THE NOTCHED OILCLOTH OF SOLE-EYE MARTHA

Being a Fair Copy of the Notches, With Her Answers, Taken Down by a Visiting Clerk Who Asked What They Meant.

A found paper. The oilcloth itself never leaves her waist. What follows is the clerk's fair copy of the notch-marks, in order, with Sole-Eye Martha's answers set down verbatim — she having agreed to answer one question per notch, while poling, on the condition that the clerk sat still and touched nothing.

A NOTE BY THE CLERK. The cloth is greasy, salt-stiff, and shows no landmarks of any kind. No channels, no villages, no names. Only notches, cut along the hem with a knife, some old enough to have healed shiny. I asked how it could be called a map of the Drownings when it shows nothing of the Drownings. She said it shows the only thing in the Drownings that matters, which is how deep the water was on various Tuesdays. I asked why Tuesdays. She said the water has to be asked regularly or it thinks you have stopped caring, and Tuesday is when she asks.

THE NOTCHES, IN ORDER, WITH HER ANSWERS

Notch the first (short, old, shiny) — "Two hands at the third post. A good year. You could take a cart across the walk if the cart was sensible."

Notches two through nine (regular, evenly spaced) — "Tuesdays. Two hands, two hands, two and a finger, two and a finger, three hands, two, two, three. You are writing them all down. They are not all interesting. Write them all down anyway; that is the whole trick of it."

Notch the tenth (deeper than the rest, cut twice) — "Four hands at the third post, and rising while I measured. That is the Tuesday we moved the walk. The old walk is still there, under. It looks fine. That is what four hands looks like: fine."

Notch the eleventh (a small notch beside the tenth, like a footnote) — "That one is Mattie Reed's boy. He went in at the old walk on the Thursday, before the moving of it, because Thursday is not Tuesday and the water knows it. He came out. He came out because the third post held and his mother did not stop shouting his name at the water until it gave him back. The notch is not for the depth. The notch is so that the depth has to look at it, every Tuesday, when I measure."

Notches twelve through twenty — "Tuesdays again. You may write: ordinary. The Drownings does ordinary better than anywhere in the realm. Nobody thanks it."

Notch the twenty-first (long, angled, unlike the others) — "The channel that was good last year. It is not good. The notch is angled so my thumb finds it in the dark, because the sort of night you need telling is the sort of night you cannot read."

The last notch (at the very end of the hem, square-cut, deliberate) — The clerk asked what depth it recorded. She poled twice before answering.

"That one is not a depth. That one is where I stop. Past that post the bog is having a private conversation, and it is rude to step on the words, and the ones who stepped on the words are why the notch is square, the way you square off an account. You will want to write something clever about it. Don't. Write: she stops at the last notch. Then stop."

THE CLERK'S CLOSING NOTE. I offered payment for the answers. She refused it. She charged me a shilling for the tea, which I had assumed was included, and when I remarked upon this she said that answers are free because the water gives them to her for nothing, but the tea costs, because the tea is hers — which is, I have come to believe on the pole home, the right way round, and the whole of the law of the Drownings, and I have been sitting with it ever since.

Filed at Drudgeford. The Office notes that the above constitutes the most complete survey of the Drownings in the Crown's possession, and consists of twenty-two knife-marks and a woman who stops.