(2007) The Pesthouse

by Jim Crace

  'Are you well?' he asked, the common greeting between strangers but heavily appropriate on this occasion.

  'I'm tired,' she said. But not dead, apparently. Instinctively she felt her armpits to check for any goose eggs. She could hardly check for boubons in her groin with Franklin watching her. She took comfort from the fading of the blotches on her arms and from the absence of any dried blood around her nose or mouth or, indeed, what would have been a certain sign of approaching death, three pock-shaped black marks on her hands or, worse, the clot of blood — a present from the Devil — that corpses were said to clutch in their palms to pay their entrance fee to Hell. Perhaps she would not die, after all. Perhaps she'd have the good luck denied to Pa, as her mother had promised. Margaret even chanced a smile toward the stranger at the door. 'What color are my eyes?' she asked the man.

  'I haven't seen your eyes,' he said. 'It's dark in here.' He blushed, of course.

  'Not red, not bloody red?'

  'I'll see. Can I come close?' Her eyes looked clear enough. 'No blood,' he said.

  'No blood is good.' She closed her eyes again.

  'You ought to eat.' He showed her the heavy sling of cloth and chose the plumpest nut for her.

  'Can't chew.' Her jaw and throat felt stiff and timbery.

  'Maybe I could make a soup... from... the woods are full of things.' From leaves, from nuts, from roots, from birds. From mushrooms, possibly.

  'Nothing, no.'

  'What can I do for you?'

  She shook her head — there's nothing to be done, she thought, except to sleep and hope for the best. The last thing that she needed in her state was a mouthful of dry nuts or a stomach-load of soup from the woods. She felt both half awake and dreaming. Deeply conscious, in a way, but inebriated, too, by the toxins that accumulate when hunger, fever and exhaustion are confederates. 'What color are my eyes?' she asked again, almost sleeping now.

  'Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?' asked Franklin, not wishing to bully her with questions but worried that she might be slipping into unconsciousness rather than slumber.

  She raised her head just high enough to see him for an instant. A silhouette. No expression on her face. It didn't matter who he was. 'I don't know you.' But she managed to lift her head again and study him for a moment longer. 'What do they want?'

  'Who do you mean when you say they? Your family? Are they the people in the town?'

  'I don't know who they are.'.

  He had to let her sleep again. He left her to it and went out into the clearing to check the hill for any sign of Jackson and to bring his two dried tarps and his possessions into the Pesthouse. He had persuaded himself- too readily — that he would be safer, drier, warmer with the feverish woman than he would be outside for another night. More useful, too. The Pesthouse smoke would protect him from her contagion. He sat down at the far end of her bed, his back warmed by the fire, looking out through the open door across the clearing as the light lifted and receded once again and the cold returned. The last few of that day's travelers led their carts and horses to the lip of the hill and disappeared from sight, leaving just their voices and their bells to briefly dent the quiet.

  That evening, emboldened by the darkness and keen to wake her lest she slip too far, Franklin sat and spoke about himself, as strangers should. Occasionally he could tell by her breathing or by some note of interest or sympathy that she was listening in between her bouts of sleep. He gave his name, his age; he told her about his father's death, the family farm, their animals, the mocking sets of storms and droughts that had destroyed their crops and fields, the famine and lawlessness, the day that he and Jackson had begun their journey to the ships and how his mother had busied herself indoors rather than witness their first steps of departure. He described their hardships on the road, the damage to his knee, how Jackson had volunteered to go down the hill to Ferrytown to replenish their supplies.

  Her voice, at last, less small than it had been. 'They'll take good care of him,' she said, glad to hear the mention of her home. And then he told her what they hoped to find on ship: 'those tiny rooms, just made of wood' and great white birds among the sails, to show the way. He could not imagine exactly what awaited them when they set foot abroad, what type of people they might be, what language they might speak. But he was sure that life would be more prosperous. How could it not be better there? Safer, too. With opportunity, a word he'd come to love.

  'And when we're there,' he said, hoping to restore her with his optimism, 'they say that there is land enough for everyone, and buildings made of decorated stone, and palaces and courts and gardens planted for their beauty, not for food. Because there is abundance in those places. Their harvests never fail. Three crops a year! Three meals a day!'

