Chapter 72 Two Days' Weather

Alasdair Banntyne drove them and their gear over the moor to Achmore himself on the Monday morning, uninvited and unapologetic, and loaded the boat with his own hands in an atmosphere of such concentrated gruffness that Neve afterward said she understood how a man might express love entirely through crates. He put in bread, mutton already cooked, a sack of oats, and — at the last moment, thrust through the companionway without meeting anyone's eye — a tin of his wife's blackcurrant jam. Then he stood back on the slip with his arms folded and watched them out of the bay, and did not wave, and was still standing there when the point took them from each other's sight. The first day was kind. They ran northwest with the flood under them and a wind out of the south that let Callum carry canvas he would not have trusted to a stranger's eye, and the coast of the mainland fell away astern into long blue distances until it became a rumor instead of a country. Lila stood at the lee rail most of the morning and watched the sea change its mind about color, green to slate to a deep wine-dark that had no name she knew, and thought about bearings. A line of drowned stones pointing at nothing; a song pointing at the same nothing; a girl on a strand holding both of them true across two days of open water without ever having seen either. The old women had built their road underneath the world, and the world had rolled over it, and the line of it ran on all the same, patient under the miles, the way a stitch runs under cloth. They anchored for the night in the lee of the Monachs, low sand-and-machair islands that showed themselves at evening as a smoke of marram grass above the water, and Callum woke twice by habit and once by weather, and by dawn the second day the calm was gone and the promised wind had come round into the west and begun to argue. It was short work after that, close-hauled, wet, the boat driven with everything shortened and the land invisible somewhere off the bow, and Neve took the tiller for three hours running because Katrin was needed forward and Iris was needed below, being quietly and thoroughly ill among the luggage with her intervals still going under her breath like a rosary. Lila watched Neve work. The girl rode the tiller with her whole body now, reading the sea ahead in the language of backs and shoulders, and when a gray wall of water shouldered up under the quarter she met it without drama, and something in Lila that had been holding its breath since Achmore let a little of it go. Wren had sent them a sailor the way she sent everything: unannounced, finished, and better than ordered. Tarskay made itself known before it made itself visible: first the tide-rip off its southern tip, a long seam of troubled water that Callum gave room with respect; then the smell of peat and sheep and nesting birds, blown out to meet them like a household smelling of baking; and then the island itself, rising green and steep out of the sea with its fields striped bright up the hillside like a blanket woven by someone with strong opinions. And there, behind and above the township, exactly where the paper had promised, stood the fire hill — a broad smooth shoulder of ground, grassed deep and even, greener than anything around it, shaped like no natural hill Lila had ever seen. It looked, she thought, like a loaf. Like something risen and baked long ago and never gone cold inside. The township came down to the slip as they came in, because islands do. Three dozen souls perhaps, two hundred sheep, a kirk twice wrecked and once rebuilt as a barn, one pier, one shop that was also the post office that was also somebody's kitchen — and every house, Katrin said as they warped in, keeping what her people kept. Her uncle Ewen met them at the foot of the pier: a big slow man with a beard going gray in patches like weather coming and his sister's height and nothing else of his sister's quickness, and he gripped Lila's hand in both of his and held it a moment longer than greeting, looking at her with eyes the harbor-gray she had learned to read the whole coast over. "You'll be the keeper," he said. Not a question, on this coast where nothing important was. "Then you'd better see the shelf." The shelf was in the hall of his house, beside the door where a coat-hook would hang in another family's world: a plank of dark wood, worn glossy, and along it a row of sea-smoothed pebbles, each one rubbed flat on one face and scratched on that face with a single small mark. One pebble for every soul the house had given to the water since the house stood, Ewen said, in the tone other men used for stating the number of cows. His great-grandmother had cut the marks; the family renewed the rubbing, each generation, so the stones would stay smooth enough to read. "Folk inland put up photographs," he said. "We've light enough in here for neither. You run your thumb along it of a morning and it tells you who you're asking for." There were nine stones. The ninth was newer than the rest, its scratch still white-edged: Signe's mark, cut by Katrin's own hand in February, because the outer keeping died with her and the shelf had to be told. They ate that night at Ewen's long table — mutton, oat bread, the blackcurrant jam passing hand to hand and vanishing with suspicious speed — and the talk went the way island talk goes, sideways, oblique, arriving at the matter only when the matter was ready. Ruaridh, Katrin's cousin, a wide quiet man of forty who dived for lobster when the price made it worth the cold, listened with his chin on his fist while Callum explained the springs and the lifting, and then said six words that settled the salvage better than any contract: "I'll be under. You'll be on the rope." And old Mrs. Enright, who owned the shop and half the opinions, looked at Iris's drawing of the Kilvane stone spread out between the teacups, and put on spectacles she pretended not to need, and studied the columns for a long time. "My mother sang some of those sounds," she said at last. "Different words. Wee different turns." She looked up, sharp as a gull. "You'll not be telling me we were singing your writing all these years." "No, Mrs. Enright," said Iris, with the care of a woman defusing something. "Your writing came first. We just learned, very late, to hear it." Lila walked out alone before bed and stood in the lane under a sky rinsed clean of cloud, stars thick as grain, the fire hill a deeper darkness against the dark. Somewhere under that smooth green slept whatever the centuries had trusted to it. Nine feet at the big ebb, said the paper; and the ebb would begin Thursday morning; and between here and there lay one day of making ready, which on Tarskay, she was learning, meant the whole island quietly rearranging itself around a job, the way water rearranges itself around a keel.