第57章 The Boat from the Islands

Spring came late to the north and then all at once, the way it does there — three weeks of iron, then a single week in which every cliff turned green out of spite. Lila and Neve traveled at the end of April: mailboat west and then north-west, six hours in a following swell, Skerr Vean rising out of the sea haze at midday like the back of a sleeping animal, one white tower on its neck. Signe met them at the slip. She was seventy or nearly, tall and weathered straight as her own lighthouse, with a man's oilskin jacket and a ring of keys that sang when she walked. She shook hands like a person concluding a transaction she had waited years to close. "You came," she said. "I half wrote you off as a rumor. A keeper who answers letters." She glanced at the oilcloth bundle on Neve's back without pretending not to. "And you brought the book." "We brought ourselves," Lila said, and heard Neve smother a smile, because Neve had heard her say it before, on another doorstep, in another January. The island was small enough to walk around by evening and old enough to have worn its walking thin. Forty-one people lived on Skerr Vean now; Signe could name them, and did, in passing, the way other people recite shopping. The light itself had gone automatic decades ago — a sensor and a lamp and a maintenance visit twice a year — but Signe still climbed the tower every dusk, she admitted, "to switch on nothing," because the habit had been her husband's and then hers and habits were how widows kept house for the dead. She said it lightly. She meant every word of it. Lila recognized the tone; it was the tone of an entire coast. They talked boats that first night at her kitchen table, under the photograph of a craft that looked less like a boat than like a wooden thought about a boat — low, double-ended, clinker-built, made for rowing into weather that would sink anything with an engine. *Friendship*, painted along her bow in gold leaf long since dulled. Six oars, a lug sail, ninety years of herring behind her. "Every island family lost somebody to that water, in the days before radio and lifeboats, and after them too, truth be told," Signe said. "And burials were no use here — the ground's two feet over rock, and half the lost were never found to bury. So the custom grew up, nobody knows when, that when a name needed keeping, it went inside the hull. Painted, with the date, below decks on the strakes. My grandmother's brother is in there, lost 1922. A whole crew of 1888 is in there, seven names in a arc around the mast step. The last entry is 1961." She turned her cup once, precisely, a full circle. "The last entry is my father's cousin. And then the motor boats came, and Friendship was sold — she went south to a farmer in Fenwick who wanted her as a feature in his garden, God help us all — and the painting stopped, because you can't pour your grief into somebody else's garden ornament." "And the farmer?" Neve asked. "Died in 1994. The boat passed to his son, who has a farm and a barn and no feeling about boats whatsoever, near as anyone knows. I wrote him once, twenty years ago. He never answered, and I let it go, because I had no right that I could name. You can't write to a stranger and say *my island's dead are in your shed.* It sounds like madness. It took your letters to teach me that it sounds like Tuesday instead." Fenwick was a day south by ferry and bus. They went down the next morning, Signe closing up her tower with ceremony ("the nothing won't miss me for one night"), and found the farm by asking at a crossroads garage where a woman drew them a map on the back of a lottery slip. The son, Aldous, was sixty and suspicious until the word Skerr Vean landed, and then something old moved in his face. "The boat." He put down the feed bucket he was carrying. "You've come about the boat. I wondered if any of you ever would." He walked them across the yard to a stone barn, unhasped the door, and stood back. "My father bought her off a beach for five pounds and called her a folly. I've mowed round her forty years. Go in. I'll not come. I've no feeling about boats, but I'm not sure my feelings are the point anymore, do you see." The barn smelled of hay and creosote and time. Under a tarpaulin stiff with dust lay the hull, upside-down on trestles exactly as some long-dead practicality had left her, and when Lila and Neve dragged the cover away, the afternoon light through the door-slats fell inside the shell of her, and the names came up out of the gloom all at once, the way faces come up out of photographs. Rows of them. Dozens. White and cream and faded gold oil-paint on the pale strakes, climbing from the garboard toward the gunwale like tidelines, each name with its date beside it, each date with its sea. The hand changed every few entries — generation after generation of islanders taking up the brush where the last one set it down — and here and there a name had been refreshed, recoated by a later brush, kept legible on purpose, kept *going*, the way lamps are trimmed and walls are mended. Neve made a sound that was not quite words and began, wordlessly, to unpack the tracing paper. "It's a ledger," she said finally, hoarse. "It's a ledger shaped like a boat. It *goes to sea*. Whoever fished out of her carried them — all of them, every year, right over the water. We read the names *at* the sea. This boat *took them out into it.*" They worked two days. Signe came down from the north with four island elders, and the second afternoon became, without anyone planning it, a homecoming: elders standing in the barn touching paint, finding grandmothers' brothers, reading dates aloud in island voices while Aldous stood in the doorway with his arms folded, watching strangers weep over his folly, his face doing arithmetic it had clearly avoided for forty years. On the third morning he brought out tea in mis-matched mugs and said, to the straw roof, "She'll want to go home, I expect," in the voice of a man conceding an argument he'd been having alone since 1994, and Signe answered him gently that yes, she would, and that the island would build her a proper shed at the harbor, glass-fronted, so that the names could be visited in any weather, "because visiting is the half of remembering nobody warns you about." It was on the second day, copying the oldest strake in the failing light with a hand-lamp propped on a sawhorse, that Lila stopped writing. Halfway down a run of 1900s names, bracketed by islanders lost to their own water, was an entry in a smaller, more careful hand — an outsider's hand, a stranger's brush — and it read: *GRACE MORROW. Lost from the south, winter 1921. Given by the sea to Skerr Vean, March the same. Kept above the beach till claimed. Never claimed.* Below it, in the same hand, almost as an apology: *We did not know her name to sing. Someone told us after. We keep it for her people, wheresoever they may be.* Lila sat back on her heels in the straw with the copied page trembling slightly in her hand, because Grace Morrow was not a stranger to her. Grace Morrow lived in the Thornhaven ledger, on the page Clara Maren had opened eighty years of askings ago — a single name between a drowned fisherman and the year's blank space, one line, no story, no ending, no grave. Half a record on each side of the water. And the other half had been lying in a barn in Fenwick, going out to sea every summer for a hundred years, waiting to be read.