Arboreal

A red maple shaded the yard in front of our Victorian. There was one branch just low enough that a tall nine-year-old, leaping with an outstretched arm—or a six-year-old lifted by her father—could snatch a leaf to treasure for the duration of a walk, or occasionally press in a dictionary. It was tall. The deed indicates that builders made our fieldstone foundation in 1891, and I assume the maple had been planted around the same time. Dozens of seedlings appeared each spring. I always meant to transplant two or three to the back yard instead of mowing over them, but I didn’t, and now I can’t. There’s a stump, and my home is not my home anymore.

They desperately looked in all the wrong places, first. I mean after it decimated the hospital, because at the hospital they weren’t really looking for the cause. They only tried to treat a patient, and then it was too late for all of them. The bodies of a dozen doctors and nurses get an awful lot of attention, even more than the few dozen patients, because we assume the professionals can protect themselves. When they couldn’t, the CDC vans rolled into town, and we knew we were in trouble.

That dread was all we knew, that and what the evening news could say. “Mysterious lung ailment,” “unknown disease,” “killer plague.” Even within the quarantine, we got no information from the hazmat suits that roamed our streets. I do not blame them anymore because silence is better than a lie. Advanced degrees or not, when you know nothing, what can you say? They rounded up the usual suspects – rodents, birds, mosquitos, romaine lettuce – and found no origin. None of the initially presenting patients had left the county for six months, let alone the country, so it had to be endemic. Whatever corrupted our lungs, it came from here, and we demanded that they find it.

And they did. Some still blame them for the time the investigation took, unfairly. Who would have suspected fungus? They could not immediately recognize the spores in the tissue samples: the smallest previously-known spore had been 3 micrometers by 2 micrometers, so they did not know to look for 1X1. When they did find spores, they believed them incidental rather than the culprit because while pneumonia can stem from fungi, the rapidity with which the disease murdered the doctors and patients at Davenport Hospital screamed “contagion.” Fungal pneumonia was never contagious and rarely rapid, until now. Prior to this mutation, only the immunosuppressed were at risk. And, of course, fungal infections respond to antifungals.

Our plague responds to nothing.

Certainly, they could not have suspected it came from the trees. Healthy trees, of all species, with not a visible blemish on them, until you looked very closely at a limb, any limb, and saw the spots. Black. Myriad. Fecund.

So now the trees are gone. It was the only way. Mile after mile of pine and oak and birch, chopped and incinerated. They found fire kills the spores if it’s hot enough (cremation is mandatory), and it’s all they know to do, here and in the other places. Most of the contamination spread in-state, but there were also outbreaks across the border in Pennsylvania. A few poor souls drove spores to Kentucky when their kindergartner kept a hiking stick, which souvenir cost them their lives and everyone else Knobs State Forest.

There have been no outbreaks for ten months. We’ve all moved away, and I assume my family will be safe, miles and miles from our Victorian where, for all I know, the plates still wait at the dinner table. The hazmat suits who rushed us away ordered us to leave everything behind for fear of those micrometer by micrometer specks. They think they’ve destroyed them all, though of course the world will know soon enough. The spores would germinate in June.