The Pesthouse (8 page)

What first disquieted them, when they emerged below the hill from the thicket of junipers, laurels and scrub oaks that flourished on the lower slopes, was the smell — sour milk and mushroom, earthy, reasty and metallic. It was an unfamiliar smell that they recognized but could not name. It was as if this new experience was one that life itself had stored for them. Now from the access path they could see the mules and horses in the tetherings, not resting and expecting rain as Margaret had imagined, or at least hoped, but spread out and gaping, alarming and unambiguous, cold as stones. They were seemingly untouched, with no wounds except the fresh ones inflicted by the crows and jays and turkey vultures that had already abandoned the hills to gather on their bodies. Dead animals, still picketed.

But their alarm was manageable until Franklin spotted what he did not mistake for long as dead, piebald goats. Jackson's coat was spread out in the middle of the tetherings beside a dead mule. There was no confusing its color and its length and who its owner was. No two mothers in the world could stitch together such a piece. The body underneath seemed small, but Franklin was sure, as he stumbled forward with Margaret bouncing on his back, that he'd discover no one else but his brother, dead drunk, he hoped, and not just dead. But the body rolled too readily as he pulled at the coat. Too light, too small. A boy. He tumbled out of the goatskins as easily and weightlessly as a dog might be rolled out of its blanket. Franklin was relieved and horrified all at once. 'Who's this?'

Margaret had not seen, at first, what had induced such panic in her porter. She could barely see over his shoulder and had to stretch her neck to discover what had caused his sudden stumbling and his cry of alarm. She saw the puzzling coat in Franklin's hand. She was puzzled even more when he began to shake its creases out and smell the fabric. 'It's Jackson's coat,' he said. The brother's name. Then Margaret spotted the body at Franklin's feet and was in shock herself. This bundle was a neighbor's son, the nightwatch boy called Nash, a boy she'd known very well since he'd been a baby and she, barely out of her teens, had been his little nurse. 'What's happened — let me see him.'

She was too firmly trapped to his back to release quickly, so Franklin kneeled down by the side of the body, twisting so that she could see it clearly. Already it was smelling a little, like cured bacon. There wasn't any blood on the earth or on the coat. No wounds. No sign of blows or bruises.

'There's not a mark on him,' Franklin said. 'Just look at those.' He lifted his chin to indicate the carcasses of mules, horses and donkeys. There was, as well, a single dog. Franklin closed the boy's eyes, then cleaned his fingers in the soil. 'There's not a mark on him,' he said again.

'There's something else,' said Margaret. She had to concentrate to hit upon the oddity. She was not familiar with human corpses. But still it came to her, a chilling absence. 'No flies. These tetherings are always full of flies. They love the horses. But there's not a single one. Can you see one?' Both she and Franklin put their hands across their mouths and stepped away. They held their breath. No flies.

So Margaret's premonition had been correct: here was pestilence, or flux of some new sort, that did not care if you were man or fly or horse or mule or (now that they were hurrying into Ferrytown and discovering more beastly cadavers at every step) chicken or hog or dog or rabbit. The ground outside the stockades was scattered with animals. Even before they found the second human victim, Margaret had begun to blame herself. Who else? She'd been the first to host this current flux — so maybe she had passed it on to her grandpa and he'd brought it back into the town once he had left her safely in the Pesthouse. And without the benefit of barbering and pigeons to protect them, every beating heart in the village had been stilled. Yes,
every
beating heart. She guessed exactly what she and Franklin would discover if they dared to go beyond the stockade and the palisades. Not a single fly. No living creatures, other than the few travelers and the birds that had arrived since death had done its work. No welcome from her family.

WHAT SHOULD Franklin and Margaret do, other than flee the valley as quickly as their bodies would allow? They dare not squander any time on shock or lamentation. Any thought that Franklin might have had of settling or tarrying in Ferrytown could come to nothing now. This was the habitation of the dead. The living had to turn their backs on it and speed away.

