Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

It was only when Bella was eating that Margaret looked across the room and saw that what she was doing was mirrored at the higher table. The twenty Finger Baptists were the Helpless Gentlemen. They did not want to feed themselves, it seemed. They sat before their food, their arms hanging loosely at their sides, their beards and hair pushed back, while devotees — one each — spooned food into their mouths and wiped their lips with cloths. The devotees lifted cups of water and juice and waited for their masters to sip. One was holding up a chicken leg for his Gentleman to gnaw. Another offered dry beans, one at a time, as if he were hand-feeding a turkey.

“What are they doing?” Margaret asked the mother who had befriended her.

“The very same as you.”

“So I see. But why?”

“Has no one told you yet? They’re not allowed to use their hands. The hands do Devil’s work.”

The Devil’s work, Margaret soon found out, included not only fighting and stealing, both of which indisputably required dishonest hands, but also art, craft, cooking, working, and the age-old and best-forgotten practices of technology for which all metal was the chilling evidence. The Helpless Gentlemen had set their minds and bodies against the country’s ferrous history. Wingless and with withered arms, they’d earn their places at the side of God.

So the winter passed. It was an oddly comfortable existence for Margaret and Bella. Much of the doubt, regret, and danger had been removed from her life, though what replaced them was mostly dull. In this respect, the Finger Baptists were proved correct — no blades, no blood. The emigrants were honest, because there was nothing to steal; sharing, because there was plenty to eat; sober, because there was no liquor. There were no misers, because there was no wealth to hoard; they were industrious, because it was work or starve.

As the mother of an infant, Margaret’s duties were long but light. It was her job to sit from sunup to sundown at the Ark’s water supply, a shallow well, protected from the cold by a three-sided shelter. For most of the time there was nothing for her to do except be patient and keep Bella amused and out of mischief. The girl was an adventurous crawler and then a reckless walker, who, like the worst puppy, would take any opportunity to slip away behind Margaret’s back to investigate and taste anything that caught her eye, whether it be a dangerous splinter of wood or a shard of ice or a scrap of crust or mud. Then Margaret had to clean out Bella’s mouth with her finger and force open her fists to remove any trophy. The child was growing, becoming more interesting and more difficult, first learning to recognize the word no and then learning to resist it. Once she had discovered how to pick things up and use them without help — her cup, for example, her spoon — it was not long before she devised the game of throwing things down for Margaret to fetch or simply to enjoy the sound of tumbling, rolling, and breaking.

There were busy times when Margaret had no choice but to strap Bella to her back and deal with the peak demands for water. The first to arrive were those emigrants whose duty it was that day to fill the family water jugs. There were eighty-two overwintering families in all, including Margaret and Bella, and so the line for water was often long and unruly, with impatient boys trying to jump the line and older men demanding precedence, especially as the first waters of the morning were the least cloudy and the sweetest. Margaret had instituted the Ferrytown method to prevent arguments. As people arrived at the well, they threaded a loose rope through the handles of their jugs. That fixed the line beyond question. Then they had no choice but to be patient and talk to each other rather than argue, or to play with the child.

Margaret’s still-short hair was long enough by now to be revealed to the women in her sleeping shed. She could safely recount to them the story of her illness and some details of her journey to the Ark. She could relive out loud and weep again at the horrors of Ferrytown, that rock-hard memory: every member of her family dead in sleep. Now she appeared to the women as a survivor, as someone who had once been alarmingly dangerous but was no longer. They were the only ones who saw her bareheaded, though, and they were the only ones, too, who inevitably saw Bella naked. So Margaret’s pretense that Bella was a boy called Jackson was short-lived. No, Jackson was a girl’s name in her family, she’d explained, despite the sound of it, its final unfeminine consonant. So she had begun calling Bella Bose “little Jackie.” It was more convincingly girlish. Bella did not seem to notice the change. Indeed, it wasn’t very long before she did not even respond to the word Bella . She became Jackie to herself. And Margaret was known to her as Ma, a not entirely dishonest pretense, given her first name. Ma for Margaret . Ma for make-believe .

Jackie was not a predictable baby. She was ready to grant broad smiles to any woman or child who paid attention to her but was more reticent with men, especially the workmen and the craftsmen from the half-completed tower, who came throughout the day, smelling of sweat, stone dust, and timber, to fill their buckets. And when any of the twenty Finger Baptists came and required Margaret to draw water for them, Jackie was prone to burst into tears and hold on to her ma as if these Helpless Gentlemen meant to do her harm.

Margaret thought the girl was disturbed by the Baptists’ long gray robes, but actually she was smelling Margaret’s own uneasiness. Their greatest marks of holiness — their flaccid arms and lifeless hands, which had weakened over the years for want of use — were usually hidden in their sleeves. But when they came from their ablutions (where, according to the gossip, though no one had witnessed it, they cleaned their intimate parts by squatting in a shallow bowl), they liked to have their hands washed as well — force of habit from their less devout childhoods, she supposed — and Margaret had to hold back their sleeves while they dipped and trailed their emaciated fingers limply in the water. Then she had to take the washing block and soap them, sometimes as far up as their armpits. Their arms, especially those of the residents who had been there longest, who had not so much as picked their own noses for twenty years or more, were wasted from the shoulders down and weighed less than a strip of feather wood. Once the Baptists had washed, she had to dry them, too. She found the whole procedure unpleasant and disturbing. Their hands were weak and useless but not shrunken. In fact, with so little flesh and so much prominent bone, they seemed huge and corpselike.

Margaret tried to keep her eyes lowered and maintain silence when the Finger Baptists were at the well. She did not want to be selected as one of the emigrants who had the honor of serving these men in their private quarters. She’d heard — more rumors, possibly, but disquieting nevertheless — that duties might include massaging and masturbating them, washing them down all over, washing their hair, providing pellets of food, pulling their clothes on and off, cleaning their teeth, and helping the fatter and the older ones to sit and rise. But only once in those winter months had Margaret been asked to do anything more intimate than draw the water and wash and dry the arms. On that occasion, one of the younger Helpless Gentlemen, who, although his arms and hands were useless, was very mobile elsewhere, a speedy walker and a man with fat, expressive lips, had lifted his face toward Margaret and, with a series of commands—“Higher,” “Lower,” “Aah, just there!”—required her to attend to an intolerable itch on the side of his face.