A History of Wild Places(35)

My hands stall against the earth, and a feeling twitches through me—the haunting sense of déjà vu—the kind of memory that’s marrow-deep. I press my palm to the ground and clear away a layer of fallen leaves, sweat beading at my spine, eyes watering, then yank up a clump of knapweed.

But something else comes up with it, caught in the veiny roots.

I sit back on my heels and pluck the thing free from the dirt—holding it in my palm. It’s small, silver, not earthen-made. Carefully, I blow at its edges, and bits of soil and loam scatter, revealing a number on the small thing: 3.

My eyes refocus, holding the thing close, and I finally understand its shape: it’s a tiny silver book, no larger than my fingernail, with a small broken clasp.

Perhaps it was a child’s toy, dropped in the garden a century ago by the first settlers. But it doesn’t seem that old, the silver still has a shine to it. I run my thumb over it, trying to see if there are any other markings, a way to identify it, but there is only the number three—as if there were others like it. One and two, at least. Part of a collection.

But how did it find its way into the garden, buried beneath the wild roses?

I wipe the sweat from my eyes, glancing beyond the garden fence, when I see her: a flash of long auburn hair, hues of red shivering in the morning light.

Bee is moving swiftly down through the field, past the pond, toward the house—her stride is a pinwheel, every movement rounded and fluid. The world gives way for her, spreads open, clears a path.

I tuck the small book into the pocket of my apron and stand up, squinting through the slanted rays of sunlight.

“How is the baby?” I ask when she reaches the garden gate. A few nervous chickens scatter away from her, moving farther back into the garden to hunt for earthworms in the damp soil.

Bee shakes her head. “Not well.”

“Will she survive?”

My sister seems to look past me at the house, at the peeling blue walls, and the second-floor windows. But I know it’s just her eyes straying, not focused on anything in particular. A crease forms between her eyebrows. “Not without medicine or a doctor.”

She moves past me, up the porch steps, and into the house. Not wanting to discuss it further.

But I leave the garden and follow her. “There must be something you can do?” I ask, closing the screen door softly behind me.

Giving birth within the community is a tenuous act—a thin thread separates life from death, survival from a slow, often painful letting go. Death is not dignified out here, it’s often bloody and full of long, wretched moans, pleading for relief we have no way to give.

Bee stops at the sink and washes her hands, scrubbing at her fingernails roughly, like she could scrub away the skin. “No,” she answers, a cold bite to the word. She turns off the sink faucet and exhales, looking exhausted. But she doesn’t make a move to grab the towel on the counter, she lets the water drip from her fingertips onto the floor, standing like a doll whose cotton stuffing has been torn free from the cavity of its chest, and now it’s forgotten how to move, how to swing its arms with its insides now gone. “She needs a hospital,” Bee says at last.

I shake my head even though she can’t see me, and my heart makes a little twisting ache in my chest.

“Faye will talk to Levi,” she explains. “There will likely be a gathering tonight to discuss it.”

I rest a hand against the kitchen counter, needing to feel something solid. “It won’t change anything,” I say softly, knowing all too well from other such gatherings where requests have been made, desperation for some outside thing: a dentist, a visit to see an aging family member. They are never granted—it’s too dangerous.

While my heart throbs with the thought of Colette losing her baby—a life so quickly lost after taking its first fragile breath—the other pang sparking in my chest is louder, the screaming fear: We can’t go past the trees; we can’t go down the road.

We can’t go for help.

Bee doesn’t respond, but I can see the pained lines forming on her face, drawing the smooth skin of her forehead together, making her look older than she is. She leaves the kitchen and walks to the stairs.

“It’s not your fault,” I say after her. But I don’t think she hears. Or cares. She’s already walking up the stairs and down the hall to her room. I hear her collapse onto her bed, the springs giving way. She will sleep until tonight, until the gathering. She needs rest.

Whatever decision is made, not everyone will agree.

A child is sick.

Some will want to go for help, for a doctor. For medicine we can’t make ourselves.

Some… will want to go past the boundary.



* * *




The members of Pastoral are seated in the half-circle facing the stage—the wind gusting from the north, shaking the oak leaves of the Mabon tree, rain threatening to fill the skies. But the group does not sit quietly or talk in hushed tones as is usual—they are speaking in a fervor, some are even arguing, red-faced, talking with their hands to punctuate a point.

Theo and I sit at the back, my own hands working together, my body strangely uncomfortable. I feel fidgety and nervous. This gathering won’t be like the others, and I have the sense—a tiny imperceptible itch—that nothing will be the same after today.

I look for Bee perched beside a nearby tree—she doesn’t like to sit among us, she prefers to be separate, where she can listen from afar and avoid the messy noise of too many voices, too many heartbeats. When there’s too much sound, she told me once, I can’t pick out a single voice, because the crush of them all becomes like mud.