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.
But she’s not standing at the tree line or at the corner of the kitchen building where I usually see her. She must be somewhere else.
Levi appears from the fence line that borders the crop fields—as if he’s been wandering the rows, thinking—and he climbs the short steps and walks to the center of the stage, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, head bowed slightly, like he’s carefully considering the words he will speak, sensing the restless state of his people.
I do not envy what he must do—decide the fate of Colette’s child.
A hush sinks over the group, faces tilted upward and bodies leaned forward, anxious to hear about the baby—the too-small newborn with a too-small heart. It’s been years since one of our members was this gravely ill, aside from the few elders whose time it was to pass on anyway.
I lean forward, hands in my lap.
“I know everyone has their own opinions about what should be done,” Levi begins, eyes cast down at the stage, a sign of his humility, a show of his reverence for his people. His eyebrows are sloped together, and he has the look of a man burdened with something none of us could imagine. “But we have more than one life to consider here. We have an entire community.” He finally looks up, his soft gaze passing over the crowd, and any lingering side conversations fall quiet. A wind stirs over the group, brushing through our hair, chilling our skin, and I catch Levi’s eyes straying on me, then flicking out beyond the circle—he’s searching for Bee, for the comfort and assurance she provides. He needs her, but she has slipped away somewhere out of sight.
“As most of you know,” he continues, eyes clicking back to the front row of the gathering circle, “our newest arrival was born into Pastoral last night. But she was born early, too early, and she is unwell.”
Someone coughs, shifting in their seat, and the wood bench creaks beneath them.
Someone else, seated near the front, speaks up—her voice like a sharp stab in the air. “We can’t let the child die.” It looks like Birdie, her nest of curly gray hair pinned at the nape of her neck. She asked me for yarrow at the last gathering, her nerves on edge, fearful that her son Arwen might be sick. But she never came to the house for a bit of fresh ginger from the garden. Perhaps she was afraid the others might see her—and they might wonder if something had happened. Or maybe she realized it was a worthless remedy anyway. I only offered it as comfort.