The others shift on their wooden seats: bare feet against the dirt, toes wriggling; fabric scraping together as arms are crossed; throats cleared. While my own body fidgets, my mind bulges with a thousand things I want to scream through the trees at Levi. But I stay quiet.
“It’s been many years since anyone has left our borders,” Levi begins. He doesn’t know how wrong he is. “And many years since we’ve had to perform the ritual.”
I hate how it feels, listening to the oration of his words, the swooping cadence of each vowel. It makes me feel weak, my eyes heavy in a way that’s hard to explain, like I could slip back into the gravity of his arms and believe anything he said. I could fall in love all over again.
This is what he does to me: this man whose baby grows inside me, fingers and toes, a tiny warbling heart. This man who loves someone else.
I press my palms to my ears, muting his voice, and blocking out the rush of wind through the trees. I remind myself of what he’s done to me, and the familiar hurt rises again, the hate finding structure and meaning inside my chest. This is what I want to feel—not the other thing. I want to loathe him with a deep, wretched pain that cannot ever be undone.
I release my hands and the rustle of the trees fills my ears again.
“Now,” Levi continues, “we will see if these men have been cured. Or if the pox has already rooted itself inside them.”
A dull silence falls over the others, a collective breath held stiffly in dry throats. And then another sound, the heaving of two men being pulled up from their graves. Of dirt sloughing away. Of ropes grating against limbs. Of Ash and Turk moaning against the effort.
Someone, Parker I’d guess, and maybe Henry, are tugging against the ropes, which have likely been looped over the branches to help hoist Ash and Turk from the ground. They are being pulled upward by the same ropes that bind their arms overhead—a method to avoid touching the men at all. To avoid contact if they are still infected.
I feel myself leaning closer, away from the tree line, straining to hear. To understand what’s happening.
Someone is crying among the group, a woman: Marisol, I think, Turk’s wife. Perhaps she shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t witness this—someone should take her away, but the weeping continues and no one stops her.
The limbs of the Mabon tree creak strangely, the ropes bearing too much weight, and my body cringes against the sound. The men are hanging now, suspended, arms overhead. I wish I could see them, look into their eyes and know if there is darkness in them.
“Their blood will reveal the truth,” Levi says. Even at this distance, I can hear his heart rate rise, a club against his ribs—the tension building inside him for what he must do next. He moves beside the two men and I know he holds something in his hand. A blade. A knife. A way to cut through skin.
One of the men groans—Turk—and he sounds like an animal, gritting through an awful kind of pain.
His wife lets out a shrieking cry.
I can’t see where Levi has pressed the blade into Turk, but I imagine it’s punctured his forearm or maybe his hand, a place where the flesh is thin and pale, easily cut. Levi takes a step back, the only footsteps against the earth, and there are gasps from the group, heads shaking, hands worrying together. A chill coils down the length of my spine, landing in my toes.
If blood, ripe red, poured from the wound, there would be no gasps of shock from the others. Instead, they are seeing something unnatural. Something that isn’t right.
I swallow, trying to slow my breathing, my heartbeat, so that my ears can pick out each sound.
Levi walks to Ash, suspended several steps from Turk, and he performs the same test—pushing the blade into Ash’s skin. But Ash does not moan in pain, he doesn’t make a sound, although I hear his heartbeat quicken in his chest.
The response from the group is the same. Several women begin to cry in earnest, and someone mutters, “no, no,” like they can’t believe the sight before them. People begin writhing in their seats, disgusted or frightened.
I cannot see the wounds in Ash and Turk’s flesh, but I can imagine what’s pouring from their veins: mud, thick and black, infected.
“We had hoped the ground would draw out the illness,” Levi says, his voice carrying out over the crowd, to the trees where I stand. “But their blood pours from the flesh black as death. The pox has taken hold inside them.”
More crying erupts from the group, along with a muttering unease, a restlessness that reminds me of the goats in Henry’s barn when they startle and begin stamping the ground, wanting to run.
“This is what we fear,” Levi declares. “This is the illness we work so hard to keep outside our valley.”
“No!” Marisol cries out suddenly. I can almost hear the tears dropping from her cheeks and falling to the earth, salt returning to salt. Someone near her coos softly in her ear—a worthless effort. Because it’s obvious how this will go, the end this gathering will arrive at.
My heart climbs up my throat and I feel like I suddenly can’t breathe, too many sobs are clotting the air—the group whimpering and shifting in their seats, the noise like static, like a growing roar.
“It’s not true,” a voice—low and unnatural—speaks for the first time. “We’re not sick.”
It’s Ash who’s spoken, and the group falls still again.
“We only tried to help my child,” he pleads, “because you all refused to do anything. You’d rather stay safe within your homes than see what’s out there, beyond our walls.”