第14章 The Net

Karin went out to the seal-rocks on the twenty-first night, in the boat, alone, and the reason she went was the one she gave out loud and the one she did not. The one she gave out loud was that she is the meteorologist and the cord is a thing you can read. "You can do that?" Torsten said. He was at the table with the generator manual open in front of him and had been at the table with the manual open for a week. "You can do it with a hand on it and a barometer," Karin said. "Anybody who spent ten winters on a coast can do it. That is not the reason." She put her coat on over the sweater and stopped doing it up. "The reason is that I have been on this rock three winters and I have never been out there. Three winters. Ingrid was the one who went and she died and then Odd went and nobody thought of asking the meteorologist whether she had ever seen the thing the whole station is named for." The sea was four of a following swell and running. That is not a sea you take a boat out in to look at a rock. Odd went with her as far as the jetty and stood there in the wind with the painter round his wrist and did not say one word against it, and when she was forty yards off he called out the only instruction he has ever given anybody on this station. "Keep the rock on your right hand all the way in. When it comes across to the middle you are too far." She kept it on her right hand. She was gone an hour and ten minutes and she came back on the last of the flood with the small boat full to the gunwales and her hands white to the second joint. Then she stood in the doorway of the wire room with the water running off her onto the boards and said, "It is not a line." "You have been out for an hour in that sea," I said. "Listen." She was not performing. She had not had anything out of the way of eating or warming or sitting down. "I have been putting my hand on cord on that rock for an hour and there is a woman in me who has been doing it since she was seven years old, and I want you to understand that I am not exaggerating and that I am not being poetic. There is no one in this station who can do what I did tonight except Odd and Ingrid, and Ingrid is dead." She put her wet hands flat on the wire-room table and left them there. "It is a net. It is not a cord. A cord is a line. What is on those rocks is six lines, laid in a shape, and the shape is the shape of the strait — you can feel it under your hand the way you can feel the turn of a tide by watching a float. It is a net for the sound. The gale comes up the strait and it hits the net and the net holds it, the way a rim holds water, and a man with his hand on the cord can tell what is coming for an hour before it arrives." "Odds has said some of that." "Odd has said all of that to me twice and he said it the way you say a thing about the weather. It took me an hour on that rock to find out that it is not weather." She looked at the shelf. "The net has six cords. One for each of the six. That is not a metaphor and Ingrid did not invent it — the braiding is three strands and it is a working method, and you cannot work a six-cord net by yourself because you cannot hold six ends and work three strands at once. It takes two. But the count is six, and it is six because there have been six of us at this station since 1948, and the people who came before us were six, and they laid six." "Six at a time, and one for each of the six," said Halvard from the chair, without turning round. "Yes." "Then on the seventh night," said Odd, from the doorway. I did not know he was in the room. He had come in from the boat shed with his hands wet and had been standing behind the door for some time, and he had not made a sound in a station where a chair caster squeaks. "On the seventh night the net is whole," he said. "That is what the seventh night is. It is not a night that anything happens. It is the night the net is finished, and it is finished because it takes seven nights to lay a six-cord net with a gale coming up, and on the sixth night the last cord goes on, and on the seventh night you go out and you take the whole of it off the rocks and you coil it and you bring it in, because after the seventh night the seals come up and the cord has to be clear of them." Nobody said anything. "That is the whole of the seventh night," Odd said. "It is the night we bring it in. And I have not been able to tell anybody why that matters for a month and I have been trying, and this morning I have not been able to tell anybody, and now I am telling a station-master at a table." "Odd," said Karin. "Why does it matter?" "Because I have been laying one cord a night since the ninth," he said, "and I have been laying it wrong." "In what way wrong," said Halvard. He had turned the chair round. "The count." Odd came and put his hands on the table, and they were still wet, and he put a wet hand on the dry wood and did not notice. "One cord a night, on the ebb, from the north end working south. Six nights and the net is whole and I bring it in on the seventh. And I have been bringing it in on the seventh, for three years, and it is the wrong night." "How do you know it is the wrong night." "Because I laid it with Ingrid and we laid it from the south end working north, and the first night is always the south end, because the south end is where the first gale comes up the strait and you want the first cord where the wind finds it." He wiped his hands on his coat and made it worse. "Six of us, six cords, and the seventh is the night you take it off. And I have been going out on the seventh night in the dark in a sea and taking a net off a rock that was never finished, and I have never once thought about that until a woman stood on the rock tonight and told me the shape of it." "What are you going to do," said Torsten. "Start again on the fifth," said Odd. "Six nights from the fifth is the tenth of December. And the tenth is the seventh night, counting the third, when the first of the six rang and I did not know yet what any of it was." Nobody in the wire room had done the arithmetic out loud before, and Torsten did it now, and I watched him do it. "The third of December," he said. "The third is the third. The tenth is the seventh. Erik, that is six nights. That is exactly six nights." "Then somebody has to lay the first one on the fifth," I said, "and there is no gale forecast before Thursday and a half of this building, and that is a short notice, and Odd is the only one of us who can do it." "And you know what is on the fourth, and the sixth, and the eighth," Karin said. "Yes." "Well," said Sven, from the doorway, where he had been standing for some time with a cloth in his hand. "Then somebody had better tell that generator-man to bring the boat round to the north jetty on Wednesday, because I am not having this station with a hole in it on the fourth of December."