The Pesthouse (21 page)

Margaret chose a bed that was not already made up with a blanket and covered with possessions. She found a crib for Bella. The hut was empty of other residents. All were working, she presumed, maintaining their circles of effort and reward. The mattress was a luxury that she had almost forgotten, cotton ticking stuffed with chaff and moss. She fell asleep at once, with Bella on her chest, and neither woke until the daylight had gone entirely, robbing the shed of any definition. They slept until someone passed by with a mallet, beating on beams and doors, and calling out between the drumming of wood on wood, 'Let's eat. Let's eat.'

It was not hard to find the dining hall, even though it looked exactly the same as the sleeping huts. Everyone was going there, holding their bone spoons. She followed, keeping her distance, not yet wanting to talk to anyone or introduce herself, but once she had handed over her token, climbed the three steps and was inside the hall, she found a decent smile to wear and tried to look as if she belonged and was not at all embarrassed by the company of so many strangers, divided as usual into tables for men and tables for women and a circle of low planks for the children. The two tables nearest the door were reserved for pilgrims, devotees and anyone entitled to a loop of white tape.

Margaret should have known that her discomfort could not last. A woman with a baby, especially one as beautiful as Bella, is always welcome at a table of other women. Within a moment she had been summoned by another mother, whose own child was old enough to handle his own spoon, and she was sitting among friends, with Bella on her lap. There was more good food in front of her than she had seen since Ferrytown. But no one was eating yet. One higher table at the side of the building was still unoccupied. They would have to wait, it seemed, for the latecomers.

When she saw them it was not immediately clear how the Finger Baptists had earned their name. They wore long sleeves, long hair and long beards, and seemed to have trouble walking with any strength or commitment. There were exactly twenty of them. One had to die before another devotee could be elected to their group. Twenty was the holy maximum. They took their seats at the higher table, paying no attention to the crowded hut, and one of the attendants struck his mallet on their table to beat out the blessing — wood on wood — and to indicate that dining could begin. Margaret mashed some of the softer food for Bella first, and added a little milk to make it into a digestible paste. She broke up a piece of chicken into safe shreds and let the girl suck it while the paste was cooling and then she took her too-large spoon and began to feed the stolen child, her boy Jackson, her girl Bella.

It was only once Bella was eating that Margaret looked up across the room and saw that what she was doing was mirrored at the higher table. The twenty Finger Baptists were the Helpless Gentlemen. They did not want to feed themselves, it seemed. They sat before their food, their arms hanging loosely at their sides, their beards and hair pushed back, while devotees — one each — spooned food into their mouths and wiped their lips with cloths. The devotees lifted cups of water and juice and waited for their masters to sip. One was holding up a chicken leg for his Gentleman to gnaw. Another offered dry beans, one at a time, as if he were hand-feeding a turkey. 'What are they doing?' Margaret asked the mother who had befriended her.

'The very same as you.'

'So I see. But why?'

'Has no one told you yet? They're not allowed to use their hands. The hands do Devil's work.' The Devil's work, Margaret soon found out, included not only fighting and stealing, both of which indisputably required dishonest hands, but also art, craft, cooking, working, and the age-old and best-forgotten practices of technology for which all metal was the chilling evidence. The Helpless Gentlemen had set their minds and bodies against the country's ferrous history. Wingless and with withered arms, they'd earn their places at the side of God.

SO THE WINTER PASSED. It was an oddly comfortable existence for Margaret and Bella. Much of the doubt, regret and danger had been removed from her life, though what replaced them was mostly dull. In this respect, the Finger Baptists were proved correct — No Blades, No Blood. The emigrants were honest, because there was nothing to steal; sharing, because there was plenty to eat; sober, because there was no liquor; there were no misers, because there was no wealth to hoard; they were industrious, because it was Work or Starve.

