(2007) The Pesthouse

by Jim Crace

  Margaret woke earlier than Jackie and Franklin as usual and, rather than disturbing them, just lay on her back watching the inside of the cabin take shape and listening a little nervously to the ocean, the wind, the sunup birds, the breathing at her side. She stretched her legs and flexed her muscles, feeling well if just a little stiff. She cleaned her teeth with her nails and wiped her eyes clear of sleep. She pushed her hands through her now almost finger-length hair and wondered if it would be possible, now that they had fire, to heat a little water. She hadn't washed or even combed her hair for several days. She was ashamed of it. What must she look like to her faithful Franklin?

  Then, she had it. An idea.

  The best protection for their journey west. The answer to the biggest problem that they faced. Now nobody would bother them. Franklin would be safe, for all his size and strength.

  Margaret rolled out from under their saddle blanket and found the tool box. There was hardly enough light yet to see each item clearly, but she could feel them. The gutting knife, still sticky from the horse's blood. The implements they could not recognize. The mallet and the skillet. Some loops of string. She felt what she was hunting for, caught in the corner of the box. The fillet blade. She pulled it out by its bone handle. The metal cutting edge was sharp. After the attentions of a decent whetstone or a leather strop — and she was certain she could find something suitable — the edge of this blade would soon be dangerous. She'd always been the one at home in Ferrytown to sharpen tools, so she was confident. Yes, this would do. As soon as Franklin was awake and she had warmed some water, she'd shave her man, from head to toe. She'd make him look truly dangerous for once. He would become an outcast with the flux.

  It was a strange experience, painstaking and embarrassing. Margaret's hands were shaking at first, possibly because she had gripped the fillet blade so tightly and for so long when she was stropping it on one of the horse leathers, but also because Franklin was lying on their bed with his hands behind his head, like a lover. Satisfied. He had started out standing, and she had kneeled at his feet, first softening the hairs on his legs with water and then shaving them with upward movements of the blade, against the nap. But almost at once she nicked him. Just two tiny cuts. The blood spread alarmingly on his damp skin and her hands began to shake even more. So she started again, with better light. 'Lie on your back,' she said. 'Then I can reach you more easily.'

  Margaret shaved both lower legs first, holding on to Franklin's feet with one hand and cutting with the other. His hair was black but wispy there, on his calves and ankles, and only became more unruly and patternless toward his thighs. She did not shave far above his knees, just the full span of her fingers and no further. These lower parts of his long legs seemed common property and safe. Out of harm's way. A man could show his legs this high to strangers and seem open-hearted rather than immodest. But any higher and the intimacy would be too great for strangers.

  Margaret kept her movements prim and did not speak. She wanted to appear dispassionate and concentrated on her task. There was, though, ardor in her heart. Just touching him in all his public places was such an unexpected pleasure. The hollows and the mounds, the muscles and the sinews, the rough male skin. Her fingers followed the blade.

  Her thoroughness would have to recognize its limits, though. Franklin let her shave his back and chest and every last part of his arms, from the wiry hairs on the back of his knuckles to the tangled, wet and gingery hairs in his armpits. But he became less comfortable when Margaret started on the mass of hairs around his nipples. He had to hold her leg to steady himself. His breathing became restless. His eyeballs rolled. His eyelids dropped. 'Are you okay?' He nodded, couldn't speak. He cried out only once and let out a deep sigh, when Margaret was tugging up the hairs below his belly button to cut them as short as she could. She thought she'd cut him, though there was no blood so far as she could see. But she could soon tell what was troubling him. Indeed it now was just a finger span away from her cutting hand. Franklin was excited by her touch. That was something new — alarming and interesting. So her impulses were both to stare and to look away. 'Margaret,' he said. And then a little later, 'Margaret,' again. And then, 'Mags, Mags.'

  Margaret said nothing. She just busied herself, making sure that all the visible parts of his body were as clean and smooth as her tools would allow. It was up to him, not her, if this resulted in anything other than shaving. If Franklin had reached out his hand and pulled her to him, she would have fallen on him happily. If he had taken her hand and pushed it farther down his body under his clothes and into the hair that modesty had said she should not touch or cut, she would have allowed it, for surely it was time for her to take that risk. She would have welcomed taking such a risk.

  When Franklin had said so forcefully the day before that he would stay with her and Jackie, no matter what, Margaret had known for sure that, given time but as undoubtedly as water runs downhill, they must be man and wife. So even though he was once again too shy and hesitant — too cowardly, perhaps — to take advantage of her shaving him by making love to her, Margaret did not really mind. What was the hurry, after all? They'd not be parting. She could let him take his time, no matter how curious she was about the shadows of his body, no matter how great her desire to kiss him had become, no matter that she herself had felt both breathless and light-headed to be so close to all of him. Her bladder seemed to press on her. Her skin felt red and prickly. Her tongue was active in her mouth.

  But, for all that intimacy, it was the shaving of Franklin's head and face that was for Margaret the most disturbing and surprising. She cut away to find a double crown. A bad-luck sign, as much as red hair was. She loved him all the more. By shaving it, she made it disappear.

