Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

Margaret and Franklin spent a month inside the Pesthouse, waiting for their moment to arrive and letting a few of that year’s early emigrants pass by unhindered. Dreamers do not want advice. Nothing the pair of them could say would make a difference to determined travelers. Let them go down to the coast and find out for themselves. Let them see how pitiless the ocean was. They watched as emigrants constructed a new raft on rope pulleys, tied to rocks and scorched tree trunks, so they could haul themselves across, into the remnants and the debris. They looked down on the little empty town, knowing that the sight of it was punishing. Mostly, though, they turned their backs against the east. Margaret finally succeeded in drying her spy pipes by the fire. She could see clearly once again — the western woods, the western hills, the distances.

The spring advanced itself. The girl began to walk with sturdy legs and say her first words, Ma and Pa and Stop . The winter cold retreated, holding sway only at night. And thunderclouds came eastward, throwing shade across the lake at Ferrytown and delivering the rain that had been lifted from the plains and prairies, from the hopes and promises, from the thicknesses and substances that used to be America and would be theirs. The couple knew they only had to find their strength. And then — imagine it — they could begin the journey west again. They could. They could imagine striking out to claim a piece of long-abandoned land and making home in some old place, some territory begging to be used. Going westward, they would go free.

JIM CRACE is the author of eight previous novels. Being Dead was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize and won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Jim Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England.