The Long Days' Catch

The Sogmarsh Year — Saltgate, the Cold Coast, in the Long. A tale: being the Midsummer shoal, the one night the Sacketts and the Pells fished as one crew, and the far water Nate Sackett will never sail to.

There are three or four nights in the Long — the shortest nights of the year, when the light barely leaves the water before it comes back — when the near shoal runs into Saltgate's own bay, silver and vast and brief, and the whole harbour lives or goes thin on the taking of it. And on one of those nights, the greatest of them, the shoal is too great for any one boat-family to net alone; and so, once a year, in the pale small hours of the Long, the two boat-families of Saltgate — the Sacketts and the Pells, a hundred years of racing and feuding and marrying across the same grey harbour — put down the feud where it stands on the quay, and go out, and fish it as one crew.

Nobody calls it a truce. Loveday Sackett would not use the word, nor Goodwife Pell's kin, nor any of them. It is simply that the shoal does not care whose grandmother wronged whose over a herring in a year nobody now remembers, and the fish will not wait for a feud to be settled, and a family that let the great catch pass for the sake of an old grievance would be a family too proud to eat — and no one on the Cold Coast is that. So the boats go out together, Sackett and Pell, gunwale to gunwale in the half-dark, and the two crews become, for the one night, the single crew the harbour has always secretly been.

Nate Sackett fished that night at the near net with Cassie Pell at the other end of it, and the whole silver weight of the Long between them, and did not speak to her, because you do not, across the feud, in front of the families; and hauled, and hauled, the shoal coming up out of the black water like a spill of moonlight into the boat, more than the Sacketts had taken in a season, more than the Pells; and it was, by any reckoning the town keeps, the best catch of the year, and the best of many years, and Nate Sackett stood in the middle of it up to his knees in silver and looked, as he always looks, past all of it, out through the harbour mouth, to the far water.

For that is where Nate's eye goes and has always gone. Not to the near shoal, which feeds them; not to the harbour, which holds them; but out, through the gap in the wall, to the open sea beyond, the far water no Saltgate boat has crossed in living memory — the sea the whole magnificent idle fleet is kept forever ready and forever unwilling to sail. Nate fishes the near water like the good son he is, and never once, in all his life, has cleared the harbour mouth, and never will; and everyone in the town knows it, the way they know the tide, and no one says it, because to a young man who aches for the far water there is nothing crueller you can say than that he is right to stay.

But in the dark, at the turn of the tide, when the net was in and the great catch taken and the two crews rested a moment gunwale to gunwale before the long pull home, Cassie Pell — from the rival boat, the wrong family, the other end of the net — reached across the little gap of black water between the two boats, quick, where the families couldn't see, and took Nate Sackett's cold hand in hers, and held it, and looked with him out through the harbour mouth at the far water, and did not tell him to stop wanting it. That was all. She held his hand and looked where he looked. And Nate Sackett, who will never in his life sail past the wall, understood in that moment that there are two far waters a man can ache for, and that one of them was sitting in the next boat holding his hand, and that this one, at least, the feud might yet let him cross.

They said nothing. You say nothing. The families hauled for home in the first grey of the returning light, Sackett and Pell together, the year's great catch shared out on the quay before the sun was properly up — so many baskets to the Sacketts, so many to the Pells, and not a fish nor a cross word between them, because for one night there had been no between. And by full morning the feud was back where it belonged, on the quay, exactly as it had been, both families swearing they'd raced the harder and taken the bigger share; and Loveday Sackett and old Goodwife Pell's people cut each other dead across the fish-market as they have for forty years, and would walk into the sea for one another, and know it, and never say.

And the far water lay beyond the harbour mouth, uncrossed, as it always lies. But Nate Sackett fished the near water more gladly that Long than he ever had — because a man can bear a sea he'll never sail, it turns out, a great deal better with a warm hand to hold while he looks at it; and because the deepest thing the Long taught him that year was that the harbour he'd spent his life longing to leave had, in it, at the other end of a net, the one crossing worth staying for.