Chapter 95 The Year the Wall Went Green

The years after the crossing opened changed the coast in the small ways that matter, the way a family changes when it stops being ashamed of its size. The four houses met by turns at whichever shore the season came round to, keeping the same feast on the same stone at four corners of the water, and the roll the four keepsers shared grew a fifth and a sixth hand as the children of that generation came up learning four coasts as one country, and Clara, no longer the woman returned to bury but the woman whose burying had opened a door, let the keeping pass into hands that did not remember it as a grief, which was, Katrin told her, the whole point of a true keeping, that it be kept at last by someone who has never had to be taught to hold on. The wall, cleaned and let stand open at the low for the first time in living memory, went green that spring from tide-mark to crown, and the salt-and-fresh, no longer held apart by any pride of one shore, ran together in the channels behind it, and the fish that had gone thin in the villages' nets came back fat, and it was said among the headland people that the sea, having at last been answered, was paying interest, and Clara, who knew it was only the arithmetic of asking kept steadily forever, let the good story stand because a coast needs its myths as much as its gates, and the two are not so far apart, both being promises kept by something larger than the one who told them. Wren's chair by the window was given to no one and kept exactly as it had stood, and on the shortest day the four lamps were lit and the whole company read the covenant's first leaf together, the original Devereux had proven older than every family's claim, and the four keepers, mainland, island, the returned fourth shore, and now a fifth that had sent word over the winter, said the words of the free water aloud into the dark until the sea took them and carried them out to whatever coast was next to be asked, and the keeping, which had begun as a drowned brother's single stone and ended as the holding of every drowned and absent name, did not rest, because a keeping that rests is a door that has forgotten it is open, and the lamps burned on, four and now five, steady and green and answered. The fifth shore, when its keeper at last came walking over the causeway on the great spring ebb to set his own lamp in the fourth socket's fellow, was the island beyond the fourth, and then the country beyond that, so that the coast discovered over the years a truth the whole sea had always been keeping for them, that the wall and the gate and the four sockets were only the nearest four rings of a very large and patient pattern, that every shore had been trusted with one latch and the whole of the keeping would not be complete until every one of them had been asked, steadily and forever and in the open air on the low with both hands willing. Katrin, now grown to the best diver of the crossing, laid the seaward stones straight for the fifth and sixth shores with her hands and her breath and a patience the whole coast envied, and the roll grew a dozen names before it was done, and Clara did not live to see it whole, but neither did she die before it, which was the gift the sea gave back to her in the end, that she should both begin the keeping and see it grow past herself, that the arithmetic of grief she had come home to dismantle should become, in the last year of her hands on it, the arithmetic of the whole wide sea. When they buried Clara they laid her at the wall's foot, beside Thomas's stone and the names of all the drowned the gate had welcomed home, and they did not bury the third key, the smaller worn one, they gave it to the girl from the fourth shore to carry on, and the roll was closed for that day and opened the next, because a keeping is never finished, only handed, and the lamps of the five and soon the six shores went up on the shortest night like a string of the coast's own stars, asking, green, answered, and the sea, keeping what it is given, held them all. And the keeping went on, the way Wren had promised it would, outliving the hands that began it, growing past the grief of one woman come home to bury a mother into the holding of a whole coast's absent dead, so that the four lamps became a dozen, and the dozen a score, and the score a light running out round the rim of the world on the lowest ebb of each year like a tide of lanterns, each shore setting its one latch and being asked its one name, and the sea keeping it all, steadily, forever, in the open air, with both hands willing, and none of the keepers, living or dead, ever again alone on the wrong side of a wall they had mistaken for the end of everything when it was only, all along, the door. And Clara, laid at the wall's foot with the whole roll open on the stone beside her, would have laughed, the dry full laugh of a woman who had come home grieving a private sea and found it a chorus, that the drowned brother's single returned stone should have grown into a hundred lamps on a hundred shores, that the asking, not the answer, was the keeping all along, and the coast, keeping what it had been given, held even her, and the wall went green each spring under the tide, patient and open and answered forever.