The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “Andy was tore up about it,” Roz said. “It made me wonder if something was going on between them.”

  “Maybe there was. I wouldn’t have thought less of him for it.”

  Roz made a dubious grunting sound.

  “We’ve asked a lot of him. Everything of him. And he’s delivered.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Roz said.

  “What went wrong wasn’t on him. I can only blame myself for that.”

  Roz twisted on the stool to turn and give her a hard look. June used her hands to firmly turn Roz’s head facing forward again. She’d finished cutting, more or less—maybe shy of a few corrective touches—but she liked the feel of Roz’s close-shorn layers under her fingers, and she liked talking to the back of Roz’s head about this stuff more than she did meeting her eye. “I was stupid. I told myself I could work with them. I told myself I needed to treat them with respect if I had any hope of getting Feingold’s cooperation. But the truth is that I didn’t have the stomach for what needed to be done.” June dropped her chin to the crown of Roz’s head. Roz leaned back, and they kissed softly. “I still don’t, Roz. But we’re in it up to our eyeballs now.”

  “What needs to be done?” Roz said. They were still face-to-face, Roz craning her neck back, June hunched over. June could smell the bitter earth of the tea on Roz’s breath. Instead of answering, she kissed her again.

  —

  By 10:00 a.m. it was hot. Summer hot. Second half of October and you couldn’t stand to be out unless your shirtsleeves were rolled up. Each year June allowed herself to be lulled by the occasional runs of seasonally appropriate days into thinking: well, it’s not so bad, maybe. There’s hope yet. And then she’d see steam wafting off the kudzu, or she’d forget to wear her bonnet and come home with her neck sunburned again, and the despair would settle on her once more. The flowers thrived in the heat, though. There was that. As she so often did, June thought, as she passed the flower crop to the village, about how the world offered its cures in its diseases, and its diseases in its cures. The hotter climes that the ticks liked so much? They extended the growing season, making it possible to produce enough Salt to bankroll Ruby City and inoculate its residents against tick bites. June had been tempted over the years to see harmony in that. Proof of some bigger, elemental force of balance. Divine planetary engineering. But she knew better.

  Especially these last few years, when she could no longer deny the evidence right in front of her. The last birth in Ruby City had been three years ago. Hap Hollander, Mose and Ivy’s youngest. Even before him there had been cause for worry, but these things were clearer in retrospect than they were in the living, as so many things are. The birth rate had been slowing for years before Hap marked the onset of its standstill, but in a community of fewer than five hundred people, a couple hundred of them women in their childbearing years, fewer than that number paired off, much less actively trying for children—theirs was a world, after all, where plotting parenthood required some magical thinking, or dogged unthinking—this hadn’t seemed so strange. For a long time, it hadn’t even registered as something to notice.

  The first to notice was Harold Owle—“Doc,” everyone called him. Not that he was really a doctor, though what qualified as “real,” really, in this day and age? He’d supplemented some passed-down folk knowledge with a lot of self-education—his house was full of old medical books and encyclopedias, some literature and digital files (including a bank of video tutorials) smuggled from in-zone. June, through her connections, could get her hands on certain medicines, pieces of equipment, and Harold and his two apprentices put these items to use fairly successfully, though they were never going to be able to administer chemotherapy or an MRI out here. Harold’s chief roles were sawbones and midwife, and, as he told June nearly two years ago, he was not getting as much practice at the latter as he used to.

  “You know, I was checking on Marianne Worth the other day, and her older boy—the ten-year-old—he was out in the yard playing with the Ventry twins, the girls, and I had this funny thought. I thought, those kids are all going to be trying to fool around with each other in four or five years, and how’re we gonna handle that? Getting ahead a myself, like I do. Thinking we’re going to have to start teaching ’em sex ed. Trying to smuggle rubbers out a the zone. God help us. ’Cause you know, there was that bumper crop of them. The Worths, the Ventrys, the Redferns’ three, Mary Sue, Terry’s girl, whatever her name is, the Pullman boy with the harelip, the Esquillo twins, and them’s just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. Seemed like there was a couple years there where I couldn’t just about put my head down at night without someone pounding at my door, yelling me to come out and catch another one.”

  June, remembering this time, had smiled. The baby boom had been a morale boost in the camp, evidence of Ruby City’s legitimacy. Life out-of-zone was hard, but they’d made a sweet little town for themselves, and what better testament to that—to their hopefulness—than babies?

  “But you know, my next thought after that was—well, gosh, I can count on one hand the number of births in the last five years. Well, OK, maybe that’s normal, I think at first. You know, a crop of little ’uns is born, then everybody has their two or three and quits it, and the original settling group had a lot of twenty-some-year-olds in it. So you have to grow the next generation up before there’s another boom. Even so, it don’t add up.”

  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.

  “This was always going to be a problem,” Harold said, adding his third pinch of tobacco to the pipe bowl and packing it tight with his yellow-stained forefinger. “We started small. We were going to have to bring in some outsiders no matter what, or else start inbreeding.” He stuck the pipe stem between his teeth and lit a match, then touched the flame to the bowl, tasting the smoke with what appeared to be deep satisfaction. “The current situation just—you know—underscores the problem.”