As the mother of an infant, Margaret's duties were long but light. It was her job to sit from sunup to sundown at the Ark's water supply, a shallow well, protected from the cold by a three-sided shelter. For most of the time there was nothing for her to do except be patient and keep Bella amused and out of mischief. The girl was an adventurous crawler and then a reckless walker, who, like the worst puppy, would take any opportunity to slip away behind Margaret's back to investigate and taste anything that caught her eye, whether it be a dangerous splinter of wood or a shard of ice or a scrap of crust or mud. Then Margaret had to clean out Bella's mouth with her finger and force open her fists to remove any trophy. The child was growing, becoming more interesting and more difficult, first learning to recognize the word
no
and then learning to resist it. Once she had discovered how to pick things up and use them without help — her cup, for example, her spoon — it was not long before she devised the game of throwing things down for Margaret to fetch or simply to enjoy the sound of tumbling, rolling and breaking.

There were busy times when Margaret had no choice but to strap Bella to her back and deal with the peak demands for water. The first to arrive were those emigrants whose duty it was that day to fill their family water jugs. There were eighty-two over-wintering families in all, including Margaret and Bella, and so the line for water was often long and unruly, with impatient boys trying to jump the line and older men demanding precedence, especially as the first waters of the morning were the least cloudy and the sweetest. Margaret had instituted the Ferrytown method to prevent arguments. As people arrived at the well, they threaded a loose rope through the handles of their jugs. That fixed the line beyond question. Then they had no choice but to be patient and talk to each other rather than argue, or to play with the child.

Margaret's still-short hair was long enough by now to be revealed to the women in her sleeping shed. She could safely recount to them the story of her illness and some details of her journey to the Ark. She could relive out loud and weep again at the horrors of Ferrytown, that rock-hard memory: every member of her family dead in sleep. Now she appeared to the women as a survivor, as someone who had once been alarmingly dangerous but was no longer. They were the only ones who saw her bareheaded, though, and they were the only ones, too, who inevitably saw Bella naked. So Margaret's pretense that Bella was a boy called Jackson was short-lived. No, Jackson was a girl's name in her family, she explained, despite the sound of it, its final unfeminine consonant. So she began calling Bella Bose 'little Jackie'. It was more convincingly girlish. Bella did not seem to notice the change. Indeed, it wasn't very long before she did not even respond to the word 'Bella'. She became Jackie to herself. And Margaret was known to her as 'Ma', a not entirely dishonest pretense, given her first name. Ma for Margaret. Ma for
make-believe
.

'Jackie' was not a predictable baby. She was ready to grant broad smiles to any woman or child who paid attention to her but was more reticent with men, especially the workmen and the craftsmen from the half-completed tower who came throughout the day, smelling of sweat, stone dust and timber, to fill their buckets. And when any of the twenty Finger Baptists came and required Margaret to draw water for them, 'Jackie' was prone to burst into tears and hold onto her ma as if these Helpless Gentlemen meant to do her harm.

Margaret thought the girl was disturbed by the Baptists' long gray robes, but actually she was smelling Margaret's own uneasiness. Their greatest marks of holiness — their flaccid arms and lifeless hands that had weakened over the years for want of use — were usually hidden in their sleeves. But when they came from their ablutions (where, according to the gossip, though no one had witnessed it, they cleaned their intimate parts by squatting in a shallow bowl), they liked to have their hands washed as well — force of habit from their less devout childhoods, she supposed — and Margaret had to hold their sleeves back while they dipped and trailed their emaciated fingers limply in the water. Then she had to take the washing block and soap them, sometimes as far up as their armpits. Their arms, especially those of the longest residents, who had not so much as picked their own noses for twenty years or more, were wasted from the shoulders down and weighed less than a strip of feather wood. Once the Baptists had washed, she had to dry them, too. She found the whole procedure unpleasant and disturbing. Their hands were weak and useless but not shrunken. In fact, with so little flesh and so much prominent bone, they seemed huge and corpselike.

