第56章 The Reading at Carrowhead

The reading was set for the first Thursday of February, and word of it traveled up and down the coast the way word of weddings once did — by post, by telephone, by the older network that runs underneath both. On the morning itself the sky did its best work: hard blue at the top, a low burnished band out at sea where the light came through, and enough wind to make the flags on the new crane honest without making the readers hoarse. The twelve stones stood in their temporary order along the timber staging beside the half-built wall, each one bedded upright in sand for the day, faces out, like a choir arranged by height. Eleven had come from the old base course, cleaned and numbered in white chalk by Neve's careful hand. The twelfth had come off the Maiden, and it stood last in the row, and people came up to it all morning and touched it and went away again without saying anything much. Saltwick sent a delegation. Moira arrived with four children from the Saltwick school and a tin of sandwiches for eleven people, and behind her, to everyone's astonishment including his own, came Tomas — ninety in March, twice-broken and thinner than his own walking stick, carried down into a car by two grandnephews who then pretended he had arranged the whole journey himself. He walked slowly to the staging with Moira's hand under his elbow, and he looked at the row of stones for a long time, and then he took from his pocket the small rounded stone with its single worn letter — the letter E, older than any of them, which he had kept since Lila's first visit — and he pressed it into Ailsa's hands. "For the reading," he said. "Elspeth held it every morning of her life at our own wall, and I've held it since, and I'm past holding anything as heavy as a name now, my hands are done. But a stone with an E on it will stand an F today, if you ask it kindly. They're near neighbors in the alphabet and they were nearer in life." Ailsa closed her fingers over it. "Who was she?" she asked — though Lila had written to her of Elspeth months before; some questions are asked only so they can be answered aloud. "My sister," Tomas said. "The keeper. She sang to ours the way your Mrs. Sandison read to these, and when she died I thought it had ended, and it hadn't ended, because nothing ends, it just changes hands." He nodded down the row of stones, all twelve faces. "You'll see. By tonight you'll have letters coming from harbors you couldn't find on a map." They read at noon. Wren had sent instructions south and could not come, but her voice was there anyway, in the order of service Lila had copied out: names first, plainly, one reader to a stone; then the dates where dates survived; then the word beneath, all together. Rona Tait, the schoolteacher, led Carrowhead's children, who had spent two weeks learning the tones — the humming beneath language, passed hand to hand from a dead woman's mornings to living throats — and when the last name went out over the water, the hum rose under it like groundswell under a boat, untaught-seeming, ancient-seeming, made new on the spot, which is the only way such things are ever made. Tam Brechin read his grandfather's stones. Callum read the Maiden stone — *Effie*, in front of the entire village, in a voice that started rough and finished steady — and then stepped back and stood with his cap over his heart while Ailsa came forward. She wore the plaid shawl. She held Tomas's small stone in her right hand. She did not need the paper. "Effie Munro," she said. "Euphemia. Nineteen years old, lost January 1913, remembered January of every year since, whether we knew it or not. My grandmother Lettie wrote her name in a prayer book because that was the only paper she was allowed. Then she cut it in granite because paper wasn't big enough. Then she carried it out to the rock because even granite wasn't far enough out to sea." Her voice held; her chin did not quite; nobody minded. "She was never forgotten, friends. She was forbidden. And this morning the prohibition is lifted, and the name stands in daylight with her sisters, and any child in Carrowhead can read it, and none of them will ever be told not to. That's the whole ceremony. That's what took us a hundred years." The silence afterward was the good kind — full, not empty. Then Miss Sorley, off-duty and out of uniform, stepped forward with a document folder and read out, in the flat glad tone of a woman quoting regulations at happiness, the amended specification: all twelve stones to be reset face-out in the new parade wall at eye level, in their present order, on a bedded course of their own; and — she had kept this to the end, and Lila saw her enjoy it — a thirteenth place left in the row, dressed and waiting, for whatever the sea gave back next, "since this village has now demonstrated," said Sorley, "that it intends to keep checking." Afterward, in the mission hall, with sandwiches and strong tea and the electric fire losing its battle cheerfully, Ailsa sat beside Lila and did the thing she had promised: she opened the prayer book to the back, where blank pages wait their whole lives for someone brave, and she wrote, under her grandmother's line, in her own upright hand: *Effie. Remembered aloud at last by her sister's granddaughter, at the harbour of Carrowhead, with the whole village listening. Nothing asked is ever lost.* Then she blotted it, and passed the pencil across — not the pen, the pencil, deliberately — to Rona Tait, and said, "Your ledger starts whenever you're ready, Miss Tait. First page. I've carried mine far enough." It was Moira, watching this from the tea urn, who mentioned the letter. "It came to Saltwick on Tuesday, forwarded from Thornhaven, and it's odder than most, which is saying something." She produced it from her enormous coat — the post on that coast seemed to travel inside coats more than bags — and handed it over. "Woman on an island called Skerr Vean, away north and west. Signe, she signs herself. The lighthouse keeper's widow. She says—" Moira paused, choosing the sentence she still half disbelieved "—she says her people never used stones at all. She says they kept their lost ones *in the boat*." Lila looked up from Ailsa's fresh ink. "In the boat?" "Painted inside the hull, she says. Every soul the island lost, painted below decks where the water couldn't wear it, going out fishing with them year after year. And the boat's been gone forty years." Moira sat down, shaking her head slowly. "Sold south when the motor boats came, she says. Sold to a farmer. She doesn't know if it still exists. She says—" and here Moira's voice went carefully gentle, the way voices do around the largest facts "—she says she has no name of her own to bring. No grief, no missing sister, no gap. She just keeps the light and the records, and she can't bear that the island's whole remembering might be rotting in a shed somewhere without anybody asking after it. She wrote to you because you were the only person she'd heard of whose whole business is asking after things." Lila folded the letter closed along its old creases and put it inside her coat, against her chest, where letters went when they had changed the weather. "Then we know where spring is going," she said.