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Refuge
Jim Crace sets his new novel, The Pesthouse,
sometime in the distant future in America. For unknown reasons, life seems to
have more characteristics of medieval times that the era of technological achievement.
Refugees are heading East to take ships across the ocean away from America
for a better life elsewhere. The two protagonists, Franklin and Margaret, try
to join the journey East, but end up heading West instead, trying to survive.
The title refers to the house where he found her in isolation for disease.
Here’s an excerpt, all
of Chapter 3, pp. 25-29:
Franklin
had not expected so much rain. Anyone could tell from how brittle the
landscape was that, in these parts at least, it had scarcely rained all
season, and what clouds there’d been that day had been horizon clouds,
passersby, or overtakers, actually, for they were heading eastward, too—but
hardly any time had gone before the last light of the day threw out its
washing water, splashing it as heavily as grit on the brittle undergrowth and
setting free its long-stored smells, part hope and part decay. The rain was
unforgiving in its weight. It meant to stay and do some damage and some good
in equal parts. It meant to be noticed. It meant to run downhill until it
found a river and then downstream until it found a sea. “If you’re looking
for the sailing boats, just follow the fallen rain” was the universal advice
for inexperienced travelers.
Franklin couldn’t sleep through this.
He couldn’t even sit out such a downpour. He’d have to find some better
shelter. He shook out the leaves from his bedding, wrapped the two already
damp tarps around himself, and limped as best he could onto a rocky knoll
from which he could peer into the darkness and through the rain from a
greater height. He hadn’t noticed any caves or overhanging cliffs or any
forest thick and broad-leafed enough to offer hope of staying dry for very
long. This was the kind of rain that wouldn’t rest until its job was done.
Now Franklin considered the
little boulder hut on the fringe of the clearing, with its gray scarf of
smoke. It was the sort of place where inexperienced or incautious robbers
might make their den, well positioned for picking off stragglers even though
anyone with any sense would give it a wide berth. But Franklin
would take the risk—despite Jackson’s
warnings, but also because of his brother’s stinging accusation earlier that
day that “only the crazy make it to the coast”—and see if he could bargain
any shelter there. He’d lost his bearings in the storm and in the darkness,
though, and couldn’t quite remember where he’d seen the hut. On the forest
edge, for sure, but where exactly, how far off? What residue of light
remained was not enough to spot its chimney. He sniffed for wood smoke but
sniffed up only rain. He’d have to stumble in the dark and trust to luck, and
still take good care not to wake any hostile residents, though the chances
were it was just a woodsman’s cabin or some hermitage, a no-choice place to
rest his knee and stay dry for the night.
No matter where he
stumbled, he could not see the outline of a roof, as he had hoped, or any
light, but he was old enough to know where anyone would build a hut if there
was free choice. Not entirely under trees, for a start, and not in earthy
shallows where bogs might form. But half in, half out. Not too exposed to
wind or passersby. But looking south and on flat ground, preferably face on
to a clearing.
It was her coughing
that led him to her, finally—the hacking, treble cough of foxes, but hardly
wild enough for foxes. A woman’s cough. So now Franklin knew the place, and where it stood
in relation to the far too open spot where he had rolled his cocoon. He took
his bearings from the coughing, waiting for it to break out, then subside,
and then break out again, and from the heavy outlines of the woodlands and
the hillside. He shuffled through the soaking grasses, taking care not to
snap any sticks, listening for beasts below the clatter of the storm, until
he could hear the telltale percussion of the rain striking something harder
and less giving than the natural world, something flat and man-made. And now
indeed he could hear and see the black roofline of a hut and a chimney stack.
Then, between the timbers of its door—but for a moment only—he caught the
reassuring and alarming flicker of a candle flame, just lit from the grate.
He knew exactly what that meant: whoever was inside had heard him creeping
up. They had been warned and would be ready.
Franklin hung his back sack on a
branch, pulled off his tarps, and took out his knife, its blade still
smelling of the meadow onions they had found and eaten raw earlier that day.
The lighted candle meant that the occupant (or occupants) was nervous, too.
