Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

The distant escarpment, after their first observation, had not been clearly visible for much of their journey that morning, so it had come as a relief and a surprise when they had crested an oddly regular esker of oval hillocks to gain their second view of what seemed now, on this closer inspection, to be an unnaturally shallow, flat valley, without a river but flanked by parallel mounds as regular as the best plowed furrow — except that no plow was big enough, not even in the fairy tales, to throw aside so great a swath of earth. Initially, they were merely baffled. This was no escarpment provided by nature, unless nature had on this one occasion broken its own rules and failed to twist and bend but had instead hurtled forward, all symmetry and parallels. But soon their bafflement was overcome by astonishment. What at first they might have mistaken for cattle turned out to be a horse-drawn carriage traveling at an unusual speed along the center of the valley surface, as if the route had been designed specifically for wheels and hoofs. Margaret, who could not see as well as Franklin, shook her head and looked at him. Something worried her about the escarpment. But Franklin said, “I’ve heard of it. This has to be the Dreaming Highway. It takes us to the ships.”

They rested on the esker top, lunching on the nuts that they had gathered in the woods and on cold bird meat. They watched a pair of travelers with a string of eight laden mules progress without impediment or any deviation along the same track the carriage had followed.

“This makes me hopeful,” Franklin said. The optimist.

Margaret shook her head again: “It worries me, Pigeon.” This nickname tease of hers, which thoroughly amused her when she applied it, was so disarming for Franklin that he broke into a smile and reddened whenever she said the word. “That road makes me nervous now we’re close to it.”

“What is there to be nervous of?” A question, not a challenge.

“It’s just too bare. I don’t know what it is, but…it’s open ground. You know, exposed . There’s not a tree on there to hide behind. I feel we shouldn’t even step on it. Not one single toe. We have to find another way. We have to hide ourselves.”

Franklin was impatient to move on swiftly, as the mules and the little carriage had done, and thereby reach the ocean soon. “Why hide ourselves? You only have to hide your head. That blue scarf of yours should do it. No one need know that you’ve been ill. Your color is healthy today. Just cover up.”

“My scarf won’t make us safe. The roads on this side of the river are dangerous, all of them.”

“Who told you that?”

“Everyone in Ferrytown.”

What “everyone in Ferrytown” had known, according to Margaret, was that the journey to the coast, rather than becoming more straightforward once the river had been crossed, became more hazardous and deadly. “Why do you think we kept that wooden bridge a secret?” she asked. “Not just for the ferry fees. But to stop anybody from fleeing back to our town on the safe side of the river.” She’d heard her father talk about it many times when he was working on the ferry. Once in a while — too often for comfort, actually — bodies would be pushed onto the shingle landing beach or caught in the weed beds, the bloated corpses of people who had tried to swim back across to Ferrytown and drowned. And every few days a little group would be waiting on the eastern side, terror on their tails, begging to be taken back to the settlement by ferry.

She said, “I’ve heard of people there with gaping wounds, and widows with the pieces of their murdered men and sons in sacks, and tales of little boys and girls, hardly big enough to climb down off their mothers’ laps, who’ve been taken by gangs and sold or put to work. We had to turn them back, of course.”

“You turned them back?”

“Well, yes. Don’t frown at me. There wasn’t any choice. That’s what our consuls said.”

Ferrytown’s failure of charity to these westward refugees, according to Margaret’s uncomfortable explanation, was simply a business decision. The town was geared to take in paying emigrants from the west, help them part with some of their wealth, then ferry them out eastward as speedily as possible. Any westward refugees who made it back to Ferrytown would be not paying guests but “beggars and schnorrers.” All they’d do, apart from eat and use up moneymaking beds, was spread alarm. With their stories. And the expressions on their faces. And their wounds. The far side of the river would become a place to fear.

“Pigeon, think of it,” she instructed him. “What would happen if the migrants learned that Ferrytown might be their last safe place? They’d never leave us, would they? Would you? Imagine, then, how huge our town would be. Big and poor and as crowded as a beehive. And think, if people found the wooden bridge, we’d wake up to an even larger herd of strangers, with not a scrap between them to pay for their beds and suppers. We couldn’t let them cross. It’s unkind, yes, I know it’s unkind, but that’s the truth of it.”

“Why have the wooden bridge at all?”

“For us. Not them. Who can say when we might need to run away ourselves? Or on what side of the river safety will prefer to live next season? The bridge is our security.”

Franklin laughed uneasily and pulled a face. Is , not was ? She hadn’t even guessed, then, what he had inflicted on her bridge. He wouldn’t tell her, either. What difference could it make, except to have him seem a fool? He wouldn’t be her Pigeon anymore. He’d be her turkey, big, stupid, and clumsy. Instead he steered their discussion back to the long straight track where some time ago, he supposed, great vehicles and crowds had hastened between the grand old towns— cities was the word he’d heard — and the people of America had been as numerous and healthy as fleas.

He found, in his eagerness to change the subject from the bridge, an uncharacteristic bullying and determined tone to his voice. “This will speed us to the boats,” he said. “We have to take a chance. The winter’s closing in on us. You’ve seen the frosts. The snow is never far behind. And anyway, this barrow is exhausting me. You think that because I’m big, I can’t ache?” He began to blush, embarrassed to sound so much like his brother — except that Jackson would not have admitted to aches or exhaustion.

Margaret held up her hands in comic submission, but conscious, too, that for the first day, at least, she’d not made the barrow any easier to push. “Let’s not make the big man ache,” she said.

“We’ll either have to throw out half of our possessions, ditch the barrow, and carry what we can, and that is not a good idea. We’ve not got much, but what we’ve got we need,” he continued. “Or else we’ll have to find a path where wheels are helpful rather than a hindrance. In other words”—he pointed toward the disappearing train of mules—“that road. Our wheelbarrow will fly along that road.” That dreaming road.

It did not take them long to reach and climb the first of the two parallel mounds that protected the road from the wind and then to descend the sloping, grassy berm, varicosed with gopher trails, to the flat corridor itself. It was almost as wide as the river at the ferry point in Ferrytown, and that made no sense at all. The widest transport that had ever passed through Ferrytown was only three horses wide, while this great swath of track would easily take two teams of horses, each fifty wide or more. It had to be the pathway of a giant or else to have been designed to carry something huge and heavy — those wooden war machines, perhaps, that Margaret had heard talk about, the ones that broke through walls, or shot boulders in the air, or hurled fire.