Текст книги "The Pesthouse"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

More unburned bodies were out in the tetherings, and even some stockades had escaped the fire untouched. The living beasts had feasted all the winter on the dead, and here there still were packs of feral dogs and one or two remaining turkey vultures tugging at the parchment skins and stiffened pelts of horses, mules, and donkeys, many with their skeletons still picketed to posts. Somewhere among them were the bones of Nash, the boy whose job it had been to guard the animals. Franklin thought of Jackson and his coat. Any hope he’d nourished that his brother had survived was now abandoned. No one who’d slept in Ferrytown could still be breathing air. But he hurried on toward the first slopes of the mountains, still hopeful in his heart. His mother might be waiting on her stoop. This year, possibly, or next, he would return himself to her. But first he had to find a roof under which he, Jackie, and Margaret could recuperate.

Soon they reached and passed through the thicket of junipers, laurels, and scrub oaks, which smelled sweet with spring. The last time they’d been there, the odors had been fungal and metallic. Now they could begin to climb their old acquaintance, Butter Hill.

The going up was easier than the coming down had been, for Franklin at least. On that fall day, Margaret had just evaded death’s damp grip and Franklin had had to carry her, despite his painful knee. Every step had been a punishment. Now he walked ahead with Jackie and the mare, relishing the gradient. Every pace away from Ferrytown, away from the ocean, closer to home, was a reward. He sang his way uphill, inventing words and tunes for Jackie but glad to let the girl justify his sudden happiness so soon after their encounters in the town. But Margaret was silent. She kept her distance, preferring her own company. She was thinking more about the only time she’d been up Butter Hill before. That time she’d been collapsed across a horse’s neck, weighed down by her blue scarf. (Whatever happened to that scarf? She’d lost so many things.) She’d been as heavy and inert as the net bag draped across this mare’s haunches. She half remembered having to give way to descending travelers, her grandpa’s voice excusing her, the midges feeding off the lesions on her face.

It was not until the afternoon, when finally the three of them crested the last rise on the path and looked across the flatter clearings of grass and highland reed toward the black-green woods and the high white peaks beyond, that she truly recognized the place. It hadn’t changed, despite the bare branches and the blanched-out colors of the undergrowth. It was still a little warmer than the hillside path, its dips and hollows protected from the worst of the wind. It still appeared the safest acre in America, a place of remedy and recovery where surely they could at least spend the night, or spend the month, or spend eternity

“So this is it?” she called out to her family in front. An exclamation and a question.

Franklin turned around and smiled at her, his oversized, boyish face and his shaven head reddened by the sun, not blushing. He laughed with happiness, his long arms flapping like a girl’s. He pointed to the forest. “Margaret,” he said.

And there it was, just as it was, the little soddy where she’d first met Franklin, the sun-dried turfs, the chimney stack, the boulder walls – the Pesthouse, where her eyes had almost closed for good.

Seventeen

Now good fortune showed its face to these four travelers, the man, the woman, the child, the horse, which had finally earned the name of Swim. The Pesthouse was not exactly as they’d left it. Franklin pulled aside the barricade of planks that served as a door, and after he had struck the lintel a few times with his stick to scare off any snakes, he stooped to look inside. There were no smoke fumes, for a start. The grate had not been used for months, evidently. Some of the hut’s turfs had collapsed inward. There was pellet evidence of mice and rats. He looked toward the sleeping bench, half expecting to see the ghostly form of Margaret lying there, the bald round head of someone very sick and beautiful. But what he saw, tucked between the bed and the wall, virtually hidden, was just as thrilling and unnerving. His heart missed several beats. Three lucky things inside a cedar box.

By evening they’d sorted out the place, made fresh bedding, started up a fire, dug in the reeds for water, found a little forage for the mare. There even was a stub of candle they could use, a stub of candle that they had left behind themselves. Margaret could sit with its light spread out across her lap and clean the tarnish from her silver necklace. She could revive the color in her finely woven piece of cloth by rubbing off the green-blue mold. She could acquaint herself again with coins from a past when Abraham sat on his great stone seat and the eagle spread its wings. She could not help thinking, too, about everything that she had lost: a family, a home, a length of hair, a green-and-orange woven top, a heavy scarf, a dream of living on a distant bank, a pot of mint that, if it had survived the Ark, if it had defied the cruelty, could not provide its aromatic leaves for her. Still, there was her Pigeon and her Jackie to take the place of everything. And there was Swim. What greater compensations could there be?

Franklin held on to her feet and watched her face, dancing and expressive in the candlelight. He loved her, yes. He loved her now without constraint. There was no urgency. He pushed his finger in between each toe. He rubbed her ankles and her heels. He felt the ridges of interrupted growth at the end of her toenails, evidence that she’d been ill and that her illness had almost grown out. Tomorrow he would find the gutting knife and pare the ridges off.

Margaret and Franklin spent a month inside the Pesthouse, waiting for their moment to arrive and letting a few of that year’s early emigrants pass by unhindered. Dreamers do not want advice. Nothing the pair of them could say would make a difference to determined travelers. Let them go down to the coast and find out for themselves. Let them see how pitiless the ocean was. They watched as emigrants constructed a new raft on rope pulleys, tied to rocks and scorched tree trunks, so they could haul themselves across, into the remnants and the debris. They looked down on the little empty town, knowing that the sight of it was punishing. Mostly, though, they turned their backs against the east. Margaret finally succeeded in drying her spy pipes by the fire. She could see clearly once again – the western woods, the western hills, the distances.

The spring advanced itself. The girl began to walk with sturdy legs and say her first words, Maand Paand Stop. The winter cold retreated, holding sway only at night. And thunderclouds came eastward, throwing shade across the lake at Ferrytown and delivering the rain that had been lifted from the plains and prairies, from the hopes and promises, from the thicknesses and substances that used to be America and would be theirs. The couple knew they only had to find their strength. And then – imagine it – they could begin the journey west again. They could. They could imagine striking out to claim a piece of long-abandoned land and making home in some old place, some territory begging to be used. Going westward, they would go free.

A Note About the Author

JIM CRACE is the author of eight previous novels. Being Deadwas shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize and won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantinewas named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Jim Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the GuardianFiction Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England.