  “Well, it does more than that,” June said. She tried to imagine some new order, where women—some women—stopped taking the Salt in the hope of getting pregnant. What a choice. To live with all of that fear and uncertainty again while your man kept bopping along on his merry way? An image flickered across June’s mind: all-male hunting groups, all-male fishing and scavenging groups, the women hanging back at the hearth, venturing nervously out into the village, maybe, their worlds suddenly very small, their existences defined by one hope: a baby. It was not a course of action June would have ever taken herself. She had known, even before committing to Roz eighteen years ago, that children weren’t in the cards for her, that caring for Violet was the only parenting she ever wanted to do. And there would be others like her, others content to forgo motherhood. But she recognized what was at stake. She recognized how betrayed the women would feel, this done to them without their knowing, without their approbation. And June might be forgiven if ceasing the dosage eventually restored a woman’s fertility, but if it didn’t? And what about the girls, the ones who’d gotten their first exposure to Salt through their mother’s milk? What would this mean for them?

  And there was another problem: David Perrone. If David knew that regular consumption of Salt caused infertility, would he keep buying from them? What about that big, onetime deal he kept offering? And if this killed any hope of a deal, what were the chances that he’d simply leave them alone?

  “Tell me what to do,” June said. “What’s the right thing here, Harold? We call a meeting tonight and show them what you just showed me? Leave it up to the individual to keep taking the dosage or not?”

  Harold shrugged. “Maybe. But we don’t know anything for sure yet.”

  “What, then?”

  “Well. We could quietly try some things first. See what effect there is, if any.”

  “What things?” June said. Her throat was very dry. It seemed to stick to itself when she swallowed.

  “Leave that to me,” said Harold. “I’ll put out a feeler or two. I have some ideas.”

  “We can’t risk this getting out. There’ll be a panic. People’ll say I kept it from them.”

  “Like I said, I have an idea. The less you know about it, the better.”

  —

  Once a few years back, Roz had gotten word from a villager who’d been out hunting that there was pack of abandoned wolf pups trapped in a crevasse on the other side of the mountain. “Thought you might have some use for ’em,” he’d said, and Roz, who’d always hoped she might breed a little wolf into her princes, had gotten downright chipper, which itself was quite a sight. June, amused by Roz’s excitement, had accompanied Roz and the hunter back to the puppies, and what she’d seen when she looked down into the hole had made her very nervous about Roz’s rescue plan. There were seven of them: one dead, two close to dead, lying on their sides, stomachs fluttering. The other four, who had been eating the dead pup, looked up at the three humans not with relief or even
indifference but a wary desperation, muzzles red.

  “Goddammit, Billy, those are coyotes,” Roz had said. “I can’t believe I dragged my ass a half hour up a mountain for a pack of goddamn coyotes.”

  Anyway, after only a couple of days’ incarceration, the nine hostages looked a bit to June like those four puppies had. The room smelled nauseatingly of their unwashed bodies and old urine.

  They’d left the coyote pups where they found them, June remembered.

  “Here’s what I’ve decided,” June said, without preamble. “I’m sending five of you back with Andy. He’ll drop you within walking distance of the Wall. You’ll be given a story about the group getting separated during a hunting party. You’ll say that Tia was leading your half of the group and was killed in a bad fall, and her communication devices went down with her. You’ll say you found your way to the Wall through pure luck. Andy’s going to make an emergency call to report the separation, and he’s going to try really damn hard to convince the folks in-zone to let him complete the excursion as planned, once word comes through that you five are safe in Quarantine. That’s where Feingold’s microsuit deal is going to help us, I hope.”

  “Sounds risky,” Ken Tanaka said.

  “It is,” June agreed. “You’ve left me no better choice. Unless you’re all willing to stay. That offer still stands.”

  “Offer,” one of them snorted—the man who’d called Violet a “thing.” Lee, was it? “Well, my answer’s no. To your offer.” He sneered around the word.

  “Which five go?” the singer asked. June stabbed the air at him with her left index finger. “You,” she said, noticing that a flash of relief passed across his face before he could reconfigure his features into the anger he wanted others to think he felt, or maybe even wanted to believe he felt. She turned to point to the other four. “You, you, you, you”: Lee; Wendy Tanaka; the woman with the long blond hair; and Marta Severs. She had consulted with Andy. Splitting the pairs was a no-brainer. Keeping Feingold, ditto, and the two who’d already volunteered. But the other choices were trickier. June wished she could have held on to both Tanakas—and she trusted Wendy Tanaka, with her purpled forehead and cheek, to keep her end of the bargain least of them all, maybe—but she’d recognized that uneven treatment would cause a panic, and she knew from Andy that Ken Tanaka was already wise about the Salt, had purchased a top-secret Elite excursion package with its “bite-free guarantee.” That, she hoped, would make him compliant.