Margaret jockeyed Franklin to a path that headed upstream on the river’s bank, until, at the back of a group of boathouses, they reached a dry, rocky ledge surrounded by planted fruit trees where someone had built a wooden bench and a fishing platform. Beyond the ledge the river narrowed into cascades and was no longer navigable, except to trout. Franklin could carry her no farther, and she could ride no more. It had been a heavy day. Margaret could rest. But he had duties to perform. He would have to leave her there alone for the afternoon. She took the knife he offered, though she was in no state to protect herself if she was discovered by any of the living emigrants, or any ghosts.
Franklin, wrapped up in his brother’s coat, his mouth and nostrils stuffed with wads of cloth, had agreed to Margaret’s shamefaced proposition — why hadn’t she thought of it while they were there? — that he should take the risk of going back into the village and to her home to make the best of their chances in the voyages ahead. As soon as he arrived in the compound, he should wash his hands and face, and the cut on his ear, in fresh vinegar, she warned him. There was a pot of it outside her family house. Then he should begin the job of salvaging. Should he salvage other people’s property? he asked. “It can’t be theft, to take things from the dead.” No, it wasn’t theft, perhaps, she agreed, but it wasn’t seemly either.
Franklin went first to the second-largest boathouse, as she’d suggested, and found the open-keeled barrow that was used to wheel the one-man skiffs down to the fishing pools. He spread one of his tarps across the baseboards and tied the corners to the uprights of the frame with creel ropes, so that his barrow had a strong, sagging basket for carrying their spoils. The vehicle was long and clumsy in his hands at first, but Franklin was strong enough, despite his nagging back and still troublesome knee, to push it on his own. He soon got used to it, the trick of trading weight with balance, allowing the one to take care of the other. He was glad of having something useful to do, as otherwise his head would have been overcome with fear, doubt, grief, dismay — too much gloom to quantify. At least he had a purpose now and, he anticipated, a companion for the future, who might be as dependent on him as he had been on Jackson. A new experience. His world had never been shaped that way before.
He and Margaret hadn’t settled on a plan, exactly, but no matter. A plan might not be any value in a world where everything had already been bludgeoned out of shape. They’d simply have to proceed instinctively, like children trying to walk a tightrope. There were no choices to be made on a tightrope, just the one and only step ahead, and then the next.
His first step now was to load the barrow with provisions. Taking fresh food would not be sensible, she’d said. An illness always settles on the food. But it might be sensible, if not entirely safe, to bring as much sealed food as he could find. She told him where the family larders were, where Ma had stored her honey and flagons of juice, where he might secure a good supply of salted meat and taffies as bright and hard as flint, which Margaret had made herself. She told him what clothes she wanted from her box, where blankets were that had not been tainted yet by the occupancy of death.
It was an odd experience, opening her box of clothes and other possessions. The smell was intimate for the few moments that it resisted the stronger odor of the dead from rooms that, thankfully, Franklin did not have to visit again. He could see how careful she had been with her possessions, packing everything tenderly in matching folds. He found the woolen pants that she’d described, the cloak, the green-and-orange woven top, the hat and scarves, the undershirts. He added the cleanest of her combs and a stiff hairbrush, with tangled copper evidence of her ownership. Her hair would grow again, to be as long as the strands caught between the brush’s teeth — and he would see it growing. How many years would that take?
What would his mother have said if she could have witnessed what he did next? He opened chests and cupboards, uninvited, the looter, looking for valuables, some jewels or decorations they might trade, or anything to benefit their journey. But finally the stench of death and his fear of it was too much for him, and he fled the compound with nothing more except for some nicely carved ceremonial platters, a heavy silver cup that surely must be valuable, a hunting bow and a wrap of as yet unbloodied arrows. Already men had drawn their bows at him that day and loosed their slings, so he would be prepared next time. Jackson would be proud of him.
The family yard provided more: two extra water bags; some cattle skins, scraped but not yet completely cured; a coil of decent rope; a pair of wading boots; and a weighted fishing net. Finally he damped his face and neck with vinegar and poured what remained over his hands.
The boat barrow was not overloaded, but it was heavy, though slightly easier to maneuver now that it was weighted down with spoils. He added one more thing, a lover’s touch. He lifted the clay pot of kitchen mint that was growing on the porch beside the cat and chair and wedged it safely at the center of the barrowload, so that the leaves would not be damaged. He hoped that this one living thing from Ferrytown might bring Margaret some comfort, though the plant itself was gasping for water after its almost three dry days of neglect and no rain. Surely she’d be grateful for his gifts, though gifts was not perhaps the right word for property that was either already hers (the comb and brush) or her unexpected inheritance (the family platters that she would have eaten off on feast days and at funerals, the mint that would have flavored so much of her summer food, the silver cup whose purpose, probably, was just to be valuable).
Franklin could have — should have, almost certainly — abandoned Margaret at this point, now that he was so well equipped and so enriched. Any sensible man would have. Any person truly set on getting to the coast would not have stripped his chances to a sliver by traveling with a plague-ridden stranger who had to be carried. There were companions at the ferry point whom he might join, if he disguised himself by taking off his coat. He could trade his strength for their camaraderie and for their meals. He could save himself from many of the troubles ahead by being level-headed now. But then, what had his brother said? Only the crazy make it to the coast.
It had taken Franklin Lopez half the afternoon to equip himself from the pickings of Margaret’s compound for their journey, and only half a moment, once he was certain that there was nothing else of irresistible benefit, to set a flame to Margaret’s family home, as she had requested, and do her folks the honor of cremation. He was more than fifty paces away, still negotiating the rutted lane with his long barrow, before he heard the roof straw whoosh and the timbers crack. And he was a hundred paces away before the smell of fire replaced the stench of bodies and he began to feel the heat himself. The wind pressed smoke on him, but he was glad of that, glad to have his lungs filled up with something other than the heavy odor of death, glad, too, to have the corpses of those two early risers who had fallen on the steps of their oven house far from their beds hidden from him by the smoke. The wind also helped to spread the fire, carrying the burning chaff from Margaret’s roof across the alleyways first to the family outhouses and then into the yards and compounds of other houses, the timbers screeching and the flames leaping from thatch to thatch like nightmare cats.
Franklin hastened forward with his load to reach the outskirts of the village before the fire caught up with him. His size and strength mattered now. He could not afford to rest or be distracted by his problems. Living flesh burns just as well as dead. But when he reached the large guesthouse with its adjacent dormitories in a wide lane that he had not walked down before, he knew at once where his brother must have spent his night in Ferrytown. The first dormitory that he entered was where the women migrants slept. It took him only moments to recognize what kind of clothes were hanging over the bed ends — too voluminous and colorful for men — and to retreat outside into the deafening air.