The Pesthouse (6 page)

Margaret did not wake, even when Franklin stooped into the Pesthouse. She was dreaming of her father, as she was bound to in that place. She was dreaming of a death like his. She could not forget how red his eyes had been, his sneezing and his hoarseness, or the black and livid spots across his face, and how his body — especially his neck and thighs and arms — had erupted overnight with boils as solid and large as goose eggs.

Margaret twisted on her bed, beset by recollections that she had learned to push away when she was conscious but that in sleep she could not shift — how, early on, he had bled from the nose and laughed it off as picking it too hard'; how then his tongue and throat had swollen so that he could barely speak; how later, in his delirium, he had tried, and failed, to stand; how they had carried him, as weightless and boneless as a discarded coat, to his cot, where he'd convulsed with hickeye, dry heaving into his bedclothes and producing nothing but thick and ropy sputum, that harbinger of death; how, finally, once he had dropped into a daze, the further end of sleep, they'd sent him up Butter Hill to the Pesthouse on the same horse as they had Margaret, stenching and insensible, with no farewells from anyone, no touch of lips, no vinegar.

Franklin pulled his coat and collars up around his mouth, stepped farther into the Pesthouse, and — his first touch — pressed his hand on her forehead, her exposed arm, and then — he dared but not without blushing — he felt her shoulders. She was warm and damp, but, nevertheless, she should stay wrapped, he judged, or she would take a chill on top of everything. Yet when he pulled the coverlet over her, she soon pushed it off again, still unwilling to bear the weight of cloth even in her sleep. Her scalp, though, was cold. He imagined he could feel the first growth of her hair under his palm, more like the underbelly of a pup than like a peach skin. He turned the fire, banked the ashes, added fresh wood and held his hands above the smoke in case his touch had picked up her infection. It seemed, too, like a fairytale: the sleeping woman, troubled evidently by her dreams, unaware that she was visited, unconscious of the stranger who would come to save her with his... friendliness. What could he do to help her now? What magic could he summon that would drive her fever out and take away the rashes and the heat? What must he do, so that he could touch her without fear?

ENCOURAGED BY a day of sun and by the full sling of nuts that he had foraged as a gift, Franklin found the courage in the afternoon to go back to the Pesthouse. Margaret was still barely awake and could manage only a faint 'Yes?' to let him in when he pish-pished.

'Are you well?' he asked, the common greeting between strangers but heavily appropriate on this occasion.

'I'm tired,' she said. But not dead, apparently. Instinctively she felt her armpits to check for any goose eggs. She could hardly check for boubons in her groin with Franklin watching her. She took comfort from the fading of the blotches on her arms and from the absence of any dried blood around her nose or mouth or, indeed, what would have been a certain sign of approaching death, three pock-shaped black marks on her hands or, worse, the clot of blood — a present from the Devil — that corpses were said to clutch in their palms to pay their entrance fee to Hell. Perhaps she would not die, after all. Perhaps she'd have the good luck denied to Pa, as her mother had promised. Margaret even chanced a smile toward the stranger at the door. 'What color are my eyes?' she asked the man.

'I haven't seen your eyes,' he said. 'It's dark in here.' He blushed, of course.

'Not red, not bloody red?'

'I'll see. Can I come close?' Her eyes looked clear enough. 'No blood,' he said.

'No blood is good.' She closed her eyes again.

'You ought to eat.' He showed her the heavy sling of cloth and chose the plumpest nut for her.

'Can't chew.' Her jaw and throat felt stiff and timbery.

'Maybe I could make a soup... from... the woods are full of things.' From leaves, from nuts, from roots, from birds. From mushrooms, possibly.

'Nothing, no.'

'What can I do for you?'

She shook her head — there's nothing to be done, she thought, except to sleep and hope for the best. The last thing that she needed in her state was a mouthful of dry nuts or a stomach-load of soup from the woods. She felt both half awake and dreaming. Deeply conscious, in a way, but inebriated, too, by the toxins that accumulate when hunger, fever and exhaustion are confederates. 'What color are my eyes?' she asked again, almost sleeping now.

'Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?' asked Franklin, not wishing to bully her with questions but worried that she might be slipping into unconsciousness rather than slumber.

She raised her head just high enough to see him for an instant. A silhouette. No expression on her face. It didn't matter who he was. 'I don't know you.' But she managed to lift her head again and study him for a moment longer. 'What do they want?'

'Who do you mean when you say
they
? Your family? Are they the people in the town?'

'I don't know who they are.'.

He had to let her sleep again. He left her to it and went out into the clearing to check the hill for any sign of Jackson and to bring his two dried tarps and his possessions into the Pesthouse. He had persuaded himself- too readily — that he would be safer, drier, warmer with the feverish woman than he would be outside for another night. More useful, too. The Pesthouse smoke would protect him from her contagion. He sat down at the far end of her bed, his back warmed by the fire, looking out through the open door across the clearing as the light lifted and receded once again and the cold returned. The last few of that day's travelers led their carts and horses to the lip of the hill and disappeared from sight, leaving just their voices and their bells to briefly dent the quiet.

That evening, emboldened by the darkness and keen to wake her lest she slip too far, Franklin sat and spoke about himself, as strangers should. Occasionally he could tell by her breathing or by some note of interest or sympathy that she was listening in between her bouts of sleep. He gave his name, his age; he told her about his father's death, the family farm, their animals, the mocking sets of storms and droughts that had destroyed their crops and fields, the famine and lawlessness, the day that he and Jackson had begun their journey to the ships and how his mother had busied herself indoors rather than witness their first steps of departure. He described their hardships on the road, the damage to his knee, how Jackson had volunteered to go down the hill to Ferrytown to replenish their supplies.

Her voice, at last, less small than it had been. 'They'll take good care of him,' she said, glad to hear the mention of her home. And then he told her what they hoped to find on ship: 'those tiny rooms, just made of wood' and great white birds among the sails, to show the way. He could not imagine exactly what awaited them when they set foot abroad, what type of people they might be, what language they might speak. But he was sure that life would be more prosperous. How could it not be better there? Safer, too. With
opportunity
, a word he'd come to love.

'And when we're there,' he said, hoping to restore her with his optimism, 'they say that there is land enough for everyone, and buildings made of decorated stone, and palaces and courts and gardens planted for their beauty, not for food. Because there is abundance in those places. Their harvests never fail. Three crops a year! Three meals a day!'

'They'll all be fat.'

'They
are
all fat. Like barn hogs.'

THAT NIGHT he slept beside her bed, his feet below her head kept warm by the fire and his head by the Pesthouse door, where he could be on guard against any animals or visitors and breathe the colder but untainted air. Margaret was restless, though she seemed to sleep. She turned around in her bed, gasping for breath, disturbed by nightmares, troubled by the sore skin on her torso, legs and arms. Not one of her bones seemed in its normal place.

Franklin did not remember how it happened, but, when he woke in the early lights, he found that Margaret was sleeping on her back and that she had shot her legs out of her bed coverings and that he had been sleeping holding a foot between his two hands, restraining it, perhaps, or keeping it warm. He knew at once — a shiver — how risky that had been. Diseases depart the body through the soles of the feet. That's why — when pigeons were so plentiful and decent meat was served at every meal — the people of his parents' generation had strapped a living pigeon to a sick child's feet. He'd experienced this remedy himself. When he'd been eight or nine years old, he'd caught a tick disease that had paralyzed his body for a day or two, until his brother had been sent out with nets to trap a bird, and his aunt had tied it to his feet, pinioning its wings and back against his insteps. 'Stay there, don't move, until the illness passes into the pigeon,' she had instructed. She had remained with him, making sure he kept still, helping him to urinate and defecate into an earth jar, feeding him by spoon, until, after two more days of feeling its warm and beating heart against his insteps, the pigeon stopped protesting, and went cold and silent. It had done the trick as well. His illness had passed, and he had been able to walk up with his father to the bone yard and bury the bird and his disease under a stone. He could see that stone still, in his mind's eye, a gray, dismaying slab that had haunted him ever since. When the harder times had come and pigeon meat, even at feasts, was often all they had to eat, Franklin had preferred to go without. The flesh was tainted in his view: the bird was hazardous. Jackson always ate his share. Now, with Margaret's cold and clammy feet in his hands, Franklin felt unwell himself. His body ached. His throat was dry. His shoulders and neck seemed fixed. His eyes were watering. His hands were tingling. But he chose to hold onto her feet and massage them, exactly as his mother had massaged his feet when he was young. He pressed his thumbs against each toe, he pushed against the hollows of her ankles, he worked his knuckles against the soles, he stroked each nail. She seemed to push her legs against his hands, as if she knew what he was drawing out of her. He did not want to let her go, not even when he heard the first arrivals of the day begin to come out of the woods and make their way down Butter Hill to reach the longed-for welcome at a town just blocked from sight, as usual at that time of the day, by mist.

