Late in the afternoon, with the sun too low to light the road but the sky still brightly blue beyond the escarpments, they caught up with the mule train and its two attendants, a boy not much more than twelve years old and his father. One of their mules carried their personal effects, including a large canvas tent. The other seven were laden with jugs, pots, and crocks.
Margaret had been persuaded that she ought to wear her blue scarf, hiding her shaven head, so that unless a stranger scrutinized her eyebrows too closely, her recent illness could remain a secret. The potman and his son did not seem too alarmed when finally they halted the mules with their sticks and turned to exchange greetings. The size of Franklin could not have been reassuring from a distance, but his manner was mild, and his smile — something Margaret had noticed with increasing satisfaction — was disarming. She might, she thought when they were sleeping side by side in their barrow bed that night, allow his hand to hold hers, or even let her head rest on his shoulder, the bristles of her scalp against his beard. What harm could come of it? A man who would go back for her, to rescue her three talismans, a man who was so sweetly timorous, a man who could remove the flux with his enormous thumbs, must surely deserve something more than words of gratitude.
Franklin and Margaret introduced themselves to the potman as Ferrytowners and, instinctively, as brother and sister. A woman of her age could not admit to traveling with an unrelated man. But claiming to be husband and wife would have been not only embarrassing to themselves but unconvincing to strangers. There was their age difference, for a start. Six or seven years, possibly. And then the careful, respectful formality that still existed between them and would not persist between lovers and certainly not between spouses. The potman raised an eyebrow, though. “You’re not exactly twins,” he joked, surveying the immensely tall, black-bearded man and the pale, tiny redhead, scarcely reaching his chest.
“Different mothers,” Margaret said. “Mine died.” That much was true.
They traveled together for a short distance, until the escarpments at the edge of their road flattened out entirely into a broad, barriered semicircle and provided them with daunting views across a debris field of tumbled stone and rock, stained with rust and ancient metal melt. Colossal devastated wheels and iron machines, too large for human hands, stood at the perimeter of the semicircle, as if they had been dumped by long-retreated glaciers and had no purpose now other than to age. Hardly anything grew amid the waste. The earth was poisoned, probably. Twisted rods of steel protruded from the masonry. Discarded shafts and metal planks, too heavy to pull aside even, blocked their path.
Margaret had seen a lesser version of such things before, in the historic north of Ferrytown, where once there’d been — or so tradition claimed — a vast workshop that produced shoes in enormous numbers, though why people could not make shoes for themselves in their own homes was never clear to her. The flaking bodies of machines were still buried there, and as Margaret knew from her own experience, even to that day if anybody turned the soil in that area, she’d be unlucky not to find shiny buckles or little metal eyelets, presumably for bootlaces, among the loam of rotted leather. But she, and certainly Franklin, had never encountered such mighty metal blocks before or such a profligate display of waste by these ancestors. The smell was oily, acidic, and medicinal, the sort of smell even a skunk would avoid. This had to be the junkle that she’d heard reported, third-, fourth-hand, from stories that had managed to cross the river back to Ferrytown, even if the storytellers hadn’t.
In Ferrytown, metal things were sometimes prized and always hard to come by. People could manage without. Margaret’s family had owned only the silver cup, some bluish pewter cooking pots, some knives, a crude iron grate that Grandpa said was owned by his grandpa and half a dozen grandpas beyond him, a hand-beaten kettle, a very useful shovel, and an ax. Margaret herself possessed, or had possessed, her silver necklace and the coins she had found in the river shale when she was a child. But that was all. Carts could not get by entirely without a little metal toughening. On wheel rims, for instance. And boatbuilders and carpenters could manage wood more easily with sharp-edged tools. But generally metal objects were not preferred to those fashioned out of timber or leather or bark or root or withies or cane or wool or gourds or clay or fur. There were so many obliging materials that one could use without going to the time-consuming and dirty trouble of mining and smelting.
It was fascinating, if disturbing, to stand now among the bludgeoned stones and rusting cadavers, trying to imagine what America had been all those grandpas ago, while the potman and his son hunted for any thin metal scraps that they could scavenge and use as staples for fixing broken shards of clay. Margaret and Franklin did not speak. They retreated, shaking their heads, baffled but excited by the presence of so much antiquity, until they noticed signs of life on the outskirts of the junkle. Smoke was rising from the entrance of a sheltered cave of debris beneath an overhang of collapsed stonework. An elderly man in his fifties with a graying beard came out into the daylight, looked across a little nervously at the potman and at Margaret and Franklin, and finally called out a word of greeting.
Franklin, as the younger man, would have to walk across to introduce himself. He left Margaret in charge of the barrow and the lead rein of the mules and made his way across the debris. As he got closer and could see into the deep darkness of the shelter, he recognized the little carriage that they’d spotted earlier that day. A pair of carriage horses were tied against a wall of squared stone, mossy green, at one side of the cave, where pools of greasy water stood. The old man’s family — his wife, a son — were sitting around their fire, warming their knuckles. There was a grandchild sleeping in a reed-weave basket with a mattress of fishnet.
They spent the night together in the dry shelter of the stone-and-metal cave, all of them, three “families” sharing their provisions as travelers should, sharing the fire, and glad of the company. When they had eaten and Margaret had handed round her taffies as a treat, especially for the potman’s boy, they took it in turns, according to their seniority, to tell the stories of their emigration so far.
The carriage family was from a riverside community much farther south than Ferrytown and on the opposite bank. There was no work or trade for them anymore. The river was narrow there, and so, while it had once been good for fishing, it was not suitable for ferrying and profiting from travelers as Ferrytown had done. The old man, Andrew Bose, and his wife, Melody, had been net and creel makers, employing eight hands and growing rich from their efforts. Their son, Acton, had been a fisherman and fish merchant. “Also doing well for himself,” added Melody. “He was much admired.” But when the village started to empty as striking out offered better prospects than staying put, the fish and net trade beached itself. Acton became his parents’ last remaining customer for nets. They became the only ones to buy his fish. The Boses hoped to sit their problems out. Things would get better. Only a fool would leave the riverbank, because whatever happened there, you would never run short of water or food. But then their daughter-in-law died in childbirth, and Acton determined to leave for somewhere less ill-fated. His parents were too old to stay behind alone, though their son had not insisted that they join him and the baby. On the contrary. But it was time for all of them to “face the facts and leave.” So once the child had been weaned by the last of the village pay-moms and cut her first two teeth, they’d shuttered up their house and joined the exodus. Andrew had his tools with him, he said. There was bound to be work for a net maker as soon as they reached water. Net makers were always valued and respected wherever there were boats.