Текст книги "The Pesthouse"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

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’tfind 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.

She 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 tugging of the water on 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 withdrawn, 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 crab 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 loosely tether the horses in the lee of the buildings and let them graze unhindered, though out of sight of any passersby.

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 toolbox. 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 firestone 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 eyeholes, 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 widen the barrels 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 among 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 farthest, 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 were 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 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 take 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 their options. 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 oceangoing ship, full-rigged and shirty in the wind. It was heading between the outer banks, which 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.

“That’s the call that we’ve been waiting for. Deliverance,” he said, embarrassed more by their embrace than by his dance. “Tomorrow morning, Mags, I’m going for that ship. It must be putting ashore close by. I’ll see if we can get aboard.” She shook her head. He took her hand. “I’ll come back with some food for Jackie. It’ll be okay. I’ll be wary for myself. You just keep low and out of sight.”

“You’ll not go anywhere,” she said. “I’ll go. It’s better if I go. No one’s hunting for me. I don’t stand out like you, not since my hair grew out a bit.”

“It’ll be okay…”

“No, Franklin. You’re to let me have my way. I couldn’t bear it if you went and we never saw a hair of you again. Anyway, I’m used to begging for a bit of food. And women make a better hand of getting information out of sailors. That’s well known.”

They laughed at that, then argued briefly, but Franklin saw the sense of what she proposed. He was relieved, in fact, and a bit ashamed to be so uncourageous yet again. “Take this, Mags.” He gave her the spy pipes. “You can trade it for some bacon and our passage fees. I’m sure it’s worth a lot, especially to sailors.”

Margaret took the pipes. “Good meal ticket,” she agreed, but knew at once that she could part with them only if they were prized from her fingers. She needed them to see the distant world. They were of more value to her than to any sailor.

That night they slept with Jackie at their feet and not between them. When he could, when her breathing said that she was dozing, Franklin found that he had taken hold of Margaret’s hand. He fell asleep with one of her fingers wrapped inside his palm. He felt her tug it free at sunrise and heard her washing at the water trough. But he kept quiet and still when she slipped outside into the cold and started on her explorations. It wasn’t prudent to tempt fate by exchanging goodbyes, not when the task ahead was dangerous. He tried to sleep.

Franklin could not expect a restful day. He was not used to children, so having sole care of Jackie would be a test, not all of it welcome. Over winter he had learned to be less of an optimist. Whereas the old Franklin might have happily envisaged Margaret’s journey to the ship as being safe and easy and bound to succeed, the new one needed no encouragement to imagine her in trouble. Margaret robbed or raped, kidnapped or lost at sea, Margaret deciding to abandon him and the girl, Margaret attacked by gulls or tumbling down a cliff into the waves, Margaret losing her way back to the cabins and having to spend the night outside. A landscape full of Margarets undone.

Once he was up and washed, though, and had seen the egg-blue, cloudless sky, Franklin determined to be high-spirited. He would keep his hands and his imagination busy with domestic matters. He’d be a useful rather than a moping husband for the day. He muttered a list to himself, counting off his tasks. He’d take good care of Jackie, but when she allowed it he would see what improvements he could make to their quarters, which for some reason and despite his hunger he already felt reluctant to abandon. He’d make a more comfortable family bed with some fresh-cut grasses. Even though it might be difficult, he’d start a fire in the afternoon, as soon as it was safe to make a little smoke. He’d started fires without a spark stone when he was a boy. Why not now? He’d gather shoots and roots and find a way of sieving clean the drinking water in the trough. He’d find some way of preparing a meal as well. A feast, with meat. Surely he could trap a rabbit or a bird. Surely these salt marshes should boast some prairie chickens or quail. There was no shortage of netting to drape between bushes. He had all day. Even Margaret had caught a quail, that first frosty morning out of Ferrytown.

What Franklin did not have was bait. Although he visited his bush nets every so often during the morning, they remained empty, apart from a few hollow plant stems brought in by the breeze and some sticky yellow spume sent up from the ocean. He tried laying out some of the smoked fish, but not even the spring flies or the gulls seemed tempted by this leathery treat. Why would they be tempted when only a short flight away the sea and the shore were tumbling with food?

