The Pesthouse

Seventeen

Now good fortune showed its face to these four travelers, the man, the woman, the child, the horse, which had finally earned the name of Swim. The Pesthouse was not exactly as they’d left it. Franklin pulled aside the barricade of planks that served as a door, and after he had struck the lintel a few times with his stick to scare off any snakes, he stooped to look inside. There were no smoke fumes, for a start. The grate had not been used for months, evidently. Some of the hut’s turfs had collapsed inward. There was pellet evidence of mice and rats. He looked toward the sleeping bench, half expecting to see the ghostly form of Margaret lying there, the bald round head of someone very sick and beautiful. But what he saw, tucked between the bed and the wall, virtually hidden, was just as thrilling and unnerving. His heart missed several beats. Three lucky things inside a cedar box.

By evening they’d sorted out the place, made fresh bedding, started up a fire, dug in the reeds for water, found a little forage for the mare. There even was a stub of candle they could use, a stub of candle that they had left behind themselves. Margaret could sit with its light spread out across her lap and clean the tarnish from her silver necklace. She could revive the color in her finely woven piece of cloth by rubbing off the green-blue mold. She could acquaint herself again with coins from a past when Abraham sat on his great stone seat and the eagle spread its wings. She could not help thinking, too, about everything that she had lost: a family, a home, a length of hair, a green-and-orange woven top, a heavy scarf, a dream of living on a distant bank, a pot of mint that, if it had survived the Ark, if it had defied the cruelty, could not provide its aromatic leaves for her. Still, there was her Pigeon and her Jackie to take the place of everything. And there was Swim. What greater compensations could there be?

Franklin held on to her feet and watched her face, dancing and expressive in the candlelight. He loved her, yes. He loved her now without constraint. There was no urgency. He pushed his finger in between each toe. He rubbed her ankles and her heels. He felt the ridges of interrupted growth at the end of her toenails, evidence that she’d been ill and that her illness had almost grown out. Tomorrow he would find the gutting knife and pare the ridges off.

Margaret and Franklin spent a month inside the Pesthouse, waiting for their moment to arrive and letting a few of that year’s early emigrants pass by unhindered. Dreamers do not want advice. Nothing the pair of them could say would make a difference to determined travelers. Let them go down to the coast and find out for themselves. Let them see how pitiless the ocean was. They watched as emigrants constructed a new raft on rope pulleys, tied to rocks and scorched tree trunks, so they could haul themselves across, into the remnants and the debris. They looked down on the little empty town, knowing that the sight of it was punishing. Mostly, though, they turned their backs against the east. Margaret finally succeeded in drying her spy pipes by the fire. She could see clearly once again — the western woods, the western hills, the distances.

The spring advanced itself. The girl began to walk with sturdy legs and say her first words, Ma and Pa and Stop. The winter cold retreated, holding sway only at night. And thunderclouds came eastward, throwing shade across the lake at Ferrytown and delivering the rain that had been lifted from the plains and prairies, from the hopes and promises, from the thicknesses and substances that used to be America and would be theirs. The couple knew they only had to find their strength. And then — imagine it — they could begin the journey west again. They could. They could imagine striking out to claim a piece of long-abandoned land and making home in some old place, some territory begging to be used. Going westward, they would go free.