The Pesthouse (3 page)

Once the moon came up above the leaden volumes of clouds, augmenting what was left of day, the lake in the valley — hidden up till then in mist — was like a silver pendant, with the river as its glinting chain. Franklin had not seen so much standing water before. Perhaps the sea would be like that, flat and safe and breathtaking.

THE BOULDER HUT on the far side of the bald, well out of danger's way, too high for that night's heavy vapors, was occupied by Margaret, the only stub-haired person in the neighborhoods. Red Margaret. Or the Apricot, as she was called by local men, attracted by her color — and her plumpness — in a land where nearly all the other heads were black, and then were gray or white. Her grandfather, as any parent would, had condemned her coppery tresses to the flames as soon as he had suspected that she was suffering the flux. She'd vomited all day, she'd had diarrhea, she'd shivered like a snow fly but was hot and feverish to touch, she'd coughed as dryly as a jay, there were rashes on her face and arms, her neck was rigid and painful, and the onset of her problems had been cruelly swift, though not as swift as the news of her illness, which had raced around the houses as fast as sound — the sound of her mother weeping — and, once again, turned their compound of dwellings into a place to avoid.
Once again
, because only three months previously, in the high heat of the summer, her father had gone to bed healthy, sweet, a little overweight, red-haired, just as she had done the night before, and woken up soft, battered and darkened. He'd died of flux, the first of seven townspeople to die and who knows how many unnameable travelers on their journeys to the boats who'd reached the far bank of the river and were out of sight and out of memory before they started shivering.

The flux was carried in and carried out by travelers, or by their goods, or by their animals, or in their bedding, or in their clothes. The illness was an intermittent visitor, unwelcome but well known. So what else could be afflicting Margaret except that self-same flux that must have hidden like a demon in their house since Pa had died, biding its time while choosing someone else's bed to share? And what choice had they but to carry out the rules and protect Ferrytown from her?

Her grandpa — repeating what he'd already done too recently for his son, her father — had shaved her skull, removing all the ginger drama from her head with a shell razor, and then called the closest women in the family, two sisters and her ma, to take off Margaret's body hair, snapping it out to the roots, the last of it wherever it might be — from her eyebrows and, most painfully, her lashes; from her nostrils, even; from her lightly ochered forearms and her legs; elsewhere, the hidden hair — and massage her scalp with pine tallow, until she was as shorn and shiny as a stone and smelling like a newly readied plank.

Everybody in the land must know what shaven baldness signified. No one could mistake her for a safe and healthy woman now. Not for some time. Not for a tress of time. She should not expect a welcome anywhere with that alarming head. But if she were that rarity — a sufferer who could defeat the flux — the regrowth of her hair, once it had reached her shoulders anyway, would prove that she was truly safe again.

They burned her clippings on the outside fire, full thirty-one years of growth reduced in moments to a brittle tar. It smelled like a blacksmith's shop, like horses' hoofs, like carcasses, as you'd expect from such a pestilence. With any luck the venoms of the flux would now have been destroyed by fire, and Margaret would survive her illness, as trees survive the winter if they shed their leaves. At least the flux could not be drawn back into her body through her hair, now that she was almost bald. The signs were good, they told her, hoping to believe these baseless reassurances themselves. No bleeding yet, no body smell. Her father had bled from his mouth and nose. She'd be more fortunate than him. If there were any justice in the world, she'd have the good luck denied to Pa, her mother said.

But still, like him, she'd have to go up to the little boulder Pesthouse above the valley for ten days or so, unattended and unvisited, to see if she recovered or was lost. There was no choice but to be hard-hearted. If any of the travelers were ill, then they were thrown out of town at once. No bed or sustenance for them. But if the victim was a Ferrytowner, the Pesthouse was the only option. Margaret would have to take the westward route up Butter Hill against the tide of history.

The women had already rid themselves of wool and fur and dressed in their safest waxed clothes — garments that were too slickly fibered, they hoped, to harbor any pestilence. They chewed tobacco as protection. Nevertheless, they were unwilling to resist this final risk and their last chance, probably, to make their farewells. They kissed Margaret on her cheek. And the men shook hands with her. Then — when she had gone to pack her bag with her three things and her brother had been sent to prepare the horse — they all washed their fingertips and lips in vinegar. You don't take chances with the flux.

