Chương 46: Winter Water

The sleet arrived before the light did. Abe came down the Row at half past five, half an hour before he needed to be anywhere. He had decided something at four in the morning and did not want to talk himself out of it on the way down. He went past the turn for the shed and out onto the apron, the wide stone shelf where the bottom of the Row meets the water. There was one lamp on the wall and nobody under it.

In November, in a stopped street, rain had hung in the air and let him walk right through it and never fallen. In October, at the bottom of the drain, he had stopped three inches short of the black water, certain that putting a hand in it would give the whole world back at once. Both of those could not be true. He had never found out whether water ended a still, because he did not want the answer to be yes. He got quiet. It took a while in the cold, and then the sleet stopped where it was.

All of it, from the stone to well over his head. Falling ice packed the air above the apron, every piece of it hanging in the lamplight with nothing holding it. Abe walked to the edge of the stone and looked down. The water was flat like a floor. The wind had stopped in the middle of dragging on it, and the little standing waves were all still there and not one of them was going anywhere. He put the toe of his boot in. Nothing happened.

He stood with his foot in stopped water and the world stayed exactly where it was, and his heart started going very hard. Then he kicked it. He kicked the water as hard as a boy kicks anything. A sheet of it came up off the apron, went out over the basin, and stopped in the air. It hung there. All of it. A curved wall of black water and white spray, four feet high in front of him, lit down one side by the lamp. Every single drop of it exactly where his boot had put it. Abe stood in front of that for a long time.

Then he laughed out loud, on his own, in the dark, at the bottom of a road where thirty people were asleep. He put his hand into the hanging wall. The drops came apart around his fingers and shut behind them and stayed shut. So he walked into it. The spray opened and let him through and held its shape. He waded off the apron and down the shelf, and the water came up his legs and his hips and his chest. It opened in front of him at every step. It closed at his back. Nowhere in any of it did it push.

The cold was appalling and he did not care about it in the slightest. Chest deep, twenty feet out from the stone, Abe turned around and looked back at where he had come from. There was a hole in the basin in the shape of a boy walking. The water stood open behind him the whole way to the apron, a trench with black walls in it, and it was not falling in. He kept going down the shelf until the water closed over his head. Underneath, the whole basin was glass. There was no sound down there at all.

He could look up through the water and see the underside of the sleet sitting on the ceiling of it. He tried to come up the way you come up, and nothing came of it. There was nothing to push against and no up to go to. So he put his feet on the bottom and walked up the shelf instead, until his head came out into the air. He came up because his chest told him to, and he was too happy to notice that it had. He climbed out onto the stone soaked to the neck in a stopped world.

In October he had come three inches from finding this out, and then he had taken his hand back and gone and fought something instead. Then he thought about what else in the world is under water. Four hundred and twenty streets on the old coast, with their doors shut, and nobody down any of them since long before he was born. Abe sat down on the wet stone without meaning to, and worked it out sitting there.

Miles of it he can walk into, with nobody in any of it, and two million marks written on a wall in his kitchen. And no boat until March, no map of the bottom, and no idea which of those streets has one thing worth carrying up. So the answer was no, for dull reasons, and he was angrier about that than about anything in weeks. Then he let the world in. The sleet moved. The wall of spray came down all at once and hit the apron like a tipped bucket.

The trench fell in on itself and the basin closed over it and went back to being water with a wind on it. The cold arrived properly and took him by the whole body at once. He wrung his coat out over the stone and put it back on wet, and went up the apron to the shed grinning like an idiot in the dark. He came down onto the boards at ten to six with his collar up, wet through underneath it and saying nothing about that to anybody.

The muster shed sat at the end of them with every window lit, the same as his first morning, and nothing else about the morning was the same. The water past the lamp was a black nothing with a wind lying flat on it. Sefton caught up with him at the bottom of the road, hands in his armpits, hood soaked through already.

"My uncle's knee called this on Wednesday," he said.

"Sleet by the weekend. He's been wrong about everything since August, and now this. He's going to be unbearable through Christmas."

"What does the knee say about January?"

