So Franklin understood that he could not readily afford to waste much time nursing such a slight injury. Within a month, the weather would have mugged the final stragglers and the roads and ways would be empty again, untrodden till spring.

Once summer turned and limped away, its sack crammed full of leaves, the route was challenging. And if the stomach survived that, then the less sturdy travelers were betrayed by bones and joints, starting at their knees and working upward, pain on pain, through hips, up spine, and into the shoulders and the neck until there was nothing left to sour, fail, or be betrayed except the soft pith of the head. Then the stomach gave way, soured by ditch and pond water and the usual makeshift meals of hardtack, jerked meat, pine nuts, and scrapple-and, in the brothers’ case on one occasion, a stew made from a hand–caught rabbit too diseased to run away, with nettle tops as greens. The wayside going east was already littered with the melancholy camps and the shallow graves-soon to be torn up by wolves-of those whose bodies couldn’t take the journey, those who had been fatally chilled by wading through rivers, those who had starved and weakened, those who had been thrown by their horses or poisoned by their suppers, those who had been crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.įeet failed first nothing could prepare the feet for this. Only the ill–prepared, the ill–fated, and the ill–timed were still strung out thinly along the previously busy route, hoping to make the final sailings before ice and squalls shut down the sea, and anyway made shore–to–ship or ship–to–shore impossible. Traveling would become more hazardous and then impossible. The first rains had arrived, and soon the winds and snow would get to work. Apart from nuts and mushrooms, there was little free food to be gathered at the trackside.

The prairie tall–grass had already whitened and buckled. He and his brother, Jackson (named for their parents’ small hometown on the plains), had left the journey rather late as it was. Certainly he shouldn’t walk downhill on such a long and hazardous gradient, unless he wanted to damage his knee beyond repair and put paid to any hopes of getting to the coast and boarding ship before the worst of the fall storms. He’d weathered such pain the day before that he’d been forced to consider what anyone (other than his brother) who’d seen the wincing recoil in his limp or examined his inflamed leg had already told him, that he shouldn’t walk another step. He’d not been sleeping anywhere, in fact. Franklin Lopez had not been sleeping in Ferrytown, though he’d wanted to.

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace