Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

Men were easier to browbeat than women, Margaret soon discovered. For men, a child was a mystery. She had only to tell a man, “Look at my poor girl’s dry lips — that’s thirst. And look at her skin. Those blotches on her nose, you see? That’s hunger rash. My darling’s only got a day or two to live, just feel her bones,” and he would rather part with his big toe than stand accused of heartlessness. How Margaret loved her newly invented, inventive self, and how powerful she could be with certain, tidy men. But a woman, and especially one who’d been a mother, would know that just a little redness around the nose was common to all children of that age. Some kids are red around the nose for fifteen years and never hungry once.

So Margaret chose her victims carefully. Once she’d seen a man on the land, preferably near a well-kept house with livestock, she would approach, first greeting him in the old American way, then showing him the child (her beauty first, her hunger next, and then the red nose and the dry, chapped lips), and finally, if all of that had failed, dragging off her blue scarf to show the evidence of flux. This last act always had the greatest effect. Men everywhere fear illness more than women do, she supposed. But it was more complicated than that. She could not know — especially now that Franklin was not around to tell her — that as the days passed and her hair grew a little longer, she became more strikingly unusual. In the first days after the shaving, she would have seemed ugly to most men. Her color was not good. The illness bleached her. Her lids and brows, though, were red from where each pinch of hair had been plucked out by the women in her family — her mother, her two sisters. But except for the scabs where her grandpa’s shell razor had nicked her skin, her scalp had been oddly white and ailing from never having been exposed to light before.

But now her color was a healthy one. Since Ferrytown she’d had good exercise in open air, if not good food, and she had what country people call “ripe cheeks, sweet enough to pick.” Even if she did not remove her scarf, anyone could see she was a handsome woman. Her eyebrows were light and thin as yet, but that need not declare her as a recovering invalid and possibly contagious. The black-haired people of America did not expect those rare, unlucky redheads among them to have the forceful facial hair of normal folk. But with her scarf off and her history of contagion clearly on display, her attractiveness was enhanced instead of betrayed. By the fourth day of her begging her regrown head hair had become tufty enough to hide her scalp entirely under a soft, springy carpeting, but not long enough to hide the good shape of her face, the candor of her forehead, the set of her mouth. Her great green eyes, which might not see too well over long distances, looked to any observers — and there would be many — as if they were the largest eyes they’d ever seen. They’d wonder whether they would dare to sleep with her. Was such rare beauty worth the risk? It was.

So on her last trip into the final farmlands of America in search of milk, on the morning before she and the Boses expected to reach the salty, giant-pumped river, the man she found mending his harnesses outside his neat wood cottage, with its pen of three fatly uddered cows, was easily — excessively — seduced. When Margaret arrived with Bella and called out her greetings from the boundary fence, the man, like all the others before him, took hold of something with which to defend himself (in this instance, a weighted leather strap) and ordered her to stay exactly where she was and state her business unless she wanted to be driven out of the county with blood on her back.

Margaret was used to these immoderations. The man — as old as Margaret’s father by the look of him, and not as tidy as his house — did not seem alarmed. Just aggressively cautious. She gave her name. She smiled. She was polite. She introduced “her” child. She said how hungry they both were. She asked if there were any chores, anything at all, that she could do in return for a little milk and some food, and then, before he could actually suggest any suitable work, she pulled down her scarf and let the blue material puddle on her shoulders.

She saw the startled look on his face and expected him, like all the others (at least once their wives had shown their faces), to order her to keep away from the house while he brought milk and then to feed the child and leave his land immediately, or else. But this man stepped toward her, calling out to someone in the house as he did so. And then she realized, not from experience but from base instinct, that pulling down her blue scarf, together with her smiling offer to do “anything at all” in return for milk and food, had been taken by this man to be an invitation to advance and put his hands on her. Her hair was not short enough to scare him off. “You’ll have the milk,” he said. “You’ll have it twice.” Another man appeared behind him at the door.

When Margaret and Bella had not returned to their rendezvous tree by late afternoon, Andrew Bose acted out of character. Anxious, fretful, and exasperated by Melody’s demands that he “do something on his own account for a change” rather than just cussing their misfortune and feeling sorry for himself, he volunteered to do exactly what she suggested and risk “a little scout” into the nearest fields.

He left his wife in charge of all their possessions. She would, she said, make as much smoke as she could if the missing couple were to return in his absence and as much noise as she could if a stranger approached and offered her “any inconvenience.” She was pleased with herself for sounding so spirited in such worrying circumstances. In fact, she had discovered, and liked herself for it, that she could be tougher— steelier , to use the older word — than she had expected. Acton first. Now Bella. She still felt strong and calm and ready to be tested further, although she acknowledged in her heart that the prospect of Andrew’s being the third loss to the family was one that was mildly amusing to her imagination only so long as it didn’t actually happen. He was thin water, though. No denying it.

Her husband set off across the strips of field toward the wood cottage that Margaret had identified, just before noon, as promising. Andrew, whose distance eyesight was still sharp despite his age, had clambered onto the same tree trunk as Margaret and agreed that, yes, her eyes were not deceiving her, that was a man outside the house and those were cattle, though he could not specify whether they were shes or hes.

“Take your knife,” Melody instructed him, but he thought it better to arrive at the dwelling empty-handed. He doubted that the inhabitants would want any nets mended — they hadn’t passed a decent river for days — and knew for certain that he would not be able to use a knife effectively for any other purpose. He had no plan in mind, other than to take no great risks. He’d satisfy his wife’s challenge and no more. He would walk as quietly as he could, keeping to the shade and to the low ground as much as possible, and see what he could see from a safe distance.

He did not approach the house directly by its path but followed a line of trees and then a highish loose stone wall that provided good cover. The only sound he could hear, apart from the entirely natural disharmony of birds and wind and branches, was the half gate of an abandoned hut that was swinging noisily on the last of its leather hinges and repeatedly banging its jamb. But by the time Andrew Bose had reached the end of the wall a dog had begun barking. You can’t creep up on a dog. Andrew waited. There was no point in running away from a dog. He expected it to arrive with its inquiring nose at any moment. He would do his best to charm it. Perhaps he should have brought that knife. Stabbing a dog would be no more difficult, surely, than gutting a good-sized fish. But not only did the dog fail to arrive, it also stopped barking after a while.