WRITINGS FROM THE SCHOOL OF ENGLISH
Whisper BO LEWIS | VERMONT In the first year of the plague we built a chicken coop, dug a root cellar, and watched our son grow four inches. When we’d drunk up all the wine, Mitch consulted the homesteading book on mead. When Adam’s clothes burst at the seams, I made him culottes from the drapes, smocks from the percale bedsheets. “Is that Maria von Trapp?” my husband said, and kissed my hairline. “Is that my very own Mrs. Wilder?” It was no sacrifice, making do. It was part of the adventure. We’d left the city in the second wave, when a handful of doctors broke the gag order and confirmed everyone’s fear: the vaccine wasn’t working. The president went on claiming total victory, but the leaked photos told another story: there were the cadavers, their limbs swollen from the virus, their shoulders bearing the vaccine’s telltale crescent of scar tissue. Bodies photographed just before the soldiers trucked them off to the incinerators. By dawn the next day, we’d loaded what we could into the station wagon and split. Mitch’s parents kept a fishing shack in a holler off the Shenandoah River—“Gun country!”—where we could monk ourselves away. “It’ll be like camping,” we told Adam, “only better.” Mitch promised the running of trotlines, the chopping of firewood, the growing of vegetables—everything we hoped the book would cover. In the little town we bought a maul, a rifle, a dozen kinds of seed. For a good long while it really was as we’d described it. A summer of fishing and grilling and watching things grow. An autumn that smelled of hickory fire and venison roasts. But winter fell, and Adam’s nightmares began. A whimper that rose to screaming, to thrashing—and never the faintest memory of what he’d dreamt. At first we chalked it up to so much darkness— nights so black you wondered if the earth had slipped its orbit. Then came full moons, then spring, and no change. Now it is June. The days are long and there is much to do, but the nights leave us tired. Still, Mitch says, tired is no excuse. I rise at first light, scoop extra coffee into the percolator. Mitch paddles out to set his trotline. Adam resumes his war against leaf-eating beetles, picking tenderly through the vegetable patch like a school nurse checking scalps. We’re low on salt, propane, and hen feed, but Mitch says to hold off on supply runs. He was in town last week and overheard two locals, a few aisles over, talking about us.
SUMMER 2022 | 13
