The Pesthouse

Four

Jackson had taken a liking to the modest town, with its smoke and smells and the clamor of voices, livestock and tools. Even though he had arrived at its boundary fences a little after dark, a few trading stalls were still set up, warmed and lit by braziers and lanterns, where he was greeted by dogs, his palms and tongue inspected for infection by gatekeepers, and told at once what the tariffs were — how much he’d have to pay to cross their land, the cost of food and shelter for the night, the onward ferry fee. He would be welcome as a guest if his face was free of rashes, if he wasn’t seeking charity, if he didn’t try to win the short-term favors of a local woman, and if he put any weapons — and any bad language — into their safekeeping until he traveled on. Weapons, rashes, charity, and short-term favors of any kind were “off the menu,” he was told. But otherwise, they had good beds, fresh bread, sweet water, and easy passage to the other bank “for anyone prepared to keep the peace and pay the price.” What had he to offer in return? He had only his coat to trade, he told them, and any labor that they might require of him during the few days that it would take his brother, Franklin, to recover from his exaggerated laming.

All the traders at the gates seemed interested in his piebald coat and gathered around him, admiring his mother’s stitching and marveling at the immodest pattern. But their interest was mostly an excuse to question their oversized visitor and stare at him. None would purchase the coat, no matter how little he wanted in exchange. It was too grand for them. Nobody they knew was tall or outlandish enough for such a garment, they explained, and there was little likelihood that another man of such height and in need of protection against the cold and rain would pass through their community. Nevertheless, the traders were careful and flattering in their dealings with Jackson Lopez, as strangers always were, he’d found. His height and strength earned him promises of work in exchange for lodging: there were sacks of grain to stack and store for winter in the dry lofts, and as ever, there was wood to cut and sewage to be carted out, all familiar tasks. They even promised him a single bed. For once he wouldn’t have to share his body space with Franklin.

Jackson need never sleep with his brother again. He was free to stop just one night in Ferrytown and then move on alone the next day, unencumbered. He was tempted to, or certainly he’d played out the idea as he’d come down the hill, still irritated by the unwelcome waste of time.

His brother had been a constraint even before his knee had let them down. Younger brothers often are. They’re the sneaks who tell your parents who broke the bowl or lamed the mare or stole the fruit. They’re the ones who hold you up, pleading caution, wanting home. They’re the ones who’d choose to go roundabout Robert to avoid danger rather than to smell it out and face up boldly — and unblushingly, as Jackson always would — to the argument, the snake, the bear, the cliff face, or the enemy. And older brothers have no privacy, unlike older sisters, for whom privacy is considered fundamental. No, the firstborn males are expected to share their blankets with all the younger ones, and share the work, and entertain the others in the evenings with the light of just the single candle, and travel — even migrate! — in a pack, as if no future were possible except in the others’ company. It certainly was dead right, that traditional warning to anyone with itchy feet, that there is no better way of getting to resent a friend, whether it’s a brother or a neighbor, than by traveling with him.

“You take good care of him,” his mother had instructed every time they’d left the farm buildings for a day of work, all the way through his childhood and adolescence. And those had been almost her final words to Jackson when her sons had set off toward the boats two months previously. “You take good care of him.” She still saw Franklin as a boy who needed to be tied by ropes to someone bigger and more trustworthy. She hadn’t said, “And you take good care of yourself.” Perhaps he ought to start. Walking down the hill alone, at his own pace, had been an unexpected pleasure that he might happily prolong, on this side of the water and beyond. He’d sleep on it. He’d make up his mind once he’d tested the local hospitality and found someone to trade with him. No matter what he decided — return to Franklin and that maddening laugh of his (as seemed dishearteningly inevitable) or hurry on (the thrilling fantasy) — he had to freshen his or their supplies of food.

As it happened, while Jackson was walking in past the tetherings toward the guesthouse, savoring his recent freedom and the prospect of his first good meal for many days, the boy called Nash was on his way to begin his night of caretaking with the local and passage animals. He was wheeling a smoking barrow with a cargo of glowing stove stones from the family grate bedded in earth to keep him warm. He had pushed some sheets of thin cloth up the back of his shirt as well, but he still expected to be cold, especially in the period just before sunup, and on that night, at least, he expected to be wet. He could smell the coming rain, and the bats, always trustworthy forecasters of a storm, were out unusually early in search of rain-shy insects.

