The Pesthouse Read online

  Margaret thought the girl was disturbed by the Baptists' long gray robes, but actually she was smelling Margaret's own uneasiness. Their greatest marks of holiness — their flaccid arms and lifeless hands that had weakened over the years for want of use — were usually hidden in their sleeves. But when they came from their ablutions (where, according to the gossip, though no one had witnessed it, they cleaned their intimate parts by squatting in a shallow bowl), they liked to have their hands washed as well — force of habit from their less devout childhoods, she supposed — and Margaret had to hold their sleeves back while they dipped and trailed their emaciated fingers limply in the water. Then she had to take the washing block and soap them, sometimes as far up as their armpits. Their arms, especially those of the longest residents, who had not so much as picked their own noses for twenty years or more, were wasted from the shoulders down and weighed less than a strip of feather wood. Once the Baptists had washed, she had to dry them, too. She found the whole procedure unpleasant and disturbing. Their hands were weak and useless but not shrunken. In fact, with so little flesh and so much prominent bone, they seemed huge and corpselike.

  Margaret tried to keep her eyes lowered and maintain silence when the Finger Baptists were at the well. She did not want to be selected as one of the emigrants who had the honor of serving these men in their private quarters. She'd heard — more rumors, possibly, but disquieting nevertheless — that duties might include massaging and masturbating them, washing them down all over, washing their hair, providing pellets of food, pulling their clothes on and off, cleaning their teeth, and helping the fatter and the older ones to sit and rise. But only once in those winter months had Margaret been asked to do anything more intimate than draw the water, and wash and dry the arms. On that occasion, one of the younger Helpless Gentlemen, who, although his arms and hands were useless, was very mobile elsewhere, a speedy walker and a man with fat, expressive lips, had lifted his face toward Margaret and, with a series of commands — 'Higher', 'Lower', 'Aah, just there!' — required her to attend to an intolerable itch on the side of his face.

  'Count yourself lucky,' one of the women had commented that evening. 'A man can itch in many places.'

  There was no escaping the evening sermons, mostly delivered by a Baptist aspirant while all the families were eating: metals were the cause of weaponry and avarice, 'Think on iron, think on gold'; metals were invaders in a world otherwise designed from fire, air, water, earth and stone, all of which were more or less compressed versions of each other and indestructible; 'Metal has brought Death into the world. Rust and Fire are God's reply.' Sometimes, their mouths oily with food and scarcely able to restrain their laughter, the emigrants were required to repeat some favorite Baptist lines out loud. The diners were always happy to join in, though hardly any of them truly felt that tins and sins were quite the twins that the Baptist songs made them out to be.

  Otherwise, Margaret's life in the Ark was without problems and without external incident. The trickle of new arrivals — which, luckily, did not include any Boses — stopped as the snow thickened and the cold intensified. The world beyond the palisades became a memory of hardship and sore feet. She did her best not to dwell on Franklin or her family in Ferrytown. The devotees, pilgrims and disciples who had arrived during the fall kept to themselves in the evenings, preferring to concentrate on their rites and religious ambitions rather than consort with people who were less hostile to the old ways of America than piety and reason demanded. Once in a while, a group of devotees, expressionless as usual and wearing their sorters' gloves, disturbed the domestic calm of the sleeping huts by enforcing an unexpected search for hidden jewelry or any other trace of metal. A non-observant mason brought in from Tidewater during the summer because his carving skills were unrivaled was rumored to have hidden shards of metal between the tower walls to undermine its sanctity. The devotees had not found any evidence of that, but their confidence had been undermined. So they took no chances with the integrity of their new building. If anyone was caught with as much as a half-nail or a splinter of tin, their whole family was expelled at once, no matter if it were the day or night, or in the middle of a storm. The Ark would not abide so much as a fleck of metal.

