Chapter 7 The Ebb

The call came on the night of the second Friday in December, at an hour when the tide was running out. It was the smith's wife, brought to bed a month early in a house at the south end of the village, and the boy who came to fetch Eudora was white and out of breath and said the word early three times on the way. Eudora took up her bag and went out into the cold, and on the path she met two of the village women coming the other way, and one of them caught her by the sleeve in the dark. "The tide is on the ebb," the woman said. "Wait for the flood." "There is not time to wait." "There is time." The woman's grip was strong and her voice was steady, and Eudora understood that she was being given the rule, plain, the way it should have been given to her weeks ago. "No child of this parish is born on the ebb. The flood comes in two hours. We hold her till the flood." "You do not hold a labour," Eudora said. "You do not hold a woman's body. A month early and the head already down, and you want her to lie in that house for two hours against a rule out of a counting game? I am going in, and if you want to stop me you will have to hold me, and I will remember it." The woman let go of her sleeve. In the dark Eudora could not see her face, but she could hear the fear in the woman's breathing, and behind the fear something else that took her a long moment to name, and the name of it was relief. The village had been waiting a long time for someone who would not wait. The birth was hard. The child was small and the labour was too fast for the body to be ready for it, and Eudora did the work at the hearth with the tide going out under the floor of the house so that the whole room seemed to be tilting, and the women who had told her to wait stood along the wall and did not wait. They brought her what she asked for and then stood still with their hands folded in their aprons, and when the child came at last, a boy, blue and quiet, Eudora cleared his mouth and turned him and rubbed his back and felt the long terrible pause that a midwife feels, and then he took a breath and cried, and the cry went up in the small house and filled it. The smith's wife began to weep with relief. The child was alive. The room should have been full of that and nothing else. Instead every woman along the wall had gone the colour of ash, and one of them whispered, in a voice Eudora would hear for months, "He cried. On the ebb, he cried." Eudora wrapped the boy and gave him to his mother and turned on the women with her hands still wet. "He is alive," she said. "Do you understand me? He was born early and he was blue and he is alive, and it is because he is alive that you heard him cry, and if you had your way he would be dead and quiet. Now someone bring this woman water and something to eat, or I will do it myself and none of you will be needed here again." They brought the water. They did not forgive her. In the grey hour before morning, when the mother was sleeping and the child was feeding, Eudora sat by the dying fire and looked at the water in the basin and understood that she had done the right thing by every measure she owned, and that in Grithfen the right thing was not the same thing as the safe thing, and that a child born on the ebb with a cry in him was, to the women of this village, a debt already called in. She checked the boy before she left. She did it in the dark with one candle because she did not want to be watched, and she found, on the sole of his right foot, the mark she had first seen on the innkeeper's granddaughter: faint brown, thumbprint-sized, the shape of a leaf or a shallow cup. She had told the mother it would fade or it would not. She walked home along the raised path with the flood coming back in over the water-meadow and the Skein filling under the boards of the houses, and she took out her book and wrote the case down, and for the first time since she had come to Grithfen she wrote a lie into it. She wrote the time of the birth as an hour after the flood. She did not know why. She told herself it was a clerical thing. She looked at the lie a long while and left it there. The next morning the smith himself came to the door with a pig's trotter wrapped in paper, which was how that household said thank you, and stood on the step turning his cap and would not come in. "She is well," Eudora said. "The boy is small and he will need feeding up, and if he goes blue you send for me at any hour, day or night." "He has the mark." "He has a birthmark." The smith looked down the street toward the water-meadow, where the flood had left a line of weed along the top of the bank like a hem. "My mother had the mark," he said. "It went when she was six. My sister had it and it did not go, and she went out with the ebb in the year of the great frost, and I was eleven years old and I carried her down to the water myself." He put his cap on and straightened it. "I am not telling you that to frighten you. I am telling you because you are the first one in my lifetime to say the word in this street without dropping your voice, and I think you should know what the word costs before you say it twice." He went away down the street. Eudora stood in the doorway with the trotter in her hand and understood that beneath the salt and the book and the ringing of the ninth bell there was a whole village of people who had each carried a child down to the water at some point in their lives and had never once, in all those years, been allowed to say out loud that they had done it. She went back inside and turned the ledger to the year's page and did the sum she had been avoiding. Sixteen births since the last Reading, eight written Kept, eight written into the third column, and now a seventeenth child born on the ebb with a mark on his right foot and breath in his lungs. She closed the book and set it face down on the shelf and did not open it again for six days. Not opening it was a kind of answer, and she knew it, and she left the shelf alone the way you leave alone a door you have decided not to open, and every morning she dusted around it and every evening she told herself she would look tomorrow. ---