He walked with Jackie down to the beach and, once he had washed her, kicked about in the shallow water, much to her amusement, but there was nothing there that he could trust as edible. It all smelled bad: the weeds, the water and the sand, the shells, the battered lengths of drift, the pink-gray armored parts of animals that were not spiders exactly. He did not like the shore. It seemed ungenerous. Its music was funereal. It was a mystery.

He was glad to turn his back on it and return to the dune top and its fringe of slanting thickets, wedged by the wind. As a farmer, he could judge what kind of living such land could provide if – just if – he and Margaret and the girl were forced to make their futures there. He knew it was a foolish fantasy. But somehow he was more comforted by it, by this ill-sited version of the life he knew and understood, than by the growing prospect of the new world overseas and, more immediately, by the thought of swapping solid ground for a tossing deck.

He had heard too many tales about the treacheries of ocean travel for all of them to be as false as his hope that it would only take “all day” to cross: ships becalmed on windless plains of water with great birds circling, waiting for the passengers to die; ships swept forward by such determined winds that water slammed and crashed against the hulls until their timbers split and the ocean’s tongues had reached across the decks and snacked on all the voyagers; ships where captains, maddened by the noise and stench of life aboard, relinquished their command to rats the size of mules; ships where travelers who didn’t want to starve would have to dine on weeviled bread, share meat with maggots, and drink bilge wine. Then there were pirates, mutinies, and lightning storms to survive.

Even if he could persuade himself that paradise was at the far end of the sea, Franklin was no longer convinced that it was worth the journey. He looked more fondly on the land than he had done for months. Yes, land was something he could deal with. Even this brackish neighborhood. Remove the skin of sand and he’d find fertile earth. He was certain that he could coax a little corn from it, despite the salt and wind. He had the horses. He could make a plow. In time he’d have some chickens and a cow, a pair of goats. Milk, eggs, and meat to feed the family. He’d build a kitchen garden, protected from the wind by logs and fences, for pumpkins, turnips, sugar peas perhaps, some salad greens. And what they couldn’t eat, they’d sell or trade or butcher and smoke for winter. There was the little matter of the rustlers, but in this version of his life Franklin was like Jackson, victorious and strong. His captors came to take him and their horses back to their encampment. Franklin sent them packing with nothing but his fists, though not before he’d pulled Captain Chief from his saddle and stripped him of his clothes. Now Franklin stood among his fields and animals, his goatskin coat restored – his brother’s and his mother’s goatskin coat.

Something in this version of his future nagged at Franklin. Some words, some action. He went through it all again: the clearing of the land, his planting, the harvest, his confrontation with the riders. Now he had it. He’d been a fool not to think of it before! Butcher and smoke!That was the simple way – an all too obvious way, in fact; what had he been thinking of? – to provision some food both for the next few days and for their ocean journey if they had to make one. He almost laughed out loud. Margaret had promised that whatever happened, she would be back by nightfall; well, then, now Franklin could almost guarantee that she would come home to a proper welcome and a warm household, lit by flames from a grate and with fresh meat in the skillet. He could not start at once. He had to spend an age rocking Jackie on his shoulder, but just when his patience was almost at an end, she settled down, despite her hunger and her fear that Ma had disappeared for good.

Franklin went out to the horses and renewed their water and their hay. Margaret’s mare was a spare horse and not young. The fetlocks and the pasterns on her legs were worn. Her haunches were angular and unpromising. The bigger horse was younger, though. A three-or four-year-old gelding and almost plump around the girth. Its eyes and teeth were clear. And it seemed docile. It’d not prove difficult. Franklin led it to the lee end of the smokeshop and reined it to a high, protruding joist, so that its head was raised. It tried to drag away. It didn’t like the awkward and unnatural angle of its head, but tugging on the rein was even more uncomfortable, so it compensated by scuffing the ground with its hind legs.

Franklin left the horse to its devices for a while, not wanting to rush the animal and not wanting to rush himself either. He stood at the smokeshop door, looking up the coast in the direction in which the sailboat and Margaret had disappeared. He had to plan his work carefully. He felt immensely happy suddenly, certain that Margaret would return safely, certain that he would delight her with his welcome. This was something he was good at – tending a homestead, using tools, providing food for the table. It was the life that he’d been born to, and surely one that could not be bettered anywhere. The ocean did not seem truly promising to him, despite its grandeur and its relentless noise, which in many ways was more wearying for him than Jackie’s crying. He recognized it now for what it was, an obstacle and not a route to liberty. That was a shock, to realize that he did not truly want to leave America. His dream was not the future but the past. Some land, a cabin, and a family. A mother waiting on the stoop.

