They were in Harold’s little house, at his kitchen table he’d built with boards he’d planed and sanded himself, and he patted a sheet of paper on the tabletop. “Skootch on around here,” he’d said, and June had dragged her chair over to his side. “I got some numbers from Curtis and did some figuring.” He ran a forefinger that looked like a gnarled twist of tobacco down a column of numbers. “Here on the left is years since settlement. Then there’s number of live births, number of deaths, and over here I’m keeping a tally of total population. Then there’s the percentages: birth average, death average, total percentage of increase. Now, don’t hold me to all this, exactly. I haven’t gone through to double-check my work. But you’re going to get a rough idea.
“We finished the first year at two hundred seventy-eight people, more or less. Course there was some flux that year, a few packs broke off, I think we ended up bringing in another group right before Thanksgiving, but two hundred seventy-eight’s the number Curtis took down in his books. One birth, twenty-eight deaths. That was a rough time. Death average was about ten percent, birth average not even half a percent.
“The next year was a little better. Two births—that jumps the birth average up to point-eight percent—and eighteen deaths, which brings the death average down to seven-point-two percent. And the numbers level out quick from there, then they switch, like they’re supposed to. By our tenth year, the number of births jumps up into the high teens. There are two years when it tops twenty, almost five percent, and the mortality rate goes down to eight, or about two percent. Not bad, considering what we’re working with here. I mean, you got me cutting melanomas off a people, and there were still a fair number of tick bites happening then.
“But then, here”—he motions to Year 11—“something starts to change.”
June let her eyes drift down straight to the bottom line scribbled out in Harold’s shaky hand.
“Now if you were going to chart this out some way, it’d look a little like this,” he said, and he drew a line across the sheet under his chart. It was a lopsided mountain: a gentle but steady rise on the left, a peak—and then a sharp downhill slope.
“I can already tell you that this year’ll be half that, assuming the two who’s pregnant carry to term.”
June stared at the page, rubbing the furrow between her eyebrows with her middle finger. Harold drew a line through the mountain peak, made a little arrow. Under it he wrote, Year 11. “I guess I don’t hafta tell you what happens here,” he said. “Or maybe I should say, what happens about nine months before here.”
He did not. That little peak and the sharp slope that followed it marked a couple of Ruby City’s most exciting years. That was when they had made their deal with Perrone for large-scale distribution of recreational Salt and standardized their own inoculation through regular consumption of the seed tea. They broke ground on Town Hall. A group of children put on a Christmas pageant, and June had laughed until she cried when little Meera Ouaka had abandoned her mark on the stage, where she had been praising God on high along with the other angels, to meander over to the manger, toss the doll baby Jesus roughly to the side, and climb in herself, tucking her thumb into her mouth and slipping effortlessly into a deep sleep. We are not just a camp, June had thought. We are not just a mite clinging to the back of civilization. We are a community. We are a town. She had been able to declare, at the annual New Year’s Eve gathering, that there had been not a single tick bite all year, and a big cheer went up in the crowd.
“The Salt,” she said hoarsely.
“Aye,” said Harold. “The Salt.”
“But this doesn’t really prove anything, does it?” She looked at the numbers again. “The percentages are scary, but we’re talking only a handful of births’ difference a year, really. We’re such a small community that the standard measures just might not apply.”
“Like I said, that occurred to me. It may still be true. But I can tell you that I’ve had three different women come to me in the last year asking for advice about getting pregnant. One of them said she’s been trying for almost two years. The other has had three early miscarriages.”
“Still—” June began, but Harold raised a hand to hush her.
“Hear me out. There’s more. I got to thinking and looked over my journals. Now again, this ain’t scientific, and God knows how many other factors come into play, but it gives you pause. I think I’m safe saying that I’m seeing more cases of female troubles altogether. Irregular periods, late-onset periods, endometriosis. I’m also seeing lactation problems among the newer set of mothers. I don’t have the know-how to really study this thing, June. If I had an ultrasound machine—”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I’ve been trying, Harold.”
“This ain’t blame-laying. I’m just telling you how it is. Something’s going on, but I don’t really have a way to tell you what it is.”
“So what are you saying? Do we stop taking the Salt?” She imagined how that would go over. What kept Ruby City stable—and the worst they’d weathered in their sixteen years as a community, extraordinarily, were some thefts and some fistfights, one serious enough to result in death, and a couple of cases of domestic violence—were luck, June’s leadership, and the Salt. The Salt was a powerful incentive for good behavior. It was, June thought sometimes, a miracle drug, and not just because it kept the ticks from biting. The Salt gave Ruby City its economic power, and it cohered them to each other. You couldn’t grow, harvest, and process a crop alone. It took a village.
Without Salt, would Ruby City survive?
Without babies, she knew, it surely wouldn’t.
“I’m not saying that,” Harold said. “For one thing, you got to look at the number of deaths, too. That keeps dropping. We stop taking our dosage, who knows?” He reclined in his chair, grabbed a leather bag off a little shelf by the wall, and started unpacking his pipe and tobacco. “Remember Mike Ventry.”
How could she forget? Mike, eight or nine years ago, had become convinced that his Salt dosage was responsible for his heart palpitations. For that matter, maybe it had been. But the upshot was that he stopped taking it, after years of regular usage, and a month later he was tick bitten down by the barns. His bad luck must have been saving up for that day; he contracted Shreve’s and died eighteen hours later.
“People are going to want to stop taking it when they know,” June said. She flicked her eyes up to Harold’s, quick, and dropped them again. “When we tell them,” she added, though the word in her mind was if, not when.
Harold seemed to sense this. “So far as I can tell, it’s not people who’d have to stop it. Just people who want kids. And maybe just women, at that. I can’t know that men aren’t also having fertility issues, but I’m not seeing them come in with other symptoms.” He sprinkled a pinch of tobacco into his pipe bowl, packed it. “Even so, who’s to say if it would matter? The damage might be done.”
“My God,” June whispered.