Текст книги "The Pesthouse"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Thirst and hunger seemed unlikely, and anyway, in this relatively undamaged land, more forested and fertile than the country he had fled, only the sick and lazy could easily starve. He was well equipped to find their dinner if there was any dinner to be had. He was a farm boy, after all, even though he had mostly been an unenthusiastic one. He knew what was welcome in a pot and what was poisonous; he knew which parts of plants were tasty in the fall and which were fibrous and troubling. He knew his mushrooms pretty well.

Again he made a list. What had they got to help them eat? They had a good-sized weighted net to fish with. (He even had the fisherman’s wading boots to make the task a dry one.) He had a bow and good arrows should they chance upon deer, game birds, or rock goats. There was enough rope somewhere on the barrow, under Margaret’s body, to make lassos or trip-snares. Anything they caught or trapped could be butchered and prepared with his two knives. And anything they cooked and ate would have the garnish of some fine fresh mint.

He could imagine it, the two of them, their faces warm above a fire, their backs defended from the cold by Margaret’s blankets, dining on some venison he’d caught and butchered. And then, when they retired to sleep, they’d have the barrow as their raised cot, too high for dew to bother them as they held hands beneath the tarps, their bodies separated only by the necklace at her throat.

“We have enough,” he told himself out loud as he proceeded on an easy but narrowing path into the woodlands on the high bank of the river. Soon they’d be across and they could rest. His dream became more complicated and more comfortable, more settled, oddly. No huddling round a makeshift fire, no venison, no cold night air, no boat barrow. Instead there was a clearing in the trees, a little soddy built of boulders and wood and earth, a narrow bed, and just the two of them, asleep, a curl of smoke from their shared hearth, his fingers wrapped around her toes.

The light was weakening when they reached the bluffs where the falling torrent from the lake had etched a deep, unclimbable gulch into the hillside. They could go no farther on this bank of the river. Franklin, not wanting to wake Margaret before he’d delivered her to a safe place, left her sleeping in the barrow while he went in search of access to the bridge. From lower down the path he’d spotted its slatted wooden sides swaying high above the water. A fall from it would be fatal. But once he’d reached its level, the bridge seemed to have disappeared. He had to clear away some wood and debris from the deep undergrowth and pull aside a screen of branches. It could not have had much use in recent months.

Thankfully, the bridge was wide enough for the two wheels of the barrow, and it seemed firm, too, despite the swaying. A little weight would steady it. The crossing actually was easier than he had feared. The planking of the bridge was smooth, and sagged slightly downward toward a lower mooring on the far bank. Franklin had to concentrate only on keeping a good line with the leading tip of the barrow and trying not to let himself or his load tilt to the side. He was not fond of heights. He’d never been a boy for conquering trees or swinging out on ropes. He counted heartbeats as they went across, taking one step for every other beat, and hadn’t reached a hundred before he was able to bump his load over the last impediment, a strut of raised wood, and put his feet and the barrow wheels on solid ground. His first step in the east. He should have felt proud of himself. Triumphant. Mightily relieved. He should have felt brave. But he did not. Rather, now that he no longer needed to be determined, he counted himself weak, dishonest, craven, and troubled by disloyalty.

Something had happened that he did not truly understand. Not the slaughter in the village – he’d never have an explanation for that, except what he had always known, that life hangs on a spongy spider’s thread that can stretch only so far but then is bound to snap. Not his own unexpected secrecy about the bridge, his failure to inform the other travelers. Not even the likelihood that, even if Jackson had managed to survive, he would never take another step at his brother’s side, or slip his long arms into the sleeves of his own goat coat. No, what troubled Franklin from the moment he reached the east side of the bridge was the fear that he had made a big mistake, that where he truly should be traveling was westward, back to the family hearth, back to Mother waiting at the center of abandoned fields. If instead of taking the path eastward down Butter Hill that morning, he and Margaret had fled westward, heading back to his mother’s house, then his brother – and all the people of Ferrytown – could be alive in their imaginations, at least. They could forward him by their best hopes to the coast and then propel him by wishful thinking (quite a gusty friend) toward the new lands over there. If Franklin still hoped to be a true and dutiful son, he should take Margaret back home with him to introduce her to his ma, to have those ancient hands touch his and hers and give their blessing. A mother could expect no less. How had they ever left her there?