  'They'll all be fat.'

  'They are all fat. Like barn hogs.'

  THAT NIGHT he slept beside her bed, his feet below her head kept warm by the fire and his head by the Pesthouse door, where he could be on guard against any animals or visitors and breathe the colder but untainted air. Margaret was restless, though she seemed to sleep. She turned around in her bed, gasping for breath, disturbed by nightmares, troubled by the sore skin on her torso, legs and arms. Not one of her bones seemed in its normal place.

  Franklin did not remember how it happened, but, when he woke in the early lights, he found that Margaret was sleeping on her back and that she had shot her legs out of her bed coverings and that he had been sleeping holding a foot between his two hands, restraining it, perhaps, or keeping it warm. He knew at once — a shiver — how risky that had been. Diseases depart the body through the soles of the feet. That's why — when pigeons were so plentiful and decent meat was served at every meal — the people of his parents' generation had strapped a living pigeon to a sick child's feet. He'd experienced this remedy himself. When he'd been eight or nine years old, he'd caught a tick disease that had paralyzed his body for a day or two, until his brother had been sent out with nets to trap a bird, and his aunt had tied it to his feet, pinioning its wings and back against his insteps. 'Stay there, don't move, until the illness passes into the pigeon,' she had instructed. She had remained with him, making sure he kept still, helping him to urinate and defecate into an earth jar, feeding him by spoon, until, after two more days of feeling its warm and beating heart against his insteps, the pigeon stopped protesting, and went cold and silent. It had done the trick as well. His illness had passed, and he had been able to walk up with his father to the bone yard and bury the bird and his disease under a stone. He could see that stone still, in his mind's eye, a gray, dismaying slab that had haunted him ever since. When the harder times had come and pigeon meat, even at feasts, was often all they had to eat, Franklin had preferred to go without. The flesh was tainted in his view: the bird was hazardous. Jackson always ate his share. Now, with Margaret's cold and clammy feet in his hands, Franklin felt unwell himself. His body ached. His throat was dry. His shoulders and neck seemed fixed. His eyes were watering. His hands were tingling. But he chose to hold onto her feet and massage them, exactly as his mother had massaged his feet when he was young. He pressed his thumbs against each toe, he pushed against the hollows of her ankles, he worked his knuckles against the soles, he stroked each nail. She seemed to push her legs against his hands, as if she knew what he was drawing out of her. He did not want to let her go, not even when he heard the first arrivals of the day begin to come out of the woods and make their way down Butter Hill to reach the longed-for welcome at a town just blocked from sight, as usual at that time of the day, by mist.

  6

  PERHAPS SHE WOULD have gotten better anyway, but as usual nature's undramatic remedies would remain unrewarded. Margaret was bound to credit her rescue to Franklins busy hands. At first she had been startled by the pressure of his thumbs on her soles and heels and by his shocking, intimate invasion of the gaps between her toes. No one had played with Margaret's feet since she'd been a child. Certainly since she had been ten year
s old or so, she had been taught how precious her body would be in securing a husband but how untouchable it should remain until that man had revealed and committed himself with an exchange of labor or of goods. The phrase 'The virgin pulls the plow' did not mean that in Ferrytown the young unmarried women were put to work in the fields, but that a pure girl would be worth a pair of horses or a team of oxen in a marriage contract. You wouldn't get a brace of rabbits for a girl who'd drifted.

  When she'd been younger, Margaret had hardly dared even to touch herself for fear of losing value, but lately — as time and opportunity elapsed and it seemed less likely that any man in Ferrytown would volunteer to embrace a wife whose lovely, tempting copper hair was such an ancient omen of disaster and such a sign of waywardness — she had broken that taboo. She was, at thirty-one, she had admitted to herself, a woman who might be a daughter and a sister and an aunt but never a wife or mother. Her body would retain its value and remain unshared.

