THE BLOOD

THE BLOOD is a warning posted along the fences at the fields of a Mennonite community whose members suffer from a debilitating illness after the flu. It operates both as a barrier and as a misrepresentation: outsiders read it as a reason to keep away, while later medical care clarifies that the disease is not transmitted through ordinary contact. The phrase helps shield the community from attackers even as illness continues to weaken and kill its members.

The warning and the illness

Hig describes roughly thirty Mennonites living south of his and Bangley’s perimeter, about ten miles away. Their illness appeared after the flu pandemic. In his account, it resembles a plague with a slow course; the children were born with it, are sick and weak, and some die each year. These details give THE BLOOD a specific, frightening context, but they do not establish that blood itself is the only cause or route of the illness. The words on the fences condense a complicated public-health reality into a stark warning that outsiders can understand without approaching the sick community.

The name also sits beside unresolved explanations for the wider catastrophe. When Hig asks Cima how the outbreak began, she does not confirm the press account that a mutation of a monitored superbug combined with bird flu. Reports had blamed New Delhi after cases first appeared in London; a rumor instead placed the origin at Livermore and linked the outbreak to a military courier flight carrying a sample to England, supposedly lost in a crash at Brampton. Cima emphasizes that nobody will know for certain. These competing accounts concern the pandemic’s possible origin, not a proven explanation for the later blood illness. The distinction matters: the warning’s authority comes from the community’s visible suffering, while the precise causes and mechanisms remain uncertain.

What the sign does

The warning’s social effect is clear even where its medical meaning is not. Hig recognizes that the signs and the fear they provoke have kept attackers away. The same message that marks the community as dangerous to approach has, in practice, helped preserve its members’ lives. Its protection is not a cure or a remedy: people remain exhausted and ill, and some die. The sign can deter violence, but it cannot stop the disease that gives it urgency.

Its force depends on distance and interpretation. From outside the fields, THE BLOOD offers a simple reason to stay away; the warning turns an unfamiliar illness into a boundary that outsiders are reluctant to cross. That misperception serves as a defensive screen in a world where communities face attack. Yet it also risks making the sick people themselves seem like a threat. The phrase does not explain their condition or distinguish between forms of contact; it communicates danger broadly, and that broadness is part of its protective effect.

Medical clarification and changed contact

Cima’s intervention revises what the warning appears to mean. She is an internist with a public-health background, and she tells Hig that the fear of ordinary contact is mistaken: in her explanation, transmission involves bodily fluids and blood, rather than casual proximity. Once she gives this clarification, she tells him he can come across and mingle. The boundary created by the signs is therefore not simply permanent separation; medical knowledge makes cautious contact possible without dismissing the community’s real illness.

At the old farmhouse, Cima uses a room that had served as a parlor to examine the families. Wearing latex gloves, she treats people and tends to their needs, including sewing up cuts, dressing wounds, arranging warm water, advising a pregnant young woman, and consoling an older man. The sequence makes the contrast concrete: THE BLOOD has helped keep outsiders away, but Cima’s work depends on entering the community and caring for people directly. Her medical practice challenges the fear attached to the words without treating the illness as imaginary or harmless.

An illness still under study

Cima also describes evidence suggesting that the autoimmune disease may progress faster when the body’s ability to produce vitamin D breaks down. She presents the proposed mechanism as a new and tentative finding, comparing it to AIDS’s effect on T cells while noting the limits of the analogy. There is no evidence, she says, that the reverse is true—that vitamin D can slow the disease. Accordingly, the later vitamin D infusion she dispenses for the children is not presented as a proven cure. On or about the Fourth of July, while Cima is spending the day with the families, she gives the infusion to them, especially the children she cannot stay away from.

THE BLOOD thus belongs to two different systems of response. As a sign, it turns fear into a perimeter that has helped keep attackers at a distance. As a statement about contagion, it is too broad: Cima’s account makes clear that ordinary presence near the community is not the same as transmission. And as an explanation of the disease, it cannot replace ongoing inquiry. The phrase’s importance lies in that tension: it has protective value, but the protection rests on a misunderstanding that compassionate medical attention can begin to correct, even while the illness itself remains dangerous and incompletely understood.