PERHAPS SHE WOULD have gotten better anyway, but as usual nature's undramatic remedies would remain unrewarded. Margaret was bound to credit her rescue to Franklins busy hands. At first she had been startled by the pressure of his thumbs on her soles and heels and by his shocking, intimate invasion of the gaps between her toes. No one had played with Margaret's feet since she'd been a child. Certainly since she had been ten years old or so, she had been taught how precious her body would be in securing a husband but how untouchable it should remain until that man had revealed and committed himself with an exchange of labor or of goods. The phrase 'The virgin pulls the plow' did not mean that in Ferrytown the young unmarried women were put to work in the fields, but that a pure girl would be worth a pair of horses or a team of oxen in a marriage contract. You wouldn't get a brace of rabbits for a girl who'd drifted.

When she'd been younger, Margaret had hardly dared even to touch herself for fear of losing value, but lately — as time and opportunity elapsed and it seemed less likely that any man in Ferrytown would volunteer to embrace a wife whose lovely, tempting copper hair was such an ancient omen of disaster and such a sign of waywardness — she had broken that taboo. She was, at thirty-one, she had admitted to herself, a woman who might be a daughter and a sister and an aunt but never a wife or mother. Her body would retain its value and remain unshared.

But she'd been tempted many times by the strangers who had traveled through her town and who evidently did not share her neighbors' wariness of redheads. She'd had her rear slapped more than once. She'd had her fingers kissed. And one fine-mannered man, her father's age, had proposed a midnight meeting place beyond the palisades where they might talk and hold each other's hands. She'd often wondered what might have happened had she done what he'd suggested, where she might have ended up, if she hadn't opted, instead, for seeking Ma's advice, with the result that it was her brothers and her father who went out at midnight with their sticks to honor his proposal.

So this caressing of the feet was something both alarming and overdue. She had been tempted to protest. To kick this stranger, even. To judge his touch as cheapening. But who doesn't like their feet caressed? Who isn't weakened and disarmed by such discrete attention? It helped that Franklin spoke to her while he was working on her feet, making less of a stranger of himself. He recounted how his mother had tipped him on his back and 'loved his feet' when he was very small — and, even, not so small, a teenager. He talked about his patient aunt and the pigeon that had cured him when he was young. If this was something that a mother and an aunt might do, then surely it was innocent.

Except it could not feel entirely innocent. Margaret found it hard to tell if this narrow fever that encompassed her, this breathlessness, this pounding of her heart, this fresh disorder that seemed to want to shake and flex her by the spine, was something else new that could be blamed against her flux. Or was it something that she owed to Franklin's thumbs and knuckles? She drifted in and out of it. She even dreamed that he brought shame on her by venturing beyond her feet along her hairless legs to press his thumbs and knuckles where only she had pressed before.

The first thing Margaret noticed when she woke was how quiet it was. She had to remind herself that she was no longer at home, waking in the family house, with just moments left before the call to work. She could lie back and let the shapes absorb the light. But she knew at once that something had changed, both within her and beyond. Her body ached. Her mouth was still so dry and bitter that she could barely swallow. But she was feeling partially restored, not sinking now and fearful, but strengthening. Her feet and lower legs felt supple and alive. Her head was clear. Her scalp was bristling. She did not have to struggle to remember what had happened in the night. She could recall every movement of the young man's hands. He was responsible.