  Margaret had nothing to fear from these occasional disruptions. She had no possessions that might harbor contraband. She did not care about their tower. She was without blemish and, in their eyes at least, lived a blameless life, hoping only to pass unnoticed or, at most, to be regarded as an attentive mother. She exchanged her token for food each day and earned it back by her attendance at the well. She slept and ate and grew more confident.

  At mealtimes, when they could be stared at, the Finger Baptists were a source of great amusement among the younger emigrants, including Margaret. Afterward, gathered around the candles in the privacy of the sleeping sheds, their faces animated by the warmth and light, the women of Margaret's hut could laugh and joke at will, and then exchange their hopes and ambitions for the coming spring.

  In some respects, Margaret had never been happier. Of course, her happiness was always haunted by the all-too-recent and the all-too-memorable loss of her family, her home town and her only man. The very thought of them was crippling. Nevertheless, Franklin had become the perfect husband and father in her imagination and in the stories that she told to her companions. He was her lover and her friend. He was the father of Jackie. She would never look at another man until she was certain he was dead. She could not shake off entirely the receding but nagging shame and guilt she felt for her abduction of the child. But for once she was part of a community that had not known her as a girl, that did not count her coloring as unfortunate and that could not control the way she lived her life or how she raised her daughter. She was a woman with status, a mother, a wife with a lost husband, a good friend whose wit was appreciated in the hut. Here was a warmth and neighborliness that she had never encountered in Ferrytown, where the only common interests at times seemed to be avarice, jealousy and competition. In the Ark, among her shed companions, there was the common interest of strangers sharing their directions and their hopes.

  Over the months both Jackie and the half-completed tower grew higher and more ornate. The Finger Baptists hoped to move into the lower levels when the spring and a fresh intake of both pilgrims and travelers arrived. Everybody amongst the emigrants dreamed of walking out through the double gates to see a sail ship in the estuary. Another month would see them free again. A month was nothing to endure. Then America could be a nightmare left behind. Even Margaret began to believe that her best future — their best future — would be beyond the ocean, that taking to the ships would not be cowardly. That dream she'd had, up in the forest on the night when she had lost her way, that dream of being once again a safe and ancient girl in her soddy at the top of Butter Hill, had been a delusion. Yes, happiness was in the east. Wasn't that what everyone believed?

  As the final days of winter passed and the moon, losing its hold, retreated back toward midnight, Margaret settled to the thought of finding passage in a ship along with her new friends. It was a comfort, in a way, to have a shared plan. She was distressed less and less by thoughts of Andrew and Melody, and Acton, their son, or by recollections of her life and family in Ferrytown. Even Franklin, her Pigeon, became more remote to her, despite the many occasions when her version of him as a father and a husband was offered to the women in the Ark or the many times she dreamed of their reunion. In fact, one morning when she was still exhausted from a restless night of Jackie's teething, she realized she could not remember many details of his face, and she could scarcely recall his family name. It wasn't Lombard, and it wasn't Lopate. She was relieved when, finally, the name was retrieved. Lopez, that was it! Franklin Lopez from the plains. How could she be so ready to forget that part of him, to let him slip away? That was troubling. It was as if the winter in the Ark had enriched her and robbed her at the same time.

  The first truly warm day came when there was still
snow on the ground, and the earth was hard. Spring's breath was in the air, crying green. Margaret had checked her pot of mint for signs of life, but there were none as yet. She was enjoying the sunshine at her duty spot beside the well and dozing, despite the usual hammering of carpenters and masons at the tower and the not-so-usual cries and hammering at the outer gates of the Ark.

  Jackie, now into her second year, was playing push-and-pull with another toddler. It was she who first spotted the man, dismounting from a horse and running across the courtyard from the entry gate toward the tower works, followed twenty paces behind by a gang of thirty or so, all armed with swords and pikes. Metal swords and pikes, some already wet with Baptist blood. But it was not their shining blades or brass-encrusted shields or the clanking of their buckles and their armor that most alerted Jackie. It was the first man's clothes. A pinto coat like his, in such a striking pattern, was bound to catch a child's eye. She called out, not a word exactly, and pointed at the man, clearly amused by something. For an instant Margaret, with her poor eyesight, mistook him for Franklin. She half got up. She half cried out. But then she saw how short he was, his bandy legs, his many layers, the colored ribbons tying back his beard. She recognized his face.

