Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

The road, indeed, seemed built — by how many laborers and over how many years? at what immense cost? — to take great weights. Its now damaged surface, much degraded by the weather and time, comprised mostly chips of stone, loose grit, and sticky black rubble, which only the toughest of plants — knotweed, sagebrush, and thistle — had succeeded in penetrating. Along the verge, behind thick curbs of fashioned rectangular rock and what seemed like rusted metal fences thinned to a finger’s breadth by corrosion, were clumps of jimson, not yet cut back by the frost, their summer trumpets rotting at their bases. There was nothing edible for travelers, unless they craved hallucinations and stomach cramp or could, like beetles, dine on rust. The going, though, despite the often uneven rubble, was almost as easy as Franklin had hoped. Margaret could climb on board again, to rest herself. (“Don’t let me make you ache,” she said.) The barrow, aided by a slight decline in the easterly direction, was quick and easy to maneuver. Franklin only had to lift it a little by its handles and it almost rolled forward on its own, anxious to make progress.

To tell the truth, Franklin’s chosen route, though fast, was tedious. Protected by the mounds of earth, it was impossible to tell if any breeze or stormclouds were building up on a far horizon or even if there was any danger in the wider world. Margaret had resigned herself to feeling a bit uneasy on the highway, but she had allowed her Pigeon to win their dispute about her fears and so would have to make the best of it. She had not minded Franklin’s unexpected tone of voice. Her brothers, though they were both much smaller men than Franklin, had been greater bullies in their time and much louder in their arguments, so she was used to bombast. She would have been more surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed, to have gotten her own way easily. It was better, all in all, to be in the care of a man who was strong and determined to have his way than to place her trust in what was known by the women in Ferrytown as a lily liver, whatever that might be exactly. Franklin had expressed himself. She had allowed him to. Now the responsibility was his. She could hold him to account if anything went wrong.

Late in the afternoon, with the sun too low to light the road but the sky still brightly blue beyond the escarpments, they caught up with the mule train and its two attendants, a boy not much more than twelve years old and his father. One of their mules carried their personal effects, including a large canvas tent. The other seven were laden with jugs, pots, and crocks.

Margaret had been persuaded that she ought to wear her blue scarf, hiding her shaven head, so that unless a stranger scrutinized her eyebrows too closely, her recent illness could remain a secret. The potman and his son did not seem too alarmed when finally they halted the mules with their sticks and turned to exchange greetings. The size of Franklin could not have been reassuring from a distance, but his manner was mild, and his smile — something Margaret had noticed with increasing satisfaction — was disarming. She might, she thought when they were sleeping side by side in their barrow bed that night, allow his hand to hold hers, or even let her head rest on his shoulder, the bristles of her scalp against his beard. What harm could come of it? A man who would go back for her, to rescue her three talismans, a man who was so sweetly timorous, a man who could remove the flux with his enormous thumbs, must surely deserve something more than words of gratitude.

Franklin and Margaret introduced themselves to the potman as Ferrytowners and, instinctively, as brother and sister. A woman of her age could not admit to traveling with an unrelated man. But claiming to be husband and wife would have been not only embarrassing to themselves but unconvincing to strangers. There was their age difference, for a start. Six or seven years, possibly. And then the careful, respectful formality that still existed between them and would not persist between lovers and certainly not between spouses. The potman raised an eyebrow, though. “You’re not exactly twins,” he joked, surveying the immensely tall, black-bearded man and the pale, tiny redhead, scarcely reaching his chest.

“Different mothers,” Margaret said. “Mine died.” That much was true.

They traveled together for a short distance, until the escarpments at the edge of their road flattened out entirely into a broad, barriered semicircle and provided them with daunting views across a debris field of tumbled stone and rock, stained with rust and ancient metal melt. Colossal devastated wheels and iron machines, too large for human hands, stood at the perimeter of the semicircle, as if they had been dumped by long-retreated glaciers and had no purpose now other than to age. Hardly anything grew amid the waste. The earth was poisoned, probably. Twisted rods of steel protruded from the masonry. Discarded shafts and metal planks, too heavy to pull aside even, blocked their path.

Margaret had seen a lesser version of such things before, in the historic north of Ferrytown, where once there’d been — or so tradition claimed — a vast workshop that produced shoes in enormous numbers, though why people could not make shoes for themselves in their own homes was never clear to her. The flaking bodies of machines were still buried there, and as Margaret knew from her own experience, even to that day if anybody turned the soil in that area, she’d be unlucky not to find shiny buckles or little metal eyelets, presumably for bootlaces, among the loam of rotted leather. But she, and certainly Franklin, had never encountered such mighty metal blocks before or such a profligate display of waste by these ancestors. The smell was oily, acidic, and medicinal, the sort of smell even a skunk would avoid. This had to be the junkle that she’d heard reported, third-, fourth-hand, from stories that had managed to cross the river back to Ferrytown, even if the storytellers hadn’t.

In Ferrytown, metal things were sometimes prized and always hard to come by. People could manage without. Margaret’s family had owned only the silver cup, some bluish pewter cooking pots, some knives, a crude iron grate that Grandpa said was owned by his grandpa and half a dozen grandpas beyond him, a hand-beaten kettle, a very useful shovel, and an ax. Margaret herself possessed, or had possessed, her silver necklace and the coins she had found in the river shale when she was a child. But that was all. Carts could not get by entirely without a little metal toughening. On wheel rims, for instance. And boatbuilders and carpenters could manage wood more easily with sharp-edged tools. But generally metal objects were not preferred to those fashioned out of timber or leather or bark or root or withies or cane or wool or gourds or clay or fur. There were so many obliging materials that one could use without going to the time-consuming and dirty trouble of mining and smelting.

It was fascinating, if disturbing, to stand now among the bludgeoned stones and rusting cadavers, trying to imagine what America had been all those grandpas ago, while the potman and his son hunted for any thin metal scraps that they could scavenge and use as staples for fixing broken shards of clay. Margaret and Franklin did not speak. They retreated, shaking their heads, baffled but excited by the presence of so much antiquity, until they noticed signs of life on the outskirts of the junkle. Smoke was rising from the entrance of a sheltered cave of debris beneath an overhang of collapsed stonework. An elderly man in his fifties with a graying beard came out into the daylight, looked across a little nervously at the potman and at Margaret and Franklin, and finally called out a word of greeting.

Franklin, as the younger man, would have to walk across to introduce himself. He left Margaret in charge of the barrow and the lead rein of the mules and made his way across the debris. As he got closer and could see into the deep darkness of the shelter, he recognized the little carriage that they’d spotted earlier that day. A pair of carriage horses were tied against a wall of squared stone, mossy green, at one side of the cave, where pools of greasy water stood. The old man’s family — his wife, a son — were sitting around their fire, warming their knuckles. There was a grandchild sleeping in a reed-weave basket with a mattress of fishnet.