Franklin looked back along the woodwork of the bridge. For the moment, it seemed to him that crossing the river had been an act of abandonment. Certainly he was not able to contemplate his own journey eastward anymore with much degree of hope or self-respect. But equally he recognized the nonnegotiable truth. Going home was not an option. It’s fearful men who go back home to be with Ma. Only the crazy make it to the coast.

Franklin shook himself. So he’d be crazy then. He’d force himself to be. He’d not allow himself to fail. He had – again – to do the mean and foolish thing. Not out of spite, more spite, toward the other travelers. What did it matter to him whether their journey to the coast was easy or hard? Not simply to protect the safe side of the river from the burning one and keep the flames from skipping across the bridge like imps. He meant to cut himself off from his own timidity.

He took the sharper of his two knives and went back to the bridge. It was slung across the river and tethered only, on the eastern side at least, to several sturdy tree trunks. It would not be a complicated task to cut it loose. The mooring ropes were thick and greasy, toughened by the weather, but they responded to his blade, each strand and ligament springing back as Franklin severed its tension. The whole bridge slumped to one side when he had entirely cut through the first rope. Anyone crossing it would have been tipped into the water far below. The second rope was easier and springier, as the weight on it had doubled. Soon the secret bridge was freed from its eastern shorings. With a little help from Franklin’s powerful shoulders, it slithered and bounced down the rocky bluff above the river, breaking up a little as it fell and then finally settling in the water.

There was no longer a secret bridge from Ferrytown. There was instead a steep, timbered slide into the river on the western side of its coulee. A dangling trail of timber. But not even that for long. The racing waters began to tug on the severed end of the bridge, smashing the planks against the rocks. Within a month, much of the debris would be swept away.

“We have enough,” Franklin said aloud again. He was thrilled and appalled by what he’d done, in equal measure. But he did not want to examine his feelings too deeply. He’d have to put his doubts behind him and concentrate only on the journey. There was a job to be done: to find a safe place in the forest or beyond where they could pass the night. He had to make the most of what little light remained. Once more he put his weight behind the barrow with its obliging, well-oiled wheels and made good their escape from Ferrytown by climbing up through sunshine along the river bluff until he reached the eastern shoreline of the lake, the silver pendant that he’d only glimpsed before from Butter Hill. He’d never seen a spot more beautiful.

Eight

This was no place for a barrow, especially such a heavy one with a fragile human cargo. A sledge would have been better: a sledge loves mud. Or even a rowboat, though preferably one with oars – and an oarsman – tough enough to scull through mud and leaves.

The downpours that only three nights previously had shaken the vapors out of Ferrytown lake might have dried out in the open country around the settlements and on sloping ground. But on the east bank of the river, where the water table was high, the going was wet. The flat forest paths beyond the wooden bridge and the lakeside were still drenched and swollen. Here, away from the thin, rolling soil of the mountain passes and the well-drained scrubland of stocky junipers and tangled laurels that labored for existence on the lower slopes, rain could not drain easily or quickly. Where could it go? It had to settle in and spread itself and deepen.

These wet, silt-rich forests, a mixture of chestnuts, marsh oaks, maples, and hickories, which at this time of the year were exchanging green for oranges and reds, were distended with water and therefore so fertile and tightly undergrowthed in places that not even a mule could pass. What might look from a distance like startled outstretched hands were antlers of pink lichen, a breathtaking and magical sight, especially in this dusk, with the sun finding angles through the hammock to pick out strips of foliage and blaze its reflection in puddles. Even this late in the day and this late in the year, the sun’s heat was strong enough to coax a gauzy vapor from the forest floor.