The horse had entirely settled now. It had turned sideways against the stone wall of the smokeshop by the time Franklin arrived with the fisherman’s toolbox, some rope, and a handful of spring-beauty roots. The horse took the roots from his palm almost before they were offered.

Franklin did not need to hobble the horse too tightly, just close enough to stop it kicking or moving away. The animal had been badly treated for most of its life and so had learned to be long-suffering. It did not struggle against the ropes, not even when its hind fetlocks were secured to the building so that it could not move away from the wall. It only nudged Franklin – successfully – for more roots.

Franklin removed the gutting knife from the toolbox and tested its sharpness on some reed grass. The knife was blunt and rusty, but it would have to do. He’d butchered animals before with blunter implements, though nothing quite as large and heavy as this poor creature. Jackson had always taken care of the family cattle. Franklin had been put in charge of goats and pigs and chickens. It was not a job he had relished, but he had enjoyed the meat that it produced and so had never made a fuss. He presumed there was some intimate procedure that was best for felling horses, but he had never been taught it. He would simply have to use the same method that he had employed for pigs, one determined cut to the jugular and then patience. At least it was easier to comfort and to quiet a horse. Pigs and goats were beyond comfort. They always recognized the smell of butchery. They always ran away from blades.

Franklin took off his shirt and, bare-chested, held the horse’s head in his arms and whispered to it, blowing in its ears, “There’s a boy. There’s a good, good boy. It’s not long now.” But he was hardly thinking of the horse. There was another animal that bothered him. Captain Chief would have a fit if he could see what was happening. One of his precious horses had been stolen and then slaughtered by a slave. Franklin could abandon any hope of mercy if he was ever caught and returned to the rustlers’ encampment. He could imagine Captain Chief swirling around him in Jackson’s overlong coat, ludicrous and dangerous. “You cooked our horse? You cut its throat and cooked our horse?” Franklin could not imagine what his punishment might be, though cooking seemed a possibility.

The horse’s skin was even tougher than he’d expected. The knife went in easily enough, but it was hard to drag the blade across the throat and find the busy vein. But luckily the horse threw back its head in shock and helped the progress of the knife. A stream of blood welled up and then a gush. Franklin stepped back at once, leaving the gutting knife protruding from the wound. His hands and forearms and the top of his chest were sticky with blood, but otherwise he had done his job quite cleanly. Now he only had to wait. And not for long, he hoped. The horse was suffering.

Franklin did not stay to watch the animal pumping its blood onto the wall of the smokeshop until, shocked and weakened, it fell against the stonework and slipped heavily to the ground. Instead he busied himself indoors, first making Jackie comfortable and then assembling whatever he could find to help with the cutting and the preparation of the meat. He had to leave no trace of any horse. Once he had stored the best meat, the carcass would need to be removed, no easy task.

The horse was just a little warm when Franklin cut into its flanks and upper thighs for the leanest meat. It was a laborious and messy task, and he returned often to the water trough to wash his face and clean the blood from his hands and arms. The horse’s smell was overpowering, but the rewards were plentiful. Soon he’d filled one fish basket with steaks and chops and cuts and a second with thin strips of rib meat and red sinew, suitable for making jerky. With some help, more time, and better tools, he could strip the whole horse down, bones and all. Back home, on the family stead, a butchered horse could provide everything from glue to a cudgel, but Franklin was in too great a hurry. There was much to do before Margaret’s return.

He tried to pull the carcass away from the smokeshop himself. Within a day or two it would smell and fill with maggots, flies, and rats. It would attract the foxes, wolves, and bears and draw attention to the cabins. But the horse’s carcass was too heavy still, despite the butchery. So, although it seemed in Franklin’s mind to offend the rules of good husbandry, he harnessed up the little mare and led her over to help drag her mate away with ropes passed through the exposed rib cage.

Together they labored over rising ground until they found a path into the thickest salt scrub in a shallow dip. Franklin did his best to hide the carcass, kicking sand over it and pulling dead leaves and wood onto it, but by the time he and the mare had returned to the row of cabins and Jackie’s cries, the gulls had arrived in their hundreds. They could be seen and heard from afar.