  At last, she stepped back to find she had revealed a teenage face and a boy's head. The gap between their ages, already a caution for her, widened into a chasm. Not six years now but twenty. It was so unusual to see the bare face of a man and his cropped skull that for a moment she was frightened. Franklin's features seemed so large, his expression so undisguised, his skin so shockingly pale and vulnerable, so convincingly sickly, as if the ruse of shaving had actually delivered him the flux. He seemed more natural as well. In a way, this was more like Franklin. It explained his nervousness, his blushing bashfulness, that womanly laugh, those indecisive hands, his fear of taking risks, his failure — yet — to kiss her. He had not quite grown out of being young.

  'If only you could see yourself,' she said, and laughed finally. A laugh of disappointment and understanding. This 'boy' could be her son.

  'I can feel it.' Franklin ran his hand around his face and head and in a circle round his lips. 'My mouth feels strange. Huge ears.'

  'You look like a boy. A giant boy. A giant pink boy, with flux. The worst case of the flux I've ever seen. No one will want you now' Her two-crowned beauty boy.

  MARGARET AND Franklin were not sorry to wave the ocean goodbye. They'd laid their eyes on it, witnessed its implacable size, its anger, its serenity, and that was enough for the time being. For a lifetime probably. The ocean was best as a memory or as a prospect. They could not imagine living with it as a neighbor. The noise would send them crazy. Besides, they'd have to watch the sail ships coming in and going out, packed with dreaming emigrants, and be reminded all the time of the distance they had traveled and the dangers they had met and all without purpose. The ocean — unending to the eye — would serve only to tell again how lost they were, how desolate and damned they might become if they stayed put.

  They started out before sunup, to be sure of getting into and beyond the environs of Tidewater before many people were around. Certainly before any horsemen from the rustlers' encampment had begun their day. The panniers of the little mare were not large enough to provide a riding basket for Jackie, so Franklin had cut the sides of one pannier and let it out, enlarging it with trawl netting and securing it with ropes. He'd cut two holes for Jackie's feet and legs, and Margaret had made a pillow ou
t of net. The girl would travel like a queen. The other half of the pannier was filled to the same weight as the girl with strips of fumed horse flesh, the best of the fisherman's tools, the spy pipes, a good supply of water, some tinder, fish oil, and the fire stick and fire bow that Franklin had made.

  They headed north for a short distance and then set their route and their hopes toward the west, taking it in turns to lead. They were too cold and concentrated to talk, though not too cold to smile. Soon the wind and sun would come up at their backs and press them onward, deep into America.

  16

  FRANKLIN HAD NOT forgotten the damage he'd inflicted on the concealed wooden bridge at Ferrytown, or the exhilaration he had felt at cutting through its greasy mooring ropes and seeing it slump and slither down the river's high banks to break up in the water. But he had put it to the back of his mind as important only to the past. He'd not expected to re-encounter it or to be so embarrassed and inconvenienced by his handiwork. He'd meant only to prevent the flames of Ferrytown skipping across the bridge like imps.

  'Some idiot has cut it,' Margaret said, holding up the docked end of the tethering, which was still hanging loose from its tree trunk, each strand and ligament too cleanly cut to be the work of nature. 'Now what?'

  Franklin shook his head. He did not want to lie to her, but even so he did not see the point in identifying the 'idiot'. He might admit to it once they had crossed the river. If that were ever possible. He had persuaded himself on their journey back to Ferrytown that somehow the wooden debris of the bridge would still be scattered at the bottom of the gulch, and that all he'd have to do was clamber down the coulee and use the remaining timber to pull himself through the rapids or, if fortune was entirely on his side, as a set of steps. Apart from that severed end of rope in Margaret's hand, though, the only evidence that there had ever been a bridge was a dangling trail of greening rope and timber on the far and western side of the river. No help to them. But easy to see because the fires in Ferrytown had done exactly what Franklin had feared. The imps had climbed the river bluffs between the houses and the lake, and consumed what once had been thick undergrowth but now looked like a forest of smoke-black antlers with just the first green signs of spring showing on the ground.

  There was no easy path down from the bridge to the point where the ferry used to put ashore. No one had ever worn a passage. So Margaret carried Jackie on her back while Franklin went ahead with the mare, crashing through the dry waste and bushes and beating back the more resistant undergrowth with a stick. It took all afternoon, and Franklin's arms and face were raw with blood and scratches by the time they stopped to set up camp for the night. They had reached the low bluffs at the river's farthest limits. Below them were the flood meadows, vapory and gray, and beyond them — though hardly visible in the afternoon's retreating light — the last remains of the log boardwalk that had led up from the gravel landing beach through levees of sediment and saved the ferry passengers from a drenching, first-foot contact with the east.

