第76章 The Asking at Tarskay

Sunday evening came down mild and windless, with the sea flat as slate poured to the edges of the world, and the township gathered on the strand below the township in numbers that included, Mrs. Enright noted with satisfaction, both the elder of the little kirk and the schoolteacher ferried out from the Monachs for the occasion, seated amicably together on one bench as if history were a wedding and they had agreed to walk out. They had agreed beforehand how it would be kept, because Iris had done the counting and the counting forbade grandeur. Seven packets; hundreds of names; hours of reading if they gave every syllable its voice, and the tide and the old folks would not sit for hours. So the form was trimmed the way the practice had always trimmed itself, down to what could be carried: each packet would be named — station, region, count — and from each, one name spoken entire, chosen by lot from among those marked *lost* with no return stroke after them, so that the unfound should speak for the unfound. Seven names, then, whole and slow. And then the line that had closed askings on this shore within living memory of Signe's own voice, and which Katrin taught them that afternoon in Ewen's kitchen, syllable by syllable, like handing round something fragile: *and all their company, kept.* The tide was at the ebb. Lila stood at the edge of the wet sand where the last of the water slid back down the shingle in long glassy sheets, and the crowd stood behind her in a crescent, hats off, children held or hushed, and she began. The names themselves were strange music — the old coast names, Gaelic-bent, worn smooth by centuries of mouths — and she gave each one the full length of a wave coming in, so that the sea itself seemed to take them up and carry them the final distance. Packet by packet, station by station: a roll from a fishing village south of Achmore whose stones had gone to a field wall; a roll from an island east of Skerr Vean; a roll whose home-place Iris could place only as *somewhere on the drowned road*, and whose single drawn name, a boy of eleven listed between two grown men with no surname anyone recognized, made Donald, at the crescent's edge, turn his face entirely away toward the water for a while. Then Katrin stepped forward, and the shape of the evening changed, because everyone had known it would and everyone had privately braced. "My grandmother," she said. Her voice was level and carried further than level voices usually trouble to. "Signe MacArthur of this island, keeper of the outer keeping, dead in February and buried in our ground yonder, and never once asked-for at the water, because we didn't know the asking was ours to do." She looked at the sea, and the sea looked back with its whole gray attention. "You took her house two springs past, and her in the end this winter, and you have given nothing back that we could hold. So I am asking who her person was. She spent her life being everybody's. Who was hers?" And then, before the silence could set, she did the thing her grandmother had done at the end, and the island had heard once and never forgotten: she hummed. The tones rose off the wet sand, unhurried, climbing, and one by one — Mrs. Enright first, then Ewen, then Ruaridh in his chest, then the children in a bright thread under the adults, then Iris and Neve and, finding her own place in it, Lila — the crescent behind her took the sound up, and the name went out over the slack water on the combined breath of an entire community, and the answering came. Not words. Never words. The swell laid itself along the shore in a rhythm that had not been there five minutes before, long and deliberate, wave and draw, wave and draw, like breathing that had noticed the room; and in the third interval of it a wave came farther than all the rest and laid a ribbon of foam in a clean unbroken arc at the feet of the crescent, and old Mrs. Enright said, comfortably, into the hush, "There. She's pleased. She always liked arriving." Afterward, on the walk up the brae in the long light, Neve fell into step beside Lila with her notebook open against her forearm, writing as she walked, because the answering had to go into the record while it was still wet. "How do I write what happened," she said, "when what happened was weather?" She had copied Kilvane's doorstep stroke by stroke and the drowned row buoy by buoy; this was the first entry in her careful hand that refused the careful alphabet. In the end she wrote what Iris told her to write — *the sea attended* — dated it, and ruled a line under it, which is all any archive has ever managed when the thing itself was still going on. The elder of the kirk fell into step on Lila's other side, and for a minute or two they walked in the companionable silence of two professions that have spent four centuries pretending to be different trades. "I read over that door a psalm tomorrow," he said at last, "and I'll not pretend it's for the door's sake. It's for mine." He tucked his stick under his arm like a gun after a day's shooting. "Four hundred years ago my trade burned names out of walls on the coast south of here. I've read the session records, keeper. I know what we did." He looked up at the hill, black against the west. "A man minds his predecessors' debts. Tomorrow I pay a wee bit of interest." At the top of the brae the township split to its separate doors, and Lila stood a moment alone in the lane. Below her the sea had gone back to its own accounts. Above her the fire hill held its green shoulder over the dark, over the cold room, over whatever had waited out the storms and the silence and the forgetting in air that smelled of nothing. Monday morning, the door. She found that her hands, hanging at her sides, had curled slightly, both of them, into the shape of holding something the size of a key.