Текст книги "The Pesthouse"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

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Two

The boulder hut on the far side of the bald, well out of danger’s way, too high for that night’s heavy vapors, was occupied by Margaret, the only shorn-headed person in the neighborhood. Red Margaret. Or the Apricot, as she was called by local men, attracted by her color – and her plumpness – in a land where nearly all the other heads were black, and then were gray or white. Her grandfather, as any parent would, had condemned her coppery tresses to the flames as soon as he had suspected that she was suffering from the flux. She’d vomited all day, she’d had diarrhea, she’d shivered like a snow fly but was hot and feverish to touch, she’d coughed as dryly as a jay, there were rashes on her face and arms, her neck was rigid and painful, and the onset of her problems had been cruelly swift, though not as swift as the news of her illness, which had raced around the houses as fast as sound – the sound of her mother weeping – and once again turned their compound of dwellings into a place to avoid. Once again, because only three months previously, in the high heat of the summer, her father had gone to bed healthy, sweet, a little overweight, red-haired, just as she had done the night before, and woken up soft, battered, and darkened. He’d died of flux, the first of seven townspeople to die and who knows how many unnameable travelers on their journeys to the boats who’d reached the far bank of the river and were out of sight and out of memory before they started shivering.

The flux was carried in and carried out by travelers, or by their goods, or by their animals, or in their bedding, or in their clothes. The illness was an intermittent visitor, unwelcome but well known. So what else could be afflicting Margaret except that selfsame flux, which must have hidden like a demon in their house since Pa had died, biding its time while choosing someone else’s bed to share? And what choice had they but to carry out the rules and protect Ferrytown from her?

Her grandpa, repeating what he’d already done too recently for his son, her father, had shaved her skull, removing all the ginger drama from her head with a shell razor, and then called the closest women in the family, two sisters and her ma, to take off Margaret’s body hair, snapping it down to the roots, the last of it wherever it might be – from her eyebrows and, most painfully, her lashes; from her nostrils, even; from her lightly ochered forearms and her legs; from elsewhere, the hidden hair – and massage her scalp with pine tallow until she was as shorn and shiny as a stone and smelling like a newly readied plank.

Everybody in the land must know what shaven baldness signified. No one could mistake her for a safe and healthy woman now. Not for some time. Not for a tress of time. She should not expect a welcome anywhere with that alarming head. But if she were that rarity, a sufferer who could defeat the flux, the regrowth of her hair, once it had reached her shoulders, anyway, would prove that she was truly safe again.

They burned her clippings on the outside fire, full thirty-one years of growth reduced in moments to a brittle tar. It smelled like a blacksmith’s shop, like horses’ hoofs, like carcasses, as you’d expect from such a pestilence. With any luck the venoms of the flux would now have been destroyed by fire and Margaret would survive her illness, as trees survive the winter if they shed their leaves. At least the flux could not be drawn back into her body through her hair now that she was almost bald. The signs were good, they told her, hoping to believe these baseless reassurances themselves. No bleeding yet, no body smell. Her father had bled from his mouth and nose. She’d be more fortunate than him. If there were any justice in the world, she’d have the good luck denied to Pa, her mother said.

But still, like him, she’d have to go up to the little boulder Pesthouse above the valley for ten days or so, unattended and unvisited, to see if she recovered or was lost. There was no choice but to be hard-hearted. If any of the travelers were ill, they were thrown out of town at once. No bed or sustenance for them. But if the victim was a Ferrytowner, the Pesthouse was the only option. Margaret would have to take the westward route up Butter Hill, against the tide of history.

The women had already rid themselves of wool and fur and dressed in their safest waxed clothes – garments that were too slickly fibered, they hoped, to harbor any pestilence. They chewed tobacco as protection. Nevertheless, they were unwilling to resist this final risk and their last chance, probably, to make their farewells. They kissed Margaret on her cheek. And the men shook hands with her. Then, when she had gone to pack her bag with her three things and her brother had been sent to prepare the horse, they all washed their fingertips and lips in vinegar. You don’t take chances with the flux.

Her grandpa led her on the horse up into the hills that same morning, three slow and ancient travelers, it would seem, the old man taking care with every step as if his bones were as fragile and as flaky as log ash, the woman slumped across the horse’s neck, too weak to sit straight, the mare itself so displeased with the unresponsive weight and the loose stones on the butter-churning climb that it stopped and tried to turn whenever the leash was slackened.

Margaret had never been into the hills before. There’d been no need. It was unwise, and indeed against the community conventions, for a local woman to go beyond the palisades unless she was unwell. Time was too precious for useful bodies to wander aimlessly in the neighborhoods. Margaret, like all the other women without husbands or children, was kept busy helping out in the guesthouse, where there were nearly always more than a hundred meals to serve each evening and beds and breakfasts to make next day.