  But she'd been tempted many times by the strangers who had traveled through her town and who evidently did not share her neighbors' wariness of redheads. She'd had her rear slapped more than once. She'd had her fingers kissed. And one fine-mannered man, her father's age, had proposed a midnight meeting place beyond the palisades where they might talk and hold each other's hands. She'd often wondered what might have happened had she done what he'd suggested, where she might have ended up, if she hadn't opted, instead, for seeking Ma's advice, with the result that it was her brothers and her father who went out at midnight with their sticks to honor his proposal.

  So this caressing of the feet was something both alarming and overdue. She had been tempted to protest. To kick this stranger, even. To judge his touch as cheapening. But who doesn't like their feet caressed? Who isn't weakened and disarmed by such discrete attention? It helped that Franklin spoke to her while he was working on her feet, making less of a stranger of himself. He recounted how his mother had tipped him on his back and 'loved his feet' when he was very small — and, even, not so small, a teenager. He talked about his patient aunt and the pigeon that had cured him when he was young. If this was something that a mother and an aunt might do, then surely it was innocent.

  Except it could not feel entirely innocent. Margaret found it hard to tell if this narrow fever that encompassed her, this breathlessness, this pounding of her heart, this fresh disorder that seemed to want to shake and flex her by the spine, was something else new that could be blamed against her flux. Or was it something that she owed to Franklin's thumbs and knuckles? She drifted in and out of it. She even dreamed that he brought shame on her by venturing beyond her feet along her hairless legs to press his thumbs and knuckles where only she had pressed before.

  The first thing Margaret noticed when she woke was how quiet it was. She had to remind herself that she was no longer at home, waking in the family house, with just moments left before the call to work. She could lie back and let the shapes absorb the light. But she knew at once that something had changed, both within her and beyond. Her body ached. Her mouth was still so dry and bitter that she could barely swallow. But she was feeling partially restored, not sinking now and fearful, but strengthening. Her feet and lower legs felt supple and alive. Her head was clear. Her scalp was bristling. She did not have to struggle to remember what had happened in the night. She could recall every movement of the young man's hands. He was responsible.

  Margaret raised herself quite easily onto her elbows and peered through the thinning gloom at the body slumped at the side of her bed, a silent silhouette as still and heavy as a sack of grain. Was he alive? He hardly seemed alive. She dared to push his shoulder with her foot. No sign from him. She'd not detected any body heat. Her panic was shortlived but strong enough to make her cry out loud. What had he said? The pigeon drew the toxins out through the soles of the feet. The illness was defeated, but the pigeon died. Its warm and beating heart would stop protesting and its body would be cold and silent. She stretched her leg again, pushed her toes against his chest and waited for a heartbeat. Yes, Franklin was still warm, but even so she was not sure. She pressed again. A kick, in fact. An ill-judged kick. The sort of kick to wake a dog or mule.

  ONCE MARGARET had washed herself and drunk a little water, and was, she said, 'now clean enough to show my face to the day', Franklin helped her to her feet. It would do her good to sit and recover in fresh air with views from the sunlit hillside down into the still-shaded valley of her home. This was the first time she had stood since her abandonment at the Pesthouse. He had to steady and support her for the few steps to the wooden door, and the more difficult fifty steps beyond to the fallen tree trunk that he had partly covered with one of his tarps, but he was glad of that, and glad as well to see her face in open light. Her eyes, without the distraction or the competition of any hair, were huge and thrilling.

  'Your color's good,' he said, something that she'd never heard when she had heavy auburn curls.

  Margaret could see at once that something odd had happened in Ferrytown. There was hardly any hearth smoke for a start. And at that time of day — too early in the town for the sun to make a difference — she would have expected to see the flames of braziers and courtyard lanterns, not yet doused in households lucky enough not to have to start work 'on the nose' at first cock.

  Everything was indistinct in those murkier moments of morning. Perhaps she was mistaken and nothing was unusual, except her own state of mind — and her eyesight. Her eyes were good enough when she was face to face with work or conversation. Anything beyond a hundred paces was blurred. But later, once the sun had directed its angles above the treetops on the far side of the river and into the valley, Margaret could see her home in slightly less blurred detail. By now there should be fifty fires or more, she thought. The lanes and roads should be busy, as animals were led out of the tetherings and neighbors went about their tasks. The ferrymen's raft should be taking its first plunge across the river with its paying cargo of animals, carts and emigrants. There should be at least some movement near the guest houses.

