(2007) The Pesthouse

by Jim Crace

  'There's not a road in this whole land that isn't crowded with dangers,' one said. 'We all started out with husbands. And now we're castaways and jetsam. We haven't got one single man to share between the nine of us. We only share our beds with dogs and kids nowadays. Except when someone's paying us, of course.' So that explains the dresses, Margaret thought, and how these women earn their keep. The younger ones and the best kept of the older ones are whores.

  'What happened to your husbands, then?' she asked, not really wanting to be delayed by the answers but keen to be polite. Now all the women were speaking at once. Three of their men had been lost on the journey, one to fever, one to drowning and the other crushed by a collapsing cart. One of their men had, like Franklin, been taken as a slave by a gang of rustlers. Again that phrase, 'He could be anywhere by now. Or dead.' But the other five men had made it all the way to the coast and, as far as their wives could tell, continued all the way across the ocean to the Far Shores.

  'Then why are you still here?' asked Margaret.

  'Because about that time the boats decided they wouldn't take us, dear. New rules.'

  'Wouldn't take you? Why?' Margaret was instantly alarmed.

  'Because we're neither men nor girls.'

  'Nor rich,' added Joanie, her voice a little louder and more insistent than those of her neighbors. 'That's all they're taking on the boats and has been for more than a year...' She held her fingers up and tallied off the types of travelers who might still find a welcome at the anchorage. 'That's pretty girls, for one, girls who haven't got a husband or a child, girls that they can marry on the other side, or sell. Families that have the valuables to bribe themselves some berths, is two. Men that are fit enough to put to laboring, or men with skills. That's three and that's all, as far as I could tell. Everybody else can go screw themselves. They'll never get a berth.' She shook her head gravely, to allow her sisters to chorus 'never, never, not a chance'.

  'You ask me where my family is?' Joanie continued, squatting at Margaret's side and gripping her wrist. 'My husband was a carpenter. He could turn his hand to anything from a coffin to a wheel. My son was his apprentice and clever at it, too. Better than his pa, to tell the truth of it. Our daughter was as pretty as a dove and fifteen years of age. No way they'd leave her behind. But me. What am I? What use am I, a married woman?' She spread her hands, displayed herself in the firelight, a weary mother, plump and pockmarked. 'And what about my little boy? Step forward, Suff, and show your face to our friend. He was only nine years old at the time. No place on board for him, either.'

  'Why not?' Again, a question that Margaret understood she had to ask.

  'Because they wouldn't be able to slave him in a field or use him in a workshop, that's why. Not yet anyway. Too young and small. Try again when you're a man, they said. They could have said the same to me, except I'll never be a man. And so I'll always have to be American.' She spoke the last word as if it were a burden that would take her to her grave.

  'We're all Americans now,' one of the gaudier women said. 'No ship'll take us, not one of us.'

  'I told my husband that I wouldn't hold him back,' Joanie continued, raising her voice again, 'but he said he'd rather stay with me. Keep the family together. I could've cried. But my son and daughter had already set their hearts on it. You know, the Dreams of Leaving. Young people have a right to want the best. There'd be nothing here for them. They couldn't stay. It wasn't safe—'

  'There's nowhere safe.'

  'I told my husband, "Don't let them go alone. They're not old enough to lose both parents. You go with them, and then I'll follow on some time, when I'm rich enough — or when I'm man enough." It bust our hearts, it snapped our family in two, but that's what happened, that's what happens down there every day. You'll see. Me and my small boy waved them off and saw their boat shrink before our eyes and then disappear for good. We judged ourselves the most unwanted people in the world. That's our story. And — Margaret, is it? — if you're not lucky that'll be your story, too. That's the cold truth. This coast is blighted with bad luck. It's no coincidence. Why does sea water taste the way it does?'

  Margaret shook her head.

  'There's salt in tears, that's why. The ocean's one great weeping eye. On clear days, we can see the curve of it.'

