A History of Wild Places(93)

He was taking something from me.

If I had known what was happening, I might have refused, but instead I let myself tumble into the smooth cadence of his voice, the scent of his skin—pine and earth—filling my nostrils.

He whispered about darkness and shadows, until finally, one afternoon, the blackness crept across my vision and didn’t recede. Until the landscape was blotted out and he was the last thing I saw.

I forgot that he was to blame. I forgot that his words into my ears started it all.

He took that from me too: my memories. A swift pluck from my mind, you won’t be needing those, and they were gone.

And now I wonder: How long after that until a new idea entered his mind?

If he could convince me I was blind, he could convince the people of Pastoral of just about anything. A year later, Cooper died and Levi became our leader.

“You lied to me—to everyone,” I say.

“I kept you safe.”

“From what?” I ask, eyebrows raised, challenging him to tell the truth. No more lies. No more whispers against my neck to make me complaisant, to make me his. “The pox?”

“The real world is dangerous,” he answers. “It’s broken and diseased. People suffer out there from things you can’t even imagine.”

“You don’t know that,” I say. “You’ve never left Pastoral.”

“Cooper told me what it was like out there; he told me I needed to protect the community from the outside. Do whatever it takes.”

“He didn’t want this.” I close my eyes briefly then look back at Levi. “Is it real or not?” I demand. “Are the trees sick?”

“I created a story that you would all believe.” He breathes, and in his eyes I see the boy I remember from when we were kids. The gentle curve of his mouth, the softness that once lived in his bottle-green eyes that’s now gone—the boy I loved so deeply I would have believed anything he said to me. “Cooper told me the story about the early settlers who lived here, about the young girl who disappeared, how they saw her stalking through the woods looking wild and feral, diseased, as if she was sick. As if the trees themselves had infected her with something.”

“So you used that story, and you made up a new one?”

“Maybe the settlers were right, and there really was something in the trees.” His eyes skip away to the garden, drops of rain exploding against the cornfields, long leafy stalks twitching from the impact. “At first I only told the group that the road was unsafe, that we should close our boundaries and protect ourselves from the outside world. But they didn’t want to do it, they still talked of leaving, trading with the outside.” His temples twitch, like he’s admitting something he’s never talked about before, and it’s causing little stabs of pain behind his eyes. “I needed them to fear the woods, the road. I needed them to fear for their lives.” He swallows, and a strange, long-suffering look tugs at the features of his face—the truth of what he’s done sinking into his chest. “Every week at the gathering, I told the same story: about the illness in the trees. And soon they couldn’t remember a time when they didn’t fear the pox. They believed it so completely. Even you.”

“You made me carve marks onto the trees,” I say. “You used me.”

He nods, no longer hiding what he’s done. “I needed a way to make the pox real, to make the others believe without question that it waited outside our borders.”

I shake my head. “And you buried Ash and Turk in the ground, you cut them open and made everyone think they were infected.”

A coldness washes over his eyes. “The others saw what I told them to see.”

“You killed them and you didn’t need to.”

Levi takes a step closer to me, his forehead pinched flat. “I had to do it,” he says. “I had to prove a point. If you leave Pastoral, you will be punished.” His eyes press me to the earth. “I did it to protect what we’ve built here.”

I think of the others over the years, the ones who’ve slipped past the perimeter, their bodies sometimes seen in the woods—but we would never dare cross over the boundary to retrieve them. We believed the pox was to blame for their deaths, but it was Levi, teaching us the rules of the world he’s built, teaching us to obey. All this time. He was killing members of our community to protect his lie, to make it true.

But what he’s really done is make himself a murderer.

Now, he stands a foot away from me, looking hard-faced and indifferent, but I know his burdens have been unraveling him. An albatross of guilt. The alcohol numbing what he doesn’t want to remember.

“You’ve been killing us,” I say coldly—he is the monster we should have feared, not the disease. “You’ve made us prisoners.”

“No,” he says. “I’ve created a place where nothing can harm you.”

“Except you.”

His eyes dip quickly to the ground then back up, his pupils turned icy-cold, like he’s calculating something: the time it will take to reach forward and clamp his hands around me. “I needed a wife who wouldn’t abandon me, who wouldn’t turn against me,” he says now.

I take a step back, bile rising up into my throat.

“You were always the one I wanted,” he says. “The one I couldn’t live without.” This might have been true once, but not anymore. He loved the girl I was when I obeyed, the girl who didn’t question him in front of the others, who was blind and malleable and nodded when he asked me to carve marks into the border trees. But now, I cannot be trusted.