(2007) The Pesthouse

by Jim Crace

  'Poor man,' she said, but could not truly mean it. She wished Acton well, but also she wished him far. 'Poor man,' she said again, and felt that the second time she had sounded more convincing.

  Franklin checked the mare's panniers, hoping to find some better protection against the cold for himself and Margaret, but there was nothing suitable, just an empty water bag, some damp nuts and a few twists of meat that were almost too stiff and rancid to be edible. They had to find some shelter very soon, shelter for themselves and shelter for the horses. At that time of year, the land could not store the day to warm the night. The early-spring heat was too thin a sheet. It melted almost as quickly as the last light of the afternoon. They also had to find some food. The adults might be resigned to sleeping with nothing in their stomachs except a knot, but Jackie would not understand. The child — already unnerved and overexcited by that day's events — was bored and fretful, and tired of being sung to. She wanted her friends, she wanted to play, and she wanted something sweet to suck.

  'What happened to those taffies, Mags?' asked Franklin, and Margaret rewarded his familiarity with her broadest smile. 'Those Boses stole them from me,' she said, and, once she'd swallowed hard, added, 'Pigeon', not quite loud enough for him to hear.

  It was almost dark when they discovered the outline of a long, uneven roof with a tall chimney on slightly higher ground above the track that they were following. They could smell smoke and supper, but no lights were coming from the building. Franklin found a stick and went alone to see if there was any danger. After a few moments he called out that it was safe to bring the horses up, 'if they'll bear the smell'.

  The building was a row of connected wood cabins with a square, stone smokeshop at one end. And it was mostly empty. No fires were burning, and the only signs that it was still a working place were the sheets of scraped leather that were curing and the hands of stiff, smoked fish hanging from the rafters of the house, discarded and forgotten remnants of last season's netting. There was no other food there or in the cabins, so far as they could tell in the fading light. A side of bacon would have been welcome or a butt of apples. But there was water in a deep trough at the far end of the buildings, and some forage drying for tinder that would make do for the horses' evening meal. They were out of the wind, if not the drafts. At least they could stay relatively warm, although they could find nothing with which to strike a fire. Tomorrow when the sun was up they might discover greater comforts.

  But, for the time being, once they had picked at the smoke-toughened skin and flesh of a fish that they had never tasted before and would pray never to taste again, Margaret and Franklin — Mags and Pigeon — stretched out together as a family on a wooden pallet as far from the stench of the smokeshop as they could, separated only by the girl, and sharing the saddle blanket for their bedding. It had been a busy day. They were exhausted and they slept 'mid sentence' as the saying goes, with things that mattered left unsaid and drying on their lips.

  Margaret woke in the middle of the night and took a moment to remember where she was and who was at her side. She panicked for a bit, but the sounds that she could hear were only breathing and the wind, and the restlessness of horses, and something deeper, far and near, a sort of restful quake. That was a sound she'd never heard before, but still she recognized it from the stories she'd heard. The snoring sea. The grieving sea. The Waters of the Whispering. The river with one bank. The Deep. She checked that Jackie was well covered and kissed her on her forehead. Then she leaned toward Franklin, a large dark shape. She put her hands into his hair and kissed him on each cheek, beneath his eyes. A tiny sin. Then nothing else. He was asleep and could not know how motherly, how sisterly, how loverly she'd been, or how her fingers and her mouth still smelled of last night's fish. He could not know how full of sudden hope she was, and warm. They'd reached the ocean, then. She was embraced and heartened by the thick of love.

  By the time she fell asleep again, Margaret had decided that she would wake at first light, at the very moment that the owl became the cock, and lead her family outside to stare into the ocean's salty promises. She had little doubt now that her problems — their problems — were largely behind her. Why else would fortune have delivered such a rendezvous? They'd reached the coast. And they had reached it together. And it was almost spring. All they had to do was find an early boat and set sail for that better place, a place she could not even name but where there would be... no, she could not say what there would be. But she was clear, in her imagination, about what they wouldn't find across the sea. They wouldn't live in fear of Captain Chief. They wouldn't have to battle for their meals. They wouldn't have to travel every day. They wouldn't have to sleep with fish and smoke. They wouldn't have to hide their height or hair. They wouldn't be afraid to kiss. Tomorrow she would break down all the barriers.