Her grandpa hadn’t been up into the hills very often either. Until the ascent with his ailing son three months previously, he hadn’t been up to the summit of Butter Hill in many years, not since the travelers, drawn to the river’s shallow crossing, had made his town rich. All the more ambitious huntsmen and fishermen had turned to making their fortunes out of farming for the table, ferrying, hospitality, and charging everyone for doing anything: crossing charges, passage fees, stabling costs, piloting, provisioning, protection tax, and levies just for wanting to go east.

It was astonishing how wealthy a little hospitality could make the locals. This fertile valley, of which it used to be boasted that you had only to flick a booger on the ground for a mushroom to grow overnight, was now fertile in even less demanding ways: stretch a rope across the road and travelers would pay you with their jewelry, their cloth, their inheritances just to be allowed to jump over it; toss a rag across a log, call it a bed, and they’d be lining up to sleep in it; shake a chicken’s feather at a pot of boiling water and you could make your fortune out of soup.

The only problem was that travelers bring problems of their own and ones beyond control. Stockades and palisades could keep marauders at bay. The lockup beyond the tetherings with its no-bed and its no-light could hold and quiet down the troublemakers and those who couldn’t settle bills in this stay-and-pay-or-on-your-way community. But illnesses, like bats and birds, were visible only too late, when the damage had been done. The toughest maladies have wings. There are no fees or charges high enough to deter the flux; no palisade is that tall.

. .

It was, as usual, busy on the road. Margaret and her grandpa stepped aside and hid from every descending emigrant they passed, every string of horses, every cart or barrow, every band of hopefuls that made its way downhill.

Her head was covered in a heavy blue scarf, so her shorn white scalp was out of sight. That would not draw any comment from strangers. Even at that time of the year, all travelers with any sense would protect themselves against the sun and midges with hats, headscarves, veils, or hair. The sun occasions modesty. It disapproves of flesh. But Margaret’s face, if shown, would certainly betray the dangerous and appalling truth. What little of her skin wasn’t raised and scarlet with rashes was gray with exhaustion.

It was uncomfortable – unbearable – to wear the heavy scarf around her hot and nagging head. She tried to lift it, push it back and off. But she could not allow herself to be seen, her grandpa told her – it would be too damaging for business if word got out that even just one person in the valley had the symptoms of the flux. A hundred meals, a hundred beds, would go to waste each day. Nobody would dare to spend the night with them. “Turn your head, Mags, if you can,” he instructed her. “Pull your scarf across your face, let them mistake you for…” He couldn’t think that she resembled anything, except a woman at death’s door riding in the wrong direction with her back turned to the sea. He did his best to hide her from the stares and even from the necessary greetings. He pulled the horse into the thickets whenever he heard voices coming or the sound of carts and bridle bells. He made her duck into impasses of rock until the path was clear. And if anybody happened to get close to them or called wanting directions or news, he answered for the two of them, trying not to draw attention to himself by being either too unfriendly or too welcoming. If anybody asked, he’d claim his granddaughter was simple, not bright enough to speak. “Best let her float in her own company,” he’d say.

So Margaret and her grandpa took half a day to reach the nearest woody swaggings in the sash of hills, where the rocky scrubland of the ascent relaxed into softer meadows and clearings of grass and highland reed, before the darkness of the woods and the distant, snowcapped mountain pates. The view was wasted on them. They hardly bothered to look back. The old man had to get home, while Margaret wanted nothing more than to sleep. She’d rather die than undertake another climb like that. So for her, the first sight of the Pesthouse at the edge of the hunter’s bald was a relief.

Unlike the tree-trunk barns and cabins in the valley, the hillside hut had not been built for comfort. It was at core a woodsman’s soddy, constructed out of sun-dried turfs, fireproof and wind-protected, much loved by mice, but easily collapsed. Indeed, it had collapsed from time to time, in those far regretted days when it had had little use, but since that healthy time, that time of remedies and cures, the Pesthouse had been strengthened by an outer wall of boulders, dry-built and sturdy. There was a sleeping bench inside, a hearth and chimney stack, a leather bucket and some pots.

Margaret hid in the undergrowth to empty her bowels – no blood, good luck – and then collapsed into the grass while her grandpa set to work. He swept out the soddy with snapped pine brooms, beat the stones with sticks in case any snakes had taken up residence, and set the fire in the stone grate with kindling and a striking stone. Provisions and a water bag were hung from roof branches above the fire, where they’d be marinated in wood fume and safe from little teeth. He gathered bracken and country corn for Margaret’s bed. She rested her three lucky things – a silver necklace that was old enough to have been machined; a square of patterned, faded cloth too finely woven to have been the work of human hands; some coins from the best-forgotten days, all inside a cedar box on her chest – and lay down on the bed, with Grandpa’s help. He placed an unfired pot of cough syrup made from onions mashed in sugar on the floor at the side of her bed: “Watch out for ants, Mags.” He touched her forehead with his thumb, a finger kiss. “I’m ashamed to leave you here. I hope it grows. Thick and long.” He wiped his hands again on a vinegary rag, then he and the horse were gone and she was sleeping.