  'What do you see?' she asked Franklin. 'Can you see something moving?'

  He looked with her, although he didn't know what she expected him to see. 'Nothing,' he said, meaning Nothing to Worry About.

  'I can't see anything either,' Margaret said. 'Maybe there's something moving by the ferry beach. Is that a cart?'

  Indeed, it was a cart. But by the evening the cart would still be there at the river's edge with its bewildered owners and some others newly arrived that day, yet no one living, no one able, no one in attendance to take their crossing fees and set them safely on the far bank.

  FRANKLIN HAD NOT wanted to abandon the Pesthouse so soon. He had started to take pleasure in its intimate darkness. He'd argued that Margaret ought to allow more time for her recovery; she was too weak to walk, even if it was downhill all the way. The flux was unpredictable and might return. Her shaven head would frighten people off. He was not fit enough to walk himself, as his knee was still troublesome. Besides, his brother, Jackson, had promised to return within a day or two, and if anything had gone wrong down there in Ferrytown, Jackson would certainly have come back to Franklin at once. That was his way. 'He's mightier than me.'

  Margaret's immediate apprehension had been that everybody in Ferrytown had come down with the flux. And that made sense. It would explain the almost empty roads, the stillness and the absence of smoke. Everyone would be reduced to bed, too weak to move or light a fire, too battered to be visible. Her fear of such overwhelming pestilence was not illogical, or unprecedented, even though, according to her report, since the deaths of her father and the six other Ferrytowners three months before, there had not been any disease among her neighbors other than her own. She'd been the only victim of this outbreak as far as she knew, and now look at her, starting to recover after only a day or two and nothing lost except some weight and a lifetime of hair.

  So Franklin was not unduly worried. If it was illness that
had stifled Ferrytown, then it was a weak and passing visitor. But, in his view, he and Margaret would still be wise to stay up on the hill, at least until the fires were lit again, if not until Margaret's hair had reached a respectable length, as was normally required.

  'Let's wait to hear what my mighty brother has to say,' he suggested.

  'What if he doesn't come?'

  '"Mighty Jackson, but Jackson mighty not."' He laughed like a boy. Immediately, he felt embarrassed to have been so childish in her presence, and blushed again. Blushed like a redhead might. 'That was our joke,' he explained, feeling half her age and suddenly recognizing with a further blushing shudder how foolish and immature and unreasonable he was to be so smitten by this woman, this sick and older woman who would regard him, surely, as a silly youth. 'That's what we always used to joke about my brother,' he repeated. 'I only meant to say, let's wait at least a day or two, until you're well enough to walk, and see if he comes up for me.'

  His brother's failure to return so far had bothered Franklin. Jackson was mighty, but he was impetuous and unpredictable as well — 'mighty not', indeed — the sort of man to take off on his own for days on end. That also had been 'his way', since he'd been able to walk. The world was not a dangerous place to him, and so he could never understand why people worried about his absences. Besides, he had a thirst. If there was liquor in Ferrytown, Jackson would sniff it out and knock it back in quantity. And he'd have to sleep it off in quantity as well. So two, three days? Inconsiderate, perhaps, but not unusual.

  Franklin had that morning left Margaret sitting on her tree-trunk bench and hobbled as best he could into the clearing at the top of the trail where he and Jackson had parted. Was there any sign of his brother, she'd asked. Nothing yet, so far as he could tell. Nobody coming up. Just stragglers going down, the usual travelers in family groups, alone, with horses, carts or nothing but their legs for company, a little string of refugees from Hardship House picking their way down the track for a night in bed and a country breakfast. Sea dreamers. Everything as normal, then. He tried to challenge her fears. Ferrytown, from his high vantage point, had simply looked quiet and uneventful, he said, hardly a scarf of smoke to be seen, perhaps without the usual bustle at the crossing point, no casual sound, maybe, but it still seemed flourishing to him, a sleepy habitation, blessed to be exactly where it was, staying rich at nature's bottleneck.