So when the immense man in the surprising coat asked him to point out the roof of the guesthouse and where the clothing broker lived, an opportunity was spotted and a deal was soon struck. Jackson parted with the coat, and Nash set aside his wheelbarrow and hurried briefly to his family yard to provide the dried fruit, the pork, the leather water bag, and the apple juice that he had traded with this astounding visitor, who seemed less astounding, shorter even, as soon as he pulled off his outerwear, kissed it farewell as if it were a friend, and draped it around the boy’s narrow shoulders. Nash set off for the tetherings again, but slowly. The coat, twice too long, was a greater hindrance even than the heavy wheelbarrow full of earth and stones. Nevertheless, these were joyful moments for a ten-year-old — except that he felt anxious. He’d been overeager to win the good opinion of the giant and exchanged too many useful things for something inexplicable. Inexplicable to his parents and neighbors, at least. He’d been selfish, too. A coat serves only its owner (although in this rare instance, four small boys and their dogs could easily find shelter under it). Nash would have to spend the night perfecting his excuses. But for the moment he was glad of the opportunity, as the final strangers of the day passed by, to parade his new encumbrance.

Jackson felt the evening chill at once, but he was liberated, lighter in himself. He’d left his ma behind at last and distanced himself a little from his brother. The coat had been her manhood gift to him. In richer times. They’d feasted on four sibling goats with all the other families and she had scraped and tanned the hides to make his gift, which she said — too frequently — would last him a lifetime. It would outlast him. Jackson was certain that if she were to imagine him now and wonder how he and Franklin might have fared, the coat would be a sure part of it. Now he was beyond imagining, and glad of that.

The meal that night was not as grand as he had hoped, although the usual country protocols were followed closely before the food was served, raising expectations. Those eating had to wash their hands at the canteen door in water that, after passing through two hundred hands dirtied by the journey, smelled of horsehair, sweat, and rope and looked as brown as tea. And for at least the second time that day (for news of Margaret’s illness had made the Ferrytowners vigilant and fussy) they were all inspected for rashes or livid spots before they were allowed to take their places. The women had the best benches, on the wall side of the tables. The men sat in the central gangway, with nothing to support their backs. Their children and any adolescent boy too young to grow a beard gathered on their haunches, on mats to the side of the fires, and were forbidden to move or speak above a whisper. No dogs. Hats off. And sleeves rolled up, in optimistic readiness.

Jackson was given a low stool at the head of the shorter table so that he could stretch his legs and use his elbows without fear of braining a neighbor. It suited him to take this mostly practical and cautious placement as a mark of respect not only for his size but also for his bearing, which he considered dignified. The candlelight made all the faces seem rudely healthy and animated, and soon new friends were being introduced and stories told. Jackson, though, stayed mostly silent, partly because he had no direct eye contact across the table, partly because his immediate neighbors were too old and tired to draw his attention, but largely because he was taciturn by nature, prepared to express a short opinion but not eager or even able to prattle. Besides, his head was full of awkward possibilities.

When the food was served, it was clear that the hosts had gone to no expense. It was hog and hominy with corn bread, they said (though it was later claimed by one of the travelers — possibly a joke — that he’d pulled a yellowish raccoon hair from between his teeth. “I’ve never seen a ring-tailed hog before!”). Hardly anybody failed to clear his plate, however. Anything was better than the travel pantry that had provided yesterday’s meals.

The meat was followed by oatmeal and molasses, offered without the benefit of silverware, so eating it by hand was a noisy, self-conscious business. The adults felt obliged to extend their little fingers respectfully as they ate, using their fores and indexes as spoons and reserving the pinkie for dipping into the dishes of salt and for scooping pine-nut mash onto their molasses. Such good manners seemed excessive for that quality of food but necessary in the company and under the scrutiny of strangers.

Nobody was truly satisfied. This was not the meal that they’d been dreaming of on the journey, when they’d been making do, at best, with brushjack stew and feasting on the skeletal corpses of pack horses and mules, or on carrion. A chicken’s egg, some milk, some recent, cultivated fruit, true bread and mutton, would have served them better.

Despite the quality of food, however, Jackson could have eaten twice as much again. At least his stomach was half full for once, and sweet. And eating in the company of so many other emigrants had been a kind of nourishment as well, even though he had not spoken yet. But when the elderly woman to his right offered him her unfinished oatmeal and some untouched quarters of bread, he felt required, once he had cleared his board, to set aside his dignity, provide his name, and say a word or two about his journey east. He had listened to the travel tales of his fellow diners with little interest. So much disaster and regret should be not be spoken of when it was over, Jackson thought. What was done was dust, as far as he was concerned. Such rapes and robberies and injuries and deaths, so many bolting horses, snapped axles, wagon fires, and sudden floods, did not fit his experience. His account would tell of uneventful days marked out by boredom and hardship and livened only when the weather or the landscape played its trick of exposing travelers to mud or drought or, when the route had not been notched or blazed on tree trunks by preceding travelers, luring them into valleys that had no exit at their farthest ends. He told his story in a sentence, one that did not mention his brother.

“We could use a pair of shoulders like yours,” an old man said, nodding at his wife for her approval. “Our cart’s too heavy and we’ve lost a horse. We’re moving out tomorrow, if you’d appreciate the ride. Pay your fare with your muscles, when the going’s poor.”

