The Pesthouse

Five

The dawn seemed tired and hesitant at first, hardly capable of shaking off the clouds and pushing out into the day. The sun, rising for its daily journey to the west, was veiled by that night’s retreating storm, which, like everything else, including the slight wind, was — typically for this season of migration and withdrawal — resolute in going east, unlike the light. The last stars lingered on, just happy to be visible beyond their time. But once the breeze stood up, the storm was cleared entirely. No cloud at all, and only gray-white mist and yesterday’s smoke in the hollows of the valley, hiding Ferrytown.

When Franklin, drenched and stiffer than a log, finally emerged from underneath his bedding and dragged the tarps into the clearing where they would drain and dry, it was unusually warm and bright on Butter Hill. The undergrowth was steaming, and the air was fragrant with pine and earth, and faintly sulfurous. A henhouse smell. He stood for a while in the sunshine, hoping to recover quickly, and indeed, he soon felt well enough to walk around a little. The rest had benefited his leg, but not sufficiently to pledge a day of walking. He washed in standing water and cleaned his teeth with a snapped branch, which smelled of nuts but left his gums bleeding. He would be sensible and put his feet up for one more day, he thought, flexing his knee. Less swelling, yes, though no less pain when he put any pressure on it. He would not be surprised if his brother returned that afternoon with food or some transport. But actually the prospect of another day free from Jackson’s nagging temper was not unwelcome.

Part of Franklin was uneasy and just a touch alarmed. He sensed that there was death about. He’d felt it in his bones the moment that he’d tried to stand. He recognized it in the fragile colors of the morning. On days such as this the sky is so thinly blue and hollowed out that death’s great hand can at any time reach through to harvest anyone it wants, to pick off lives like berries from a bush. And he could smell it on the air, beyond the pine, that faintly eggy smell, the chemicals of hell, the madman’s belch. Was this the smell of pestilence? He hardly wanted to check. He did not want to exchange the memory of the young woman alive in candlelight with the reality of her perished in the night, borne off on death’s enormous wing.

Franklin chose a good stick for support and made his way across the clearing to the Pesthouse, hoping not to waken her or frighten her, if she was still alive, but also ready to defend himself if there were any devils at her bed. But looking through the Pesthouse cracks and the smoke-heavy fume of the little chamber, he found her well, still breathing in her house of turfs and boulders, still palely beautiful. He was far too thankful now, too teetering, to wonder or to care whose death he’d heard during that long night of rain and sleeplessness in the forest-frowning, eastward-looking hills.

It would be a pity not to be of service to the woman in the Pesthouse, he decided, straining to see her face and shaven head more clearly, hoping to see more — a naked leg flung out of bed, perhaps, a breast. He wanted an excuse to help her, rescue her. Not just to enjoy the true heat of her wood fire or to share her provisions. Not just to do his duty for the sick, either, obeying what his people called the Golden Obligation. He simply wanted her close company. If he was careful and wrapped his face, he would be protected from infectious air; then surely he could dare to sit beside her in the hut, not too near, but near enough to see her fully and to study her more easily. Oh, don’t let Jackson ruin it by coming back too soon.

Franklin pulled aside the wooden door of the Pesthouse to let in fresh air. A corridor of sunlight fell across her bed and hands. “Pish, pish,” he whispered, a gentle call that he had learned from Ma, a greeting that had allowed him many times to walk up to a horse or among cattle without distressing them.

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 collar 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 fairy tale: 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 buboes 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 and, indeed, of 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 stomachload 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 light, 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, shivering, how risky that had been. Diseases depart from 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 on to 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.