Once he’d lost sight of his brother and the last few stragglers doing their best to negotiate the steep route through the rock chokes and the willow thickets down to the houses and a good sleep, Franklin made a cocoon of the two rolled tarps on a mattress of tinder-dry leaves and pinecones, and settled down for the night in a grassy bay with his back sack for a pillow. His knee was painful, but he was tired enough to sleep. He spoke the slumber verses to himself, to drive away regrets (the certainty that he would never see his ma again, would never walk their stead), and cleared his head of any thoughts of home or hungry animals or the comforts he was missing.
In what remained of the slanting light, Franklin Lopez tried to sleep while facing east, downhill. The closeness of Ferrytown was a comfort to him: from his high vantage point, he had seen the busy little lanes and yards and watched the ferry, its raft boards packed with the day’s last emigrants and their suddenly weightless possessions, as it was let out on its fat ropes to drift downstream, never quite capsizing, until the four helmsmen dug in their great oars and poles to bring the craft ashore in the shallows of the deeply graveled landing beach. He had seen the emigrants unload with hardly a wet rim, foot, or hoof and set off on a boardwalk of tied logs, their burdens heavy again, across the flood meadows, steaming with mist. Soon the first of them reached the outer river bluff, and then, the last of the mountains safely at their backs, they began the long haul through what seemed to Franklin from his vantage point to be a green, oceanlike expanse of gently undulating flats and plains, stretching, swell upon swell, so far into the distance that his eyes ran out. He had then watched the ferry, unladen but now set against the river, being towed back upstream by a team of oxen on a winch and beached for the night at the mooring. He had seen the first lamps lit and heard what sounded like a song. Surely Franklin could not wish for a prospect more reassuring or more promising than this.
Once the moon came up above the leaden volumes of clouds, augmenting what was left of day, the lake in the valley, hidden up till then in mist, was like a silver pendant, with the river as its glinting chain. Franklin had not seen so much standing water before. Perhaps the sea would be like that, flat and safe and breathtaking.
Two
The boulder hut on the far side of the bald, well out of danger’s way, too high for that night’s heavy vapors, was occupied by Margaret, the only shorn-headed person in the neighborhood. Red Margaret. Or the Apricot, as she was called by local men, attracted by her color — and her plumpness — in a land where nearly all the other heads were black, and then were gray or white. Her grandfather, as any parent would, had condemned her coppery tresses to the flames as soon as he had suspected that she was suffering from the flux. She’d vomited all day, she’d had diarrhea, she’d shivered like a snow fly but was hot and feverish to touch, she’d coughed as dryly as a jay, there were rashes on her face and arms, her neck was rigid and painful, and the onset of her problems had been cruelly swift, though not as swift as the news of her illness, which had raced around the houses as fast as sound — the sound of her mother weeping — and once again turned their compound of dwellings into a place to avoid. Once again, because only three months previously, in the high heat of the summer, her father had gone to bed healthy, sweet, a little overweight, red-haired, just as she had done the night before, and woken up soft, battered, and darkened. He’d died of flux, the first of seven townspeople to die and who knows how many unnameable travelers on their journeys to the boats who’d reached the far bank of the river and were out of sight and out of memory before they started shivering.
The flux was carried in and carried out by travelers, or by their goods, or by their animals, or in their bedding, or in their clothes. The illness was an intermittent visitor, unwelcome but well known. So what else could be afflicting Margaret except that selfsame flux, which must have hidden like a demon in their house since Pa had died, biding its time while choosing someone else’s bed to share? And what choice had they but to carry out the rules and protect Ferrytown from her?
Her grandpa, repeating what he’d already done too recently for his son, her father, had shaved her skull, removing all the ginger drama from her head with a shell razor, and then called the closest women in the family, two sisters and her ma, to take off Margaret’s body hair, snapping it down to the roots, the last of it wherever it might be — from her eyebrows and, most painfully, her lashes; from her nostrils, even; from her lightly ochered forearms and her legs; from elsewhere, the hidden hair — and massage her scalp with pine tallow until she was as shorn and shiny as a stone and smelling like a newly readied plank.
Everybody in the land must know what shaven baldness signified. No one could mistake her for a safe and healthy woman now. Not for some time. Not for a tress of time. She should not expect a welcome anywhere with that alarming head. But if she were that rarity, a sufferer who could defeat the flux, the regrowth of her hair, once it had reached her shoulders, anyway, would prove that she was truly safe again.
They burned her clippings on the outside fire, full thirty-one years of growth reduced in moments to a brittle tar. It smelled like a blacksmith’s shop, like horses’ hoofs, like carcasses, as you’d expect from such a pestilence. With any luck the venoms of the flux would now have been destroyed by fire and Margaret would survive her illness, as trees survive the winter if they shed their leaves. At least the flux could not be drawn back into her body through her hair now that she was almost bald. The signs were good, they told her, hoping to believe these baseless reassurances themselves. No bleeding yet, no body smell. Her father had bled from his mouth and nose. She’d be more fortunate than him. If there were any justice in the world, she’d have the good luck denied to Pa, her mother said.
But still, like him, she’d have to go up to the little boulder Pesthouse above the valley for ten days or so, unattended and unvisited, to see if she recovered or was lost. There was no choice but to be hard-hearted. If any of the travelers were ill, they were thrown out of town at once. No bed or sustenance for them. But if the victim was a Ferrytowner, the Pesthouse was the only option. Margaret would have to take the westward route up Butter Hill, against the tide of history.
The women had already rid themselves of wool and fur and dressed in their safest waxed clothes — garments that were too slickly fibered, they hoped, to harbor any pestilence. They chewed tobacco as protection. Nevertheless, they were unwilling to resist this final risk and their last chance, probably, to make their farewells. They kissed Margaret on her cheek. And the men shook hands with her. Then, when she had gone to pack her bag with her three things and her brother had been sent to prepare the horse, they all washed their fingertips and lips in vinegar. You don’t take chances with the flux.
Her grandpa led her on the horse up into the hills that same morning, three slow and ancient travelers, it would seem, the old man taking care with every step as if his bones were as fragile and as flaky as log ash, the woman slumped across the horse’s neck, too weak to sit straight, the mare itself so displeased with the unresponsive weight and the loose stones on the butter-churning climb that it stopped and tried to turn whenever the leash was slackened.
Margaret had never been into the hills before. There’d been no need. It was unwise, and indeed against the community conventions, for a local woman to go beyond the palisades unless she was unwell. Time was too precious for useful bodies to wander aimlessly in the neighborhoods. Margaret, like all the other women without husbands or children, was kept busy helping out in the guesthouse, where there were nearly always more than a hundred meals to serve each evening and beds and breakfasts to make next day.