Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

Her grandpa led her on the horse up into the hills that same morning, three slow and ancient travelers, it would seem, the old man taking care with every step as if his bones were as fragile and as flaky as log ash, the woman slumped across the horse’s neck, too weak to sit straight, the mare itself so displeased with the unresponsive weight and the loose stones on the butter-churning climb that it stopped and tried to turn whenever the leash was slackened.

Margaret had never been into the hills before. There’d been no need. It was unwise, and indeed against the community conventions, for a local woman to go beyond the palisades unless she was unwell. Time was too precious for useful bodies to wander aimlessly in the neighborhoods. Margaret, like all the other women without husbands or children, was kept busy helping out in the guesthouse, where there were nearly always more than a hundred meals to serve each evening and beds and breakfasts to make next day.

Her grandpa hadn’t been up into the hills very often either. Until the ascent with his ailing son three months previously, he hadn’t been up to the summit of Butter Hill in many years, not since the travelers, drawn to the river’s shallow crossing, had made his town rich. All the more ambitious huntsmen and fishermen had turned to making their fortunes out of farming for the table, ferrying, hospitality, and charging everyone for doing anything: crossing charges, passage fees, stabling costs, piloting, provisioning, protection tax, and levies just for wanting to go east.

It was astonishing how wealthy a little hospitality could make the locals. This fertile valley, of which it used to be boasted that you had only to flick a booger on the ground for a mushroom to grow overnight, was now fertile in even less demanding ways: stretch a rope across the road and travelers would pay you with their jewelry, their cloth, their inheritances just to be allowed to jump over it; toss a rag across a log, call it a bed, and they’d be lining up to sleep in it; shake a chicken’s feather at a pot of boiling water and you could make your fortune out of soup.

The only problem was that travelers bring problems of their own and ones beyond control. Stockades and palisades could keep marauders at bay. The lockup beyond the tetherings with its no-bed and its no-light could hold and quiet down the troublemakers and those who couldn’t settle bills in this stay-and-pay-or-on-your-way community. But illnesses, like bats and birds, were visible only too late, when the damage had been done. The toughest maladies have wings. There are no fees or charges high enough to deter the flux; no palisade is that tall.

. .

It was, as usual, busy on the road. Margaret and her grandpa stepped aside and hid from every descending emigrant they passed, every string of horses, every cart or barrow, every band of hopefuls that made its way downhill.

Her head was covered in a heavy blue scarf, so her shorn white scalp was out of sight. That would not draw any comment from strangers. Even at that time of the year, all travelers with any sense would protect themselves against the sun and midges with hats, headscarves, veils, or hair. The sun occasions modesty. It disapproves of flesh. But Margaret’s face, if shown, would certainly betray the dangerous and appalling truth. What little of her skin wasn’t raised and scarlet with rashes was gray with exhaustion.

It was uncomfortable — unbearable — to wear the heavy scarf around her hot and nagging head. She tried to lift it, push it back and off. But she could not allow herself to be seen, her grandpa told her — it would be too damaging for business if word got out that even just one person in the valley had the symptoms of the flux. A hundred meals, a hundred beds, would go to waste each day. Nobody would dare to spend the night with them. “Turn your head, Mags, if you can,” he instructed her. “Pull your scarf across your face, let them mistake you for…” He couldn’t think that she resembled anything, except a woman at death’s door riding in the wrong direction with her back turned to the sea. He did his best to hide her from the stares and even from the necessary greetings. He pulled the horse into the thickets whenever he heard voices coming or the sound of carts and bridle bells. He made her duck into impasses of rock until the path was clear. And if anybody happened to get close to them or called wanting directions or news, he answered for the two of them, trying not to draw attention to himself by being either too unfriendly or too welcoming. If anybody asked, he’d claim his granddaughter was simple, not bright enough to speak. “Best let her float in her own company,” he’d say.

So Margaret and her grandpa took half a day to reach the nearest woody swaggings in the sash of hills, where the rocky scrubland of the ascent relaxed into softer meadows and clearings of grass and highland reed, before the darkness of the woods and the distant, snowcapped mountain pates. The view was wasted on them. They hardly bothered to look back. The old man had to get home, while Margaret wanted nothing more than to sleep. She’d rather die than undertake another climb like that. So for her, the first sight of the Pesthouse at the edge of the hunter’s bald was a relief.

Unlike the tree-trunk barns and cabins in the valley, the hillside hut had not been built for comfort. It was at core a woodsman’s soddy, constructed out of sun-dried turfs, fireproof and wind-protected, much loved by mice, but easily collapsed. Indeed, it had collapsed from time to time, in those far regretted days when it had had little use, but since that healthy time, that time of remedies and cures, the Pesthouse had been strengthened by an outer wall of boulders, dry-built and sturdy. There was a sleeping bench inside, a hearth and chimney stack, a leather bucket and some pots.

Margaret hid in the undergrowth to empty her bowels — no blood, good luck — and then collapsed into the grass while her grandpa set to work. He swept out the soddy with snapped pine brooms, beat the stones with sticks in case any snakes had taken up residence, and set the fire in the stone grate with kindling and a striking stone. Provisions and a water bag were hung from roof branches above the fire, where they’d be marinated in wood fume and safe from little teeth. He gathered bracken and country corn for Margaret’s bed. She rested her three lucky things — a silver necklace that was old enough to have been machined; a square of patterned, faded cloth too finely woven to have been the work of human hands; some coins from the best-forgotten days, all inside a cedar box on her chest — and lay down on the bed, with Grandpa’s help. He placed an unfired pot of cough syrup made from onions mashed in sugar on the floor at the side of her bed: “Watch out for ants, Mags.” He touched her forehead with his thumb, a finger kiss. “I’m ashamed to leave you here. I hope it grows. Thick and long.” He wiped his hands again on a vinegary rag, then he and the horse were gone and she was sleeping.

When she woke, somewhat revived, it was already evening. The trees were menacing — they wheezed and cracked. Bats feasted on the early moths. The undergrowth was busy with its residents, and Margaret, Red Margaret, the Apricot, the drained and fragile woman in the hills, that applicant for unexpected death, felt shocked and lost, bewildered and unloved. Why had she been singled out? Why had the archer released his arrow into her? Such misfortune was too much to face alone — the pestilence, the pain, the degradation, and the restless meanness of the night, which she must spend on her own father’s deathbed, breathing his last air. She coughed, a friendless cough, and had to listen to the trunks and branches coughing back, like wolves, too much like wolves for her to dare to sleep again. She’d never feared trees before. In daylight, trees had let her pass, ignored her almost, pretended not to notice her. But now that the moon was up, the forest seemed to be alert and mischievous.