Margaret was still too exhausted and unwell to pay attention to her grief, let alone to notice the beauty all around. And Franklin, after all his efforts, hardly had the strength to lift his head from his hard work and waste himself on leaves. The barrow, with its two thickly rimmed wheels and hefty, shallow-sided deck, had been designed only to transport skiffs the hundred paces between the boathouse and the fishing jetty. And it was meant, too, to be managed by two men, not one. It certainly was not intended to be both an emigrant wagon and a transport for the sick, especially in soil so soft and giving that Franklin feared that if he stopped pushing for only an instant the ground beneath would swallow the barrow whole, and Margaret with it, but if he continued pushing he’d only be plowing furrows, deep enough to plant potatoes. The countryside appeared to him, in fact, not in the least beautiful. He was more used to the wide-lit, open country of the plains. Such a crowded mass of trees did not seem natural. It did seem sinister. Here was just another challenge to be braved.

His knee had noticeably improved. It shifted in its socket once in a while. But it was much less painful. And it was hardly swollen. Nevertheless, every step Franklin took still seemed burdened not only by the weight of his own body and the lesser weight of Margaret and their possessions but also by the load of sorrow that finally began to take its toll on him. He had been too shocked and overcome by disbelief when he’d first observed the many dead. Then he’d been too busy in Ferrytown itself to feel much more than numb docility. But here, now that he was rid of Ferrytown and the sight of any corpses, the grief was overwhelming. Brother. Ma. He bore the weight and pushed against the water and the mud. He also wept. Just tears, no sobbing, no heaving chest. He felt as inundated as the landscape he was pushing through. The tears leached from his eyes, drawn out by gravity alone, it seemed.

Franklin could not tell if Margaret was watching him. Her eyes seemed wet as well, and hardly shut. He knew he ought to care if he was being observed by a woman, but he did not.

“I’m unhappy for my brother,” he explained to the body in the barrow. He could not use the word crying, although he was certain now that Margaret had been watching him. Such feebleness as his could never pass unwitnessed.

Jackson would have been appalled, especially as this display of weakness and emotion was partly in his name. His death or disappearance had occasioned some of the tears. No, Jackson would have said that weeping was undignified and cowardly. It showed a lack of self-respect.

When he’d been small and keen to keep up with his brother, Franklin had submitted himself to all the usual boyish rituals: allowing himself to be cut to bond a friendship with blood, submitting to being marked on the forearm with a smoldering twig, letting the dogs take meat scraps from his lips, handling ill-tempered snakes. Risks without purpose, he had thought. But Jackson and his comrades, quick to intimidate the smaller – well, the younger – boy, had always warned him against refusing or admitting pain, or flinching. “Be calm and silent. Be undismayed,” they’d said, the last word being one they’d heard the adult men use approvingly. Dismay was something for the girls. If you could cause dismay in girls, then that was satisfying. But Franklin could not be calm and silent in the face of dogs and twigs and snakes and knives. He could not bully girls. And certainly he was never undismayed. He had let Jackson down too often. He had always been dangerously close to tears. He still had the all-too-minor burn marks on his arm to remind himself of that.

Margaret, in fact, had hardly paid any attention to Franklin or anything he’d said since the middle of the afternoon. She was recovering in sleep. She would not even remember crossing to the east bank of the river. She had not heard the crashing and the splintering of the bridge. The boat barrow had been too safe, and nearly comfortable. Franklin’s hand was steady, his voice was soothing, and consciousness was hardly bearable, so she had clung to sleep. She could not say exactly what her dream had been, but this was certain: when she woke, the bridge and village were far behind and marked only by distant plumes of smoke. Her head was full of animals and frights and characters: three beds confused (the one at home, now ash; the Pesthouse bunk; the barrow, bucking like a ship, her feet caressed, her scalp torn free of hair by devils with wooden hands, the smell of death and vinegar); two bearded men (that Abraham, and that other, younger one but just as tall, her toes pressed into him); two birds (one pigeon burdened by the weight of plague, tumbling with its failing wings to crash among the sleepers at the foot of Butter Hill, and one of her neighbor’s doves, its neck broken and black blood crusting on its beak).

But now that she had slept enough, Margaret could hear Franklin’s voice, driving her beds and men and birds away. His word unhappy—“I’m unhappy for my brother”—had woken her.