When she woke, somewhat revived, it was already evening. The trees were menacing – they wheezed and cracked. Bats feasted on the early moths. The undergrowth was busy with its residents, and Margaret, Red Margaret, the Apricot, the drained and fragile woman in the hills, that applicant for unexpected death, felt shocked and lost, bewildered and unloved. Why had she been singled out? Why had the archer released his arrow into her? Such misfortune was too much to face alone – the pestilence, the pain, the degradation, and the restless meanness of the night, which she must spend on her own father’s deathbed, breathing his last air. She coughed, a friendless cough, and had to listen to the trunks and branches coughing back, like wolves, too much like wolves for her to dare to sleep again. She’d never feared trees before. In daylight, trees had let her pass, ignored her almost, pretended not to notice her. But now that the moon was up, the forest seemed to be alert and mischievous.

The Pesthouse occupant took comfort from her talismans that night. She passed the necklace through her fingers, recognizing and remembering the contours of each engraved link; she rubbed and stroked her piece of cloth; she smelled the cedar in the little box. Finally she weighed the coins in her hands, the pennies and dimes and quarters that she had found among the pebbles on the river beach. She fingered all the images in the dark and tried to recognize the heads of people from the past, mostly short-haired men, one with a beard, “In God We Trust,” one with a thickish ponytail bouncing on his neck, one heavy-chinned and satisfied. Was that the eagle she could feel? Where were the leafy sprigs and flaming torch? Was that the one-cent palace with the twelve great columns at the front? She dragged her nail across the disk to count every column and tried to find the tiny seated floating man within, the floating man who, storytellers said, was Abraham and would come back to help America one day with his enormous promises.

Three

Franklin had not expected so much rain. Anyone could tell from how brittle the landscape was that, in these parts at least, it had scarcely rained all season, and what clouds there’d been that day had been horizon clouds, passersby, or overtakers, actually, for they were heading eastward, too – but hardly any time had gone before the last light of the day threw out its washing water, splashing it as heavily as grit on the brittle undergrowth and setting free its long-stored smells, part hope and part decay. The rain was unforgiving in its weight. It meant to stay and do some damage and some good in equal parts. It meant to be noticed. It meant to run downhill until it found a river and then downstream until it found a sea. “If you’re looking for the sailing boats, just follow the fallen rain” was the universal advice for inexperienced travelers.

Franklin couldn’t sleep through this. He couldn’t even sit out such a downpour. He’d have to find some better shelter. He shook out the leaves from his bedding, wrapped the two already damp tarps around himself, and limped as best he could onto a rocky knoll from which he could peer into the darkness and through the rain from a greater height. He hadn’t noticed any caves or overhanging cliffs or any forest thick and broad-leafed enough to offer hope of staying dry for very long. This was the kind of rain that wouldn’t rest until its job was done.

Now Franklin considered the little boulder hut on the fringe of the clearing, with its gray scarf of smoke. It was the sort of place where inexperienced or incautious robbers might make their den, well positioned for picking off stragglers even though anyone with any sense would give it a wide berth. But Franklin would take the risk – despite Jackson’s warnings, but also because of his brother’s stinging accusation earlier that day that “only the crazy make it to the coast”—and see if he could bargain any shelter there. He’d lost his bearings in the storm and in the darkness, though, and couldn’t quite remember where he’d seen the hut. On the forest edge, for sure, but where exactly, how far off? What residue of light remained was not enough to spot its chimney. He sniffed for wood smoke but sniffed up only rain. He’d have to stumble in the dark and trust to luck, and still take good care not to wake any hostile residents, though the chances were it was just a woodsman’s cabin or some hermitage, a no-choice place to rest his knee and stay dry for the night.

No matter where he stumbled, he could not see the outline of a roof, as he had hoped, or any light, but he was old enough to know where anyone would build a hut if there was free choice. Not entirely under trees, for a start, and not in earthy shallows where bogs might form. But half in, half out. Not too exposed to wind or passersby. But looking south and on flat ground, preferably face on to a clearing.

