Salt in Her Letters

Chapter One — The Crossing

The boat that carries me back is not the boat that took me away.

That one was the Brìghde, a fat blue thing that smelled of diesel and bait, and the man at her tiller had a beard like wet rope and called me a ghràidh as if I were still small. This one is the Sùlaire, low and white, and the man at her tiller is Ewan Mackinnon, who I have not seen in twelve years and who does not call me anything at all.

He lifts a hand from the wheel when he sees me on the slip at Port Sgadan. Not a wave. Just the hand, raised, the way you'd lift it to feel for rain. I have rehearsed this on the long drive north, the train, the second train, the wait among the creels — what I would say to him, the shape my mouth would make. All of it goes over the side the moment I step down into the boat and the deck takes my weight and gives, the way only a deck gives, and my body remembers a thing my mind has spent a dozen years forgetting.

"You'll want to sit at the back," he says. "She rolls."

So we don't speak of it. Good. I sit at the back.

The town slides off behind us, the herring sheds gone over to holiday lets now, the kirk, the war memorial with its short list of long names. Then the sound opens and there is only the grey going to silver where the cloud thins, and the cold coming up off the water into the bones of my face, and the gulls that follow us out the way they always have, hopeful, stupid, white.

I have not been seasick since I was nine. I am not seasick now. But there is a thing the sea does to the inside of the chest, a loosening, as if it has untied a knot you did not know you were keeping tied, and I have to look hard at the horizon to keep myself together. Twelve years I kept it. I find I resent the sea for the ease with which it undoes me.

We round the Sgeir Dubh, the black skerry, its weed laid flat and shining, and there it is.

Eilean Faire. The watching isle.

It comes up out of the water the way it has come up in every dream I would not admit to having — the green back of it, the machair gone its early-summer colours, thrift and silverweed and the small white scurvy-grass in the rocks; the two crofts on the south side with their roofs of corrugate gone to rust; and above all of it, on the north head where the cliff drops to the gannet ledges, the tower. White. Eighty feet of Stevenson stone, built to stand against the worst the Atlantic could send and standing yet, and the gallery rail around the lamp room, and the dome, dull as a thumbnail in the flat light.

There is no smoke from the keeper's cottage. There would not be. There has been no keeper since 1998, and no keeper's wife since eight days ago, which is when my mother sat down in the kitchen chair that faces the window and did not get up.

"They lit it Tuesday," Ewan says, over the engine. He has seen me looking. "Light's all on a clock now. Solar, and a wee diesel for the dark months. Doesn't want a thing from anybody."

"I know how it works."

"Aye." He throttles back and the bow comes down. "I forget you would."

The plaque is the first thing you read on the slip, screwed to the harbour wall where the Board put it, where the islanders wanted it, brass gone green at the edges. CALUM RAE. PRINCIPAL KEEPER. LOST AT SEA GOING TO THE AID OF OTHERS. And the dates, the second one a winter I was fifteen. Below it someone — not the Board — has set a jam jar with sea pinks in it, and the pinks are fresh.

I look at the jar a long time. Eight days dead, my mother, and she still walked down to the harbour and put flowers under my father's name.

"That'll be her," Ewan says, quiet, doing something unnecessary with a rope. "She did it Sundays."

I get out of the boat before he can hand me up, and I am ashamed of the small cruelty of it, and I do it anyway.

The cottage is colder inside than out.

That is the way of stone houses; they hold the winter in their walls into June, and my mother burned peat the way she did everything, carefully, never more than she needed. The fire is out. The grate is swept. There is a cup upturned on the rack by the sink, washed, the last cup, and I cannot look at it either.

I put my bag down in the room that was mine and is still, somehow, mine — the iron bed, the window the size of a Bible, the water-stain on the ceiling shaped like a running dog that I named when I was six and cannot now remember the name of. The bed is made up. Made up for me. She kept it made for twelve years, or she made it up the week she knew, and I do not know which is worse, so I sit on the floor with my back against it until the light goes and I am cold enough to need the fire after all.

When I go to lay it I find the kindling split and stacked in the box, and the matches dry, and a single firelighter set on top where I would see it, and I understand, sitting on my heels on the cold flag floor, that everything in this house has been arranged. Left ready. The way you'd ready a room for a guest you were no longer sure would come, but for whom you kept the bed made, and the matches dry, and the flowers fresh under a dead man's name, on the chance.

I get the fire going. The chimney draws the way it always drew. The smoke goes up and out and away on the wind to wherever the wind is going, and I sit and watch it and I do not cry, because I gave that up the year I left, and I am out of practice, and besides there is no one here to see.

That is what I think, that first night. That there is no one here to see.

I am wrong, of course. I will not learn how wrong for several days. The whole time, up in the dark above me, behind the brass and the glass, the thing she left was already waiting on the table where the light would find it every fifteen seconds, all night, turning and turning, sweeping out across the water and back across the box and out across the water and back.