  TWO WOMEN from the cottages joined Margaret for the last part of her walk. She was embarrassed by their presence at first, although there was no one else to witness the company she was keeping or to blush with her when both women linked their arms with hers, taking it in turns to be the windbreak. They were dressed not for walking but for attracting men. They were bare-legged and, even though they wrapped themselves in shawls against the bitter edge of the breeze, their skirts and blouses were flimsy and revealing and their hair was elaborately dressed. The plumper, quieter of the two was probably a little younger than Margaret, but the skinny one was thirty-five at least, flat-chested, spotty and pallid, though forlornly beautiful in a way that eludes women that have not been toughened by misfortune.

  Unlike Joanie she'd not lost any children to the boats, she said, but her husband, when given the choice of keeping his wife or following his dreams, had chosen the more abstract of the pair. 'Life before wife,' he'd said. That was two summers ago. She'd had to spend a month or so living rough at the anchorage, learning the crafts of begging, stealing, whoring and sleeping in hollows. But toward the end of that summer, her fortunes sweetened a little. She met another abandoned wife, a woman married for just a year but already with a child at her breast, and desperately hungry, cold and heartbroken to find herself so quickly 'widowed'. Two women now. They were a sisterhood — and, though their futures were hardly rosy, their lives seemed a little less bleak. That afternoon, buoyed up by each other's company and impelled by the demands of the child, they explored along the coast above the river mouth, hunting for a safer place to sleep, somewhere free of men. They found the fishermen's abandoned cottages and boats. Within the month, by summer's end, with the stream of migrants slowing for the winter and the sail ships no longer crossing, the sisterhood had grown to nine, plus seven children and the wild dogs that they'd tamed with food and kept as guards.

  'We always go down to the anchorage when ships are in,' the skinny woman said. 'There's pickings to be had — pink as hogs, they are — there's sailors there, looking for a woman and quick to pay. Can't understand a word they say, but when it comes to it the noises that they make are all the same.' The plump one laughed. And Margaret laughed as well — though these were noises that she'd only ever heard from other people's rooms. 'Anyway, I call the tunes,' the woman continued. 'When men are set on that, they're meek as lambs, most of them anyway. I take control. I do them with my hands if I can get away with it. Easy earnings. Quick to rinse off. No risk of pregnancy or catching Mrs Phylis. I'm not ashamed. I'm not happy, but I'm not ashamed. We have to eat. It's no more than you do with your husband once in a while, I bet.' She squeezed Margaret's arm to share the intimacy and laughed. Margaret smiled and nodded but — this was strange and unexpected — she felt ashamed to be so innocent. Mrs Phylis. Who was she?

  Fairly quickly, however, despite her embarrassment, Margaret was glad of the women's company. Their chatter ate the journey up. Their manner was warm and irreverent. There's safety in numbers. Besides, they knew the quickest route.

  The path from the women's cottages soon abandoned the flats and dunes and rose a bit to crest a narrow wind-torn bluff, alluvial and stony, and Margaret, still with a woman hanging on each arm, was looking down on a sight that was cluttered and entirely baffling. The boats, she understood. There were already three sail ships anchored midstream in the quieter, browner waters of the river mouth. Their sails were rolled up and tied back to the masts and rigging. From that distance, they seemed too small to take more than a dozen passengers. A fourth vessel, much larger than the others, its three masts still hung with twelve individual square-cut sails and with further triangles of canvas at the prow and stern, was negoti
ating the banks and channels, looking for shelter.

  A traffic of cargo skiffs and rafts worked between the moorings and the shore. It was only when a man began to climb the rope ladder of one of the smaller ship's sides that Margaret could tell how huge they actually were. Even their seemingly tiny flags must be the size of blankets. It was a peaceful, hopeful sight, however. Ships and water. Nothing sinister.