It was her coughing that led him to her, finally – the hacking, treble cough of foxes, but hardly wild enough for foxes. A woman’s cough. So now Franklin knew the place, and where it stood in relation to the far too open spot where he had rolled his cocoon. He took his bearings from the coughing, waiting for it to break out, then subside, and then break out again, and from the heavy outlines of the woodlands and the hillside. He shuffled through the soaking grasses, taking care not to snap any sticks, listening for beasts below the clatter of the storm, until he could hear the telltale percussion of the rain striking something harder and less giving than the natural world, something flat and man-made. And now indeed he could hear and see the black roofline of a hut and a chimney stack. Then, between the timbers of its door – but for a moment only – he caught the reassuring and alarming flicker of a candle flame, just lit from the grate. He knew exactly what that meant: whoever was inside had heard him creeping up. They had been warned and would be ready.

Franklin hung his back sack on a branch, pulled off his tarps, and took out his knife, its blade still smelling of the meadow onions they had found and eaten raw earlier that day. The lighted candle meant that the occupant (or occupants) was nervous, too. So he grew more confident. Now he made as much noise as he could, trying to sound large and capable. He called out, “Shelter from the rain?” and then when there was silence, “I’m joining you if you’ll allow.” And finally, “No cause for fear, I promise you,” though he was more than a little fearful himself when there were no replies. The boulder hut was big enough to house a gang of men in addition to the coughing woman, all armed, all dangerous. A man with a knife, no matter how tall he was, could not defend himself in the dark against missiles, or long pikes, or several men with cudgels. He tried again: “I’m a friend. Just say that you’ll welcome me out of the storm, or I’ll step away.” A test of hospitality. Some coughing now, as if the cougher had to find a voice from far away, and then, “Come only to the door. Don’t open it.” The woman’s voice. A youngish voice. Already he was blushing.

For a door, the hut had little more than a barricade of rough pine planks. Franklin said, “I’m here.” He peered between the planks and could just make out the dark form of one person, resting on one elbow in a bed, backlit by a wood fire in a grate. Nothing to be frightened of. Nothing physical, at least. Some traveler, perhaps, who just like him was suffering from knees and needed shelter for a while. “I’m going to drown unless I come inside,” he said. She coughed at him. No Stay away, no Come.

Franklin pulled the door aside with his left hand, resting his right hand, with the knife, on the low lintel at his chin height. She held her candle out to get a better look at him, and in its sudden guttering of light they saw each other for the first time. Red Margaret was startled first by the size of him, two times the weight and size of her grandpa, she thought, and then by what she took to be a face of honesty, not quite a handsome face, not quite a beauty boy, but narrow, healthy, promising, a face to rescue her from fear if only he would dare. Franklin saw the bald, round head of someone very sick and beautiful. A shaven head was unambiguous. It meant the woman and the hut were dangerous. He stepped back and turned his head away to breathe the safer, rain-soaked air. He was no longer visible to her. The door frame reached only his throat. He put the door back into place and reconciled himself to getting very wet and cold that night. “A pesthouse, then,” he said out loud, to show – politely – that he understood and that his curtailed friendliness was sensible. Too late to call his brother back, though calling out for Jackson was Franklin’s first instinct, because if there was disease in the Pesthouse, there could well be disease down there, among the inhabitants of Ferrytown.

Now the woman was coughing once again. Her little hut was full of smoke, he’d noticed. And her lungs, no doubt, were heavy with pestilence, too. Dragging his tarps behind him, he crashed his way back through the clearing and undergrowth into the thickest of the trees, where the canopy would be his shelter. He had been cowardly, he knew. He had been sensible. Only a fool would socialize with death just to stay warm and dry for the night. He found a partly protected spot among the scrub oaks just at the top of Butter Hill, where he could erect a makeshift tent from his stretched tarps and protect himself a little. His decision to stay up in the hills to rest had clearly been a foolish one. Jackson had been right, as usual. A crazier, more reckless man would have faced the risks of pressing on, injury defied, and enjoyed the benefits of a warm bed, surely better for a limping emigrant than sharing a stormy night with bald disease, no matter how eye-catching it might be.

Franklin’s knee had worsened in the rain and during his latest stumbles through the sodden undergrowth. Its throbbing tormented him. It almost ached out loud, the nagging of a roosting dove: Can’t cook, cook, cook. Even when, in the early quarters of the night, the storm had passed and the moon, the stars, and the silver lake had reappeared, he could not sleep. Her face was haunting him, her face in candlelight (that celebrated flatterer) and the shorn scalp. He might have touched himself with her in mind, despite his pain, had not the valley raised its voice above the grumbling of his knee and the hastened beating of his newly captured heart. The dripping music of the woods was joined by lowland drums. There was the thud and clatter of slipping land, a sound he could not comprehend or recognize – he knew only that it was bad – and then the stony gust, the rumbling, the lesser set of sounds than thunder that agitated the younger horses and the ever-childish mules out in the safety of the tetherings.

On Butter Hill, above the river crossing where west was granted access to the east, Franklin Lopez sat alarmed, entirely unasleep, in his wet tarps, the only living witness when the silver pendant shook and blistered – a pot, a lake, coming to the boil.