  There was a heavy mist when Margaret woke and tiptoed to the cabin door. All she could see through the cracks was a steeply falling slope covered in reed grass and a heavy gray haze backlit by a dawn still too distant to provide any shadows. She could not hear the ocean at first. All she could hear was the sound of Jackie and Franklin sleeping, their breathing synchronized, and the horses fretting on the wooden floor. But when she slipped outside, into the cold, in her socked feet, the sea returned. It sounded more placid and less promising than it had done in the night. The mist was out of reach but, at the same time, touchable. She walked toward it, her hands held out in front. It backed away, without moving. It parted for her hands.

  Margaret would not call out for Franklin yet. This was a moment to enjoy, a moment on her own. She could not remember the last time that she hadn't had Jackie at her side, wanting something, needing to be cared for. Margaret would not trade a moment of that care, but still she was relieved to have some steps of freedom. The reed grass was damp and uneven. Her socks and the hem of her skirt were soaked. But none of that counted for anything. She felt only the joy. The joy of those two sleeping.

  Margaret might have ventured no more than twenty steps, but already the cabins and the smokeshop, including the smell, had been removed from her back by the mist. The light ahead of her seemed brighter, and so she persevered, comforted by the certainty that no one would catch sight of her in such secretive weather. Another twenty steps, and she could make out tones among the grays, where true light and reflected light met to make a flat and almost black horizon. More steps and she was clear of the grass and walking on more solid ground, flat rocks and puddles of star-gathered dew. The new smell was slight but overpowering. No longer fish and smoke and timber, but something brackish and inedible, something faintly menstrual. She heard a cry that seized her heart and squeezed it. She turned around toward the cabins, fearful for her Jackie. But it was something other than a child. There was another cry, then the curtain of the mist seemed to draw apart, and there they were: the gulls, stocky, busy, laboring, their bony wings weighted at the tips with black.

  The ocean itself was a surprise. Margaret could not have guessed how leaden it would be and lacking in expression. It seemed too hard-surfaced to take a boat or for fish to pass through it, more metallic than watery. It was not until she reached the edge of a crumbling overhang and could look down through the thinning mist onto the tuggings of the water at the shore that she had any sense of the ocean's unremitting, unproductive strength and its patience. Now the leaden surface was alive. What had been flat a little way offshore seemed to resent the unresponding land. It had raised itself up in folds and furrows of water that broke against the beach, flashing their white underskirts, unloading and delivering themselves, time after time, never seeming to progress. The sea was like a great lung, but exhaling and inhaling water rather than air. The gulls breakfasted and squabbled among the underskirts, crying at the waves.

  The ocean had changed entirely by the time Margaret returned to the overhang with Jackie and Franklin. The rising light had carted off the lead and left its sheeny residues of blues and greens. The water seemed to have with
drawn, leaving a deeper beach with fringes of green-black weed, and there were yellow banks of sand offshore that she had not noticed previously.

  'What do you make of it?' she asked. 'It's frightening, it's beautiful...'

  Franklin shook his head and laughed, that laugh again, those hands, those dipping knees. 'It isn't frightening from here,' he said. 'But heaven's glory, see the size of it. Who's to say how long you'd need on board a ship before you reached the other bank. All day, I'd say—'

  'All month, and then another month. That's what I heard in Ferrytown.'

  'Two months?'

  'Can you see anything? I've not the eyesight to be sure. Can you see any specks of land?'

  They put their hands up to their brows and peered into the sunrise. No, nothing. There was nothing there.