Her grandpa led her on the horse up into the hills that same morning, three slow and ancient travelers, it would seem, the old man taking care with every step, as if his bones were as fragile and as flaky as log ash, the woman slumped across the horse's neck, too weak to sit straight, the mare itself so displeased with the unresponsive weight and the loose stones on the butter-churning climb that it would stop and try to turn whenever the leash was slackened.

Margaret had never been into the hills before. There'd been no need. It was unwise and, indeed, against the community conventions for a local woman to go beyond the palisades unless she was unwell. Time was too precious for useful bodies to wander aimlessly in the neighborhoods. Margaret, like all the other women without husbands or children, was kept busy helping out in the guest house, where there were nearly always more than a hundred meals to serve each evening and beds and breakfasts to make next day.

Her grandpa hadn't been up into the hills very often either. Until the ascent with his ailing son three months previously he hadn't been up to the summit of Butter Hill in many years, not since the travelers, drawn to the river's shallow crossing, had made his town rich. All the more ambitious huntsmen and fishermen had turned to making their fortunes out of farming for the table, ferrying, hospitality and charging everyone for doing anything: crossing charges, passage fees, stabling costs, piloting, provisioning, protection tax, and levies just for wanting to go east.

It was astonishing how wealthy a little hospitality could make the locals. This fertile valley, of which it used to be boasted that you had only to flick a booger on the ground for a mushroom to grow overnight, was now fertile in even less taxing ways: stretch a rope across the road and travelers would pay you with their jewelry, their cloth, their inheritances, just to be allowed to jump over it; toss a rag across a log, call it a bed, and they'd be lining up to sleep in it; shake a chicken's feather at a pot of boiling water and you could make your fortune out of soup.

The only problem was that travelers bring problems of their own, and ones beyond control. Stockades and palisades could keep marauders at bay. The lockup beyond the tetherings with its no-bed and its no-light could hold and quiet down the troublemakers and those who couldn't settle bills in this
Stay-and-Pay or On-your-Way
community. But illnesses, like bats and birds, were visible only too late, when the damage had been done. The toughest maladies have wings. There are no fees or charges high enough to deter the flux — no palisade is that tall.

IT WAS, AS USUAL, busy on the road. Margaret and her grandpa stepped aside and hid from every descending emigrant they passed, every string of horses, every cart or barrow, every band of hopefuls that made its way downhill. Her head was covered in a heavy blue scarf, so her shorn, white scalp was out of sight. That would not draw any comment from strangers. Even at that time of the year, all travelers with any sense would protect themselves against the sun and midges with hats, headscarves, veils or hair. The sun occasions modesty. It disapproves of flesh. But Margaret's face, if shown, would certainly betray the dangerous and appalling truth. What little of her skin wasn't raised and scarlet with rashes was gray with exhaustion.

It was uncomfortable — unbearable — to wear the heavy scarf around her hot and nagging head. She tried to lift it, push it back and off. But she could not allow herself to be seen, her grandpa told her — it would be too damaging for business if word got out that even just one person in the valley had the symptoms of the flux. A hundred meals, a hundred beds, would go to waste each day. Nobody would dare to spend the night with them.

'Turn your head, Mags, if you can,' he instructed her. 'Pull your scarf across your face, let them mistake you for...' He couldn't think that she resembled anything, except a woman at death's door riding in the wrong direction with her back turned to the sea. He did his best to hide her from the stares and even from the necessary greetings. He pulled the horse into the thickets whenever he heard voices coming or the sound of carts and bridle bells. He made her duck into impasses of rock until the path was clear. And if anybody happened to get close to them or called wanting directions or news, he answered for the two of them, trying not to draw attention to himself by being either too unfriendly or too welcoming. If anybody asked, he'd claim his granddaughter was simple, not bright enough to speak: 'Best let her float in her own company,' he'd say.