  On shore, there was chaos of a kind Margaret had not witnessed before. There was a wide fringe of mud and weed all along the edges of the estuary, deeply cluttered, on both sides of the river, with great, abandoned slabs of rusting metal, red in the sunlight, some of it the height of twenty men and chilling in its rawness; other pieces were intricate and inexplicable but no less unsettling. Here were rotting hulks and carcasses greater even and more foreboding than the junkie on the journey east had been. Nature could not — would not want to — shape so many squares and rectangles or perfect spheres, so many ducts and cylinders, so much massive symmetry. This was the craziest work of men, or of something worse than men. Even the mud itself seemed unearthly: what earth could boast such oily blues, such vivid greens, such silvers or such reds? The unstinting details of antiquities were always baffling. Margaret raised both eyebrows at the sight, and blew out her breath. She whistled even. She was shaken by the discovery of so much debris, especially on this dream-making coast where, surely, all the worst of all the past could be forgotten by the emigrants.

  'They say it's old-style ships,' the thin woman said, 'though I'd have thought you'd have as much chance taking ships like that to sea as you'd have floating a stone.' She shrugged. 'Well, as you see, they didn't get them very far. Stuck in the mud and left to rot.' She laughed again. Always laughing. 'Is that stupid?' Sometimes she wondered if America had once been populated by a race of fools. So many old things from that time had lost their grip on the world and dropped away, it seemed to her.

  It was not until they had descended from the bluff, and walked a further hundred paces inland and removed themselves from the gape of the ocean and the naggings of the wind that Margaret's two companions stopped to tidy and prepare themselves for work, and Margaret herself was able to look down and inspect — though only dimly; she did not want to reveal her spy pipes to strangers — the makeshift town of tents and sheds and wagons that had grown up on the dry terraces on her side of the estuary. Even from that distance she could hear the noise of shouting. Anger and impatience were in the air. Then, on top of that, came the din of tools, the beating of metal, the snapping of wood, the explosive cracking of fires, the protest of animals, and the bass note of a population with nothing much to do but sit, wait, hope and talk.

  Somehow the two women from the cottages had enhanced themselves. They'd stowed their shawls between two rocks, reddened their cheeks and lips, tidied their wind-torn hair, unfastened the top part of their blouses, scraped the mud off their shoes. They seemed both younger and older, both somber and comical. And when they embraced Margaret, she could smell some perfume. Kitchen smells. Honey mixed with spice, she thought. Nutmeg. 'You'll want to go ahead of us,' they said to her. 'Unless you're looking for a sailor.' Margaret shook her head and nodded, smiled. How thoughtful they had been with her. She could not imagine working at their sides, but still she could picture being friends with them. She blew them kisses and went ahead, light-hearted and light-footed. She had not expected such a pleasing jaunt. But now that she was on her own again, the words that Joanie had spoken came back to trouble her: 'Because the boats wouldn't take us, dear.' Never, Never, Not a chance.

  It was not until Margaret had descended through the oak and hemlock woods and reached flatter ground once again that she could see the mayhem of the dockside in any detail. Her spy pipes bothered her. She wanted to avoid any temptation to trade them. But they also made her feel vulnerable, a target for anyone, any thief, practiced at telling when a woman was concealing something of value underneath her clothes. She checked the path behind her — no sign of the two women, whose progress, in their finery, was bound to be slow if they were to keep their ankles clean — and hastily pushed her spy pipes into the piles of driftwood that had somehow, despite their bulk, been washed up during the winter. She marked the pipes' hiding place in her mind's eye and walked on, feeling less encumbered, more secure, but still nervous about what the day might have in store for her.

  Margaret had never known such crowds before, such order and disorder. Ferrytown had often been a thriving, busy place, especially in recent summers, when the emigrants had started passing through. But she could not remember ever seeing more than a hundred people in one place at the same time. Certainly she had never encountered such a press of bodies as this. There was no avoiding it.

  First, she had to make her way through the village of hastily erected huts and the tarp tents that she had spotted from above. She took her time, observing the formalities with the women and the few elderly men who were guarding their possessions, though hardly anybody responded to her nods and greetings with much warmth. Their focus was the anchorage. Would their husbands and their sons return to say that they'd secured passage on a ship? Would there be more ships? They had no time to talk. Worry was a full-time job.

