Elm Pox, we call it. But we also whisper another name, a simpler name: rot.
The younger kids sometimes play a game, chasing one another through the crop fields, shouting, “Rot, rot, you’ll soon die of the pox!” They tag one another, as if they were passing the pox onto the next person, and the game continues this way, endlessly. Until one of the older women tells the children to hush, dragging them indoors.
The rot burrows into the skin, absorbs through the lungs, and kills a person within a week or two. Unless we can treat them before it’s too late—before it spreads to others. But we’ve rarely succeeded in ridding the body of the illness once it’s taken root.
When I stood at the top of the stairs, listening, I could hear Theo’s heartbeat pulsing at his neck—a gift of losing my eyesight, the ability to hear the tiniest of sounds, the beating of moth wings and the heavy exhale of lungs. But Theo didn’t sound sick. No illness throbbing through his organs, swimming down his spinal cord, eating away at soft tissue like the blight that’s been known to ravage the green oak leaves in early autumn.
He doesn’t have the rot.
Instead, what I heard were my own memories, cool and quick, like dipping my toes into the creek in early spring, when the water has only just thawed from the glacial snow higher up in the mountains.
Theo said a name I’ve heard before.
Not the woman’s name—not the person in the photograph.
The other name: Travis Wren.
It binds itself to a memory: the sound of foreign footsteps across the hardwood floor, a man sleeping in the converted sunroom at the back of the house, whose heart fluttered rapidly. He didn’t want to be here.
He slept in that room and I snuck inside, listening to his heartbeat, trying to decide if it was fear that made it thunder inside his chest. Or something else.
Trying to decide if I could trust him.
The man whose truck Theo found out in the woods—a man named Travis Wren—slept here in our house not long ago.
He was here.
CALLA
I want to believe that he’s not sick.
I strip from my green tulip sundress and leave it in a heap beside the oak tree. I kick free from my sandals and walk down the slope to the pond, sinking into the cool, shallow water—my body turning weightless. The cold pricks my flesh and I drift onto my back, rings of water echoing out around me then unfurling against the shore.
But my heart feels knitted, pinched too tightly together, knowing what Theo has done. This man I love has risked everything, and I’m terrified I might lose him—that it might already be too late.
I stare up through the branches of the lemon trees, not even a breeze stirring their boat-shaped leaves. The fruit will be ready to harvest soon: the sun browning our shoulders while we perch on ladders, lemon skins under our fingernails, plucking the ripe yellow orbs that will glow like the sun on the kitchen counter when we cut them open. In the fall we will begin the canning, making a syrup with lemon juice, wild blackberries, and currants in dozens of glass jars—the urgency of autumn always prodding at us. Yet, when the temperature drops and the first few flakes catch on windowsills, when the ground hardens and the sky turns gray, we can’t help but wonder what else we could have done to prepare. Will we have enough? Will we survive this season? Will we have a winter like last year, when the mice got into the sacks of cornmeal in the cellar and spoiled nearly half of it?
There is hardship here, but there is also a slow contentment: the way the sun sweeps through the trees in the morning, the broad-billed hummingbirds’ methodical pulsing among the wildflowers beside the porch, gathering the first nectar of the day. And yet, my husband found it so easy to stride down the road, past the border trees, as if he could leave it all behind. As if all of this means nothing. Our home, this land. Me.
Watching him in the kitchen, he showed no signs of illness, no inky spots at the rims of his eyes, no darkened fingernails. But it makes no sense: How could he walk down the road, breathe in the damp moldering air of the forest, and not bring back the rot?
Unless he’s right—and he is immune.
But if it’s true, shouldn’t we tell the others? Shouldn’t they know that he can pass through the woods untouched by disease, while everyone else who’s dared cross the boundary has returned sick and died shortly after?
Yet I also know admitting what he’s done to the group would mean admitting that he’s broken our rules. Not just once, but hundreds of times. He’s gone down the road and risked bringing back the pox, he has betrayed all of us. And for what? To find an old abandoned truck and a meaningless photograph?
A soft breeze ripples over the surface of the pond, my skin briefly pricked with gooseflesh, and a memory comes with it: of Rose and Linden, their deaths still so razor-edged in my mind. Their bodies left to rot in the woods, visible from the border—limp, unmoving. They knew what could happen, but they risked it anyway: sneaking past the perimeter. Just like the story of the young wheat farmer’s daughter who lived in the valley back when the town was first built—before the members of Pastoral bought the land. She was only nine or ten when she snuck from her room after dark and went into the forest. Seven days passed before she was seen again, wandering beyond the border trees looking wild and mangy, like a forest creature covered in rotted elm leaves. It was the first time the early settlers started to suspect the trees might contain an illness—something they should fear. They abandoned the town shortly after, frightened of what might live in these woods.
It’s why I fear what my husband has done.