But there were doubters in the darkness, too, men who’d heard less comforting reports. Rivers too wide and wild to cross. Forests so impenetrable and gloomy that nothing grew at ground level except funguses and little moved except wood ants and blind lizards, both as white as snow, and rats that hunted for their prey by smell alone and so had noses longer than their tails. Great, dusty, waterless plains. Ridges sharper than a knife, that tore your clothes. Others spoke of brackish swamps that could be crossed — in twenty days, if you were strong and lucky — only by travelers who dared to leave their horses and their carts behind and drag themselves across the mire on wooden rafts.
And were there any people, beyond the river crossing? A multitude, yes. Everyone who’d ever headed east to catch the boats. There were no boats. Or else it was a land where no one lived and there’d be not a soul to provide, once in a while, a good dry bed or any hog and hominy. “You’d be glad to dine on raccoon then.” Or otherwise the people were all unwelcoming, or they were naked cannibals, or they were dwarfs “smaller than a prairie dog, but uglier.”
“But furrier!”
“And very tasty on a slice of bread!”
By now the laughter in the room was louder than the rain. Indeed, the rain had relented somewhat, as had their indigestion. Now they could fall asleep more easily, apprehensive but amused. “Watch out,” one of the men whispered, wanting to be the final voice, after all his companions had fallen quiet. “There’s folk out there, one day ahead of Ferrytown, who are as handy with their toes as with their fingers. They can wipe their butts, scratch their noses, poke your eyes out, and pick your pockets, all at the one time.”
But still another man was simmering to speak. “From what I’ve heard tonight,” said Jackson from his single bed at the far end of the hall, too softly to be heard by many of his fellows, “there’s at least a hundred different lands beyond the river. And none of them strike me as likely. Maybe all of us should only wait and see what we’ll find when we’ve planted our feet on the actual earth ahead of us.” He wanted to say out loud what he was hoping for within — that if he advanced his shoulders to the couple with the heavy cart and left his brother to take care of himself, then he could square it with his conscience only if the way ahead for Franklin would prove to be an easy and a kindly one. He fell silent for a little time, judging his words and wondering, too, whether he could ignore the pressure in his bladder from the flagon of apple juice he had traded and drunk, before adding, “I’ll tell you something. For free. This afternoon, I walked down the very same hill as all of you and I looked ahead and used my eyes. I saw the view. Nobody missed the view, I’m sure. And what I saw ahead of me was land and sky just like the land and sky we’ve always known. Tomorrow you can see it for yourselves.” Tomorrow, he was thinking as he fell asleep, will be like yesterday.
Five
The dawn seemed tired and hesitant at first, hardly capable of shaking off the clouds and pushing out into the day. The sun, rising for its daily journey to the west, was veiled by that night’s retreating storm, which, like everything else, including the slight wind, was — typically for this season of migration and withdrawal — resolute in going east, unlike the light. The last stars lingered on, just happy to be visible beyond their time. But once the breeze stood up, the storm was cleared entirely. No cloud at all, and only gray-white mist and yesterday’s smoke in the hollows of the valley, hiding Ferrytown.
When Franklin, drenched and stiffer than a log, finally emerged from underneath his bedding and dragged the tarps into the clearing where they would drain and dry, it was unusually warm and bright on Butter Hill. The undergrowth was steaming, and the air was fragrant with pine and earth, and faintly sulfurous. A henhouse smell. He stood for a while in the sunshine, hoping to recover quickly, and indeed, he soon felt well enough to walk around a little. The rest had benefited his leg, but not sufficiently to pledge a day of walking. He washed in standing water and cleaned his teeth with a snapped branch, which smelled of nuts but left his gums bleeding. He would be sensible and put his feet up for one more day, he thought, flexing his knee. Less swelling, yes, though no less pain when he put any pressure on it. He would not be surprised if his brother returned that afternoon with food or some transport. But actually the prospect of another day free from Jackson’s nagging temper was not unwelcome.
Part of Franklin was uneasy and just a touch alarmed. He sensed that there was death about. He’d felt it in his bones the moment that he’d tried to stand. He recognized it in the fragile colors of the morning. On days such as this the sky is so thinly blue and hollowed out that death’s great hand can at any time reach through to harvest anyone it wants, to pick off lives like berries from a bush. And he could smell it on the air, beyond the pine, that faintly eggy smell, the chemicals of hell, the madman’s belch. Was this the smell of pestilence? He hardly wanted to check. He did not want to exchange the memory of the young woman alive in candlelight with the reality of her perished in the night, borne off on death’s enormous wing.
Franklin chose a good stick for support and made his way across the clearing to the Pesthouse, hoping not to waken her or frighten her, if she was still alive, but also ready to defend himself if there were any devils at her bed. But looking through the Pesthouse cracks and the smoke-heavy fume of the little chamber, he found her well, still breathing in her house of turfs and boulders, still palely beautiful. He was far too thankful now, too teetering, to wonder or to care whose death he’d heard during that long night of rain and sleeplessness in the forest-frowning, eastward-looking hills.
It would be a pity not to be of service to the woman in the Pesthouse, he decided, straining to see her face and shaven head more clearly, hoping to see more — a naked leg flung out of bed, perhaps, a breast. He wanted an excuse to help her, rescue her. Not just to enjoy the true heat of her wood fire or to share her provisions. Not just to do his duty for the sick, either, obeying what his people called the Golden Obligation. He simply wanted her close company. If he was careful and wrapped his face, he would be protected from infectious air; then surely he could dare to sit beside her in the hut, not too near, but near enough to see her fully and to study her more easily. Oh, don’t let Jackson ruin it by coming back too soon.
Franklin pulled aside the wooden door of the Pesthouse to let in fresh air. A corridor of sunlight fell across her bed and hands. “Pish, pish,” he whispered, a gentle call that he had learned from Ma, a greeting that had allowed him many times to walk up to a horse or among cattle without distressing them.
Margaret did not wake, even when Franklin stooped into the Pesthouse. She was dreaming of her father, as she was bound to in that place. She was dreaming of a death like his. She could not forget how red his eyes had been, his sneezing and his hoarseness, or the black and livid spots across his face, and how his body, especially his neck and thighs and arms, had erupted overnight with boils as solid and large as goose eggs.
Margaret twisted on her bed, beset by recollections that she had learned to push away when she was conscious but that in sleep she could not shift — how, early on, he had bled from the nose and laughed it off as “picking it too hard”; how then his tongue and throat had swollen so that he could barely speak; how later, in his delirium, he had tried, and failed, to stand; how they had carried him, as weightless and boneless as a discarded coat, to his cot, where he’d convulsed with hickeye, dry-heaving into his bedclothes and producing nothing but thick and ropy sputum, that harbinger of death; how finally, once he had dropped into a daze, the further end of sleep, they’d sent him up Butter Hill to the Pesthouse on the same horse as they had Margaret, stenching and insensible, with no farewells from anyone, no touch of lips, no vinegar.