  Then Margaret had to negotiate the acreage of tethered animals and stationed carts that would no longer be of any use, everybody hoped. Hoofs and wheels didn't work at sea where — wonders of the world — all you needed was the muscle of the wind. What had been of value was now only an encumbrance. Beyond the carts, a pack of dogs, newly homeless, had achieved what many people only dream of and were masterless. They barked, bared their teeth and snapped at passers-by without much fear of punishment. Margaret's whistling did not placate them. She had to keep her distance and walk through muddy garbage dumps rather than over the drier ground that the dogs had claimed.

  Only then did she find her way barred by the herd of would-be emigrants, their backs all turned to her and many straining on their toes to see how far off they were from what Margaret presumed was access to the boats.

  She skirted around the crowds, not wanting to pass too closely to their heels, in the same way that she would sensibly — like any town girl — avoid the rears of cattle or horses. Once the throng thinned, she was able to get closer to the river banks, where she might gain a clearer view. Here there was a market of a sort. Women from Tidewater were selling dishes of hash and hunks of corn bread. Small boys were offering hands of fresh fish — alewives, weakfish, croakers, kings — none of which she recognized by appearance or by name. Exasperated emigrants were bartering with hard-faced men, hoping to sell their carts and horses and any heavy goods they still possessed before they put to sea but being only offered pittances — a reed hat for an oak table, a bit of bacon for a wagon, a bag of taffies for a mare. The salt air seemed to have robbed the world of value. Already a corral of newly purchased horses was closely packed with animals. An elderly emigrant who evidently — from his loud complaints — had wanted to buy back his own horse with the sack of flour that he'd been paid for it had been refused, laughed off. The purchase price for such a good mount, he had been told, was five sacks of flour. He was damping his sorrows at a row of clay-lined casks where ladles of beer and shots of shrub or hard liquor were being sold. Still, despite his evident anger, he was being pestered — as was Margaret herself — by hucksters offering good-luck charms, ship supplies, weatherproofs, potions to ward off ocean sickness. A good strong mule was not worth anything, but a finger's length of pizzle hair, they said, could make you rich and keep you well.

  Margaret hurried through them all, trying to seem purposeful and located, despite the fingers pulling at her smock and skirt and the feet that tried to trip her, the voices in her face, demanding trade and commerce beyond her means and offering goods outside her experience, new friends only from the teeth outward.

  Once she reached the river bank, she jumped down out of the multitude onto the muddy shore with its ballast of wood and metal drift. Now, if she was care
ful not to sink too deeply and if she kept low enough not to draw attention to herself, she could reach a rusty platform where she could stand and inspect from a distance the faces in the crowd and learn what it was these emigrants were straining for.

  All she could see at first was a line of tables, separated from the emigrants by a rope fence, but gradually the procedures became clearer. One by one, each individual or family was being called forward, questioned and searched by a group of men in black uniforms, looking like no one Margaret had ever seen before, unusually light-skinned and old-fashioned somehow, in factory-made jackets and tooled shoes. Their beards and hair were trimmed short, like those of teenage boys. They carried heavy polished sticks that they used freely to organize the crowds as if they were cattle. And, so far as she could tell from such a distance, they were speaking in a tongue that made no sense at all to her no matter how loud the words were shouted or how fiercely they emphasized their spoken commands with the blunt end of their sticks.

  Margaret would not join the crowd of supplicants. She kept her distance and she watched, first checking for sign of any rustlers and then, when there was none, scanning the faces of the women for any of her friends from the Ark. Again, no sign. What she witnessed, though, was exactly what the women in the cottages had warned about. The few families that were visibly wealthy — or could prove themselves to be secretly rich — were being tick marked on their forearms with a blue dye and then allowed to take their possessions through the metal wrecks and walk across the colored mud among the hard straight shadows of the hulks down to the shoreline and the cargo skiffs. Young men and men with bags of tools were being offered papers on which to thumb their signatures of agreement: travel for free across one ocean, work for free for one year. That was the deal, no arguments. Show your thumb or show your heels. Pretty girls were being flirted with and told how much richer, cleaner and handsomer the men were on the far side of the ocean. A good-looking woman could have three husbands over there if she wanted to.