(2007) The Pesthouse Page 10

  The distant escarpment, after their first observation, had not been clearly visible for much of their journey that morning, so it had come as a relief and a surprise when they had crested an oddly regular esker of oval hillocks to gain their second view of what seemed now, on this closer inspection, to be an unnaturally shallow, flat valley without a river but flanked by parallel mounds as regular as the best-plowed furrow — except that no plow was big enough, not even in the fairytales, to throw aside so great a swath of earth. Initially, they were merely baffled. This was no escarpment provided by nature, unless nature had on this one occasion broken its own rules and failed to twist and bend, but had instead hurtled forward, all symmetry and parallels. But soon their bafflement was overcome by astonishment. What at first they might have mistaken for cattle turned out to be a horse-drawn carriage traveling at an unusual speed along the center of the valley surface, as if its route had been designed specifically for wheels and hoofs. Margaret, who could not see as well as Franklin, shook her head and looked at him. Something worried her about the escarpment. But Franklin said, 'I've heard of it. This has to be the Dreaming Highway. It takes us to the ships.'

  They rested on the esker top, lunching on the nuts that they had gathered in the woods and on cold bird meat. They watched a pair of travelers with a string of eight laden mules progress without impediment or any deviation along the same track the carriage had followed.

  'This makes me hopeful,' Franklin said. The optimist.

  Margaret shook her head again. 'It worries me, Pigeon.' This nickname tease of hers, which thoroughly amused her when she applied it, was so disarming for Franklin that he broke into a smile and reddened whenever she said the word. 'That road makes me nervous now we're close to it.'

  'What is there to be nervous of?' A question, not a challenge.

  'It's just too bare. I don't know what it is but... it's open ground. You know, exposed. There's not a tree on there to hide behind. I feel we shouldn't even step on it. Not one single toe. We have to find another way. We have to hide ourselves.'

  Franklin was impatient to move on swiftly, as the mules and the little carriage had done, and thereby reach the ocean soon. 'Why hide ourselves? You only have to hide your head. That blue scarf of yours should do it. No one need know that you've been ill. Your color is healthy today. Just cover up.'

  'My scarf won't make us safe. The roads on this side of the river are dangerous, all of them.'

  'Who told you that?'

  'Everyone in Ferrytown.'

  What 'everyone in Ferrytown' had known, according to Margaret, was that the journey to the coast, rather than becoming more straightforward once the river had been crossed, became more hazardous and deadly. 'Why do you think we kept that wooden bridge a secret?' she asked. 'Not just for the ferry fees. But to stop anybody fleeing back to our town on the safe side of the river.' She'd heard her father talk about it many times when he was working on the ferry. Once in a while — too often for comfort, actually — bodies would be pushed ashore onto the shingle landing beach or caught in the weed beds, the bloated corpses of people who had tried to swim back across to Ferrytown and drowned. And every few days a little group would be waiting on the eastern side, terror on their tails, begging to be taken back to the settlement by ferry.

  She said, 'I've heard of people there with gaping wounds, and widows with the pieces of their murdered men and sons in sacks, and tales of little boys and girls, hardly big enough to climb down off their mothers' laps, who've been taken by the gangs and sold or put to work. We had to turn them back, of course.'

  'You turned them back?'

  'Well, yes. Don't frown at me. There wasn't any choice. That's what our consuls said.'

  Ferrytown's failure of charity to these westward refugees, according to Margaret's uncomfortable explanation, was simply a business decision. The town was geared to take in paying emigrants from the west, help them part with some of their wealth, then ferry them out eastward as speedily as possible. Any westward refugees who made it back to Ferrytown would not be paying guests but 'beggars and schnorrers'. All they'd do, apart from eat and use up money-making beds, was spread alarm. With their stories. And the expressions on their faces. And their wounds. The far side of the river would become a place to fear.

