The Apology Stone

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a feud ended by the wrong listener, who was the right one.

There is a standing stone on the Drudgeford road that everyone pats and says "sorry" to. Not to do so is rude. It has been this way about a hundred years, since a carter blamed the stone for the axle it broke, then felt foolish, and apologised to it — and somehow the thing caught, the way a good habit and a silly one are hard to tell apart in the doing. The Stone hears more apologies in a week than the church hears in a year, and keeps every one of them, being a stone.

Now, Elias Turf and Corbin Sedge had a boundary ditch between their holdings and a ten-year feud on top of it — whose spoil, whose slope, whose foot of good ground the ditch had quietly eaten. Neither would say sorry to the other. Sorry, in Sogmarsh, is a coin you cannot take back once it is spent, and both men were savers.

But Elias Turf had a conscience that would not lie down, for the truth was his ditch had taken a foot of Sedge's slope, and he'd known it the whole ten years. Unable to face the man, he took to apologising to the Stone instead — properly, out loud, the entire speech, the way you'd rehearse a thing you never mean to say. It is a great deal easier to a rock. A rock does not gloat.

What Turf did not know was that Corbin Sedge had been doing exactly the same. Different hours. Each man unburdening to the granite the sorry he could not put in the other's hand.

One foggy morning their hours overlapped. Turf came round the bend mid-confession — "...and the foot of slope, Corbin, I did know it was yours, I've known it ten year—" and there, on the far side of the Stone, hat off, halfway through the very same speech, stood Corbin Sedge.

They stood. The Stone between them had heard both halves, and, being a stone, said nothing, which was the one right thing to say. There was nothing left to apologise for; it had all been apologised, only to the wrong listener — which turned out to be the right one. They walked back to Drudgeford together and split the ditch, and the difference.

The parish says the Stone works miracles. The truth is duller and better: it is far easier to say the true thing when no one's face is there to make you sorry you said it — and now and again, saying it at all is enough, whoever happens to be standing on the other side.