Regional legend · 5 min read · Set in Skerry Head ·
The Water That Rings Back
Inside the point there is a bay where a bell rung once after dark answers in your own voice, slower than any echo has a right to come.
- status: disputed
Skerry-head people will tell you straight away that the sea here does not answer, and then, if they take to you, they will tell you about the bay where it does. The two statements sit together fine. The headland water is honest water, cold and loud, and it owes nobody anything. But inside the point there is a bay, the old charts call it Round Call, the boatmen call it the Call, and the bell of the mooring buoy in that bay rings back. Ring it once after dark, and the bay will ring it back at you in your own voice.
Not in the bell's voice. That is the whole of the matter. An echo off a cliff is a bell answering a bell, metal for metal, and a tuner can read the decay and know man from stone. What comes off the Call after dark is your own voice saying the bell's note, the shape of your throat on it, your breath behind it, the word you were muttering under the clang, if you were muttering one, which the honest men of the parish admit they usually were. And it comes slower than an echo has any right to. Not from the buoy, not off the head, but out of the middle of the bay, at a delay no distance in that water will account for, and the coxswain of the old lifeboat measured it once with a watch and got four seconds, and measured the bay and said there is no four seconds of water in it.
Now the rules, because the tale of Skerry-head on this point is mostly rules and always was. You ring once. Twice and the second answer does not come, and the first answer is said to start over and finish wrong, and there are families at the harbor mouth who will tell you what finished wrong sounds like, and they tell it quietly. You ring at slack water. On a running tide the call goes downstream like everything else and the answering voice comes back belonging to somebody else, which is a thing our grandfathers would not discuss on the quay and would not let the young discuss either. And you never answer it back in words. A man who is sure he heard his own voice ask him something, that night in the Call, is a man the parish supports in his silence out of decency, and the Everett family, that lost their father to a winter haul, will tell you that the worst of it was not what the voice sounded like asking, but that he had answered it cheerful.
The tale does not say what keeps the bay. We are a keeping people and a telling people, and we can tell you the difference between the two better than anyone on this coast, and this one is of the second kind and declined the first. The Methodist minister at the chapel had a theory about reflections and layers of cold air, and it covered the voice coming back slower than light, and it never covered the voice coming back at all, because a voice is not a clang in the ear, a voice is a claim, and there is nothing in a bay that ought to have the equipment. The fishermen say the buoy is just the way you knock at a door that is already unbolted, and that the bay kept the custom of answering long after whatever lived here taught it to, the way a housebell rings on in an empty house. My grandmother said the water rings back the way a mirror holds your face an instant after you have gone. She said it in her kitchen, going on with the bread, and let it stand.
The disputes, since the tale is carried under that flag and has to own it. The survey men came out twice from the mainland, sonar and lamps, and wrote in their report that the bay is ordinary and the bottom soft and the depth forty fathoms at the middle, and the report is in the county file, and the survey crew stayed four nights instead of one and left before the fourth tide, and their own night logs, which one of them sold to the press and came to nothing, record the ring on every night of their stay. The parish register at Kessin Reach has an entry of 1911, a coroner's finding, drownded, brought ashore at the Call with dry clothes and his boots full of salt water both, and the coroner wrote the impossible half of that in the margin and did not strike it out. So the tale stands disputed between the paper and the parish, and the paper has never once spent the night.
Who tells it today? The boatmen tell it at the warm end of the quay, in the shape of the rules, once and slack water and no answering, and any visitor who laughs at the shape is refused a mooring till morning, with courtesy. The grandmothers tell it in kitchen voices, like mine did, not stopping the bread. And the lifeboat crew still tells it to every new hand on their first dark passage past the point, and finishes with the one sentence the crew has carried I would say a hundred years: ring it once yourself, lad, so you know your own voice, and then if you ever hear it again you will know you did not.