Chapter 65 The Counting Rhyme

Invercorrie sat where the river met the sea and neither would give way — a scatter of whitewashed houses along one street that wandered like the water, a closed school with its bell still on its bracket, a harbor of half-tide mud and three working boats. The bead-mark on Iris's sheet sat exactly here. The cluster did not; the position was bare, one of the five, and Iris had spent the passage up puzzling at it with her lips moving. Mrs. Beattie solved it inside two days without meaning to, which was, she informed them, the method by which she had solved everything worth solving in forty years of schoolteaching. She was past eighty, small and quick as a wren, retired dominie, keeper of no ledger and all the local memory, and she had answered Lila's winter letter herself because the schoolmistress who should have was gone and somebody had to mind the post. The children came to the shore on the Friday evening for the counting of the boats — four boats went out for the early herring now, but the rhyme had been built, Mrs. Beattie said, for a harbor that had held forty — and Lila and Neve stood among the grandmothers on the shingle and heard it. The mothers swung the smallest ones by both hands in time, and chanted, and the chant ran: *One for the herring, two for the sea, Three for the boat that didna come free, Four for the coat on the water left lying, Five for the door and the dry bed crying, Six for the candle, seven for the psalm, Eight for the arms that carried them hame—* —and there the rhyme stopped, every time, mid-line, unfinished, and the mothers dropped the children's hands, and the little ones shrieked and demanded the end, and were told what had been told to their mothers: the end is not for counting out loud. Iris did not hear words. Iris heard intervals. She stood rigid through the third recitation with her hand pressed flat over her sternum, and afterward, walking back up the street, she said to nobody in particular: "The steps between the number-words. It's the tones. Not sung — spoken on the tones, the way you'd speak a lament instead of singing it. They've been teaching the hum to children for six hundred years inside a boat-counting rhyme and calling it nonsense." She laughed once, high and unsteady. "We've been looking for the script. The script was never the only way the roll was kept. Some stations *wrote*, and some stations were the writing." That was her thesis, delivered on a public road at dusk, and Mrs. Beattie, overhearing the last of it, considered it with the expression of a woman grading an essay, and gave it top marks. She also, before bed that first night, put into their hands the school's old logbook — retired with her when the school was, out of what she called professional sentiment — open at an entry in faded copperplate dated 1874. *Attendance poor today, several families gone to the herring. Corrected the infants' shore-rhyme; they have added a number to it, as children will, making nine where eight has stood these many years. Instructed them in the proper count.* And beneath, in different ink, decades later by the look of it, a second hand had added one dry line: *The proper count was wrong. The rhyme knew it first.* "My predecessor wrote that," Mrs. Beattie said, "or her successor did, and neither of them ever knew what they were admitting. Eight boats counted safe, and a ninth line the mothers kept adding because the sea would not stay told." She closed the book gently. "You take your scholars, Miss Vane. We'll keep taking ours down to the water. Between us, the thing's been taught every generation since God was young, and never once on purpose." "Aye," she said. "We never wrote here. Writing's for things you doubt you'll remember. We doubted nothing, until we did." She led them into her kitchen then, sat them down, fed them scones against their will, and got to what she had invited them north partly to have done. Her hands lay folded on the tablecloth, and she looked at them while she spoke, not at their faces. "My sister went off the Carrick point in June of 1968. Boat found; her not. Our mother never said her name again from that day to the day she died — thirty-one years, and a woman's own daughter unnameable at her own table, and me sitting through it all saying nothing, because you don't contradict a grief." The folded hands tightened. "I'm eighty-three. I find I'm done being my mother's silence now that my mother can't be hurt by it. I wrote to you in the winter because I wanted to know whether it could be done late, and you wrote back such a letter as made me think maybe it could." She lifted her chin, and her eyes were dry and furious and harbor-gray, and Lila thought, not for the first time, that grief kept a type the whole coast over. "So. Can it?" "It can," Lila said. "Late is our whole trade." They walked down to the shore together in the last light, the four of them and a handful of grandmothers who had heard and come without asking, and Lila stood at the edge of the ebb and spoke the sister's name aloud — given at last to the water after fifty-eight years — and asked who her person had been, and the sea answered in pulse and undertow, in the slap of the tide on the shingle, and behind her, unbidden, unschooled, the children who had been hanging about the boats began to hum the tones under the name like groundswell, and Mrs. Beattie put her hand over her mouth, and her sister's name went out over the same water that had taken her, and was kept. Afterward, in the kitchen, with tea going cold, the old teacher became practical again, because teachers do. "You'll be for the north cape, then, and Camas Beg beyond it." Something moved behind her eyes. "Mind how you go at the Red Gable. There was a minister there in the sixteen-nineties burned the names out of the wall at the kirk, and the place has never gotten over being told what to forget. They're decent people. But they flinch at stones."