A History of Wild Places(66)

Another reflection catches my gaze and I jerk back from the mirror.

“You’re looking for the pox, aren’t you?” Calla is standing in the bathroom doorway, arms crossed.

Only an hour earlier, we sat at the gathering and watched as Levi pushed a knife into Ash’s and Turk’s flesh, and what spilled out was not blood, it was something else: dark and ruddy, almost like oil.

I blinked and blinked, wanting the blood to not be what it was. But it was indisputable: Both men were infected. The pox was inside our borders.

Now I wonder, Is it inside me?

I turn to face my wife, and she crosses the bathroom, bringing her hands to my cheeks, sliding her fingers up my jawline. She peers close, examining my eyes like she is looking for a stray eyelash or a bit of dirt. Her gaze is soft, innocent, and it makes me think of other times when she has tended to my wounds—a crushed hand when a tree trunk rolled onto my knuckles while chopping firewood, a gash in my shoulder when a length of barbed wire tore through my shirt down to my flesh—careful and precise as she cleaned blood away and bandaged me up.

“I don’t see anything,” she says now, keeping her hands on my face, as if to prove a point: that she isn’t afraid, that she doesn’t think the pox is inside me. Or that if it is, she will gladly catch it too—whatever happens to me, happens to her too. Maybe this is love, the things we endure for the other, the willingness to face death, to stare it down, and not be afraid.

Finally, she releases her warm hands and exhales. “We’re murdering ourselves,” she says.

“They were dead either way.” But even as I say it, it feels wrong, a fairy tale told to pacify frightened children.

Calla’s eyes shiver, like she’s holding in tears, and she walks out into the hall.

I feel unsteady on my feet, the house seesawing around me.

But she spins around before entering our bedroom. “I don’t know why you’re not sick and neither is Bee. But those two men, they caught it while trying to go for help—it doesn’t make sense.” Her eyes flicker with something—a strange kind of uncertainty I don’t usually see in my wife. Like an oversized thought is pressing against her windpipe, and it’s only growing larger. “Why aren’t you infected?”

“I don’t know.”

Her hands twitch at her sides. “Something happened here,” she says, and I know she’s not talking about Ash and Turk anymore, she’s talking about the truck, the notebook, the man who slept in the sunroom at the back of the house and hid pages in our walls and floorboards. “Maybe it’s happening still.” Her voice falters, tears breaking free and streaming down her cheeks.

I step forward and pull her into my arms. She makes a wordless sound against my shoulder, a sob, and I want to say something to comfort her, but all the words fall flat in my mind. Because maybe she’s right—and nothing is what we think it is.





BEE


After the ritual, I don’t return to the farmhouse.

I rest in the burrows and hollowed-out earth made by other creatures, where the deer go to rest in gathered herds, nestled beneath an oak. I find soft rounds of soil, or grass tamped down by foxes. Clumps of fur, carcasses of birds. I rest and I wake and I dream of odd fitful things, of voices always beckoning me forth, deeper into the trees.

I have crossed the boundary.

I’ve done it many times now, careless footsteps, rattling heartbeat.

I have slipped into the trees and felt the fear always at my neck—nipping just softly like a warning, never sinking its teeth all the way in. It craves me, wants to bury me out here in this forest, but I am quick and alert, and I scurry through the underbrush, startling the quail from their roosts under thorny bushes. I am a creature too, more fearful than most things.

I lean against the old, sturdy oaks, listening for the hum, for the crack and splinter of limbs. I dare the pox to sink into me—I dare death to come close.

Two nights now I’ve been in the woods, past the border, drinking from the stream, pressing my palms to the ground to feel its warmth. Two nights of seeking something that doesn’t want to be found.

I creep close to the birthing hut, pressing my back against the wall, listening. Colette and the baby are sleeping—I can hear their soft exhales. I wonder if she’s been told about her husband: how he tried to leave and bring back help for their child, but instead brought back the pox. I wonder if she wept until the grief was too much, until she drifted off to sleep, knowing she had lost her husband. And will likely lose her baby, too.

Netta is with her most nights, tending to the infant who still has no name, then dozing in a chair near the front door of the hut. They are counting the days now, the hours, every half-second, knowing there might not be many more left.

I step back into the trees, following the sounds of breaking limbs and a hissing disease. I search for the pox, running my palms up the trunks of sick trees, feeling for sap, for illness. But the pox merely teases me. I need to know that those men died for a reason—because they were sick in a way that couldn’t be cured—I need to feel what they felt.

It also occurs to me, I might be going mad.





CALLA


Bee only comes to the house to steal toast from the kitchen or water from the well, but mostly she stays away. I don’t know what she’s staying away from: me, maybe? Or she’s looking for something out there in the dark.