They'd entered through the western gate, the usual threshold for emigrants, and walked a good distance from Nash's body before discovering another human form or, indeed, any greater signs of widespread disaster. At the outer palisade, they'd passed within a few paces of where Jackson had gone out, barefooted, in the middle of the night to urinate for the last time and where his mighty body was still lying, coatless, doubled-up and finally incapable of defending itself against even the beak of a crow. But Jackson was not discovered. In fact, Franklin never found his brother's body. He found only the coat and, later — possibly — his shoes. So one slim hope was allowed to take root and cling to life during the months ahead, the not uncomplicated hope that somehow Jackson had survived and might return, as big as ever, to reoccupy his piebald skins.

There could be no such hope for Margaret's family, however. The second human corpse they found was in her compound. Her younger brother, less than Franklin's age, was still in bed, his eyes wide open, staring at infinity from his wood cot on the screened veranda.

They persevered. Franklin held her legs. Margaret wrapped herself more tightly round his back. They went into the house. Her grandpa was in bed as well. So was her elder sister. So was her ma, her hair spread out across the pillows that all too recently she'd shared with Margaret's pa but now shared with the little serving niece called Carmena. The second brother — with Jefferson, the family rat catcher curled up at his side, the dog's ears still perked as if his hearing had outlasted death — was in the parlor, by the grate. Only Margaret's room and bed were empty. No corpses there. Her luck was inconceivable.

Across the courtyard, in the annex house, Margaret's younger, married sister, Tessie, her husband, Glendon Fields, and their boy, Matt, were almost hidden by their quilts but unmistakable — a balding man and the tops of two brown heads with just the slightest hint of red. All the hens were dead, their feathers still as beautiful and soft as the day Margaret had gone up Butter Hill. The other dog, the little terrier Becky, had deserted from her usual guard duties at the rear door, but there was no yapping from anywhere else. The compound seemed so quiet and ordered that it was easy to imagine that at any moment this merely inert, suspended world could spring alive again, that this was only sleep and that the compound's residents were simply resting late, untroubled by the light or by the summons of their usual daily duties. Death normally expressed itself more forcibly. But here it seemed that everyone had merely tumbled into a longer, deeper dormancy than usual. The one truly ugly sight was a neighbor's dove that must have ventured out at night and died in flight, only to tumble into Margaret's yard and strike its head against a water pot. Its neck was broken, and there was blood, dried almost black, around its beak and underneath a wing.

It was Franklin who broke the silence. 'We mustn't stay. You see how dangerous it is? Just smell the air.' But first, before she could even consider her departure, Margaret wanted at least to feel and suffer the family earth beneath her feet, so Franklin released her from her mobile chair on his back, equipped her with a walking stick, and let her lean on him while she went around and paid her brief attention to the members of her family. 'Try not to touch,' he said, but did nothing to stop her folding their arms, closing their mouths, covering their faces with their blankets, pressing a fingertip kiss onto her mother's cheek. It was a numb experience. No weeping. Margaret's body, drained already by her own illness, had shut down many of its functions, concentrating on the most urgent, which was the impulse to be dutiful quickly and then escape. Weeping was not urgent. There would be time for that. Besides, Margaret was too overwhelmed to feel much more than guilt. This slaughter surely was her fault.

There did not seem to be much evidence of flux on her family or on any of the many non-human bodies they had passed, no traces of vomiting or diarrhea, no rashes or blood. But what explanation could there be other than that her illness of a few days — perhaps released by her to go about its mischief the moment that she had broken its murderous grip — had passed through her feet, through Franklin's hands, and started its own descent down Butter Hill, had somehow strengthened while it had dined off her and ended up so strong that it had been able to sweep away these many lives with hardly more than a bruise and a single bloody beak to signify its cruelty?

There could be no funerals. Margaret, on her knees at the porch, between the herb pots and the little chair her father had made for his children but that now was the resting place for their dead cat, merely said the simple words of the burial lament to herself, too dry mouthed and appalled to sing them. All of the rhyme words —
done, alone, fade, gone, bone, shade —
seemed to fall like dead weights from her mouth whereas whenever she'd sung or recited them before, at neighborhood funerals, the lament had always been comforting and measured and perfectly sufficient.

