Short story · 4 min read ·
The Keeper of the Lower Lock
The lock at Ostrova has one gate that will not close, and the lock keeper has spent thirty years arguing with a boatman who keeps coming back.
The Lower Lock at Ostrova has one gate that does not close. It is the upstream gate, the old oak one, and when the keeper winds it shut the sill still shows a finger's width of black water along the bottom. The engineers say the timber has warped, and the carpenters say the hinge pin is worn, and both are right, and neither has ever managed to fix it. For thirty years the keeper, a silent woman called Ilse Marrow, has been opening and shutting that gate with a leak in it, and for thirty years a boatman has been coming through.
He comes up from the south in a long narrowboat painted the green of old coins. He never gives his name. He arrives at the lock an hour after the last working barge has tied up, when the lamps are lit along the towpath and the water is black, and he waits at the lower gates with his engine ticking over. Ilse always lets him in. There is a rule about it, though nobody has ever written it down: a lock keeper does not refuse a boat that is already in the chamber, and this boat is always already in the chamber, though she never sees it come in.
The first time she saw him, in the spring she took up the post, she had gone to the lower gates with her lantern and found the green boat tied to the ring, empty, the engine cold. She had called out. Nothing answered. When she came back up the steps the water in the chamber was already rising, and the boat was already rising with it, and the upper gate was already swinging open on its leaking hinge, and she had not touched the paddles.
She wrote in the lock book that night: *Lower Lock. One vessel, unattended, passed up. No fee.*
In the following years she grew used to him. He never spoke. He sometimes left things behind on the coping: a bottle of plum spirit, a folded map of canals that do not exist, a button from a coat she has never seen. She kept the button in a tin on the windowsill. The map she burned in the stove. The spirit she poured into the canal, because her father told her once that you never drink what a stranger leaves on a lock, and she had found that the rule held even for strangers who were never quite there.
The boatman's arguments were the strange part. They always began at the upper gate, after the boat had been lifted and the water had stilled. He would stand on the green deck with the lantern hanging from the stern and address her across the gap, in a voice that sounded as though it came from the far side of a wide valley.
"The sill is wet."
"It is always wet."
"It was dry when I came through the first time. Before the gate went."
"There was no first time. There's only this."
"There is always a first time for a boat," he would say, quite gently, and she would not answer, and he would take his lantern and go up the cut into the dark.
She tried, in the second decade, to stop him. She had the carpenters in, and they replaced the hinge pin and planed the gate and swore at it for a week. It closed. For four nights it closed properly, and on the fifth the green boat came up from the south as usual and the sill ran black again along its bottom edge, a finger's width, a clean line in the lamplight. The boatman tied up at the upper gate and looked at her.
"You shut it," he said.
"I did."
"Then you'll have to shut it on me."
She has never found a way to do that, and she has stopped looking. The engineers have plans to rebuild the Lower Lock. The new gates have been drawn and costed twice. Each time the work is scheduled, a flood comes down the cut in the night and fills the chamber and the paperwork goes wet, and the plans are put back in the drawer. Ilse Marrow does not mind. She has the lock, the lamps, and the one gate that leaks. In thirty years she has never once opened the upper paddles to the sun without finding the water already a little higher than it should be, the sill already wet, and the boatman already gone up the cut.