"The knee doesn't do January. It's a short-range knee." This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Inside the shed, Fenn had the slate down and was chalking the day onto it. Six names. Under the names he wrote MUSTER 4 JAN and boxed it in twice.

"Board reads the day after that," said Sefton, blowing on his hands.

"It does," said Fenn, and went on chalking. Nobody said anything else about the board, but Abe felt the not-saying go around the stove like a draft. The shed had stopped asking him his numbers weeks ago. They moved the tea mugs so he could reach the hooks, and watched him lift things, and did their sums in private. Dobbs had the tide sheet. He read it once, folded it into his coat, and then his eyes went down the shed, one flick, head by head.

"Six," he said.

"Boards today, at the outfall. Off the water at ten. The sheet gives us nothing after ten, and I mean nothing. The tide turns through that basin like a key." Purnell came in last with two thermoses and the day's first conversation already running, something about her sister's dog and a pan she had taken back to a shop and won. Cottle stood by the stove, drank his tea, and was wide, and said nothing. Somewhere in Prescot there was a form that said Abe owned weather boots now.

The crack in his old left boot had let the whole basin in twenty minutes ago. The outfall below Salt Row let the drain water out through a stone mouth in the apron. Every winter the mouth got six boards before the January weather, and that was how the Row kept the sea out of its cellars. It had worked for eighty years, so nobody ever thought about it. The boards were oak, off racks under the apron, older than anybody standing there.

Each one went down the stone slots and seated on the one before it, and the stack held the winter out until spring. In November it had taken Cottle and Purnell together to walk one board anywhere. Abe got the first one up onto his shoulder and walked it to the mouth alone, and the apron went quiet behind him.

"Right," said Purnell, to Cottle.

"Well." Cottle came and took the other end anyway, because the slot work was two-handed whatever the carrying was, and they fed the first board down its grooves together while Fenn kept the light on it. The work was simple and heavy and cold. Fewer things and worse weather, Purnell had told him at the shed, and the morning set about proving her right. No diving, no lines, no punt. Oak, stone, water that wanted his legs, and sleet that came in sideways whenever the wind remembered it.

Abe stood on the channel ledge thigh-deep and steadied each board while it went down. The water pushed on his legs like a crowd trying to get past. Page thirty-one of his father's book had a diagram for this, a man at an angle, leaning on the sea. Abe set his feet the diagram's way, and the water pushed, and his feet held.

Sefton did the wading back and forth that nobody else wanted, carrying pins and wedges from the racks, and came out of the water at every trip walking like a man remembering his legs one at a time. Fenn kept the count of boards on his slate even out here, a stroke for each one seated. The first board seated at seven, in the dark. The second went down at half past, easier, and the third fought them and then gave up, and by then there was a gray line out over the basin that was technically the day arriving.

By half past eight the wind had come around, and the sleet came with it, off the water instead of off the land. The day got serious. Purnell talked the entire time. The fridge boat had a name now, apparently, and there was a war on between two paint colors, and the dog from the earlier story made a second appearance and disgraced itself. None of it needed an answer. It was better than the sleet, and everybody let it run. At nine her tin came out, food wrapped in paper, packed the night before.

She gave Abe half of something with cold bacon in it and stood over him while he ate it.

"You burn it just standing out here," she said.

"Eat." Dobbs moved along the line of the work all morning and said almost nothing. Every so often his eyes went down the apron and the ledge, one flick, head by head, and then he went back to whatever his hands were doing. Other men checked their watches that often. By half past nine there were five boards seated in a mouth that wanted six, the light over the basin had gone a color Abe had no name for, and the water on the ledge had crept toward his waist without ever seeming to move.

The last board went down its slot and stopped. It stood a hand's width above the water, crooked, the top corner leaning out of true. Something at the bottom of the slot had frozen in the night, and the board was standing on it. They tried weight first, because weight was free. Abe put his shoulder on the top edge and pressed until his boots slid on the stone, and the board did not move a hair.

"Leave it," Dobbs said.

"Sheet says off at ten. It's ten to."

"First blow in January picks a crooked board out of a slot like a tooth." Purnell wasn't laughing, and she hadn't looked away from the board.

