The Pesthouse by Jim Crace Page A

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,