Everything is an accident, Hazel would be willing to say if asked. Her whole life is an accident, and by accident she has blundered into the heart of it.

Today Is the Day

Today Is the Day

Today is the day the women of our village go out along the highway planting blisterlilies. They set off without breakfast, not even coffee, gathering at the site of the old well, now paved over and turned into a tot lot and basketball court. The air at this hour is clear. You can breathe in the freshness. And you can smell the moist ground down there below the trampled weeds and baked clay, those eager black glinting minerals waiting, and the pocketed humus. A September morning. A thousand diamond points of dew.

The women carry small spades or else trowels. They talk quietly to each other, but in a murmuring way so that you can’t make out the words; all you hear is a sound like cold water continuously falling, as if a faucet were left running into a large and heavy washtub.

At one time the blisterlily grew profusely on its own. By mid-May the shores of the two major lakes in the area were splashed with white, and the slopes leading up to the woods ablaze. It must have been a beautiful, compelling sight, although a single blister blossom is nothing spectacular. It springs up close to the ground like a crocus, its toothed cup of petals demurely white or faintly purple. The small, pointed, pale leaves are equally unprepossessing. By ones or twos the plant is more or less invisible. You’d step right on it if you weren’t warned, crush it without knowing. It takes several million of the tiny blisterlily flowers to make an impact. And once, according to the old people of the village, there really were millions.

No one knows for sure what happened. Too much rain or not enough, that’s one theory. Or something poisonous in the sunlight, radiation maybe, from the nearby power plant. Or earth tremors. Or insect pests. Or a drop in the annual mean temperature. All sorts and manner of explanations have been put forward: a vicious fungus of the sort that attacks common potatoes or a newly evolved, unkillable virus. Also mentioned is crowding by larger, more aggressive species such as the distantly related blue-wort, or the towering caster plant with its prickly seed pods, or the triple-spotted tigerleaf. There is only so much root room available at the earth’s surface, and the root, or bulb rather, of the blisterlily is markedly acquiescent. To the eye it may look firm and reliable, an oval of slippery pearl under a loose russety skin, like a smallish onion or a French shallot, but it is actually soft-fleshed and far too obliging for its own good. Under even minimal pressure it shrivels or blisters and loses moisture, that much is known.