He looked with her, although he didn’t know what she expected him to see. “Nothing,” he said, meaning Nothing to worry about.
“I can’t see anything either,” Margaret said. “Maybe there’s something moving by the ferry beach. Is that a cart?”
Indeed, it was a cart. But by the evening the cart would still be there at the river’s edge, with its bewildered owners and some others newly arrived that day, yet no one living, no one able, no one in attendance to take their crossing fees and set them safely on the far bank.
Franklin had not wanted to abandon the Pesthouse so soon. He had started to take pleasure in its intimate darkness. He’d argued that Margaret ought to allow more time for her recovery; she was too weak to walk, even if it was downhill all the way. The flux was unpredictable and might return. Her shaven head would frighten people off. He was not fit enough to walk himself, as his knee was still troublesome. Besides, his brother, Jackson, had promised to return within a day or two, and if anything had gone wrong down there in Ferrytown, Jackson would certainly have come back to Franklin at once. That was his way. “He’s mightier than me.”
Margaret’s immediate apprehension had been that everybody in Ferrytown had come down with the flux. And that made sense. It would explain the almost empty roads, the stillness, and the absence of smoke. Everyone would be confined to bed, too weak to move or light a fire, too battered to be visible. Her fear of such overwhelming pestilence was not illogical, or unprecedented, even though, according to her report, since the deaths of her father and the six other Ferrytowners three months before, there had not been any disease among her neighbors, other than her own. She’d been the only victim of this outbreak, as far as she knew, and now look at her, starting to recover after only a day or two and nothing lost except some weight and a lifetime’s worth of hair.
So Franklin was not unduly worried. If it was illness that had stifled Ferrytown, then it was a weak and passing visitor. But in his view, he and Margaret would still be wise to stay up on the hill, at least until the fires were lit again, if not until Margaret’s hair had reached a respectable length, as was normally required.
“Let’s wait to hear what my mighty brother has to say,” he suggested.
“What if he doesn’t come?”
“‘Mighty Jackson, but Jackson mighty not.’” He laughed like a boy. Immediately he felt embarrassed to have been so childish in her presence, and blushed again. Blushed like a redhead might. “That was our joke,” he explained, feeling half her age and suddenly recognizing with a further blushing shudder how foolish and immature and unreasonable he was to be so smitten by this woman, this sick and older woman who would regard him, surely, as a silly youth. “That’s what we always used to joke about my brother,” he repeated. “I only meant to say, let’s wait at least a day or two, until you’re well enough to walk, and see if he comes up for me.”
His brother’s failure to return so far had bothered Franklin. Jackson was mighty, but he was impetuous and unpredictable as well—“mighty not,” indeed — the sort of man to take off on his own for days on end. That also had been his way, since he’d been able to walk. The world was not a dangerous place to him, and so he could never understand why people worried about his absences. Besides, he had a thirst. If there was liquor in Ferrytown, Jackson would sniff it out and knock it back in quantity. And he’d have to sleep it off in quantity as well. So two, three days? Inconsiderate, perhaps, but not unusual.
Franklin had that morning left Margaret sitting on her tree-trunk bench and hobbled as best he could into the clearing at the top of the trail where he and Jackson had parted. Was there any sign of his brother? she’d asked. Nothing yet, so far as he could tell. Nobody coming up. Just stragglers going down, the usual travelers in family groups, alone, with horses, carts, or nothing but their legs for company, a little string of refugees from Hardship House picking their way down the track for a night in bed and a country breakfast. Sea dreamers. Everything as normal, then. He tried to challenge her fears. Ferrytown, from his high vantage point, had simply looked quiet and uneventful, he said, hardly a scarf of smoke to be seen, perhaps without the usual bustle at the crossing point, no casual sound maybe, but it still seemed flourishing to him, a sleepy habitation, blessed to be exactly where it was, staying rich at nature’s bottleneck.
No casual sound? His phrase was like a slap. Margaret could hear perfectly, even if her eyes might let her down. She knew too well the way the community was ordained, how if every single mortal there were lying down in bed, unable to lift a finger for himself, at least you could expect, even at this distance, the dogs to be complaining and — suddenly it occurred to her — the cocks to carry out their duties for the day, proclaiming their raucous intentions to the hens as soon as the sun came up and maintaining their vanities until sundown.
She pricked her ears and concentrated. Ferrytown was not providing any noise. Again she did her best to focus on open ground, on the dark shapes of the mules and horses in the tetherings, but nothing moved, so far as she could tell, nothing was impatient for the trail or its harnesses. Indeed, it seemed that every living thing was lying down like cattle expecting rain. The only movement Margaret could now discern, other than the few recently arrived carts and people who were gathering in increasing though unusually small numbers on the river’s edge, was that of the ferry raft itself, which was neglected and had worked itself free of its mooring posts. It was swinging in the middle stream on its securing ropes, in a river still bloated from the rains of two nights previously.
In the end Franklin did what he was asked. Well before midday, he quickly gathered up their few possessions — her few clothes, his travel kit — and combined them into one pack, which he wore forward on his chest. He threw earth on the Pesthouse fire. He cut two sticks, one for himself to support his leg, an extra wooden limb, and a spare for Margaret. There was no point in pretending that she would have the strength to walk more than a few paces and certainly not down Butter Hill, with its harsh gradient and its unpredictable gravel. The days of vomiting, diarrhea, and fever had weakened her. So he wrapped the two tarps around her shoulders and stooped to let her climb onto his back, and then he tied the corner ears as tightly as he could around his waist and chest so that his warm burden was pressed tightly to his upper spine and shoulders. Finally he slipped the spare stick behind her knees and through the lower tarp knots at his waist, so that she was sitting in a kind of wood-and-canvas rescue chair and her legs could not dangle.
Margaret did not weigh much, scarcely more than the chest pack, it seemed. Despite the stiffness in his knee and the increased pain, Franklin could stand with the help of his stick and move easily at first. He’d carried deer carcasses in much the same way before, and on one occasion an injured ewe that had struggled all the way back to the stead. Margaret was a more compliant burden, and actually, if only he could put aside his lasting fear of her dry and bitter breath, and his embarrassment, she was a welcome one, the softest and the warmest pack he’d ever portered. Giddyup, he told himself, and began the slow and painful walk from the little Pesthouse that he’d grown to like so much across the clearing to the start of the descent. They were an alarming and a comic couple all at once: the oversized limping man, not quite a giant, the emaciated, recently scalped woman, with her bone head — now almost imperceptibly fuzzed orange — warning everyone and anyone who wasn’t blind to avoid her at all costs.