Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Cantor's Shoal ·
Eat Something Before the Tide Turns
At dawn on the Cantor's Shoal jetty a mussel-picker meets a man who comes back out of the tide every day, and who remembers only this one.
Low water at Cantor's Shoal is a careful business even in a flat easterly, and the dawn after the third night of the gale was low water like none Isolde Kernow had raked before. The mussel beds stood up out of the fog in black rows. Somewhere behind her the town bells were keeping the half counts. She had a bucket, a rake, and a folded sack of bread, and none of the three prepared her for the ring of salt.
She saw it from the end of the stone jetty. A shape seared into the flat weed, the size and posture of a seated man, the way a child prints a figure in snow. Salt, coarse and fine at once, glassy at the outer edge. It had not been there at the topping of the flood, she was near certain.
As she watched, the ring began to fill from the middle the way wet sand does not.
She will not make it more dramatic than it was. A man assembled out of a low tide, unhurriedly, in the order joints come: spine, then breath, then hands last. His skin at the shoulders was white and crystalline for a minute, then flushed to the colour a man's neck goes in a north wind. Thin. Thinner than she feels a man can get by waiting. He sat on the salt ring for a moment and did some private arithmetic, and then stood up, and his coat stood up with him, and his coat was the thing Isolde will tell her grandchildren about, if she ever decides which grandchildren to tell.
Paper. Pinned everywhere, rows and rows of notes in every sort of hand, some neat, some daubed, some writing over writing. Notes squared off, notes on the backs of till receipts. The oldest ones furred with salt-sweat and tucked under newer ones, years of them, kept the way a family keeps aught else.
"Morning," the man said. Kind, unhurried, the voice of a host rather than a guest. "You'll be a stranger."
Isolde had worked the Shoal for eleven years. Her family had worked it since before the wall was wall. She said so.
She found her voice and then her manners came in a rush behind it. He was, she saw, reading. Not the sea. The coat. He had tilted the lowest note up into the light with one finger, the way men read a tide table, and at the top of the front page a note in a firm woman's hand said: *Your name is Pietro.*
"Your name is Pietro," Isolde said, obeying it.
"That's kind of you," the man said. "Is that your writing?"
It was not. He took the note down, examined it, pinned it back a row higher, and went down the coat like a man doing his buttons: *You are loved. Eat something. You were a good fisherman. Your name is Pietro. Do not go out past the bell. Eat something. Eat something.* Every note he touched he read as if each had arrived that morning with a signature and a seal, and perhaps, she thought, to him each had.
He asked her, politely, at the bottom of the reading, whether she knew who he was.
She said half of it. She said the part you could say without cruelty.
"Good," he said, as if she had handed him a brake pipe. Then: "Is there anything to eat?"
She had bread, hard; two eggs boiled and forgotten; and tea in a flask. She set them on the flat top of the bollard and he ate like a man saying grace. Between mouthfuls he watched the water. He did not seem frightened of it. That frightened her more than anything in the salt ring had, the way a calm workmate does on a bad morning. Once he said, "There's less of me to feed every year — good economy," and laughed, and she laughed late and too high.
The first push of the flood came up the steps eleven minutes past its printed time, the strong cold body of it behind. He was on his feet before she saw him move. He thanked her for the breakfast, thanked her as if for three separate strangers. At the edge of the jetty he looked back.
"If you're writing anything on the coat," he said, "put what I need to hear. Not what I'd like."
The tide took him none at all suddenly. He stood into it the way you stand under a tap, and by the time the foam reached the third step there was nothing on the jetty but the salt ring, the smile of it, and one note lying face-down by the bollard where the wind had worked a pin loose.
Isolde Kernow has the note still, and has not turned it over. She has raked every tide since the gale with an eye on the top step, and she has bought a bag of pins. What she has not settled, and may not this year, is the reading. The note is in her own hand. She is sure of her own hand. But she has not yet held anything long enough on the Shoal to prove whose hand it is, and the next tide will not remember that she owned the question.