WATERING THE CRACKS

A Tale of Sogmarsh — being the daily work of an old woman on the Griddle's edge, and why the parish has learned not to ask her what it is for.

Every evening, when the worst of the heat has lifted, an old woman carries one pail of water out onto ground that will never drink it. The parish knows exactly what she is doing. That is why nobody asks.

Where the Fat Mile gives out — that thin green seam on the Griddle's wet edge, where the heat and the water meet and everything grows — there is a line. It is the line the surveyors could never fix, the one that will not hold still; and just on the dead side of it, in the last cottage before the ground gives up being ground at all, lives old Gammer Kerne.

Every evening, when the shimmer has gone off the waste and a body can stand on it without their boots complaining, Gammer Kerne fills a single pail at the good wet edge, and carries it out — not onto the Fat Mile, which grows without a soul to help it, but out onto the Griddle proper, the cracked, pale, dead, useless ground beyond — and she pours it, slow and careful, into the cracks. One pail. And then she goes home.

It does nothing. Everybody knows it does nothing. The Griddle takes a pail of water the way the sea takes a single tear: by morning the crack is as pale and dry as if she had never come, and the water is somewhere the water always goes, which is down, and away, and not back. You cannot green a waste with a bucket. A child could tell you. Children have told her, gently, because they are fond of her, and she has thanked them for the information, and gone out the next evening with her pail.

If you ask her why — and strangers do, once — she will tell you about the glass.

You will have heard, if you have got this far south, what the edge believes: that Someone, up there, keeps a burning-glass on this one spot of the map, and that the kindest of the tellings, the one they hold to by day, is that it was no cruelty but an over-kindness — a generous hand that heard a drowning realm beg for dryness and warmth and firm ground and gave the Griddle all of it, and a little too much, and will, one day, notice, and ease the glass, and the Griddle will go green. And on that day, Gammer Kerne will tell you, the ground must be ready. It must not have forgotten how to hold water. It must remember it was ever anything but a griddle. So she waters it. She keeps it in practice for its own greening, against the day the glass is lifted.

That is what she says. It is even true.

Here is the rest of it, which she does not say, and which the whole edge knows and has never once made her speak.

Gammer Kerne did not always carry the pail. She began the year the heat took her man. He went out onto the Griddle on some small errand one bright afternoon, and a hike came, and the ground shone, and he did not come back off it. The Griddle keeps everything. It kept him. There was no bringing him home and there is no grave out there — you cannot dig the cracked stone, and in any case she would not know the place — so she has never known which crack. And that is the reason for the pail, and the reason it is the whole waste and not one spot: she does not know where he is, so she tends them all. Every crack on the Griddle might be the one, and so every crack on the Griddle gets its water, a pail at a time, for as long as she has evenings left to carry it.

She will not say this. She says the thing about the glass, and the greening, and being ready. And the parish lets her — helps her — because the parish on that edge learned a hard lesson not long ago, from a Committee man who came to explain the Griddle and proved it and watched his proof burn, and went home unable to tell his certainty from a prayer. They learned from him that some things are kept only by not being examined, and that a truth you drag into the open is very often a truth you lose. So nobody asks Gammer Kerne what she is really watering. They know. They fill their own pails, and they walk out beside her.

A neighbour, watching her go one evening with her one useless pail against all that dead ground, said the thing that has been said of her ever since, and that the edge now says of hope in general: "The greening is a daily work, not a state." You do not water a thing once and call yourself hopeful and sit down. Hope left untended goes dry as fast as brass left unpolished goes dull — faster — and it must be carried out again every single evening or it has not been carried at all. Gammer Kerne is not watering the ground. She is watering the hope, which is the same as watering herself, and it is a daily work, and she does it daily.

She is very old now, so the children carry the pails. A line of them, at evening, out onto the waste, pouring good water into cracks that will not keep it — and it has become the custom of that whole edge, and no child is ever told it is about a dead man. They are told it is about the greening, against the day the glass is lifted, and they believe it, and they are not wrong, because it is about that — and it is also about him, and about every crack that might be somebody's — and the edge does not sort these apart, because sorting them apart would end the watering, and the watering is the point.

And one evening — this is the last of it — a child tipping out a pail found, down in the crack, a single green shoot. One. Nobody living had ever seen a green thing stand on the Griddle proper.

And here is the whole of what that edge has learned, and the reason this tale is told warm and not sad: they did not ask. They did not send for a surveyor. They did not kneel down and work out whether it was Gammer Kerne's water, or a seed some bird had let fall, or a freak wet season, or the glass itself beginning, at long last, by the width of a single hair, to lift. They looked at it. And they left it. And they watered it. And whether it was still there the next evening, or the evening after — well. Nobody ever found out what it meant, and nobody ever tried, because finding out is how you lose things, and the not-finding-out is the last and best thing the Griddle ever taught anybody.

Gammer Kerne, they say, only nodded when they showed her, and filled her pail, and carried it out to the shoot herself, that evening, the whole slow way, on her own two feet.

Moral: You will one day tend a hope that gives you nothing back — for a person the ground has kept, or a greening that may never come — and the world will be very ready to tell you it is useless, and the world will be right, and it will not matter in the least. Carry the pail anyway. Carry it every evening. And if one day a green thing stands where nothing should — do not ask what it means. Water it, and say nothing, and go on. Some graces keep only as long as you never make them prove themselves.