrid black. He was dead in a week.

After that, the community decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Maybe it was the rain that brought the illness over the border, maybe he was out in it for too long—allowing it to soak into his skin, drops catching on his tongue, breathing it into his lungs—or maybe Liam had slipped over the boundary into the trees but refused to admit it. Either way, we now move indoors when the rains come. Just to be sure.

Bee turns off the faucet and I can feel her stormy gray-blue eyes on me—even though she can’t truly see me. Another crack of lightning splinters the air and the walls tremor around us, the weathervane atop the house spinning wildly—the barometric pressure dropping. The magnolia trees beside the back door quiver, leaves opening wide as if in prayer, awaiting the rain, and I think how I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Unlike my sister and my husband, this place has always been enough.

“I think Theo’s keeping something from me,” I say at last, the words swallowed up by the darkening sky.

Bee turns her gaze to the window, thunder rolling across the horizon, a deep belly of fury and rainwater and electricity. “All men lie.”





BEE


My sister is afraid of the dark: of the trees at our border, the moon hanging too low in the sky, the stars pinwheeling down to crush us. She scurries indoors when it rains, while I stand in the open and beckon down the sky.

We are originals—Calla and I. We were born in Pastoral.

Our parents came in the autumn of 1972, when all mad, wild, enraged hippies were fleeing the war and the draft. They retreated across borders and into remote lands where they couldn’t be tracked down.

Our mom had been an out-of-work elementary school teacher and our father repaired refrigerators. Both skills, as it turned out, served them well in Pastoral. Mom taught all levels of education to the children of Pastoral, while my father kept things running: well pumps and windmills and wood-burning stoves. When mom was still alive, she told me how they gave up everything they knew—neighbors and family and the local market only two blocks from their home—to come live here in these woods, and they made a life in Pastoral, a good one.

She gave birth to me within these forest walls, without doctors or drugs.

People say you can’t remember your birth, but I do. I was born in this farmhouse, on the second floor, with the windows open to let in the breeze—curtains brushing against the wood floor. I can recall the feel of the sunset glimmering across my newborn body, the smell of the air so sweet for the first time, the magnolia trees in bloom. The midwife, who had long, braided gray hair, held me against her heart, and I can still recall the beating of it against my tiny shell-shaped ear. I never cried as a baby. I looked around the world with curiosity, as if I knew it wouldn’t last, that someday it would all be taken from me.

Now I navigate the farmhouse halls easily, knowing the divots in the wood floor, the slanted walls and the angles of each doorway by heart. I smelled the rain in the air as we ran from the orchard, I felt the dampness against my skin before a single drop fell from the sky. I absorb the world like a bird navigates, a memory imprinted in hollow bones, flying south season after season. The scent of poppies beside the back porch have colors that brand into my memory, the lemon trees that line the pond smell like bright, sunlight-yellow, much richer and sharper than the actual color of a lemon I recall from my childhood. The world comes to me in ravenous hues and disjointed shapes. A thing that is hard to describe.

After my sister and I retreat to our rooms, rain sheds over the house like a great weeping, slow and doldrum. Sometimes, on evenings like this, it reminds me of when Calla and I were younger—after our parents died—and it was just her and me in the old farmhouse.

But Calla doesn’t like to talk about before—the memories hurt too much. Remember how Mom would hide our stuffed animals under our blankets at the foot of our beds, so when we climbed beneath the sheets at night, we’d find them by wiggling our toes?

No, Calla would answer, shrugging off the memory. I don’t remember things like you do. As if we had a different childhood, as if she’s blotted out the years we shared with our parents before they passed. I think she’s angry at them for dying too young and leaving us alone. Instead she’d rather forget them completely than carry the hurt around inside her like a rotting piece of wood. Maybe she feels betrayed by me, too, because I’ve refused to let them go, and sometimes the divide between us feels so big I worry it will break us both.