  13

  FRANKLIN LOPEZ and his forty or so fellows in the labor gang had arrived outside the Ark soon after dawn and set to work at once. They were almost eager for the exertion. Work was their one protection against the cold, the hunger and the boredom of captivity. The masters had kept their vassals lightly clothed and underfed, but the laborers had been told that this day's work, if it was as richly productive as was hoped, might be rewarded with an evening meal and, possibly, brief access to a fire.

  'Make it quick, and keep it quiet,' was the only instruction for the gang, though that was easier said than done. The winter months had shut the landscape down, hardened it and left it brittle. Even walking through the dead, frost-stiffened vegetation that morning had been far from silent. The ground had snapped and clacked loudly underfoot, protesting at the weight of so much flesh, though, so far, only telling anyone awake inside the Ark that there were men and horses passing by. That was not unusual for these spring mornings, when everyone was impatient to catch first sight of sails. The ships were coming. Any dreaming citizen with any hope was packed and ready for the sea.

  Franklin — clumsy and stumbling at the best of times — had made more noise than most as they approached the palisades. He'd been strapped across the neck as punishment and then strapped again when he'd cried out in pain. His masters, he'd discovered, were quick to pick on him and were less eager to punish shorter men. Sometimes, when his anger and his despair became intolerable, he stood and stretched himself and laughed out loud, shaking all his limbs as if his humor knew no bounds. It was a way to shrive himself of all the furies. It was a laugh that did not seem — well, not at first — too impudent. Sometimes his masters laughed along with him, counted him an idiot, called him 'Donkey'. At other times they beat him for his laugh. But usually the beating was good-humored and less painful than not laughing.

  Franklin had been relatively fortunate during his captivity. The morning following his separation from Margaret, after a cold, hard night sleeping with the horses and the stolen animals at the fringes of the Dreaming Highway, Franklin, Acton Bose and the two Joeys had been tugged awake on their leashes at first light and hurried along at the speed of the slowest horse toward Tidewater.

  The horsemen did not stop to feed their charges. Their only opportunity to rest and urinate had not been pleasant. The seven rustlers had caught up with a cartload of furniture and farming tools, being pulled along the Highway by four heavy horses. The three emigrants who owned it, two men — brothers, with identical beards — and one wife, hoped to make themselves invisible by staying absolutely silent and making no eye contact with the newcomers, who had first ridden around them in a circle, whooping like children, and then dismounted to inspect their prey more closely.

  The travelers studied their own feet without comment or expression as Franklin and his fellows were forced to sit in a line with their backs toward the cart. The family's horses were unharnessed and their boxes kicked open and their sacks emptied onto the Highway. Only their dog did not understand that nothing could be done to save them or their property. Its barking protests were short-lived. Finally, once any valuables had been discovered and stolen and anything fragile had been broken, just for the sake of it, the heavy horses were added to the string of mules, and the two men were attached to the train of captives with loops of rope around their necks and wrists. But the woman, despite the protests of her husband, who called out her name — 'Marie, Marie, Marie' — well beyond hearing distance, was left behind in the attentive care of two of the rustlers. They caught up with their comrades later in the afternoon in high spirits but unaccompanied. When the husband once again called out her name, they shook their fists to silence him and made vulgar gestures. 'Make another noise and you'll be beaten,' they said, and added, 'Like the dog. Like sweet Marie. That goes for all of you. We're in the mood.'