So Margaret and her grandpa took half a day to reach the nearest woody swaggings in the sash of hills, where the rocky scrubland of the ascent relaxed into softer meadows and clearings of grass and highland reed, before the darkness of the woods and the distant, snowcapped mountain pates. The view was wasted on them. They hardly bothered to look back. The old man had to get home, while Margaret wanted nothing more than to sleep. She'd rather die than undertake another climb like that. So for her, the first sight of the Pesthouse at the edge of the hunter's bald was a relief.

Unlike the tree-trunk barns and cabins in the valley, the hillside hut had not been built for comfort. It was at core a woodsman's soddy, constructed out of sun-dried turfs, fireproof and wind-protected, much loved by mice but easily collapsed. Indeed, it had collapsed from time to time, in those far regretted days when it had had little use, but since that healthy time, that time of remedies and cures, the Pesthouse had been strengthened by an outer wall of boulders, dry built and sturdy. There was a sleeping bench inside, a hearth and chimney stack, a leather bucket and some pots.

Margaret hid in the undergrowth to empty her bowels — no blood, good luck — and then collapsed into the grass while her grandpa set to work. He swept out the soddy with snapped pine brooms, beat the stones with sticks in case any snakes had taken up residence, and set the fire in the stone grate with kindling and a striking stone. Provisions and a water bag were hung from roof branches above the fire, where they'd be marinated in wood fume and safe from little teeth. He gathered bracken and country corn for Margaret's bed. She rested her three lucky things on her chest — a silver necklace that was old enough to have been machined, a square of patterned, faded cloth too finely woven to have been the work of human hands, some coins from the best-forgotten days, all inside a cedar box — and lay down on the bed, with Grandpa's help. He placed an unfired pot of cough syrup made from onions mashed in sugar on the floor at the side of her bed: 'Watch out for ants, Mags.' He touched her forehead with his thumb, a finger kiss. 'I'm ashamed to leave you here. I hope it grows. Thick and long.' He wiped his hands again on a vinegary rag, then he and the horse were gone, and she was sleeping. When she woke, somewhat revived, it was already evening. The trees were menacing — they wheezed and cracked. Bats feasted on the early moths. The undergrowth was busy with its residents, and Margaret, Red Margaret, the Apricot, the drained and fragile woman in the hills, that applicant for unexpected death, felt shocked and lost, bewildered and unloved. Why had she been singled out? Why had the archer released his arrow into her? Such misfortune was too much to face alone — the pestilence, the pain, the degradation and the restless meanness of the night that she must spend on her own father's deathbed, breathing his last air. She coughed, a friendless cough, and had to listen to the trunks and branches coughing back, like wolves, too much like wolves for her to dare to sleep again. She'd never feared trees before. In daylight, trees had let her pass, ignored her almost, pretended not to notice her. But now that the moon was up, the forest seemed to be alert and mischievous.

The Pesthouse occupant took comfort from her talismans that night. She passed the necklace through her fingers, recognizing and remembering the contours of each engraved link; she rubbed and stroked her piece of cloth; she smelled the cedar in the little box. Finally, she weighed the coins in her hands, the pennies and dimes and quarters that she had found among the pebbles on the river beach. She fingered all the images in the dark and tried to recognize the heads of people from the past, mostly short-haired men, one with a beard, 'In God We Trust', one with a thickish pony-tail bouncing on his neck, one heavy chinned and satisfied. Was that the eagle she could feel? Where were the leafy sprigs and flaming torch? Was that the one-cent palace with the twelve great columns at the front? She dragged her nail across the disk to count every column and tried to find the tiny seated floating man within, the floating man who, storytellers said, was Abraham and would come back to help America one day with his enormous promises.

FRANKLIN HAD NOT EXPECTED SO much rain. Anyone could tell from how brittle the landscape was that, in these parts at least, it had scarcely rained all season, and what clouds there'd been that day had been horizon clouds, passers-by, or overtakers, actually, for they were heading eastward, too — but hardly any time had gone before the last light of the day threw out its washing water, splashing it as heavily as grit on the brittle undergrowth and setting free its long-stored smells, part hope and part decay. The rain was unforgiving in its weight. It meant to stay and do some damage and some good in equal parts. It meant to be noticed. It meant to run downhill until it found a river and then downstream until it found a sea. 'If you're looking for the sailing boats, just follow the fallen rain' was the universal advice for inexperienced travelers.