Her eyes were open slightly more, he noticed at once. Her chin was pointing at him attentively, and so he raised his voice a little. “If he was here, if he was still alive – he mightbe still alive – he’d tell us what we need to do. He’d know the way.” She almost seemed to move and nod. “And you’re unhappy for your whole family. More unhappy than I could ever be. For just one brother. I still have a little hope. I understand.”

He saw now that he, or at any rate the mention of her family, now not whole at all, had made her cry. Full tears. Her cheeks were red and wet, and he felt better – no, relieved—for seeing them. Women are fortunate, he told himself. They are allowed to weep. They are encouraged to. That was how the duties of the world had been assigned. Crying for the women. Spitting for the men. Jackson could spit a fire out if he wanted to. “My brother wasn’t frightened of anything,” he added under his breath. A curse almost.

That aunt, the aunt who had strapped the healing pigeon to Franklin’s feet when he was a sick boy, had not been very fond of Jackson and had judged his fearlessness to be infantile and foolish. “Your brother’s like a child, to be afraid of nothing,” she’d said, when Jackson was already bearded. Franklin had felt both ashamed and validated to hear her speak so disloyally. “If his bed was on fire, he’d rather sleep with flames than run for water. Like a fool. If there was plague in the house, he’d rather die than cover his nose.” Franklin almost smiled to think of it. She’d been the perfect aunt for any nervous boy, because she had considered determination and bravery dishonest. (Although when she herself had died, among the thousands during the Grand Contagion when Franklin was just starting on a beard of his own, she’d departed without a murmur of complaint, indifferent to death’s indifference.)

These moments with his wise, dead aunt brought Franklin’s weeping to an end. Wishing her or Jackson back on earth again, wanting to return to Ma, fearing the future, would not solve anything. Regret would not reveal a route ahead, and fighting for his manly dignity would not help. Dignity does not provide a supper. But he would at least attempt to remain undismayed for once. He had to find the confidence to deal with their immediate problems. If he wanted to survive himself and also take good care of Margaret, like a neighbor, like a suitor, he would have to toughen up and sharpen up.

First he’d need to understand the territory, to remember how to find his bearings from the polestar and the sun without his brother’s help. And when the sun or stars were hidden by clouds or mist, he’d have to read direction from winds and birds and lichen. Only then could they decide a route that might take them to the drinking places and the beds and the supplies of food and forage for travelers. What sort of welcome would they get now that they were among not their own people but “the others,” who might consider that they had no right to water or to go in peace or even to be alive? That they’d find out as they went along.

Franklin listened to the forest more intently now. He needed its advice. He felt lighter, weaker suddenly, less able to manage the barrow and its cargo. He had to stop and rest. It was almost too dark to go on anyway. He had already given up any hope of reaching a welcoming community with beds for hire for that night. They were still too deep in the woods. Besides, there could be no welcome for a woman as ill as Margaret would still seem to be to any strangers. He had held out a little hope, however, that there could well be a trapper’s habitation among the trees where they might bargain the use of a shed or beg hot food. Or an unused night shelter, possibly. Or a woodsman’s abandoned soddy, where they could be as snug as they had been inside the Pesthouse what seemed an age ago. He worried that Margaret might not survive a night without some shelter or some heat, even with the barrow as their bed. And he could not imagine lighting a fire for her or constructing a dry, roofed refuge in such deep mud.

In the end – the end of that day’s light – they had little choice but to spend the night out in the open. There would be no habitations for a day at least, and Franklin was too tired to take another step. He did as much as he knew how. He let the barrow stand in open ground in water only ankle-deep and as far from falling leaves and timber as was possible in such a busy wood. He gathered up their bulkier possessions – the clothes, the cattle skins, the coil of rope, the weighted fishing net – and made a pillow out of them at the head of the barrow. He stowed the valuables and the food, such as it was, in his own back sack and hung it from a branch that he hoped would prove inaccessible to animals. He suspended the water bags, too, and the flagons of juice.

Now there was room on the barrow for the making of a double bed, with a blanket, the second tarp, and his brother’s goatskin coat as the coverings. Finally Franklin placed the pot of kitchen mint at the end of their bedding, just beyond the reach of her feet. He climbed in next to Margaret, his two knives at his side, the hunting bow and arrows within reach. He stretched out, fully clothed, trying not to miss his supper or feel the unexpected cold, as all too quickly the forest yielded to the darkness that it loves.