  THESE OFF-TRACK CABINS were the perfect place to camp for a few days, and hide from any search parties, though only the smokeshop — too cluttered and smelly for sleeping — was built to withstand the cold or snub the worst of the wind. The wooden buildings were not intended to be lived in. They were just storage sheds, made from a framework of heavy poles with their stumps embedded in the earth and banked on the windward side with sand. The roof was rushes secured by bags of hardened sand hauled up from the beach.

  Franklin guessed correctly from the long-dead embers in the grates, the poor condition of the water in the trough, and the bone-dry state of the nets and fishing gear stored there, that visitors were rare and seasonal. The smokeshop was probably worked only once a year, in the fall, when what could not be eaten or sold in the summer was invested in the smoke for the leaner months.

  A daylight search of the buildings resulted in a disappointing haul of casks and creels, boxes and baskets, fish traps and eel pots, all smelling of the sea. There was a chest of salt, rock hard and encrusted with an orange fungus, and some good lengths of rope with which they could loose tether the horses in the lee of the buildings and let them graze unhindered, though out of sight of any passers-by.

  The only food that they could find — to their alarm — was a flagon of sugar liquor that smelled too dangerous to drink and some pressed fish oil that might be good for cooking or for burning in a lamp if only they could conjure up some fire. Outside the smokeshop, at its back, was a stand of logs, used for smoking and curing, and a reeking pile of glossy boulders, evidently employed as weights to press oil, brine and blood from casks of salted fish.

  It was Margaret who spotted the chest resting on the roof beams of the smokeshop. It was heavy to lift down, but it was only a fisherman's tool kit. Inside were a gutting knife, a fillet blade, fire rakes, a mallet and a skillet that must have been ten ages old, as well as implements they could not recognize. Few of these things could be of any use to them. There was no fire stone or anything that would provide an easy spark.

  But there was a leather container, not quite a pouch, not quite a box, and old enough to have been machine-tooled. There was wording on the lid, a looping example of the forgotten text that had survived on so many relics of the old country and that for some reason always begged to be touched. Both Margaret and Franklin ran their forefingers over it as tradition required, feeling its embossment but sensing no new wisdom. Inside, and almost bonded to the damp leather, was a useful spy appliance that the fishermen must have used for generations, watching boats or looking out for shoals. It had two eye holes, protected by circles of degraded rubber, and a pair of glass disks set into each end. Its twin barrels, like two black bottles, were connected by a wheel that would not turn and a stiff hinge fashioned out of some material too unnatural and perfect for anybody to make or find anymore.

  Franklin had seen something similar before. His uncle Meredith had owned an appliance like it. He used to claim it was a thousand years old already, older than America. His appliance was longer and had just a single barrel. A spy pipe, it was called. It was meant for only one eye at a time. Hold it properly — if Meredith would let you — and it could rush the world closer, make it bigger but fitfully distorted like an amberwing reflected in a pond. Franklin could remember looking through it at his brother, Jackson, working in the top field of their land and having no idea, when he stopped to piss and shake himself, that he was being seen and snickered at.

  Franklin took the apparatus to the water trough and cleaned the windows of the spy pipes with the dampened edge of his shirt. He greased the stiff wheel and the hinge with a little smoky fish oil. It took a bit of forcing, but soon the parts were moving, and Franklin could make the barrels widen to fit his eyes. Now, despite the scratching on one of the glass disks, he could make the reed grass as far as sixty paces from the cabins seem like a forest of thick, tall trees. The chickadees amongst the branches were like turkeys. He could see the intimate detail of the ground more than a stone's throw away, each pebble, each twig, each snail shell. He merged the twin images into one circle and, fixing the wheels so that the far approaches to the cabins were clear to see, he checked for men transformed into giants and horses enlarged into monsters. He tried but could not put Jackson in the circle. Jackson relieving himself. Jackson in his goatskin coat. No Captain Chief. He tried, but could not put his mother there, sitting on the homestead stoop, her old hand raised. He held his own hand up in front of the barrels. His fingers seemed both huge and far away.

