The Counting

The boat left her at the wrong dock. She understood this only after the engine had faded into the fog and there was no one to tell. The wood beneath her boots was soft with rot. A black dog watched her from a piling, then turned and walked away as if dismissing the matter.

She had pictured arrival differently. She had pictured, at minimum, a sign. The letter from the solicitor had given the village's name in a careful, English hand “Salthouse-on-Marrow” but the only writing she could find on the dock was a chalk mark in a script she didn't recognize, the letters crooked and bunched like teeth.

She walked. Her case dragged a single stripe through the wet dust of the path. The fog was the color of damp wool, and through it she could see the houses, low and white, their walls patched with lichen, their doors shut. Above each door was nailed a small wooden plaque painted with a number. Not house numbers, she saw as she passed: the numbers ran 12, 4, 19, 7, in no order at all. She tried to imagine what they meant and could not.

A woman was sweeping the threshold of one house with a bundle of twigs. She wore a long grey apron and a kerchief that hid her hair entirely. When she saw the visitor she stopped sweeping and stood very still, both hands wrapped around the bundle, and looked at her not with curiosity but with the careful blankness of a person watching the weather.

"I'm looking for the cottage of - " she began, and then she said her aunt's name. The name sounded thin in the fog, like something she had borrowed.

The woman nodded slowly. She set the broom against the door and pointed up the path. Then she touched her own forehead with two fingers, then her sternum, then she went inside her house and shut the door.

She waited a moment in case the woman came back. The woman did not come back.

Up the path she went, more slowly now, trying to remember the gesture so she could repeat it later if she needed to. Forehead, sternum. Or had it been the other way around. She had read, in a guidebook on the boat, that this part of the coast was famous for its fishermen, its salt, and its insularity. The book had described the people as shy but courteous. She had taken that to mean they would smile.

The cottage was at the top of the village, where the path gave up and became turf. Her aunt had lived here for forty-one years. She herself had visited once, when she was seven, and remembered nothing except a bowl of cold milk on a windowsill and the sound of seabirds arguing in the chimney. The bowl was still there when she let herself in, dry and fly-spotted on the sill where her aunt must have left it. The fire was cold. The bed was made.

She slept poorly. In the night she heard, through the thin walls, what she at first took to be a child crying and at last identified as the wind in some kind of metal drum set up near the path. In the morning she went out to look at it. It was an iron pail, half full of small stones, bound to a fence-post with rope. She had no idea why. She made a note to ask someone, then immediately realized she had no idea who.

The shop, when she found it, was three streets away and had no sign. She knew it was the shop because the door stood open and there were sacks of flour visible inside. The shopkeeper was a thin, bearded man wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. When she came in he was talking to two women in kerchiefs. All three stopped at once, exactly as if she had thrown a switch to their voiceboxes.

"Good morning," she said.

The shopkeeper inclined his head. The women drifted toward the door. As they passed her, the older one touched her sleeve - not in greeting, but the way one might touch a wet wall to see if the paint had dried. Then they were gone.

She bought bread, butter, and a tin of fish. The shopkeeper named the price in a coastal English so thick with consonants she had to ask twice. He repeated it patiently, without irritation, the way one repeats things to a child or a foreigner, and she had not yet decided which she resented being more.

When she paid, she said, "I'm staying at -" and then her aunt's name again. She had thought it would help. The shopkeeper's expression did something complicated and brief. He took her coins, put them in a wooden box rather than a till, and said, "She kept good accounts."

"Thank you," she said, because she did not know what else to say.

He looked at her then for what felt like a long moment. "There's a counting on the seventh day," he said. "If you mean to stay."

She did not understand this and did not say so. She nodded as if she had. He nodded back. She took her bread and went out.

That afternoon she walked the headland. The fog had lifted enough that she could see the gulls fighting over something in the rocks below. She tried to think of her aunt, whom she had loved in the abstract and barely known in fact. The cottage held very little of her, just a few books in a language she recognized as a dialect of one she had studied at university, a chest of folded linens, a row of shells lined along the mantel in a strict descending order of size.

