Chapter 13 What the Water Kept

Two days after the flood Eudora went out to the gate alone, in the afternoon, before the ninth bell. She told herself she was going to look at the bank where the water had cut, because a midwife is a nurse and a nurse who does not know the ground she works on is a nurse who will one day be surprised by it. That was true. She also went because she had seen something out there in the grey light that morning, and she found that the not knowing what she had seen had been sitting in her chest for two days like a swallowed stone, and that she had never in her life been able to leave a thing unexplained near her. The path out from the village ran between two banks of sedge to the water-meadow, and then across the saturated meadow on duckboards the villagers had laid generations ago. The boards were slick and some had floated, and she went slowly, testing each with her boot before her weight went onto it. The meadow was a shallow lake with grass standing up through it. Out beyond it the Skaithe was brown and calm again, the tide out, the channels showing as darker lines in the flat and the whole country of water gone quiet as if the storm had used it up. At the edge of the meadow, where the ground gave way to reed and open water, she stopped. The hollow boat was in the channel. It should not have been. It lived in the stone hut by the gate, and the gate was a half-mile off, and there was no man in the village who would have moved it, because it was not moved except once a year and this was not the night. And yet there it was, riding light in the channel a hundred yards from her, its ribs up out of the water and the dark space between them showing the brown of the channel bottom through it, and it was turning very slowly, the way a leaf turns on a still pool, though there was nothing in the day to move it. Eudora did not go closer to the boat. She stood on the last duckboard with the water lapping the turf at her boots and watched it turn, and it was while she was watching the boat that she noticed the reeds move. Not the whole bank of them. One patch, an arm's length from the water's edge, a dozen yards from where she stood, where the sedge was thick and tall and the wind was not. It moved the way a curtain moves when someone has walked behind it, a smooth traveling of the stems, and then it stopped, and the reeds stood still, and then it moved again, closer. Eudora had spent her adult life in rooms where women were in pain and frightened and sometimes dying, and she had learned what fear did to a body. It did this. It made the world very clear and very slow and took away every thought but one. She did not run. She stood with her hands at her sides and looked at the place where the reeds had moved and waited, and the reeds opened, and something looked back at her. It was the shape of a woman. She would say that much afterward, and no more, and she said it only to herself. It was the shape of a woman standing waist-deep in the channel among the reeds, tall and still, and there was no face to see because the light had nothing to catch on it, only a wet pale blur where a face might be, and long trailing strands that hung down and moved like hair in the water and were not hair, they were sedge, brown and jointed, the sedge that grows in every fen in that country, and it went down from the head and lay out on the surface of the channel like the roots of a willow. It did not threaten her. That was the part she could not explain and never managed to explain, in all the times afterward that she thought about it. It looked at her the way one woman looks at another across a room where a child is being born, measuring, waiting, patient with the particular patience of someone who has waited longer than you have been alive. Then it did a thing. It raised one long arm out of the water and held it toward her, and the arm was not reaching for her, and it was not asking for anything. It turned its hand over, palm up, and held it there, and Eudora, who had spent fifteen years holding the hands of women, understood the gesture completely. It was the way you hold out a hand to take a baby. She did not move. The shape stood with its hand out over the water for a long moment, and the boat turned, and the reeds talked softly against one another, and when she still had not moved it let the arm down and the reeds closed over it and there was nothing in the channel but water and sedge and a hollow boat turning on a still day. Eudora walked back over the duckboards to the village without once looking over her shoulder, which took more of her than anything else she did that winter, and she went into her house and bolted the door and sat by the fire and could not get warm. When her hands had stopped shaking she took out her own book and, in the page where she kept the count of the village, she wrote a single line, and the line was this: it knows my trade. Then she put the book away and sat up all night with her back to the wall and the door bolted, and she did not once let herself fall asleep, because every time she closed her eyes she saw a hand held out over the water, palm up, patient, and she had begun to understand what the gesture was and to be unable to stop understanding it. By the morning the fear had done what fear does in a practical woman and turned into work. She washed and ate and went out and did her rounds, the fisherman's child with the croup and the boatwright's hand and the old man with the chest, and she was steady and kind and competent at all three bedsides, and none of the three households knew that she was looking the whole time at the door, and at the window, and at the water beyond the window, at the particular way it lay against the bank. It lay the way it always lay. And in the afternoon, between calls, she walked down to the landing where Godwin Grike mended his nets and asked him, without any preface, who had taught him to set the gate. He did not look up from the net. "The one who came before me, and the one before her, all the way back. Nobody teaches it. You stand at the gate and the gate tells you. That is what they all said, and I did not believe them, and then one night I stood there in the dark and set it wrong, and the water in the channel came up six inches around my boots and would not go out again until I had set it right, and after that I believed them." "And if you set it wrong on the Tithe night?" Grike set the net down and looked at her with his flat unhurried eyes. "Then the gate is not the one that pays." ---