We all smelled like sulfur that summer. Brunswick was a pulp mill town on the coast of Georgia, beachless but shouldered by the murk of blackwater swamps that teemed with alligators and the occasional lost shark. The smell from the mill hung thick in the air like wet heat, and even the shell of fiberglass that encased our camper couldn’t keep out the stench. I had pictured the southern coast like a postcard I’d seen of the Florida Keys, the surf a frothy sparkle of blue crashing over white sand beaches. But the Brunswick ocean was a flat sheet of brown, cloudy as dishwater when I cupped it in my palms, and the swamp was so drought-shallow that at low tide it was nothing but mud.
We were staying on a patch of land close enough to the marshes that hermit crabs crawled into people’s sleeping bags at night and shards of broken shells pushed up from the dirt and cut the soles of our feet. The ground was rutted with the roots of ancient oaks that had been felled to make room for our trailers and tents and outhouses, the wide oak stumps like faces staring up at the sky. The stumps were ringed with age and had fleshy wood at their centers, soft and yellow as cornbread.
“Heart rot,” a girl who called herself Candle had told me on one of my first afternoons there, pressing her finger to the pulpy insides of a stump like she was feeling for a pulse. “They had to come down anyway.” Candle was around my age, with knotty brown hair that she wore in matted braids pinned like a crown around her head. She seemed glad to have me there, someone new and young who knew even less about this place than she did. I got the feeling that she hadn’t been part of Lovegrove for long, that despite her dirty hair and the torn kimono that she woreflapping open with nothing underneath, this was a version of herself that she was trying on for size. I imagined that a month or two earlier she’d probably still been sleeping in a twin bed in her parents’ house, pimple cream dotting her jaw and a retainer clicked over her teeth. I thought of my own house, of how my bedroom had looked so ordinary the morning I climbed out the second-story window before the sun rose, as if some version of my life would surely continue on without me. I’d left the window ajar and my empty drawers had jutted open like loose teeth, the only evidence of my absence. I imagined my mother coming in to wake me up and seeing all the clothes gone from my drawers, husks scraped clean of me. I imagined the bare hurt on her face, the wild panic.
“How do you know if the trees have heart rot?” I asked Candle, touching the stump’s soft center. It had the tender give of young skin. “When they’re still standing, I mean?
Candle looked puzzled. “I guess they tell you,” she said with a shrug, but she seemed uncertain, like she wasn’t quite buying her own logic. There was a language people at the
commune had adopted, a way of speaking that came off as both wise and a little foolish, like the sage but nonsensical proclamations of a child. I imagined the trees crying out in pain, begging to
be put down. Sacrificing themselves limb by limb.
“I had appendicitis last summer.” Candle was gazing down at the stump, her palms rubbing rhythmic circles across its surface. “My appendix burst and I was in the hospital for a week.” She looked up at me expectantly, as if we’d been talking about this all along.
I nodded, unsure what to say. Acknowledging life before this place felt like a broken spell.
“My mom kept pushing on my stomach on our way to the hospital,” she continued, pressing her fingers against the soft wood as if to demonstrate to me what she meant. The fabric of her kimono gaped open and I saw the pucker of a nipple, small breasts shadowing the pale stretch of her abdomen. “I kept asking her to push this one spot on my belly even though it hurt, because not pushing it hurt even more.” She lifted her fingers. “Isn’t that weird? Like, I didn’t want her to touch where the pain was, but not touching it was worse.”
I thought about my own mother, the suffocating press and unbearable absence of her, the infuriating comfort I felt whenever she was near me. Her fingers threading through my hair, the way she could gently untangle every knot. How she wanted us to visit the ocean together and now I was here without her. I ran my palms over the smooth plane of wood, warm from the sun, and pictured Candle’s mother, her hands on Candle’s stomach: the futile tenderness of trying to keep her child whole.