When she came back to the village a man was nailing something to her aunt's door. He was old, small-boned, his hands the color of old leather. The thing he was nailing was a wooden plaque painted with the number 6.

"Excuse me," she said.

He turned. His eyes were the very pale blue of people who have looked at the sea for a long time. He bowed his head a little, finished his work, and held out the hammer to her with both hands as if it were a gift.

She did not know what to do. She took it. He nodded, satisfied, and walked away whistling under his breath.

She stood on the path holding a hammer and looked at the 6. It was not a house number. The cottage next to her aunt's bore an 11. The cottage opposite, a 2.

She put the hammer carefully on the step. In the morning it was gone, and she had not heard anyone take it.

For four days she walked, and ate her tin of fish, and tried to read the books her aunt had left, and got nowhere. The villagers continued to greet her with the same blank courtesy as before, though she began to notice small kindnesses, things like a basket of eggs left at her door without explanation, a covered crock of something slow and salty placed on her step. She tried, once, to thank the woman she had seen sweeping on the first day, calling out across the path as the woman drew water from a pump. The woman raised her hand in acknowledgement and then immediately turned her face away, not in offence but in a kind of formal modesty, as though to look longer would be to take something not freely offered.

On the fifth day, she walked out to the headland and sat on a stone and tried to make a list of what she did not understand. The list was long and she felt foolish writing it. The numbers above the doors. The pail of stones. The hammer. The food. The gesture = forehead, sternum - which she had now seen four people make, always at her, and which she had begun, hesitantly, to return, in case it was a greeting; and which they had each acknowledged with the same small, pained nod, as though she had said something almost right but not quite.

On the seventh day she remembered the shopkeeper's words. Counting. She decided she would go down to the shop in the evening and ask. If she was meant to attend a thing she should know what the thing was.

She did not have to go. In the late afternoon a girl of perhaps twelve appeared at her door. She wore the same kerchief as the women, undersized for her, and held in both hands a small leather-bound book.

"You're meant to come," the girl said, in a much clearer accent than her elders. "Bring the plaque."

"The -" She gestured at the door behind her, at the painted 6.

The girl nodded.

She unhooked the plaque from its nail. It came off easily, as though it had been waiting. She followed the girl down through the village, holding it in front of her like a tray.

The counting took place in a low stone hall behind the church, which she had not known was a church. Inside, perhaps thirty villagers stood in a wide circle. Each held a wooden plaque painted with a number. The numbers were not in order. A man held a 19; a woman beside him held a 4; the old man with the pale eyes held a 1, very small, the paint nearly worn to wood.

She understood, at last, that the numbers were not addresses but counts. Years, perhaps. Or losses. Or something else entirely she could not name. Her aunt had held a 6, before her aunt was a 6.

The shopkeeper saw her come in. He inclined his head, very slight. He did not smile. No one smiled. They were not unfriendly. They were doing a thing, and she had been allowed to do it with them, and she did not know what the thing was.

A bell rang once. The villagers, in turn, said a word she did not catch and laid their plaques face down on the long table at the centre of the room. Each, after laying the plaque, touched their forehead and then their sternum. Then they stepped back into the circle.

When her turn came, she walked to the table. She laid the 6 face down. She thought of her aunt, whom she had not really known, and of the bowl on the windowsill, and of the shells lined along the mantel in their descending order, and she touched her forehead and then, after the smallest hesitation, her sternum.

A breath went around the circle. Not approval, exactly. Recognition. She had said something almost right.

She stepped back. The bell rang again. The counting went on without her.

Afterwards, walking home, she understood that she had been given something and had given something back, and that this was the closest she would come, and that it would have to be enough. The fog had returned. Above her aunt's door the nail held nothing now. She did not know what tomorrow's number would be, or whose, or whether she would still be there to see it nailed up. She thought, as she put her hand on the latch, that she had perhaps stopped trying to read them, and that this might be the only thing they had been waiting for.