  'Pigeon, think of it,' she instructed him. 'What would happen if the migrants learned that Ferrytown might be their last safe place? They'd never leave us, would they? Would you? Imagine, then, how huge our town would be. Big and poor and as crowded as a beehive. And think, if people found the wooden bridge, we'd wake up to an even larger herd of strangers with not a scrap between them to pay for their beds and suppers. We couldn't let them cross. It's unkind, yes, I know it's unkind, but that's the truth of it.'

  'Why have the wooden bridge at all?'

  'For us. Not them. Who can say when we might need to run away ourselves? Or on what side of the river safety will prefer to live next season? The bridge is our security.'

  Franklin laughed uneasily and pulled a face. Is not Was? She hadn't even guessed, then, what he had inflicted on her bridge. He wouldn't tell her either. What difference could it make, except to have him seem a fool? He wouldn't be her Pigeon anymore. He'd be her turkey — big, stupid and clumsy. Instead, he steered their discussion back to the long straight track where time ago, he supposed, great vehicles and crowds had hastened between the grand old towns — cities was the word he'd heard — and the people of America had been as numerous and healthy as fleas.

  He found, in his eagerness to change the subject from the bridge, an uncharacteristic bullying and determined tone to his voice. 'This will speed us to the boats,' he said. 'We have to take a chance. The winter's closing in on us. You've seen the frosts. The snow is never far behind. And anyway, this barrow is exhausting me. You think, because I'm big, that I can't ache?' He began to blush, embarrassed to sound so much like his brother — except that Jackson would not have admitted to aching or exhaustion.

  Margaret held her hands up in comic submission, but conscious, too, that, for the first day at least, she'd not made the barrow any easier to push. 'Let's not make the big man ache,' she said.

  'We'll either have to throw out half of our possessions, ditch the barrow and carry what we can, and that is not a good idea. We've not got much — but what we've got we need,' he continued. 'Or else we'll have to find a path where wheels are helpful rather than a hindrance. In other words...' He pointed toward the disappearing train of mules, '... that road. Our wheelbarrow will fly along that road.' That dreaming road.

  It did not take them long to reach and climb the first of the two parallel mounds that protected the road from the wind and then to descend the sloping, grassy berm, varicosed with gopher trails, to the flat corridor itself. It was almost as wide as the river at the ferry point in Ferrytown, and that made no sense at all. The widest transport that had ever passed through Ferrytown was only three horses wide, while this great swath of track would easily take two teams of horses, each fifty wide or more. It had to be the pathway of a giant or else to have been designed to carry something huge and heavy, those wooden war machines, perhaps, that Margaret had heard talk about — the ones that broke through walls, or shot boulders in the air, or hurled fire.

  The road, indeed, seemed built — by how many laborers and over how many years, at what immense cost? — to take great weights. Its now damaged surface, much degraded by the weather and time, was comprised mostly of chips of stone, loose grit and sticky black rubble, which only the toughest of plants — knotweed, sagebrush and thistle — had succeeded in penetrating. Along the verge, behind thick curbs of fashioned rectangular rock and what seemed like rusted metal fences, thinned to a finger's breadth by corrosion, were clumps of jimson, not yet cut back by the frosts, their summer trumpets rotting at their bases. There was nothing edible for travelers — unless they craved hallucinations and stomach cramp or could, like beetles, dine on rust. The going, though, despite the often uneven rubble, was a
lmost as easy as Franklin had hoped. Margaret could climb on board again, to rest herself. ('Don't let me make you ache,' she said.) The barrow, aided by a slight decline in the easterly direction, was quick and easy to maneuver. Franklin had only to lift it a little by its handles and it almost rolled forward on its own, anxious to make progress.

  To tell the truth, Franklin's chosen route, though fast, was tedious. Protected by the mounds of earth, it was impossible to tell if any breeze or any storm clouds were building up on a far horizon or even if there was any danger in the wider world. Margaret had resigned herself to feeling a bit uneasy on the Highway, but she had voluntarily allowed her Pigeon to win in their dispute about her fears and so would have to make the best of it. She had not minded Franklin's unexpected tone of voice. Her brothers, though they were both much smaller men than Franklin, had been greater bullies in their time and much louder in their arguments, so she was used to bombast. She would have been more surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed, to have gotten her own way easily. It was better, all in all, to be in the care of a man who was strong and determined to have his way than to place her trust in what was known by the women in Ferrytown as a lily-liver, whatever that might be exactly. Franklin had expressed himself. She had allowed him to. Now the responsibility was his. She could hold him to account if anything went wrong.