So he grew more confident. Now he made as much noise as he could, trying to
sound large and capable. He called out, “Shelter from the rain?” and then
when there was silence, “I’m joining you if you’ll allow.” And finally, “No
cause for fear, I promise you,” though he was more than a little fearful
himself when there were no replies. The boulder hut was big enough to house a
gang of men in addition to the coughing woman, all armed, all dangerous. A
man with a knife, no matter how tall he was, could not defend himself in the
dark against missiles, or long pikes, or several men with cudgels. He tried
again: “I’m a friend. Just say that you’ll welcome me out of the storm, or
I’ll step away.” A test of hospitality. Some coughing now, as if the cougher
had to find a voice from far away, and then, “Come only to the door. Don’t
open it.” The woman’s voice. A youngish voice. Already he was blushing.
For a door, the hut
had little more than a barricade of rough pine planks. Franklin said, “I’m here.” He peered
between the planks and could just make out the dark form of one person,
resting on one elbow in a bed, backlit by a wood fire in a grate. Nothing to
be frightened of. Nothing physical, at least. Some traveler, perhaps, who
just like him was suffering from knees and needed shelter for a while. “I’m
going to drown unless I come inside,” he said. She coughed at him. No Stay away, no Come.
Franklin pulled the door aside with his
left hand, resting his right hand, with the knife, on the low lintel at his
chin height. She held her candle out to get a better look at him, and in its
sudden guttering of light they saw each other for the first time. Red
Margaret was startled first by the size of him, two times the weight and
size of her grandpa, she thought, and then by what she took to be a face of
honesty, not quite a handsome face, not quite a beauty boy, but narrow,
healthy, promising, a face to rescue her from fear if only he would dare. Franklin saw the bald,
round head of someone very sick and beautiful. A shaven head was unambiguous.
It meant the woman and the hut were dangerous. He stepped back and turned his
head away to breathe the safer, rain-soaked air. He was no longer visible to
her. The door frame reached only his throat. He put the door back into place
and reconciled himself to getting very wet and cold that night. “A pesthouse,
then,” he said out loud, to show—politely—that he understood and that his
curtailed friendliness was sensible. Too late to call his brother back,
though calling out for Jackson was Franklin’s first
instinct, because if there was disease in the Pesthouse, there could well be
disease down there, among the inhabitants of Ferrytown.
Now the woman was
coughing once again. Her little hut was full of smoke, he’d noticed. And her
lungs, no doubt, were heavy with pestilence, too. Dragging his tarps behind
him, he crashed his way back through the clearing and undergrowth into the
thickest of the trees, where the canopy would be his shelter. He had been
cowardly, he knew. He had been sensible. Only a fool would socialize with
death just to stay warm and dry for the night. He found a partly protected
spot among the scrub oaks just at the top of Butter Hill, where he could
erect a makeshift tent from his stretched tarps and protect himself a little.
His decision to stay up in the hills to rest had clearly been a foolish one. Jackson had been right,
as usual. A crazier, more reckless man would have faced the risks of pressing
on, injury defied, and enjoyed the benefits of a warm bed, surely better for
a limping emigrant than sharing a stormy night with bald disease, no matter
how eye-catching it might be.
Franklin’s knee had worsened in the
rain and during his latest stumbles through the sodden undergrowth. Its
throbbing tormented him. It almost ached out loud, the nagging of a roosting
dove: Can’t cook, cook, cook. Even
when, in the early quarters of the night, the storm had passed and the moon,
the stars, and the silver lake had reappeared, he could not sleep. Her face
was haunting him, her face in candlelight (that celebrated flatterer) and the
shorn scalp. He might have touched himself with her in mind, despite his
pain, had not the valley raised its voice above the grumbling of his knee and
the hastened beating of his newly captured heart. The dripping music of the
woods was joined by lowland drums. There was the thud and clatter of slipping
land, a sound he could not comprehend or recognize—he knew only that it was
bad—and then the stony gust, the rumbling, the lesser set of sounds than
thunder that agitated the younger horses and the ever-childish mules out in
the safety of the tetherings.
On Butter Hill,
above the river crossing where west was granted access to the east, Franklin
Lopez sat alarmed, entirely unasleep, in his wet tarps, the only living
witness when the silver pendant shook and blistered—a pot, a lake, coming to
the boil.
Today’s
world is full of refugees like Franklin and Margaret, looking for a better
life and a refuge from their troubles. Perhaps Crace is asking whether
America is that kind of place. The
Pesthouse contains fine writing, and leaves readers with the hope that
individuals can overcome all odds.
Steve
Hopkins, October 25, 2007
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