"Then that mouth stands open until March, because there's no boat until March, and the Row can pump its own cellars out, can it. Forty houses, Dobbs. My mother's is the fourth one up."

"Sheet says ten."

"It wants ten minutes. Bar on the lip, weight on the board, and it's seated until April." She turned around at last.

"Ten minutes, Dobbs. I'll take the wet end myself if that's what buys it." Dobbs looked at the water, then at the sky over the basin. Then his eyes went down the line of them again, head by head. Nobody said anything while he did it, because everybody could see both halves of the choice, and nobody wanted either half said to them.

"Ten minutes," he said.

"Seated or not, then we're off it. Sefton, second bar, run." Nobody had asked Abe anything. Both of them had glanced at him once while they argued, though, because whichever way the argument went, the ten minutes was going to be his arms. Sefton went up the apron at a run and came back with the second bar and his hood blown flat against his head. The wind had found another gear while he was gone. Out past the mouth the basin had begun to move, a long slow pull along the stones, right on the tide sheet's word.

Fenn came down onto the ledge and set the first bar's point on the slot lip, where the frozen grit was, and leaned his weight on to test it. Cottle set the second bar low on the board's face and got wide over it. Abe put his chest against the board and his hands where Cottle showed him, on the high corner, the corner still standing up, where the swing would miss him if the base let go clean, and took the weight.

"On three," said Fenn.

"One. Two." The bar bit. Under it, the stone lip that had been freezing and thawing since October gave way all at once, on the side nobody expected, and three things happened in the same breath. The board dropped its hand's width and slammed straight in its slots, like a door coming home. The bar went into the water. And the top edge, whipping upright out of its lean, came through the place where Abe was standing.

"Seated!" said Sefton. Nobody else was looking at the board. The oak missed Abe's head and took him off the ledge instead, and the water went from his waist to over his shoulders between one breath and the next. Dobbs was already coming down the apron, fast and flat, before anybody had shouted anything. The cold came in over the top of his waders and took the breath he was in the middle of. The water he had walked into that morning had been cold and had let him do it anyway.

This reached in through his coat and closed a hand around his chest, and the hand meant it. His boots went down looking for the ledge and found the step below it instead, and the step was smooth as a plate and would not hold a boot. The tide had hold of his waders now, one long steady pull. The waders were filling, slowly, and the pull and the new weight wanted him the same direction. He got one hand onto the top of the seated board, and the other went after it and landed.

The sleet sat on the water around his face without melting. His breath came back off the oak in fast little clouds, and he counted the fingers he could still feel, and did not like the number. Purnell was flat on the apron with her arm down before he heard anybody move. Her hand stopped a foot short of his, and her face was very calm, and her voice wasn't.

"Out," said Cottle from the ledge, flatly. It was the loudest thing Abe had ever heard him say. Then, to Abe, patting his own chest once: "Straps. Off your shoulders." Abe got his left thumb under the wader strap and told his fingers to work the buckle. They did about half of it and stopped taking instructions. The buckle was simple, and he knew exactly how it worked, and watching his own hand not do it frightened him worse than the water had managed yet. He reached for the quiet anyway, once, out of pure habit.

There was nothing there to reach. Abe had more time than everybody on that apron put together, and not one minute of it worked with five people shouting his name into the sleet, and no still had ever held with fear inside it, and the fear was all the way in now, sitting where the cold's hand sat. Under the shouting, from a kitchen in November, June's second finger came up. If Dobbs says get out of the water, you get out. Not in a minute. Out. Nobody could have said out in time.

He would have to tell her that part too. His fingers were going without asking him. Not hurting. Leaving. The right hand first, from the outside in, like a house going dark one window at a time. Fenn ran the pole down the apron. Dobbs took it off him without a word, went past Purnell, and lay down full length on the stones with the pole out over the water, sleet on his back. Cottle sat down on Dobbs's ankles without being told to, all of his width at once, and the stones held both of them.

"Five of us up," said Dobbs, flat as the shed count.

"One down. Abe. Right hand only. Leave the left where it is." Abe told his right hand to let go of the board and close on the pole. Then he waited, in the loud cold, to find out whether it would.