  Late in the afternoon, with the sun too low to light the road but the sky still brightly blue beyond the escarpments, they caught up with the mule train and its two attendants, a boy not much more than twelve years old and his father. One of their mules carried their personal effects, including a large canvas tent. The other seven were laden with jugs, pots and crocks.

  Margaret had been persuaded that she ought to wear her blue scarf, hiding her shaven head, so that unless a stranger scrutinized her eyebrows too closely, her recent illness could remain a secret. The potman and his son did not seem too alarmed when finally they halted the mules with their sticks and turned to exchange greetings. The size of Franklin could not have been reassuring from a distance, but his manner was mild, and his smile — something Margaret had noticed with increasing satisfaction — was disarming. She might, she thought, when they were sleeping side by side in their barrow bed that night, allow his hand to hold hers, or even let her head rest on his shoulder, the bristles of her scalp against his beard. What harm could come of it? A man who would go back for her, to rescue her three talismans, a man who was so sweetly timorous, a man who could remove the flux with his enormous thumbs, must surely deserve something more than words of gratitude.

  Franklin and Margaret introduced themselves to the potman as Ferrytowners, and, instinctively, as brother and sister. A woman of her age could not admit to traveling with an unrelated man. But claiming to be husband and wife would have been not only embarrassing to themselves but unconvincing to strangers. There was their age difference for a start. Six or seven years, possibly. And then the careful, respectful formality that still existed between them and would not persist between lovers and certainly not between spouses. The potman raised an eyebrow, though. 'You're not exactly twins,' he joked, surveying the immensely tall, black-bearded man and the pale, tiny redhead, scarcely reaching his chest.

  'Different mothers,' Margaret said. 'Mine died.' That much was true.

  They traveled together for a short distance until the escarpments at the edge of their road flattened out entirely into a broad, barriered semicircle and provided them with daunting views across a debris field of tumbled stone and rock, stained with rust and ancient metal melt. Colossal devastated wheels and iron machines, too large for human hands, stood at the perimeter of the semicircle, as if they had been dumped by long-retreated glaciers and had no purpose now other than to age. Hardly anything grew amid the waste. The earth was poisoned, probably. Twisted rods of steel protruded from the masonry. Discarded shafts and metal planks, too heavy to pull aside even, blocked their paths.

  Margaret had seen a lesser version of such things before, in the historic north of Ferrytown, where once there'd been, or so tradition claimed, a vast workshop that produced shoes in enormous numbers, though why people could not make shoes for themselves in their own homes was never clear to her. The flaking bodies of machines were still buried there, and, as Margaret knew from her own experience, even to that day if anybody turned the soil in that area, they'd be unlucky not to find shiny buckles or little metal eyelets, presumably for boot laces, among the loam of rotted leather. But she — and certainly Franklin — had never encountered such mighty metal blocks before or such a profligate display of waste by these ancestors. The smell was oily, acidic and medicinal, the sort of smell even a skunk would avoid. This had to be the junkie that she'd heard reported, third, fourth hand, from stories that had managed to cross the river back to Ferrytown, even if the storytellers hadn't.

  In Ferrytown, metal things were sometimes prized and always hard to come by. People could manage without. Margaret's family had owned only the silver cup, some bluish pewter cooking pots, some knives, a crude iron grate that Grandpa said was owned by his grandpa and half a dozen grandpas beyond him, a hand-beaten kettle, a very useful shovel and an ax. Margaret herself possessed — or had possessed — her silver necklace and the coins she had found in the river shale when she was a child. But that was all. Carts could not get by entirely without a little metal toughening, on wheel rims, for instance. And boat builders and carpenters could manage wood more easily with sharp-edged tools. But generally metal objects were not preferred to those fashioned out of timber or leather or bark or root or withies or cane or wool or gourds or clay or fur. There were so many obliging materials that one could use without going to the time-consuming and dirty trouble of mining and smelting.

