Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

Margaret lay as still as she could. Soon the breathing at the far end of the barn was back to normal. Then the snoring started, and the rain, beating on the roof slates noisily. Little Bella began to stretch her legs and cry, invasively. She wanted to crawl and try to seize anything that caught her eye in that dim light. The supper was making her restless, so Margaret put her little finger in the girl’s mouth and let her suck on it, and then she let her snuggle to her breast. The cow barn settled to the night. Soon everyone was sleeping. Another day, then, passing without incident.

First they noticed that pockets of land around the pathway were cultivated and that within easy reach were clusters of unabandoned wooden huts, some with plumes of smoke and hostile dogs, others with washing lines, others with a tethered cow or two and goats. The farms around the homes were dying back for winter, but still the practiced eye could recognize where rows of beans and corn had been, and see that apples had been in such abundance that year that the ground was squelchy with windfalls. This was almost the America that they had all been born in. It was reassuring finally to discover such normality, but it was unnerving also, especially for the Boses. If everything was normal here, then who was to say that their flight from their fine shuttered house and those lucrative riverside employments that had provided wealth and respect had not been precipitate? Had Acton been the price they’d paid for haste?

Margaret tied her scarf tightly around her head and under her chin, left the adult Boses in charge of their bags and possessions, and went, with Bella sitting on her hip, to find out what she could about the way ahead and beg some baby food. She avoided the first two huts. Their guard dogs, both on long leashes, were a warning to stay away. But at the third building, a single-story cabin with a slate roof similar to the one that had kept them dry the previous evening, no dog was in evidence. There was, though, a washing line with children’s clothes on it and the bulky figure of a woman sitting on the stoop and working on a reed basket. Most important, they had a yard of nanny goats with young. There would be milk to spare.

Margaret was not noticed until she lifted the rope tie on the garden gate and began to walk slowly down the ash-and-clinker path toward the house. Then she coughed and waited. When the woman looked up, startled, it was clear that she was younger than she appeared, a girl, probably less than twenty years old. That made Margaret the elder, so instead of going forward to introduce herself, she stayed where she was, as was the custom. To do otherwise would be to insult each other’s dignity. If you are alone and they are in company, then you salute them; if you are sitting and they are standing, they greet you; if you are walking and they are riding, you acknowledge them, and certainly it always was the case that the young should defer to anybody older. So Margaret waited while the heavy girl put down her work, struggled to her feet, and came forward toward her visitor. She called out “Pa!” before addressing Margaret.

A man, her father, fat and tall and with a curly, close-fitting beard, came to the door, holding a stick. “What does she want?” he said.

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Just ask her, then.”

“What do you want, he says.”

So this was hardly normality. For all their goats and windfalls, their garden gates and washing lines, these people were living with fear, a fear that extended even to a single woman with a child. If this had been a village in the America that Margaret and the Boses had been born into, she could have expected a smile, a little curtsy from the girl. Her father would have reached his door not with a stick but with the immediate offer of a bench to sit on and a cup to drink from. In small communities like this, if not in places such as Ferrytown, where there were too many people for these observances to survive, passing guests could expect a dozen offers of a bed for the night. Neighbors would have competed “for the honor” of having her dent in their mattress. Who could be more generous? Who could promise most?

Margaret could remember being told by Grandpa that when he’d been young — and that was going back a bit! What, fifty years? — he’d gotten lost high in the hills during a blinding storm. But he’d been taken in by a family of fur trappers and allocated their only bed. They had no meat to give him for his supper, and so the father of the family had walked across the valley in the rain to his nearest neighbor’s quarters and, finding him asleep, had stolen a hen and brought it back to pluck and roast for Grandpa. When the neighbor showed up early next morning to protest about the theft, the trapper simply said, “We had a guest. He had to eat. We thank you for your hen. I’ve got a herd of sheep, still out in the pasture half a day from here. You’ll know which ones. My sign is three green bars. Next time you pass them, take two, take three, whatever you like. It makes no difference. We had to feed our guest.” That used to be America.

But all Margaret was getting from this small, fat family was hostility. Showing them the baby made no difference. Her offers to undertake any work that needed doing were ignored. Her smiles and her determined cheerfulness were wasted. And every time she made to take a step closer to the girl, her father lifted his stick and growled.

It was a struggle, but in the end she got her way, though only after pulling off her scarf and threatening to sit in the middle of their path “until the both of us, my kid and me, are full of worms.” She liked the sound of that, “my kid and me.”

“I feel sorry for that child, and that’s the only reason,” Pa said eventually, justifying his surrender to the bullying and evidently dangerous young woman. Now that he had seen her scalp, the man was desperate to find some way to compromise and give his visitors a good excuse to leave. So finally he let her sit on the garden wall, among the woody stalks of dead vegetables, and feed Bella a little goat’s milk sweetened with honey and simmered. “We’ll not want that pot when you’ve done with it,” he said. “Just throw it down. I want to hear it break.”

The girl stood and watched, breathing heavily, too uneasy to ask any questions of her own.

“How far is it before we reach the ocean?” Margaret asked her.

“I’ve never even been.”

“Ask your father. Has he been?”

The answer was a shock if it was true. Perhaps he was lying, giving Margaret false hope, just to see the back of her. He’d never “witnessed” the ocean himself, he said, calling from the safety of his front door, and he hoped his fortunes would never make him want to or need to. He touched the end of his surprisingly elegant nose for good luck. But he had been to the nearby town many times — a one-day walk — to trade the produce of their farm, and he had heard that less than three days forward on foot from there, in the direction of sunrise, was a river that was widening and salty and that breathed in and out twice a day, spreading to its banks and then receding, as if its lungs were being pumped by some outrageous giant “a thousand times my size — and that’s not small.”

“Is that the ocean there? Is that where we can take the ships?”

“It’s near. It must be near. When there’s salt in the water, there’ll be ships in water, too. Sea ships. That’s what I’ve heard,” he added, repeating what everybody who’d never witnessed the ocean said about it, that you know it “like an old friend” when you come to it, that it roars at you like a cougar, that it smells like blood, that the ocean’s got only one bank, that if you drink a cup of it your piss turns blue.