  Margaret and Franklin's journey from the coast had been slower but more comfortable than either of them had the right to hope. It had seemed as natural and inevitable as swimming upstream for a salmon. They no longer felt defeated by America, as most emigrants had on the journey out, driven eastward by their failings. The mare had proven to be a sturdy companion, eager and accommodating, especially when persuaded by Franklin's switch to brisk up her pace a bit rather than indulge her weaknesses for browsing and flagging. She repaid him with a session of nickering and some petulant shaking of her tail, but beyond that she was mostly, tooth and hoof, a neat, high-bred, dignified horse. However, she was used to being a riding mount, not a pack animal. Now she was required to tolerate bulky burdens — not only an increasingly fretful and impatient Jackie in her pannier and the second balancing pannier stuffed full of fumed horse meat but also a long net bag thrown over her haunches and containing anything useful — the tool box, pieces of leather — that Margaret and Franklin could find. They'd come equipped as well with good materials for a tent. The cabins had not been short of canvas, fishing poles, rope or netting.

  Each morning Franklin strapped these cargos as tightly as he could onto the mare, correcting any tendency to over-tip or slew to one side with stone weights. But she was not used to carrying so inert a load and did her best, if not watched closely, to scrape against a tree trunk and bring the net bag off her haunches and even, occasionally, to buffet Jackie and the panniers.

  Still, life for her was better with this family than it had ever been with the rustlers, so she had few excuses for complaint. The mare might have had greater cause to protest had either of the adults chosen to saddle her, but they had not. They had walked at her side, only tugging at her lead when the way ahead was narrow or they were fording water. Except for one tough day, when they had no choice but to pick their way across the collapsed, bothersome and puzzlingly extensive remains of an antique town, a sterile basin of cracked concrete, rubble and building slabs from the old country, the land provisioned them. There was no lack of fresh water at that time of the year, and it was not necessary to beg for food or shelter. They had everything, except variety. There was no reason to seek out strangers. On those few occasions when they passed through farmland or a hard-scrabble outpost where a few stalwarts had yet to emigrate or chanced on bands of travelers, all Franklin had to do was show his shaven chin and head, and everyone would keep their distance. The worse that they would do was shout or, occasionally, throw a stone or a fistful of earth, not to cause any lasting harm but more to urge the flux to hurry out of sight.

  Margaret and Franklin had cause to be genuinely alarmed just once. A gang of men on foot, trappers or landlopers by the looks of them, approached their camp one night, after dark, attracted by the smell of meat and the firelight and the opportunity to steal a decent horse. Franklin challenged them while they were a few paces off, but still they came forward. Margaret took Jackie out of sight, under canvas, and shushed her. But no sooner had the leading man seen Franklin's head and noted his size than he and his companions lost any appetite they had for supper and theft. They disappeared into the night a little more swiftly than they had approached. You wouldn't even want to murder someone with the flux. A splash of blood and you were dead. Even bruising your fists on such a sick man's chin was dangerous.

  Margaret and Franklin took more care from then on to pitch their camp somewhere concealed and they learned to sleep with one eye working. Otherwise, the journey back proved kinder than their journey out had done. It was as if the country that had once been hostile to them was regretful for it, and was now providing recompense — fewer dangers, warmer nights, softer going in a season that was opening up rather than closing down. It even decorated the way with early flowers. Margaret picked the largest and the prettiest, making a chain for Jackie and lacing the horse's bridle.

  'You'd better smell them when you pick them, Mags, town girl,' Franklin said. He'd been taught by his mother to hold any picked flower to his nose.

  'So as not to waste the smell?' Margaret could see the sense in that.

  'No, it's because by smelling it you add a day to your life. Don't smell it, and you throw a day away.' So, for an afternoon, they entertained themselves and kept Jackie amused by picking all the flowers they could find, sniffing fragrances, amassing extra days.

  Franklin and Margaret had grown accustomed to setting up a net and canvas home for the night and making fire. But they were tired of it. The journey had been wearying. Jackie had proved to be less accommodating and dignified than the mare. She was by now fourteen or fifteen months old and, like all normal children of that age, preferred freedom to discomfort and play to travel. She had enjoyed the pannier for half a day at most, but after that she'd kicked against it if they tried to load her in. And, once confined, she wailed and screamed in protest, on and off, throughout the day. As soon as the mare's distressed breathing signified that they should stop for the night, and Jackie was unloade
d from her pannier, she would become a toddling scamp, interfering with the tasks, getting too close to the fire or the mare's hoofs, tasting anything she had not encountered before, be it a beetle or a pine cone. She would see the erection of the tent as an opportunity to roll among the nets and canvases, despite the irritation of her adults, who wanted only supper and sleep.

  But Jackie loved it when Franklin sang to her. His antics did not quiet her. On the contrary, they made her laugh and yell, but they did keep her in one place. It didn't matter that Franklin's voice was flat and tuneless, and that he only knew three songs, one of them a little bawdy and the other two burial hymns. She clapped her hands and wrists with pleasure. His volume delighted her. She adored the way he matched the words with hand movements, drawing out or pinching off the notes with his fingers. Best of all were the moments when Margaret, exhausted by the travel and up till then too tired even to smile let alone play, could not stop herself from bursting out with laughter. 'Pigeon, that's terrible,' she'd say. And, 'Stop, stop, stop! You idiotic boy.' He was a boy. Or drunk. Just look at him. No gravitas. (It was a pity, though, she thought, how quickly his beard was growing back. She'd never had the chance to kiss his chin and throat before they were masked again by hair.)