Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Karrick Sound ·
Twenty-one Come Ashore
Every March a barque of kelp and bone regrows on the reef and moors at the old quay at Karrick Sound, and every March the figures who walk the village to look at doors outnumber the lost crew by two.
The barque Perpetua went onto the reef at Karrick Sound in 1889 with nineteen souls, and was never salvaged, and is not any more wherever she was. Her shape comes back instead. Through each winter the reef regrows her out of what it has: black kelp-rope for her lines, pale bone-coloured timber rib by rib, barnacle plate for hull skin, a membrane of weed for sails that holds the wind the way a drumskin holds a hand. The figurehead is woven weed, and faces aft, which no shipwright has ever been able to discuss patentably, and along her rail burn lanterns of soft glowing jelly, one to a shroud.
She comes in on the same March tide every year, low and slow. The harbour logs record the moorage at the old quay 112 consecutive years, which is longer than the office has had a floor. She moors for seven days. On the seventh, at slack water, the hull goes back into the shape of the sea, and the tide takes the accounts.
The crew walk the village. They are made of kelp and salt in the shapes of men, and they come ashore in a rough order, lantern-light in the lane where there is no lamp, and they go from door to door in the way of carol singers or census men, standing in front of a door for a long time — sometimes an hour — and then moving on, unhurried, not asking anything. The village sets places for them. Tables are laid on the quay, twenty-one settings, and the first two figures off the gangway are fed first, at the two places nearest the ship, always. Meredith Dann, who is the third generation of her family to bake for the week of the moorage, says the loaves she sets out for the first two come back with crumbs on the towels when there were none, and the cups at those places stand empty when they were full, and that her mother's mother's rule was to bake for those two first and never try to catch them at it.
Reuben Quayle is the harbour clerk, twenty-four, and this was his second March on the stamps. His first act on the first morning was to raise the count. The crew list of the Perpetua is a brass plate in the harbour office, nineteen names, vetted twice, generations deep. He counted the figures on the quay with a tally clicker and a strong stomach and got twenty-one. He filed the discrepancy on the correct form. The reply came back on office paper within the week: *Discrepancy noted. See Tide Tables, entry re moorage, pp. 44–45,* and the Tide Tables had nothing on page 44 but the spring heights, which Reuben read four times looking for a meaning until he understood the meaning was that he was being thanked for his vigilance by a piece of paper that had decided not to have the conversation.
Then he tried the moorage form itself, which is where the trouble properly began. The form has a line for *Name of Vessel*, and the form does not allow the name. His pen skated on the line without touching it. He tried another nib; the ink beaded up and sat on the paper like mercury and would not go into the fibre. The line has been left blank by every clerk before him for at least eighty years, with *as before* written quietly under the count of days, and the quay office has rubber stamps older than the Misprint that are the reason Reuben has a job at all. He stamps the moorage *as before* now, and has told nobody at the office about the nibs, because the paperwork here has opinions, and he has begun to be able to hear them.
The only thing he has seen that he would swear to is the doors. The figures do not enter houses. They stand at doors. His second spring he kept the tally again and kept beside it a private list of the doors each one stood at, and times them with the watch his grandmother left him, and the longest standing that year — one hour, eleven minutes — was at Meredith's own door, the one house on the lane that feeds the two first, nearest the ship. He gave up on his list then, quietly, walked it round to the quay, and said nothing, because the figures had not asked him anything either and he felt the count between them was being kept by a third party who preferred not to be introduced.
The village elders say the reef lost more than the ship on that tide in 1889, and will not be pressed on what. The crew list has nineteen names. Twenty-one come ashore. Two of them have no place in any account except the places at the table, and those are the places they are served first, every March, by people who have been told to, in a tone nobody will attribute — and the baking is always done.