Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

Margaret said nothing. She just busied herself, making sure that all the visible parts of his body were as clean and smooth as her tools would allow. It was up to him, not her, if this resulted in anything other than shaving. If Franklin had reached out his hand and pulled her to him, she would have fallen on him happily. If he had taken her hand and pushed it farther down his body under his clothes and into the hair that modesty had said she should not touch or cut, she would have allowed it, for surely it was time for her to take that risk. She would have welcomed taking such a risk.

When Franklin had said so forcefully the day before that he would stay with her and Jackie no matter what, Margaret had known for sure that, given time but as undoubtedly as water runs downhill, they must be man and wife. So even though he was once again too shy and hesitant — too cowardly, perhaps — to take advantage of her shaving him by making love to her, Margaret did not really mind. What was the hurry, after all? They’d not be parting. She could let him take his time, no matter how curious she was about the shadows of his body, no matter how great her desire to kiss him had become, no matter that she herself felt both breathless and lightheaded to be so close to all of him. Her bladder seemed to press on her. Her skin felt red and prickly. Her tongue was active in her mouth.

But for all that intimacy, it was the shaving of Franklin’s head and face that was for Margaret the most disturbing and surprising. She cut away to find a double crown. A bad-luck sign, as much as red hair was. She loved him all the more. By shaving it, she made it disappear.

At last she stepped back to find she had revealed a teenage face and a boy’s head. The gap between their ages, already a caution for her, widened into a chasm. Not six years now but twenty. It was so unusual to see the bare face of a man and his cropped skull that for a moment she was frightened. Franklin’s features seemed so large, his expression so undisguised, his skin so shockingly pale and vulnerable, so convincingly sickly, as if the ruse of shaving had actually delivered him the flux. He seemed more natural as well. In a way, this was more like Franklin. It explained his nervousness, his blushing bashfulness, that womanly laugh, those indecisive hands, his fear of taking risks, his failure — yet — to kiss her. He had not quite grown out of being young.

“If only you could see yourself,” she said, and laughed finally. A laugh of disappointment and understanding. This “boy” could be her son.

“I can feel it.” Franklin ran his hand around his face and head and in a circle around his lips. “My mouth feels strange. Huge ears.”

“You look like a boy. A giant boy. A giant pink boy, with flux. The worst case of the flux I’ve ever seen. No one will want you now.” Her two-crowned beauty boy.

Margaret and Franklin were not sorry to wave the ocean goodbye. They’d laid their eyes on it, witnessed its implacable size, its anger, its serenity, and that was enough for the time being. For a lifetime, probably. The ocean was best as a memory or as a prospect. They could not imagine living with it as a neighbor. The noise would send them crazy. Besides, they’d have to watch the sail ships coming in and going out, packed with dreaming emigrants, and be reminded all the time of the distance they had traveled and the dangers they had met, and all without purpose. The ocean, unending to the eye, would serve only to tell again how lost they were, how desolate and damned they might become if they stayed put.

They started out before sunup, to be sure of getting into and beyond the environs of Tidewater before many people were around. Certainly before any horsemen from the rustlers’ encampment had begun their day. The panniers of the little mare were not quite large enough to provide a riding basket for Jackie, so Franklin had cut the sides of one pannier and let it out, enlarging it with trawl netting and securing it with ropes. He’d cut two holes for Jackie’s feet and legs, and Margaret had made a pillow out of net. The girl would travel like a queen. The other half of the pannier was filled to the same weight as the girl with strips of fumed horseflesh, the best of the fisherman’s tools, the spy pipes, a good supply of water, some tinder, fish oil, and the firestick and fire bow that Franklin had made.

They headed north for a short distance and then set their route and their hopes toward the west, taking it in turns to lead. They were too cold and concentrated to talk, though not too cold to smile. Soon the wind and sun would come up at their backs and press them onward, deep into America.

Franklin had not forgotten the damage he’d inflicted on the concealed wooden bridge at Ferrytown, or the exhilaration he had felt at cutting through its greasy mooring ropes and seeing it slump and slither down the river’s high banks to break up in the water. But he had put it to the back of his mind as important only to the past. He’d not expected to reencounter it or to be so embarrassed and inconvenienced by his handiwork. He’d meant only to prevent the flames of Ferrytown skipping across the bridge like imps.

“Some idiot has cut it,” Margaret said, holding up the docked end of the tethering, which was still hanging loose from its tree trunk, each strand and ligament too cleanly cut to be the work of nature. “Now what?”

Franklin shook his head. He did not want to lie to her, but even so he did not see the point in identifying the idiot. He might admit to it once they had crossed the river. If that were ever possible. He had persuaded himself on their journey back to Ferrytown that somehow the wooden debris of the bridge would still be scattered at the bottom of the gulch and that all he’d have to do was clamber down the coulee and use the remaining timber to pull himself through the rapids or, if fortune was entirely on his side, as a set of steps. Apart from that severed end of rope in Margaret’s hand, though, the only evidence that there had ever been a bridge was a dangling trail of greening rope and timber on the far and western side of the river. No help to them. But easy to see, because the fires in Ferrytown had done exactly what Franklin had feared. The imps had climbed the river bluffs between the houses and the lake and consumed what once had been thick undergrowth but now looked like a forest of smoke-black antlers with just the first green signs of spring showing on the ground.

There was no easy path down from the bridge to the point where the ferry used to put ashore. No one had ever worn a passage. So Margaret carried Jackie on her back while Franklin went ahead with the mare, crashing through the dry waste and bushes and beating back the more resistant undergrowth with a stick. It took all afternoon, and Franklin’s arms and face were raw with blood and scratches by the time they stopped to set up camp for the night. They had reached the low bluffs at the river’s farthest limits. Below them were the marshes, vapory and gray, and beyond them, though hardly visible in the afternoon’s retreating light, the last remains of the log boardwalk that had led up from the gravel landing beach through levees of sediment and saved the ferry passengers from a drenching first foot contact with the east.

Margaret and Franklin’s journey from the coast had been slower but more comfortable than either of them had had the right to hope. It had seemed as natural and inevitable as swimming upstream does for a salmon. They no longer felt defeated by America, as most emigrants had on the journey out, driven eastward by their failings. The mare had proven to be a sturdy companion, eager and accommodating, especially when persuaded by Franklin’s switch to brisk up her pace a bit rather than indulge her weaknesses for browsing and flagging. She repaid him with a session of nickering and some petulant shaking of her tail, but beyond that she was mostly, tooth and hoof, a neat, high-bred, dignified horse. However, she was used to being a riding mount, not a pack animal. Now she was required to tolerate bulky burdens — not only the increasingly fretful and impatient Jackie in her pannier and the second, balancing pannier stuffed full of fumed horsemeat but also a long net bag thrown over her haunches and containing anything useful — the toolbox, pieces of leather — that Margaret and Franklin could find. They’d come equipped as well with good materials for a tent. The cabins had not been short of canvas, fishing poles, rope, and netting.