Margaret was asleep again but breathing evenly. He joined her without difficulty. The day was failing, and there was nothing else to do. Either sleep or lie awake and shiver. He should not complain that Sister Sun had denied him candles and warmth for this night when she had already provided so much daylight for free, and so much fine, unseasonable heat. And there they slept, back to back, the pale-faced shaven woman and the younger man, in their great wooden wheeled bed, between the canopies of trees, like children in a fairy tale, almost floating, almost out to sea. So, finally, some happiness.

A cold night had burdened the trees in frost, the season’s first, and stiffened the standing water and the pools of mud with a glazing of ice. The couple had slept well. Margaret was the first to stir. She woke alarmed. All she remembered at first was that everything was either dead or up in flames. She could not remember what had happened the previous afternoon, after Ferrytown, or how they’d ended up enveloped by such unexpected woodland. It took her a moment to focus her eyes, as usual. The distance always looked as if it needed a wipe, and she had trouble telling faces from afar. But she could soon see and appreciate what Franklin had set up for them the night before: the clearing in the wood, the barrow as a bed, the tarps and coat that kept them warm, the familiar pot of herbs, still flourishing in spite of everything, at her feet. She sniffed the frosty air. Her nostrils were clear. Her body seemed to ache a little less. Her hands and throat were reassuringly cold.

There was a moment of unease, or at least apprehension, when she saw Franklin at her side, in bed with her to all intents and purposes. She’d never even been kissed by a man other than a relation. Until a few days previously, when Franklin had massaged her feet, she had hardly been touched by one. She understood that these were pressured times when conventions and proprieties didn’t count for much. She felt as well that Franklin was most likely a man to trust. His laugh – how it shook his whole body down to his knees and fingertips, rather than simply creasing his face, how it seemed to loosen him and soften him – was attractive and unexpectedly womanly. She had seen him weeping, too, the day before, and that had been heartening in ways she could not begin to understand. He was a decent boy, she thought. A little nervous, possibly, and kinder and gentler than his size might suggest. She probably owed her life to him. He had become her plague-removing pigeon in her imagination. And she allowed that she might owe her future life to him. But these were only daydreams and too comforting. For the moment, at least, she needed to be tougher, to chasten herself as coldly and as bluntly as she could and to acknowledge how grave her situation was, Franklin or no Franklin. Ferrytown was history. Her family were ancestors. Her home was ash. Any chance she had was in the east, beyond the ocean. Most of her countrymen and countrywomen had already realized that. Her journey there had already begun. That was clear, and nonnegotiable. She’d have to make the best of it.

Margaret pulled on her sandals and swung her legs over the side of the barrow. She ought to test her strength, she had decided, before her fellow woke. The trees were noisy with a rising wind and the susurrus of leaf fall. The ground was soft and reluctant to bear her weight, but she succeeded in taking a dozen steps around the barrow, touching anything she recognized. The pot of mint was heartening. She was relieved by how strong she felt: not strong enough to walk a great distance, perhaps, but sufficiently robust to busy herself around the clearing, checking what provisions they had got, what clothes he’d brought for her, what food and drink there was. There was no sign of her cedar box with its three talismans. Franklin had put it somewhere safe, no doubt. She was surprised only to find the platters and the silver wedding cup, touched to see that he had packed a comb and brush for her, and glad to discover the flagons of juice. This was juice that she had squeezed herself from apples and berries.

By the time she’d drunk more than her share from one of the flagons – her thirst was still not satisfied – Franklin was awake and sitting up in their shared bed just watching her.

“I’ve decided,” she said, resolving as she spoke that she would, at the very least, take him as a brother.

“Decided what?”

“Decided that I’ll call you Pigeon. That’s my name for you. Franklin sounds too dignified.”

“You think that I’m not dignified?”

“Not with that limp. How is your knee today?”

“It’s better than it was…”

“And I’m better than I was as well, so then…you see?”

“So then, what should we do?”

“We eat, of course. You have a bow. Shoot something for our breakfast. Suddenly I’m starving.”

