Chapter 67 Out With the Ebb

The moon rose exactly when promised, which surprised nobody, and the ebb began like a held breath being let out, which surprised everybody. They stood on the harbor steps at nine o'clock, the two of them, in coats too warm for walking and not nearly warm enough for whatever came after walking, and behind them on the upper steps stood everyone else: Lily with her hands folded keeper-fashion; Iris with the ledger held against her chest; Margaret Ashford wrapped to the chin in her wet-slate coat, leaning on Ada Nilsen's arm as though this had been their arrangement for sixty years; and behind those four, at distances that managed to be both respectful and enormous, the town — Mrs. Okafor, Mr. Pryce, Owen with his tape, the ferryman, the twins, forty strangers who had become, in four evenings of reading aloud to a darkness under their feet, something harder to name than neighbors. There were no speeches. The page had forbidden luggage of the sentimental kind. June's mother kissed her once, hard, on the mouth, the way you fasten a hatch, and stepped back. Ezra looked at Iris, and Iris said only: "Say it with all of it in your mouth." He nodded. At 9:41 the sea withdrew. It went without drama, which was somehow worse — no wave, no roar, just the whole harbor sliding backward off its stones with a long gravel whisper, further than any tide in living memory, until the water stood a dark mile out and the seabed lay open to the moon: sand and weed-gardens and the black ribs of ancient boats, and there, plain as print from the top step, running straight out into all that exposed country, the road. It was made of stone. Old stone, wide enough for two, wall-less, dry at its crown where the ebb had wrung it, running level across the tilted seabed toward a headland far out that no chart any of them knew showed at all — and along its edges, at intervals, stood low posts crowned with what looked, until you were close, like lamps, but were not: each post held a small glass case, and inside each case lay an open book, glowing faintly gold-edged, banked coals, pages stirring in the sea-wind as if turning their own leaves. "The tide roads," Lily said softly. "A hundred years I kept stairs over water and never once—" She stopped herself, keeperly, and turned to the walkers, and her voice was absolutely steady. "The light goes out behind you, one lamp at a time. It is correct. Walk." Ezra and June went down the steps side by side, and the moment their feet touched the road's crown, the world behind them changed acoustics: the town's noise cut off clean, as if a door had been closed on it — no bells now, no gulls, no Mrs. Okafor's last called blessing — and looking back they saw the harbor lights indeed going out, one by one, up the hill, streetlamps and windows, patient as arithmetic, until the whole town was dark except for one golden rectangle hanging above the stairwell like a lantern hung in the sky for their bearing. "Do not stop walking," June said, mostly to herself, and they walked. The sea-wind on the road smelled wrong and right at once — salt under everything, yes, but also old paper, and dust, and rain on hot stone, the library's own deep smell, and at the third lamppost-book Ezra stopped despite himself and read the open page: it was a ship's log, half-finished, the entry breaking off mid-word in 1912, and the glow off it was the exact gold of the reading room. "They're books," he said. "The posts are shelves." "The sea keeps its shelves below the waterline," June quoted, not knowing she remembered, and they walked on. The first gate stood where the road passed between two ribs of a wrecked vessel, and they were through it and past it before they understood it had been a gate at all — no bar, no door, only a place where the wind changed, and then a voice, neither in the ear nor out of it, asking with the mildness of a customs officer: WHAT DO YOU CARRY? "The answer," Ezra said, his heart slamming, his voice coming out lower than he expected. "Spoken. For one who waits at the turning." "AND THE HANDLED THING?" "A ribbon," Ezra said. "My father's place-mark. Kept eleven years in my pocket." The wind considered him. Then, gently — there was no other word; the dead water checked papers and found them in order — it moved on, and asked June, and she said, "The witness," and told the truth about herself, that a letter had chosen her here on dry land years before she ever saw this road, and the wind accepted that too, and they walked perhaps half a mile more before either of them dared say anything ordinary. "It didn't take anything," June whispered. "That was the customs," Ezra said. "Tolls come later. Offer early, offer freely — remember?" And because saying it steadied him less than doing it, he stopped at the next lamppost, took off his cap to the open book there, and spoke aloud, deliberately, into the sea-dark: "I keep against need the sound of our television muttering jealousy downstairs while my father read to me upstairs. I have carried it as proof the world was against us, so we'd look like heroes to ourselves. I'm tired of needing it." He stood a moment, hollow, lighter, unable to locate the grievance that had organized his entire adolescence. "...It's gone already," he said, astonished. "It just — went." Ahead, faint in the moon-glitter, impossibly far and impossibly near, a point showed now beyond the wreck-ribs and the gates: a low dark headland with one light burning on it, steady, small, gold as the reading room, gold as a lit window seen from a frozen field. June looked at it, and then at the ribbon-shaped crease of fear across her own courage, and did what the oldest coward in town had taught her to do. She offered early.