Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

They went across the courtyard, past the spot where their neighbors’ dead white dove had tumbled to the ground, to the annex house. That had burned more completely than the other buildings in the compound. It had been the straw and wood room and so had almost volunteered to be destroyed by flames. Margaret waved her hand at it. This was more than she could bear. “In there was where your Auntie Tessie lived, and funny Glendon Fields, and their boy, Matt. You would have had a playmate, see,” she said. But already she had turned away and was running back to Franklin and the mare.

Her tears came silently. No sobs. No shoulders heaving with the grief. She didn’t want comforting. It was best that Franklin thought she was strong. She only muttered the burial lament to herself again and remembered how her home had been before the fire, even before she had closed her family’s eyes and mouths, folded their arms in readiness, and covered their faces in their blankets. Instead she did her best to recall her single lasting memory of the voices and the smells of home when she’d been a child of Jackie’s age. She could remember sitting on the floor, playing with a red ball her mother had stitched. A dog was barking. Her father came back from the river with a fish and made her reach to touch and smell the skin.

“You know we can’t stay here, not even for the night,” Franklin said, and then added, almost in a whisper, “Too many bones. Too many for the girl.”

“I know.” She didn’t want to stay in Ferrytown a moment more. But she wasn’t pessimistic. There was tomorrow and next year, there was the path in front of her and steps to take, but still she understood that as far as moving on from the family she’d lost in Ferrytown was concerned, there was no way ahead. Coming back had been a reckless thing to do, perhaps. She’d disturbed memories, ash memories. These were the only lasting survivors of the fire, except for those few scraps of metal implements she’d recognized: a pewter pot, the iron grate, the family kettle, dented and blackened, the sharp ends of a shovel and an ax, almost unmarked and uncompromised by the heat. What had the Baptists said? “Metal has brought death into the world. Rust and fire are God’s reply.” Well, God had not replied in Ferrytown. Metal was the only thing that God had not reduced to ash.

More unburned bodies were out in the tetherings, and even some stockades had escaped the fire untouched. The living beasts had feasted all the winter on the dead, and here there still were packs of feral dogs and one or two remaining turkey vultures tugging at the parchment skins and stiffened pelts of horses, mules, and donkeys, many with their skeletons still picketed to posts. Somewhere among them were the bones of Nash, the boy whose job it had been to guard the animals. Franklin thought of Jackson and his coat. Any hope he’d nourished that his brother had survived was now abandoned. No one who’d slept in Ferrytown could still be breathing air. But he hurried on toward the first slopes of the mountains, still hopeful in his heart. His mother might be waiting on her stoop. This year, possibly, or next, he would return himself to her. But first he had to find a roof under which he, Jackie, and Margaret could recuperate.

Soon they reached and passed through the thicket of junipers, laurels, and scrub oaks, which smelled sweet with spring. The last time they’d been there, the odors had been fungal and metallic. Now they could begin to climb their old acquaintance, Butter Hill.

The going up was easier than the coming down had been, for Franklin at least. On that fall day, Margaret had just evaded death’s damp grip and Franklin had had to carry her, despite his painful knee. Every step had been a punishment. Now he walked ahead with Jackie and the mare, relishing the gradient. Every pace away from Ferrytown, away from the ocean, closer to home, was a reward. He sang his way uphill, inventing words and tunes for Jackie but glad to let the girl justify his sudden happiness so soon after their encounters in the town. But Margaret was silent. She kept her distance, preferring her own company. She was thinking more about the only time she’d been up Butter Hill before. That time she’d been collapsed across a horse’s neck, weighed down by her blue scarf. (Whatever happened to that scarf? She’d lost so many things.) She’d been as heavy and inert as the net bag draped across this mare’s haunches. She half remembered having to give way to descending travelers, her grandpa’s voice excusing her, the midges feeding off the lesions on her face.

It was not until the afternoon, when finally the three of them crested the last rise on the path and looked across the flatter clearings of grass and highland reed toward the black-green woods and the high white peaks beyond, that she truly recognized the place. It hadn’t changed, despite the bare branches and the blanched-out colors of the undergrowth. It was still a little warmer than the hillside path, its dips and hollows protected from the worst of the wind. It still appeared the safest acre in America, a place of remedy and recovery where surely they could at least spend the night, or spend the month, or spend eternity

“So this is it?” she called out to her family in front. An exclamation and a question.

Franklin turned around and smiled at her, his oversized, boyish face and his shaven head reddened by the sun, not blushing. He laughed with happiness, his long arms flapping like a girl’s. He pointed to the forest. “Margaret,” he said.

And there it was, just as it was, the little soddy where she’d first met Franklin, the sun-dried turfs, the chimney stack, the boulder walls — the Pesthouse, where her eyes had almost closed for good.

Now good fortune showed its face to these four travelers, the man, the woman, the child, the horse, which had finally earned the name of Swim. The Pesthouse was not exactly as they’d left it. Franklin pulled aside the barricade of planks that served as a door, and after he had struck the lintel a few times with his stick to scare off any snakes, he stooped to look inside. There were no smoke fumes, for a start. The grate had not been used for months, evidently. Some of the hut’s turfs had collapsed inward. There was pellet evidence of mice and rats. He looked toward the sleeping bench, half expecting to see the ghostly form of Margaret lying there, the bald round head of someone very sick and beautiful. But what he saw, tucked between the bed and the wall, virtually hidden, was just as thrilling and unnerving. His heart missed several beats. Three lucky things inside a cedar box.

By evening they’d sorted out the place, made fresh bedding, started up a fire, dug in the reeds for water, found a little forage for the mare. There even was a stub of candle they could use, a stub of candle that they had left behind themselves. Margaret could sit with its light spread out across her lap and clean the tarnish from her silver necklace. She could revive the color in her finely woven piece of cloth by rubbing off the green-blue mold. She could acquaint herself again with coins from a past when Abraham sat on his great stone seat and the eagle spread its wings. She could not help thinking, too, about everything that she had lost: a family, a home, a length of hair, a green-and-orange woven top, a heavy scarf, a dream of living on a distant bank, a pot of mint that, if it had survived the Ark, if it had defied the cruelty, could not provide its aromatic leaves for her. Still, there was her Pigeon and her Jackie to take the place of everything. And there was Swim. What greater compensations could there be?

Franklin held on to her feet and watched her face, dancing and expressive in the candlelight. He loved her, yes. He loved her now without constraint. There was no urgency. He pushed his finger in between each toe. He rubbed her ankles and her heels. He felt the ridges of interrupted growth at the end of her toenails, evidence that she’d been ill and that her illness had almost grown out. Tomorrow he would find the gutting knife and pare the ridges off.