Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

It was not until they had descended from the bluff, walked a further hundred paces inland, and removed themselves from the gape of the ocean and the nagging of the wind that Margaret’s two companions stopped to tidy and prepare themselves for work and Margaret herself was able to look down and inspect, though only fleetingly — she did not want to reveal her spy pipes to strangers — the makeshift town of tents and sheds and wagons that had grown up on the dry terraces on her side of the estuary. Even from that distance she could hear the noise of shouting. Anger and impatience were in the air. Then, on top of that, came the din of tools, the beating of metal, the snapping of wood, the explosive cracking of fires, the protest of animals, and the bass note of a population with nothing much to do but sit, wait, hope, and talk.

Somehow the two women from the cottages had enhanced themselves. They’d stowed their shawls between two rocks, reddened their cheeks and lips, tidied their wind-torn hair, unfastened the top part of their blouses, scraped the mud off their shoes. They seemed both younger and older, both somber and comical. And when they embraced Margaret, she could smell some perfume. Kitchen smells. Honey mixed with spice, she thought. Nutmeg. “You’ll want to go ahead of us,” they said to her. “Unless you’re looking for a sailor.”

Margaret shook her head and smiled. How thoughtful they had been with her. She could not imagine working at their side, but still she could picture being friends with them. She blew them kisses and went ahead, lighthearted and light-footed. She had not expected such a pleasing jaunt. But now that she was on her own again, the words that Joanie had spoken came back to trouble her: “Because the boats wouldn’t take us, dear.” Never, never, not a chance.

It was not until Margaret had descended through the oak and hemlock woods and reached flatter ground once again that she could see the mayhem of the dockside in any detail. Her spy pipes bothered her. She wanted to avoid any temptation to trade them. But they also made her feel vulnerable, a target for anyone, any thief, practiced at telling when a woman was concealing something of value underneath her clothes. She checked the path behind her — no sign of the two women, whose progress in their finery was bound to be slow if they were to keep their ankles clean — and hastily pushed her spy pipes into the piles of driftwood that had somehow, despite its bulk, been washed up during the winter. She marked the pipes’ hiding place in her mind’s eye and walked on, feeling less encumbered, more secure, but still nervous about what the day might have in store for her.

Margaret had never known such crowds before, such order and disorder. Ferrytown had often been a thriving, busy place, especially in recent summers, when the emigrants had started passing through. But she could not remember ever seeing more than a hundred people in one place at the same time. Certainly she had never encountered such a press of bodies as this. There was no avoiding it.

First she had to make her way through the village of hastily erected huts and the tarp tents that she had spotted from above. She took her time, observing the formalities with the women and the few elderly men who were guarding their possessions, though hardly anybody responded to her nods and greetings with much warmth. Their focus was the anchorage. Would their husbands and their sons return to say that they’d secured passage on a ship? Would there be more ships? They had no time to talk. Worry was a full-time job.

Then Margaret had to negotiate the acreage of tethered animals and stationed carts that would no longer be of any use, everybody hoped. Hoofs and wheels didn’t work at sea, where — wonders of the world — all you needed was the muscle of the wind. What had been of value was now only an encumbrance. Beyond the carts, a pack of dogs, newly homeless, had achieved what most people only dream of and were masterless. They barked, bared their teeth, and snapped at passersby without much fear of punishment. Margaret’s whistling did not placate them. She had to keep her distance and walk through muddy garbage dumps rather than over the drier ground that the dogs had claimed. Only then did she find her way barred by the herd of would-be emigrants, their backs all turned to her and many straining on their toes to see how far off they were from what Margaret presumed was access to the boats.

She skirted the crowds, not wanting to pass too closely to their heels, in the same way that she would sensibly, like any town girl, avoid the rears of cattle or horses. Once the throng thinned, she was able to get closer to the riverbank, where she might gain a clearer view. Here there was a market of a sort. Women from Tidewater were selling dishes of hash and hunks of corn bread. Small boys were offering hands of fresh fish — alewives, weakfish, croakers, kings — none of which she recognized by appearance or by name. Exasperated emigrants were bartering with hard-faced men, hoping to sell their carts and horses and any heavy goods they still possessed before they put to sea but being offered only pittances — a reed hat for an oak table, a bit of bacon for a wagon, a bag of taffies for a mare. The salt air seemed to have robbed the world of value. Already a corral of newly purchased horses was closely packed with animals. An elderly emigrant who evidently, from his loud complaints, had wanted to buy back his own horse with the sack of flour that he’d been paid for it had been refused, laughed off. The purchase price for such a good mount, he had been told, was five sacks of flour. He was damping his sorrows at a row of clay-lined casks where ladles of beer and shots of shrub or hard liquor were being sold. Still, despite his evident anger, he was being pestered, as was Margaret herself, by hucksters offering good-luck charms, ship supplies, weatherproofs, potions to ward off ocean sickness. A good strong mule was not worth anything, but a finger length of pizzle hair, they said, could make you rich and keep you well.

Margaret hurried through them all, trying to seem purposeful and located despite the fingers pulling at her smock and skirt and the feet that tried to trip her, the voices in her face demanding trade and commerce beyond her means and offering goods outside her experience, new friends only from the teeth outward.

Once she reached the riverbank, she jumped down out of the multitude onto the muddy shore with its ballast of wood and metal drift. Now, if she was careful not to sink too deeply and if she kept low enough not to draw attention to herself, she could reach a rusty platform where she could stand and inspect from a distance the faces in the crowd and learn what it was these emigrants were straining for.

All she could see at first was a line of tables, separated from the emigrants by a rope fence, but gradually the procedures became clearer. One by one, each individual or family was being called forward, questioned, and searched by a group of men in black uniforms, looking like no one Margaret had ever seen before, unusually light-skinned, and old-fashioned somehow, in factory-made jackets and tooled shoes. Their beards and hair were trimmed short, like those of teenage boys. They carried heavy polished sticks that they used freely to organize the crowds as if they were cattle. And, so far as she could tell from such a distance, they were speaking in a tongue that made no sense at all to her, no matter how loud the words were shouted or how fiercely they emphasized their spoken commands with the blunt end of their sticks.

Margaret would not join the crowd of supplicants. She kept her distance and she watched, first checking for sign of any rustlers and then, when there was none, scanning the faces of the women for any of her friends from the Ark. Again, no sign. What she witnessed, though, was exactly what the women in the cottages had warned about. The few families that were visibly wealthy or could prove themselves to be secretly rich were being tick-marked on their forearms with a blue dye and then allowed to take their possessions through the metal wrecks and walk across the colored mud among the hard straight shadows of the hulks down to the shoreline and the cargo skiffs. Young men and men with bags of tools were being offered papers on which to thumb their signatures of agreement: travel for free across one ocean, work for free for one year. That was the deal, no arguments. Show your thumb or show your heels. Pretty girls were being flirted with and told how much richer, cleaner, and handsomer the men were on the far side of the ocean. A good-looking woman could have three husbands over there if she wanted to.