  On their fourth day of captivity, exhausted by their pace of travel, by their anger and anxiety, and by the meanness of their rations, the six hostages arrived at an encampment in ancient waste land to the north of Tidewater. The land was far too widely strewn with rubble and debris for many trees to have survived. Only weeds and a few low scrub bushes made their living among the remains of great stone buildings and the tumbled masonry of a grand, dead city. So deep were the fallen remnants of the now shapeless structures that pools of water, little lakes, were nestling in the marble and concrete piles. The horsemen stopped in a steep-sided canyon of rubble and wreckage where the sunlight hardly penetrated. There the captives were tightly bound and shackled to an antique, purposeless engine of some kind, smelling of decay and rust, and — or so they feared — left for dead, without a jug of water or a scrap of food, any protection against the cold or any word of what their fates might be. Their only freedom, now that their captors were out of earshot, was that they could speak among themselves, exchanging names with the husband and brother-in-law of sweet Marie, who made their oddly formal introductions, observing rules of precedence that could no longer have any value.

  'I have to get back to my wife,' Nike the husband kept repeating, as if offering an excuse not to join the others in their enforced adventure.

  'We all have someone to get back to,' the older Joey said. 'I have a wife and other children, too. I don't know where they are.' He indicated Franklin: 'He has a sister, and Acton has his parents and his daughter. That's how it is for all of us. They're lost to us, we're lost to them.'

  'You're older than the rest of us,' replied Nike, as if age devalued Joey's pessimism.

  The younger Joey spent his time either crying or sighing deeply. He was in shock: the beating of the dog had been the cruelest act he'd ever witnessed, and inexplicable to a boy of his age. He'd no idea that anyone could be so heartless as to treat a dog as if it were, well, just an animal. But the older men, once they had heard the horsemen depart and tested the silence for a while, saw this unexpected abandonment as their only chance to get away with their lives. If there was anyone to get back to, if the wife, the child, the sister and the parents had survived, then this was the opportunity to seek them out.

  The men were too tightly bound to attempt to untie any knots, but with a little wiggling each could sink his chin on to his chest and get his teeth around one of the thinner ropes. It tasted of sweat and smelled of horses and wood. But it was feasible, though not easy, to snap or chew the thin strands. Given time, it now seemed possible that they could bite through this rope, though whether that would set them free or merely damage their mouths and lips remained to be seen. They worked away, no longer wasting any energy on talk. They sounded like six feeding rats.

  The best of them had broken through only a fraction of the rope when three of the rustlers, including their short and overdressed leader, still wearing Ja
ckson's coat, returned. They were accompanied by an elderly man who rode his horse side-saddle and his two armed retainers. They helped him to dismount. He walked along the line of captives, nodding, shaking his head, behaving like a trader inspecting barrels of apples or bolts of cloth.

  'Very well,' he said. 'My offer stands. I'll take those three.' He pointed at the brothers and at Acton Bose, but shook his head at the middle-aged potman. 'And I'll take the boy. We'll make good use of him until he grows. What name?'

  'I'm Junior Joey, mister.'

  'And this one, too.' He placed his finger on the end of Franklin's chin, buried in the hair and the threads of chewed rope. 'We'll have them digging coal.'

  'No, the mountain's not for sale,' the small man said. 'We're keeping him.'

  'Well, keep him, then. The more fool you. I would have paid extra for him.' He shook hands with the rustlers, handed over the price they'd negotiated, remounted his horse, with help, and led his retainers and his four newly roped purchases out of the encampment.

  'There's much to do,' the little rustler said, inspecting the remaining Joey, now trembling with shock and fear. 'I own you now, you two. I have you for eternity. Free servitude. Work hard, and then we'll see what rations I might offer you. If you continue to devour your ropes, you'll not be fed, except with rope.' He laughed, quite normally and merrily, his beard and ribbons shaking — the very thought of feeding them on rope! Surely they could see the funny side of that. 'You call me "Master" or you call me "Captain" or you call me "Chief". Those are the names I answer to. Let's hear the sound of that. You first.'