Chapter 12 The Long Count

The wind came at three in the morning and it came off the sea. Eudora woke to a sound she had never heard the village make: the reeds at the north of the hummock talking all at once, a dry rattling roar such as you might hear in a field of standing corn in a storm, and under it the water, not knocking now, but running, a long continuous hiss as the Skein filled the whole channel and spilled over the water-meadow and began to eat its way up the north bank of the hummock. She got up and dressed in the dark and went to the door and opened it, and the wind pushed it back against her hand, and she looked out at a night with no moon in it and water where the marsh had been. The whole Skaithe was moving. She had thought of the marsh as land with water threaded through it. Standing at her own step in the wind, she revised the picture: it was a sea with land threaded through it, and once in a while the sea remembered, and came to take the land back. Men were out on the water-meadow with lanterns, and Eudora went down the street and out to the north edge and found them working in a line with boathooks and poles, shoring up the bank against the flood, and among them, upright in the wind, was Drusilla Rennock, shouting orders into the dark, and Godwin Grike, and the big slow reed-cutter Dunstan Braccan. The bank was holding but the water was in the low places and rising, and as Eudora stood there a cry went up from the south end of the village and then another, and the line of men broke and ran, lanterns swinging, and Eudora ran with them. The water had got into Sibby Braccan's house. She had the last house before the water-meadow, at the north and low, and the flood had come in under the door and taken the floorboards and stood in the room to a hand's depth. Dunstan was inside already, up to his knees, lifting his wife bodily out of the bed, and the fire was out and the room was black, and Eudora went in with both hands out and found Sibby by the sound of her breathing and helped carry her out into the street, four hands and four more, and laid her on dry ground under the wall of the chapel while around them the village fought the water with poles. Sibby was grey and shaking and seven months on. She had been lying in a cold room with water running under her bed and the shock had gone through her the way it goes through a woman with child, and Eudora knew the signs and did not like them: the cramping, the hardness under her hands that would not let go, the fine cold sweat on the skin. She sent a boy running for her bag and set her own hands on Sibby's belly and told her, low and steady, to breathe with her, in and out, in and out, and hold on, and the whole time she was counting the hardening and the spaces between and the count was wrong, much too early, and there was nothing on God's wet earth for her to do about it but stay. By dawn the wind had dropped and the water had begun to go down and the village was standing in mud in the grey light, and Sibby Braccan had not lost her child, though she had come very near to it, and would stay in the chapel guest-room with the women around her for the rest of the week and not be moved. Eudora sat on the chapel step with her skirts caked in mud and her hands shaking with tiredness and looked out over the soaked village, and it was Drusilla Rennock who came and stood in front of her, boots to the ankle in mud, and looked down at her for a long moment before she spoke. "You wrote two Kept," Drusilla said. "I wrote what was true." "There is no such thing as true when a parish counts." Drusilla's voice was not angry. It was flat and tired and very old. "The book has a column and the column has a number and the number has to stand. You cannot add one to the kept side of a page and call it true, because the page is not a record of what happened. The page is the Bond. When you wrote two Kept you told the water there was a debt, and last night the water came in and collected it in its own way, and it took the nearest thing it could find, which was the roof and floor and bed of a pregnant woman. If Sibby Braccan loses that child, you will have written it into the book yourself, and no woman in this village will ever let you touch her daughter again." "That is not how illness works," Eudora said, and heard how thin it sounded in the wet street. "No," Drusilla said. "You are right. That is not how illness works. Illness works however it wants and takes whoever is nearest and never once stops to be just. Which is why we made a bargain with the water instead, because the water does not keep books, and a village with a book can pretend the world keeps one too." She bent, stiffly, and picked up a piece of reed the flood had left on the chapel step, and turned it in her fingers. "You are a good midwife, Eudora Cawdle. That is the trouble with you. A bad one we could frighten off in a week. A good one stays, and fights the parish, and breaks the count, and then has to stand in the wreck and count the cost herself." She dropped the reed and went away over the mud, and Eudora sat on the step in the grey morning and watched the Skein run out and away, and far out at the north, past the water-meadow, out where the gate stood, she saw for the first time something that was neither reed nor water nor the hollow boat, something that showed for a moment against the grey and then was not there, and she did not tell anyone, because there was nobody left to tell who would believe her, and because she was no longer sure she believed it herself. Grike found her there a little later and sat down on the step beside her without asking, and for a while they watched the water go out together and said nothing. Then he said, "You saw something." It was not a question, and Eudora saw no reason to lie to a man who had poled a whole village's children out to a gate for twenty years. "Out past the meadow," she said. "In the reeds. A tall thing with sedge for hair, holding out its hand." Grike nodded slowly, as though she had told him the time of day. "That is the one that speaks for the water," he said. "It speaks to Mirabel Ossel, and to Mrs. Rennock before her, and to whoever can hear it, and it has never once spoken to me, and I have stood at that gate every night for twenty years, and I have decided that this is a mercy I do not deserve." He stood up and brushed the mud off his coat. "It does not want things the way you and I want things. It keeps an account. And an account that is not kept is not a thing a person can argue with. It simply comes due." ---