Franklin and Margaret did their best to avoid encountering any more bodies too closely as he carried her through the Ferrytown lanes toward the river. That wasn't hard. There were hardly any bodies in the public spaces. So far as they could tell from what could be seen when they dared to peer through open gates into the compounds and through windows into rooms, nearly everyone, not just her own family, had died while they were sleeping. That was an oddity, surely, because a pestilence will always take the weakest first and the strongest last, so that normally the deaths would be spread throughout the day or even spread throughout a month.

The only bodies that they did discover — dressed but fallen at the steps of their oven house — were those of the baker and his daughter, both on their backs and looking more startled, though no more ashen, than usual. Franklin was praying not to find the body of his brother, even though he was expecting to. Margaret was fearful of discovering the body of Becky, the missing family terrier. If only Becky had survived, she thought, there'd be something left to love. The thought of Becky still alive was enough to make Margaret call out her name and for Franklin to join in, except that once he understood that Becky was a dog, he called out 'Anyone?', 'Someone?', 'Is there anybody there?' And once or twice he called out Jackson's name. It must be possible that someone had survived, they reasoned, that at least one breathing body was still sick in bed and might be strong enough to tell them what had come to pass in Ferrytown.

They fell quiet again, both exhausted, as they reached the last few houses in the town and started on the flood-smoothed slopes above the river. Here, eighty paces away, there was finally some welcome evidence of life: people, horses, mules, livestock tied to the backs of carts, some ducks and chickens in baskets, even one or two dogs, on leashes to stop them running off to tuck into the corpses.

A group of lucky latecomers to Ferrytown — fewer than forty adults — had gathered at the river's edge, uncertain what to do. They knew exactly what they wanted. They wanted some kind of godly hand to bring the raft ashore from the midstream shingle where it had irretrievably grounded itself and ferry them to safety. The adults had gathered around to exchange ideas on how they could rescue the lost raft, how they could manage it if they succeeded. Was it possible to cross with carts or were the rapids too strong and the channel too deep for wheels and horses? There was a smaller barge, strong enough only for human passengers, in one of the lofthouses just fifty paces away, as Margaret well knew. She would have told them, certainly. She would have told them, too, about another route, a dry one, that would allow them all, though not their carts, to reach the eastern side safely and quickly. But she was not allowed to help. Once her shaven head had been remarked, and — further evidence of her sickness — it was seen that she was being carried, the travelers shouted out at her to keep her distance; and then, when she and Franklin continued to approach, hoping to explain themselves and join the group, the men began to pelt the pair with stones and even draw their bows and exercise their staves. A man ran forward and a sling shot of shingle struck Margaret's back and the side of Franklin's head as they turned to make their escape. His ear was cut.

Margaret jockeyed Franklin to a path that headed upstream on the river's bank, until, at the back of a group of boathouses, they reached a dry rocky ledge surrounded by planted fruit trees where someone had built a wooden bench and a fishing platform. Beyond the ledge the river narrowed into cascades and was no longer navigable, except to trout. Franklin could carry her no farther, and she could ride no more. It had been a heavy day. Margaret could rest. But he had duties to perform. He would have to leave her there alone for the afternoon. She took the knife he offered, though she was in no state to protect herself if she were discovered by any of the living emigrants, or any ghosts.

Franklin, wrapped up in his brother's coat, his mouth and nostrils stuffed with wads of cloth, had agreed to Margaret's shame-faced proposition (why hadn't she thought of it while they were there?) that he should take the risk of going back into the village and to her home to make the best of their chances in the voyages ahead. As soon as he arrived in the compound, he should wash his hands and face — and the cut on his ear — in fresh vinegar, she warned him. There was a pot of it outside her family house. Then he should begin the job of salvaging. Should he salvage other people's property, he asked. 'It can't be theft, to take things from the dead.' No, it wasn't theft, perhaps, she agreed, but it wasn't seemly either.