  'It fools your thinking,' Franklin said, handing over the new toy to Margaret.

  At first she could see nothing, but soon she discovered that she could revolve the wheel to its furthest, tightest point and view the distance sharply. The horizon had a bulk she'd never known before and a clarity that she had lost in childhood and had thought was irretrievable. 'It's strange to think how many eyes have looked through this,' she said. 'Imagine everything that's happened at the fat end.' She tapped the glass as if it was the top of a container. 'Dead people would've been in there. And sky-high buildings from the history. All sorts of ships and strangers.' She put the spy pipes to her face again and focused on a single bird, black-winged and rafting on the wind. Her eyesight was as good as new. 'That hawk's seen something on the ground,' she said. 'It might be carrion.'

  'I'll go and look,' offered Franklin, but he returned scratched and empty-handed. Not even a morsel of gull-picked rabbit meat for supper.

  It was their second day without a proper meal. The novelty of the spy pipes and the pleasures of each other's company could not drive away their constant nagging hunger and their tiredness. As time passed, their fear of horsemen diminished somewhat, but they felt nervous of the open air. The rustlers might still flush them out. Other strangers might bother them. All Franklin and Margaret could do about that was to be watchful and careful, keeping the horses out of sight and the noise down. It was a pity that Jackie chose that day to show her irritation and the power of her lungs. What was the point of their nervous vigilance if the girl was declaring their whereabouts so loudly and with hardly a break? Margaret and Franklin did their best to silence her, but songs and games and fingertips to suck were not enough for her. She was implacable. She seemed to have thinned and darkened, losing volume in body but gaining it in voice. Her lips were sore and dry. She showed little interest in anything but wailing.

  After his months at the encampment, Franklin was almost resigned to being underfed and to having what is called a salamander stomach, with folds of loose skin and no fat, but Margaret had gotten used to free meals at the Ark and was soon complaining of hunger pains. Together, the two of them could last for a few more days on their meager provisions, but they could not expect Jackie to survive on smoked fish, stale water, orange salt and pressed oil. They searched the ground around the cabins for edible plants, but there were no wild greens, even at the end of winter. All they found among the worts, the spurges and the sedges were some immature cattails, with shoots almost tender enough to eat raw, and a pink bed of early-flowering spring beauty with sweet, starchy roots. Mashed together with oil and water, the paste was edible enough but hard on the stomach. Jackie would t
ake only a fingerful. But finally she slept, exhausted by herself.

  Margaret was exhausted, too, and impatient. What kind of freedom had she found since she had left the Ark? The freedom to be cold, tired, hungry, anxious? She felt more trapped than she had done for months. But even so, much of the euphoria of rediscovering Franklin and seeing the ocean for the first time remained. They spent the afternoon placating Jackie and discussing what their options were. Stay safe and starve? Push on and take the risks? Wait for a sign?

  In those brief periods when the girl slept, they looked out through the spy pipes from a half-open cabin door. Keeping watch. They had good views across the ocean as well as clear sight of all the land around them. Anybody coming to their hideaway could not avoid showing himself — then the pipes would allow for close inspection.

  It was not through the pipes, though, that Franklin caught sight of his first ocean-going ship, full-rigged and shirty in the wind. It was heading between the outer banks that appeared when, inexplicably and once or twice a day, that great expanse of water drew back on itself, as if it had been inclined as easily as slops are tilted in a bowl. Where earlier there had been nothing but waves, bars and pebble banks appeared and narrow islands of sand. The ship was rising and falling in the sea, uncertain of its own weight, now light enough to hardly break the surface, now so heavy that it sank deeply into the water and all that showed above the ocean were its upper masts and sails. Franklin and Margaret held their pipes to it, picking out the details. There were huts on board, and flags and men among the riggings, and the carving of a huge eagle's head at the prow. Here was their salvation, then, their means of escape. They hugged each other, and when they parted, Franklin danced, despite his unexpected apprehension at this first sight of a sailboat.