Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

“What happened to those taffies, Mags?” asked Franklin, and Margaret rewarded his familiarity with her broadest smile.

“Those Boses stole them from me,” she said, and, once she’d swallowed hard, added, “Pigeon,” not quite loud enough for him to hear.

It was almost dark when they discovered the outline of a long, uneven roof with a tall chimney on slightly higher ground above the track that they were following. They could smell smoke and supper, but no lights were coming from the building. Franklin found a stick and went alone to see if there was any danger. After a few moments he called out that it was safe to bring the horses up “if they’ll bear the smell.”

The building was a row of connected wood cabins with a square stone smokeshop at one end. And it was mostly empty. No fires were burning, and the only signs that it was still a working place were the sheets of scraped leather that were curing and the hands of stiff smoked fish hanging from the rafters of the house, discarded and forgotten remnants of last season’s netting. There was no other food there or in the cabins, so far as they could tell in the fading light. A side of bacon would have been welcome, or a butt of apples. But there was water in a deep trough at the far end of the buildings, and some forage drying for tinder that would make do for the horses’ evening meal. They were out of the wind, if not the drafts. At least they could stay relatively warm, although they could find nothing with which to strike a fire. Tomorrow when the sun was up they might discover greater comforts.

But for the time being, once they had picked at the smoke-toughened skin and flesh of a fish that they had never tasted before and would pray never to taste again, Margaret and Franklin — Mags and Pigeon — stretched out together as a family on a wooden pallet as far from the stench of the smokeshop as they could, separated only by the girl and sharing the saddle blanket for their bedding. It had been a busy day. They were exhausted, and they slept “midsentence,” as the saying goes, with things that mattered left unsaid and drying on their lips.

Margaret woke in the middle of the night and took a moment to remember where she was and who was at her side. She panicked for a bit, but the sounds that she could hear were only breathing and the wind, and the restlessness of horses, and something deeper, far and near, a sort of restful quake. That was a sound she’d never heard before, but still she recognized it from the stories she’d heard. The snoring sea. The grieving sea. The Waters of the Whispering. The river with one bank. The Deep. She checked that Jackie was well covered and kissed her on her forehead. Then she leaned toward Franklin, a large dark shape. She put her hands into his hair and kissed him on each cheek, beneath his eyes. A tiny sin. Then nothing else. He was asleep and could not know how motherly, how sisterly, how loverly she’d been, or how her fingers and her mouth still smelled of last night’s fish. He could not know how full of sudden hope she was, and warm. They’d reached the ocean, then. She was embraced and heartened by the thick of love.

By the time she fell asleep again, Margaret had decided that she would wake at first light, at the very moment that the owl became the cock, and lead her family outside to stare into the ocean’s salty promises. She had little doubt now that her problems — their problems — were largely behind her. Why else would fortune have delivered such a rendezvous? They’d reached the coast. And they had reached it together. And it was almost spring. All they had to do was find an early boat and set sail for that better place, a place she could not even name but where there would be…No, she could not say what there would be. But she was clear, in her imagination, about what they wouldn’t find across the sea. They wouldn’t live in fear of Captain Chief. They wouldn’t have to battle for their meals. They wouldn’t have to travel every day. They wouldn’t have to sleep with fish and smoke. They wouldn’t have to hide their height or hair. They wouldn’t be afraid to kiss. Tomorrow she would break down all the barriers.

There was a heavy mist when Margaret woke and tiptoed to the cabin door. All she could see through the cracks was a steeply falling slope covered in reed grass and a heavy gray haze backlit by a dawn still too distant to provide any shadows. She could not hear the ocean at first. All she could hear was the sound of Jackie and Franklin sleeping, their breathing synchronized, and the horses fretting on the wooden floor. But when she slipped outside, into the cold, in her socked feet, the sea returned. It sounded more placid and less promising than it had done in the night. The mist was out of reach but at the same time touchable. She walked toward it, her hands held out in front. It backed away, without moving. It parted for her hands.

Margaret would not call out for Franklin yet. This was a moment to enjoy, a moment on her own. She could not remember the last time that she hadn’t had Jackie at her side, wanting something, needing to be cared for. Margaret would not trade a moment of that care, but still she was relieved to have some steps of freedom. The reed grass was damp and uneven. Her socks and the hem of her skirt were soaked. But none of that counted for anything. She felt only the joy. The joy of those two sleeping.

She might have ventured no more than twenty steps, but already the cabins and the smokeshop, including the smell, had been removed from her back by the mist. The light ahead of her seemed brighter and so she persevered, comforted by the certainty that no one would catch sight of her in such secretive weather. Another twenty steps and she could make out tones among the grays, where true light and reflected light met to make a flat and almost black horizon. More steps and she was clear of the grass and walking on more solid ground, flat rocks and puddles of star-gathered dew. The new smell was slight but overpowering. No longer fish and smoke and timber but something brackish and inedible, something faintly menstrual. She heard a cry that seized her heart and squeezed it. She turned around toward the cabins, fearful for her Jackie. But it was something other than a child. There was another cry, then the curtain of the mist seemed to draw apart, and there they were: the gulls, stocky, busy, laboring, their bony wings weighted at the tips with black.

The ocean itself was a surprise. Margaret could not have guessed how leaden it would be, and lacking in expression. It seemed too hard-surfaced to take a boat or for fish to pass through it, more metallic than watery. It was not until she reached the edge of a crumbling overhang and could look down through the thinning mist onto the tugging of the water on the shore, that she had any sense of the ocean’s unremitting, unproductive strength and its patience. Now the leaden surface was alive. What had been flat a little way offshore seemed to resent the unresponding land. It had raised itself up in folds and furrows of water that broke against the beach, flashing their white underskirts, unloading and delivering themselves, time after time, never seeming to progress. The sea was like a great lung, but exhaling and inhaling water rather than air. The gulls breakfasted and squabbled among the underskirts, crying at the waves.

The ocean had changed entirely by the time Margaret returned to the overhang with Jackie and Franklin. The rising light had carted off the lead and left its sheeny residues of blues and greens. The water seemed to have withdrawn, leaving a deeper beach with fringes of green-black weed, and there were yellow banks of sand offshore that she had not noticed previously.

“What do you make of it?” she asked. “It’s frightening, it’s beautiful…”