Margaret tried to keep her eyes lowered and maintain silence when the Finger Baptists were at the well. She did not want to be selected as one of the emigrants who had the honor of serving these men in their private quarters. She'd heard — more rumors, possibly, but disquieting nevertheless — that duties might include massaging and masturbating them, washing them down all over, washing their hair, providing pellets of food, pulling their clothes on and off, cleaning their teeth, and helping the fatter and the older ones to sit and rise. But only once in those winter months had Margaret been asked to do anything more intimate than draw the water, and wash and dry the arms. On that occasion, one of the younger Helpless Gentlemen, who, although his arms and hands were useless, was very mobile elsewhere, a speedy walker and a man with fat, expressive lips, had lifted his face toward Margaret and, with a series of commands — 'Higher', 'Lower', 'Aah, just there!' — required her to attend to an intolerable itch on the side of his face.

'Count yourself lucky,' one of the women had commented that evening. 'A man can itch in many places.'

There was no escaping the evening sermons, mostly delivered by a Baptist aspirant while all the families were eating: metals were the cause of weaponry and avarice, 'Think on iron, think on gold'; metals were invaders in a world otherwise designed from fire, air, water, earth and stone, all of which were more or less compressed versions of each other and indestructible; 'Metal has brought Death into the world. Rust and Fire are God's reply.' Sometimes, their mouths oily with food and scarcely able to restrain their laughter, the emigrants were required to repeat some favorite Baptist lines out loud. The diners were always happy to join in, though hardly any of them truly felt that tins and sins were quite the twins that the Baptist songs made them out to be.

Otherwise, Margaret's life in the Ark was without problems and without external incident. The trickle of new arrivals — which, luckily, did not include any Boses — stopped as the snow thickened and the cold intensified. The world beyond the palisades became a memory of hardship and sore feet. She did her best not to dwell on Franklin or her family in Ferrytown. The devotees, pilgrims and disciples who had arrived during the fall kept to themselves in the evenings, preferring to concentrate on their rites and religious ambitions rather than consort with people who were less hostile to the old ways of America than piety and reason demanded. Once in a while, a group of devotees, expressionless as usual and wearing their sorters' gloves, disturbed the domestic calm of the sleeping huts by enforcing an unexpected search for hidden jewelry or any other trace of metal. A non-observant mason brought in from Tidewater during the summer because his carving skills were unrivaled was rumored to have hidden shards of metal between the tower walls to undermine its sanctity. The devotees had not found any evidence of that, but their confidence had been undermined. So they took no chances with the integrity of their new building. If anyone was caught with as much as a half-nail or a splinter of tin, their whole family was expelled at once, no matter if it were the day or night, or in the middle of a storm. The Ark would not abide so much as a fleck of metal.

Margaret had nothing to fear from these occasional disruptions. She had no possessions that might harbor contraband. She did not care about their tower. She was without blemish and, in their eyes at least, lived a blameless life, hoping only to pass unnoticed or, at most, to be regarded as an attentive mother. She exchanged her token for food each day and earned it back by her attendance at the well. She slept and ate and grew more confident.

At mealtimes, when they could be stared at, the Finger Baptists were a source of great amusement among the younger emigrants, including Margaret. Afterward, gathered around the candles in the privacy of the sleeping sheds, their faces animated by the warmth and light, the women of Margaret's hut could laugh and joke at will, and then exchange their hopes and ambitions for the coming spring.

In some respects, Margaret had never been happier. Of course, her happiness was always haunted by the all-too-recent and the all-too-memorable loss of her family, her home town and her only man. The very thought of them was crippling. Nevertheless, Franklin had become the perfect husband and father in her imagination and in the stories that she told to her companions. He was her lover and her friend. He was the father of Jackie. She would never look at another man until she was certain he was dead. She could not shake off entirely the receding but nagging shame and guilt she felt for her abduction of the child. But for once she was part of a community that had not known her as a girl, that did not count her coloring as unfortunate and that could not control the way she lived her life or how she raised her daughter. She was a woman with status, a mother, a wife with a lost husband, a good friend whose wit was appreciated in the hut. Here was a warmth and neighborliness that she had never encountered in Ferrytown, where the only common interests at times seemed to be avarice, jealousy and competition. In the Ark, among her shed companions, there was the common interest of strangers sharing their directions and their hopes.