Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Albrecht Square ·
The Statue with One Degree
In Albrecht Square the bronze figure turns one degree each year, and the parish accepts this the way it accepts drainage and lamp oil.
- status: folklore
Every year on the second morning of November, before the market men have begun to lay out their stalls, a man from the parish office walks into Albrecht Square with a clipboard, a plumb line, and a small brass card table that unfolds with a snap that carries right across the flagstones. He sets the table facing north, takes the bearing of the statue, writes the number down, and folds the table away again. He does not say anything. He has never been known to say anything. The stall-men hold their crates and watch him work, and when he is gone one of them will offer the opinion that he seems a decent sort, and they will go on with their morning.
The statue is not remarkable to look at. It stands, it is bronze, it is somewhat taller than a man, and it shows a figure in a long coat with one hand raised toward the harbor as if hailing something that has not yet arrived. The sculptor is not remembered. The subject is not remembered. A woman named Enid Lather, who kept the corner shop for thirty-one years, held in her lifetime that it was put up as a Navigation Victory piece and the cost of the plaque was never recovered, though she could not say where she first heard this, and she is past holding anything now. The square is grey stone on all four sides, and the wind comes off the water and finds the one gap in the buildings, so that people pass through Albrecht Square rather than linger in it.
But the bearing does not hold.
When the statue was set up — and nobody agrees on when that was, only that all the photographs that show it young show the buildings around it young as well — it faced, the first recorded bearing says, straight down Seamark Lane toward the water. Each year the parish man's figure is one degree smaller than the year before. One degree. Not a fraction more in some years and a fraction less in others, as weather or settling would account for. One degree, as if a hand at the statue's back turned it carefully, the way a person turns a key.
The parish has files. That much is known to anyone who has ever needed a chimney permit, because the statue file comes up in conversation at odd moments. A surveyor named Pike Halloran, who did contract work for the parish in the years when men still went about with chain and theodolite, was once pressed on it by a boy of nineteen who wanted to know whether the thing truly turned. Pike said the bearings matched. He said the desk figures and the field figures agreed, year upon year, that the sums were clean, and that he had on one occasion replaced the plumb line with a new one of a different material and rubbed the card table down and checked the flags for tilt with a spirit level in three directions, and the number had come out the same as the file and one degree lower than the year before. Then he said he had floors to survey and went.
It is not the turning that the men of Albrecht Square find worth mentioning, when they mention it at all. It is the arithmetic. A circle holds three hundred and sixty degrees, and the file goes back further than anyone has seen the bottom of it, and the years go by and the one degree keeps arriving, and somewhere in the arithmetic of it the bearing must come round to facing the other way, back toward the town, and what the square would do that morning is not a thing any of them will put into words. The stall-men fold it away with the canvas and the crates. There is a rule, spoken of as lightly as a rule about gulls, that no one crops the question short by doing the sums out loud.
The parish, for its part, files the bearing. That is the whole of its conduct. No notice goes up, no rope goes round the plinth, no stonemason is summoned to true the figure. The number is taken, written, kept. Men who have served the parish on the resident lists say the statue file is the only one in the building that has never once been requested, and is therefore the only one that is never wrong.
Who tells it today? The stall-men tell it, in the low season when there is an hour to fill between the lamp order and the first customer, each of them careful to keep the sums out of it, and each of them, privately, waiting to see which way the figure has faced by morning.