Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

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 might be 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.