第53章 What the Wall Held

The fourteenth of January came in hard and clear, with a wind that had walked across an ocean to get there, and the great low water fell at nine minutes past eight in the morning. By half past seven, half of Carrowhead was standing at the top of the harbour steps watching Lila go down the ladder. She felt every one of her years on the rungs, which were iced at the top and slick with weed below, and she felt Neve's presence above her like a hand between her shoulder blades, though Neve never actually touched her. The wall's base, when she reached it, was a shelf of wet rock and old masonry as wide as a table, still dripping, streaked with the amber of dead kelp, and running along it, course after course, the foundation stones — great blocks of local granite, squared and fitted by hands that had had no machines to help them, and on their outer faces, cut shallow and worn shallower, the marks. Letters. She had known there would be letters, and still the sight of them stopped her on the wet shelf with her heart going. Names, cut the way her own village cut them — not ornamentally, not proudly, but the way you write a thing you intend someone to read when everything else about you is gone. She wiped the first stone clean with her sleeve and read it twice to be sure of her own eyes. *MAREN.* No. Not Maren — *MARREN*, a different name entirely, a stranger name, and beside it a date worn to its first two digits, and beneath both, deeper than the name itself, as if the cutter had wanted that word to outlast the rest: *REMEMBER.* "Neve," she called up the ladder, and her voice came out strange in her own ears. "Bring everything down. All of it. We'll need till the water turns." They needed more than that. Miss Sorley, the council's engineer, arrived at ten — a brisk woman of forty-odd in a coat the color of success, with drawings under one arm and, Lila noted with interest, a thermos — expecting to supervise measurements and finding instead a working party. Old Tam Brechin had come down with brushes and a plank; two of his grandsons followed with charcoal and rolls of butcher's paper for tracings; Ailsa stood at the top of the steps because her knees would not take the ladder, directing operations in a voice that carried further than any of them would have guessed. And the tide stood out, and the light came up the color of pewter, and stone after stone gave up its name. Eleven, before the morning was out. Eleven names along the foundation course of a wall everyone in the village walked over weekly without a glance. All women's names. All old — some worn past full reading, some crisp enough to be later additions cut into the joints between blocks, the way a congregation adds pews as it grows. And beneath six of the eleven, always deeper, the same word: *REMEMBER.* "It's the same practice," Neve said, kneeling on the shelf with charcoal on her fingers and her breath smoking, doing the tracings with the concentration of someone performing surgery. "Same as the buried row. Same as our stones. It traveled. Or it started here and traveled south — we can't know which way it went, can we? We only ever find where it's been." Miss Sorley stood at the edge of the shelf longer than she needed to. Then she crouched, and put her gloved hand flat on one of the carved faces, and read the name there twice, and said nothing for a while, which Lila privately filed among the day's small victories. "The schedule doesn't move," Sorley said finally, straightening. "I want to be honest with you from the start. The grant is dated, the contractor is booked, and if this wall isn't finished by spring the money goes back and this village drowns behind a failing wall within ten years. I can't give you the wall." "No," Lila agreed. "You can't." "But." Sorley looked down the row of stones, eleven dark faces in a line, like a jury that had waited a century to sit. "Anything you lift out before the seventeenth is yours to keep. My drawing shows a new toe-beam poured along this level, so anything left in place is entombed — I won't dress it up. If your villagers can lift these safely, document each position, and sign off on the voids, I'll amend the spec to fill behind you rather than over you. That much I can do." She paused. "My grandmother was a MacRitchie off this coast. There are women in my family who went to sea and didn't come back, and nobody ever made anything of it. I'd have liked somebody to make something of it." By noon the whole arrangement existed in a notebook, signed against a rising tide, and Carrowhead discovered it had work. Stones would be lifted with the fishermen's crane-gallows and slings, logged, photographed, and stored in the mission hall until the new wall rose, at which point they would go back in — Sorley amended her drawing that afternoon, in ink, face-out, at eye level along the new parade, where people could read them instead of walking on them. At low water's turning, while the men rigged the first sling, Ailsa came down the ladder after all, slowly, both hands and Tam Brechin's arm, because some things are worth a fall. They brought a kitchen chair down for her and set it on the shelf, absurd and perfect, and she sat in front of the eleventh stone — blank, they had found, unmarked — and then turned to face the ninth, where the cutting was deepest. Lila crouched beside her. "You don't have to do it here. There'll be a proper reading when they're reset." "I know." Ailsa put one glove off and laid her bare hand in the cut letters, fitting her fingers to E, F, F, I, as if to a lock. "But my grandmother wrote it in a book because a book was all she was allowed. And I have kept it in a book for thirty years for the same reason, and I am eighty-one years old, and I am done being allowed." She lifted her face to the wind, to the water, to whatever was listening beyond the wall that day, and she said, clearly, in front of the whole assembled village: "My name is Ailsa Munro. Effie was my grandmother's sister. She was nineteen when the sea took her, and nobody said her name again for a hundred years, and I am saying it now. Effie. You were remembered the whole time. You were remembered even in the silence." The gulls went up off the wall all at once, the way they do, and the tide turned, and Tam Brechin took his cap off, and Neve wrote in the margin of the tracing, in her careful schoolgirl hand, the words Lila would have chosen: *Spoken aloud at last, at the place where the sea keeps her.* It was Tam, folding his cap in his fists afterward, who frowned suddenly and counted the stones twice, and said, "There should be another." "Another?" Lila said. "A twelfth. My grandfather fished this wall his whole life, and his daybook's still in the family, and he had a saying about the base course — twelve women holding up the harbor, he called it, though none of us knew what he meant." Tam looked along the row, eleven stones, one gap of plain wall where no stone sat. "And there's a place there, see, where the coursing changes. Where a stone's been taken *out* — properly out, with the joint re-dressed after. Somebody removed one, long since. And I mind my grandfather's word for where it went, though I never thought about it again in sixty years." He looked out at the gray water beyond the wall, northward, where a black low shape broke the swell half a mile offshore. "He said the twelfth is on the Maiden."