While Franklin was out of sight in the forest, though hardly silent, Margaret stretched their coil of rope between two trees and hung the net from it. She would fish for birds and with any luck would have food already cooked when he returned. His catch could be their supper. She found the spark stone and the pouch of tinder, but there was nowhere dry enough on the ground for her to start a fire. So she emptied the mint plant from its pot, that doorstep friend from her old home, and replanted it in the heavy silver cup, which had been a showpiece heirloom in her family for a hundred years and more but never used before. Now the plant had to be the best-appointed mint in America. She firmed it in with extra, muddy soil around its tangle of stringy roots, then smelled her hands. That made her even hungrier.

The empty plant pot was big and strong, and glazed enough to withstand heat. Margaret was an old hand at striking fire. Soon – a dozen chit-chits at most – she had a flame and then a smoky oven in which to cook their breakfast. She was an old hand at fishing for birds as well, although the first few captives were too small to pluck and cook. But by the time the sun was high enough to offer some heat to the day in exchange for a little steam, Margaret had netted a fair-sized quail and a bird that she could not remember seeing before, dappled brown and black but fat and edible. She broke their necks and snapped off their wings, trying not to think either of home or of her dream birds. She split the carcasses open with Franklin’s knife. It was not easy or pleasant to pull out the bones or tug away the skin and feathers. Rather than spoil the breakfast with down and fluff, she threw away good meat among the inedible waste. The forest is always glad of carrion. The remainder, all clean breast, she wrapped in the greenest leaves she could find. Now she had only to construct a spider trivet out of twigs and hang the bird meat from it over the pot fire, where it could cook in smoke.

Franklin didn’t come back empty-handed, but he hadn’t found the chance to use an arrow either. Rather than disappoint Margaret, he had spent too much time and effort lifting fallen logs to see if anything tasty was living underneath. The logs were mostly light and flaky, but the overnight frost had iced them in and made them almost unshiftable. He’d had to rock them free. But all his efforts did not produce as much as a snail. He had mushrooms, though. Mushrooms he could trust as safe. And a few nuts. He was disappointed to have failed as a hunter while she, evidently, had managed so easily to trap fresh meat.

They sat together on the barrow, eating breakfast off carved ceremonial plates. They talked about the day ahead. They were almost eager to get on. “I’ve heard,” Franklin said, trying to joke away his failure in the woods that morning, “that on the far side of the ocean, no one uses bows and arrows. Hogs run through their woods ready-roasted, with forks sticking out of them. All you have to do is take a slice whenever you’re hungry.”

“But first you have to make the pig stand still,” Margaret replied. “And that’s not easy.” She liked it that he treated her as if she were a girl, easy to amuse.

“These pigs are trained. They come to you like a pet dog, if you whistle, if you know the proper whistle. And then you tell them, Sit. And then you put a little salt on them and dine like gods. That’s what I heard.”

“That’s what you hope.”

“That’s what we have to hope.”

“You’re a booster, then. A good-luck man?”

“Well, yes,” he agreed. He liked the thought of that, to be her optimist. “I always hope that the best has yet to come. I think that this”—he spread his hands to take in everything, from the sunlit forest to the mint, newly settled in its silver cup; he flexed his recovering knee—“all this bodes well for us. We’ll be lucky.” He didn’t add that nothing could be worse than yesterday. It wasn’t wise to challenge fate.

Franklin’s mention of good luck reminded Margaret of her missing cedar box. “You have to wear the necklace,” he said, getting up to find it for her but also fearing he might not. “I can help you put it on.” An odd offer for a man, she thought. But even though they hunted high and low among their few possessions, checking every bag, shaking out their clothes, examining the ground underneath their barrow, neither the box nor any of the three talismans was found. Margaret could remember touching them when she’d been at the Pesthouse. She could remember pushing the box under her bedclothes there so that Franklin’s large hands could do no more damage to her piece of fragile, ancient cloth that he’d been rubbing with his thumb. But since? No, everything had been so hurried and disrupted. There had been no since. But she was angry with herself, nevertheless, and her loss was such an ill-timed setback, coming just when their improving fortunes seemed assured.