Jackson nodded. Yes, he’d sleep on it and let them know. He’d be sleeping on a lot of things that night. His single bed would be crowded with temptations.

In fact, it was not at first easy for anyone to sleep that night. What they’d eaten crept around inside their guts, foraging with its nocturnal snout. And then the storm arrived, beating against the rest-house walls, keeping them all awake to wonder what state the route ahead would be in and whether they should rest up in the town for another day, allowing the mud some time to crust. The men called out in the deafening darkness from their shared beds, exchanging advice and providing their versions of the likely route ahead. No two versions were the same. The liars and the teasers could exaggerate as much as they wanted to. The worriers could share their greatest fears without shaming themselves. They were only faceless voices in the night. And they could safely list their various adversities — the beatings and the robberies, the time that they were stoned by bears, the five nights drifting on a lake, the treachery of so-called friends, the toil and drudgery, the hunger and the thirst, the murderous temperatures that they’d survived — from between warm coverings and underneath a decent roof.

The optimists among them believed that once the river had been crossed, something of the old America would be discovered, the country their grandpas and grandmas had talked about, a land of profusion, safe from human predators, snake-free, and welcoming beyond the hog and hominy of this raw place; a country described by so many of their grandparents in words they’d learned from their grandparents, where the encouragements held out to strangers were a good climate, fertile soil, wholesome air and water, plenty of provisions, good pay for labor, kind neighbors, good laws, a free government, and a hearty welcome. A plain and simple ambition, surely.

Here were men who’d come from places with flat and functional names like Half-Day Bridge, Boundary Wood, Center Island, and, yes, Ferrytown, but within a day or two they expected to travel on the Dreaming Highway, which led, so they believed, through Give-Your-Word Valley to Achievement Hill and a prospect of the Last Farewell, with its long views from the far shore of America. On the journey the country would be flat, they’d heard, with surfaced tracks as hard as fired clay. “Not flat,” someone corrected them, “but downhill all the way, sloping to the sea. The wheels do all the work. That’s why it’s called the Dreaming Highway. The country lets you sleep.” The journey to the boats, he said, would be an easy and a speedy one. “A hog could roll there in a sack.”

But there were doubters in the darkness, too, men who’d heard less comforting reports. Rivers too wide and wild to cross. Forests so impenetrable and gloomy that nothing grew at ground level except funguses and little moved except wood ants and blind lizards, both as white as snow, and rats that hunted for their prey by smell alone and so had noses longer than their tails. Great, dusty, waterless plains. Ridges sharper than a knife, that tore your clothes. Others spoke of brackish swamps that could be crossed — in twenty days, if you were strong and lucky — only by travelers who dared to leave their horses and their carts behind and drag themselves across the mire on wooden rafts.

And were there any people, beyond the river crossing? A multitude, yes. Everyone who’d ever headed east to catch the boats. There were no boats. Or else it was a land where no one lived and there’d be not a soul to provide, once in a while, a good dry bed or any hog and hominy. “You’d be glad to dine on raccoon then.” Or otherwise the people were all unwelcoming, or they were naked cannibals, or they were dwarfs “smaller than a prairie dog, but uglier.”

“But furrier!”

“And very tasty on a slice of bread!”

By now the laughter in the room was louder than the rain. Indeed, the rain had relented somewhat, as had their indigestion. Now they could fall asleep more easily, apprehensive but amused. “Watch out,” one of the men whispered, wanting to be the final voice, after all his companions had fallen quiet. “There’s folk out there, one day ahead of Ferrytown, who are as handy with their toes as with their fingers. They can wipe their butts, scratch their noses, poke your eyes out, and pick your pockets, all at the one time.”

But still another man was simmering to speak. “From what I’ve heard tonight,” said Jackson from his single bed at the far end of the hall, too softly to be heard by many of his fellows, “there’s at least a hundred different lands beyond the river. And none of them strike me as likely. Maybe all of us should only wait and see what we’ll find when we’ve planted our feet on the actual earth ahead of us.” He wanted to say out loud what he was hoping for within — that if he advanced his shoulders to the couple with the heavy cart and left his brother to take care of himself, then he could square it with his conscience only if the way ahead for Franklin would prove to be an easy and a kindly one. He fell silent for a little time, judging his words and wondering, too, whether he could ignore the pressure in his bladder from the flagon of apple juice he had traded and drunk, before adding, “I’ll tell you something. For free. This afternoon, I walked down the very same hill as all of you and I looked ahead and used my eyes. I saw the view. Nobody missed the view, I’m sure. And what I saw ahead of me was land and sky just like the land and sky we’ve always known. Tomorrow you can see it for yourselves.” Tomorrow, he was thinking as he fell asleep, will be like yesterday.