  It was fascinating, if disturbing, to stand now among the bludgeoned stones and rusting cadavers, trying to imagine what America had been all those grandpas ago, while the potman and his son hunted round for any thin metal scraps that they could scavenge and use as staples for fixing broken shards of clay. Margaret and Franklin did not speak. They retreated, shaking their heads, baffled but excited by the presence of so much antiquity, until they noticed signs of life on the outskirts of the junkie. Smoke was rising from the entrance of a sheltered cave of debris beneath an overhang of collapsed stonework. An elderly man in his fifties with a graying beard came out into the daylight, looked across a little nervously at the potman and at Margaret and Franklin, and finally called out a word of greeting.

  Franklin, as the younger man, would have to walk across to introduce himself. He left Margaret in charge of the barrow and the lead rein of the mules, and made his way across the debris. As he got closer and could see into the deep darkness of the shelter, he recognized the little carriage that they'd spotted earlier that day. A pair of carriage horses were tied against a wall of squared stone, mossy green, at one side of the cave, where there were pools of greasy water. The old man's family — his wife, a son — were sitting round their fire, warming their knuckles. There was a grandchild sleeping in a reed-weave basket with a mattress of fishnet.

  They spent the night together in the dry shelter of the stone and metal cave, all of them, three 'families' sharing their provisions as travelers should, sharing the fire, and glad of the company. When they had eaten and Margaret had handed round her taffies as a treat, especially for the potman's boy, they took it in turns, according to their seniority, to tell the stories of their emigration so far.

  The carriage family were from a riverside community, much farther south than Ferrytown and on the opposite bank. There was no work or trade for them anymore. The river was narrow there, and so, while it had once been good for fishing, it was not suitable for ferrying and profiting from travelers, as Ferrytown had done. The old man, Andrew Bose, and his wife, Melody, had been net- and creel-makers, employing eight hands and growing rich from their efforts. Their son, Acton, had been a fisherman and fish merchant. 'Also doing well for himself,' added Melody. 'He was much admired.' But
when the village started to empty as striking out offered better prospects than staying put, the fish and net trade beached itself. Acton became his parents' last remaining customer for nets. They became the only ones to buy his fish. The Boses hoped to sit their problems out. Things would get better. Only a fool would leave the river bank, because whatever happened there you would never run short of water or food. But then their daughter-in-law died in childbirth, and Acton determined to leave for somewhere less ill fated. His parents were too old to stay behind alone, though their son had not insisted that they join him and the baby. On the contrary. But it was time for all of them to 'face the facts and leave'. So, once the child had been weaned by the last of the village pay-moms and cut her first two teeth, they'd shuttered up their house and joined the exodus. Andrew had his tools with him, he said. There was bound to be work for a net-maker as soon as they reached water. Net-makers were always valued and respected wherever there were boats.

  The potman and his son — both named Joey — had traveled from the south from a market town where, once the region's farms had failed and folded and their owners had joined the emigration, there was no work, no market, no demand for pots, and so no supper on the family table. The elder Joey had made the future easy for himself by first sending his wife and their three other children ahead in the company of neighbors. Then he'd traded some silver for the mules, loaded up his stock of finished pots, his tools and some powdered fixing clay, and followed on, taking his time. He and his son had survived during the two months of their journey so far by doing pot repairs in exchange for food and lodging. The Joeys had been in Ferrytown ten days before, and they had sealed the cracks in several of the guest house's earthenware water ewers, and had stapled broken plates and dishes in many of the wealthier homes. 'My wife knows it's her job to break as many pots as she can, ahead of me,' he said. 'She does the damage. I do the repairs.' In just a few days' time, he hoped, he'd meet up with his wife again, somewhere on the coast. 'I'll find her, you can bet. She's got a laugh can shatter clay. That's why I married her.'