The Quarantine Hut

A tale of the Drownings, in the Dark: being the ague come to Sodden Bottom, the hut on its stilts where nobody may go, and the long night the whole village went anyway, without once setting foot in it.

The Quarantine Hut stands on its own four stilts out in the open water, a long pole's reach from anything, with a painted board nailed to the door that says WAIT WATCH WASH, and under it, smaller, in a different hand, health first. welcome later. It is the loneliest building in the Drownings, and it is meant to be. When the ague comes into a stilt-village it goes house to house along the water faster than any boat, and the only thing that has ever stopped it is a person willing to be rowed out to the hut and left there until it passes, or they do.

That Dark, it was Ma Skeel.

She had it three days before she admitted it. Ma Skeel does not admit things. She raised the Skeel floor four times without discussion and has buried more than anyone should, and she went on keeping fire and family and roof above the water while the ague shook her, until the morning she dropped the kettle, and looked at it on the floor, and said to nobody in particular: "Well. That's that, then." And went and got her shawl.

Nobody argued. You don't, in the Drownings, when it's the ague; and you don't with Ma Skeel. Nobby Sculls poled her out himself in the grey of the morning, with her blankets and her tin cup and a pot of broth and the little lamp, and stood the boat off at a pole's length while she climbed the hut ladder, which he was not allowed to hold for her; and she went in, and shut the door on WAIT WATCH WASH, and called through it, "Mind you feed the fire, Tom's hopeless," and that was all.

The rule of the hut is that nobody goes in. Nobody touches the ladder. Food goes up on the end of a pole to the little shelf by the door; the pot comes back down the same way and is washed in boiling water before any hand in the village touches it. That is all. That is the whole rule. It has kept the Drownings alive through worse winters than anyone now remembers, and nobody breaks it.

But there is nothing in the rule about talking.

It was Dab who noticed that. Dab is the smallest Skeel, who poled a boat before she could walk and tells the time by the tide-mark on the third stilt. On the first night Ma was gone, Dab would not settle, and at the fourth bell Wet Tom found her missing from the bed she shared with Dib, and the little boat missing from the landing, and went out in the big boat in a fright — and found her sitting in her boat in the dark, tied off a careful pole's length from the Quarantine Hut, talking.

"— and Tom let the fire go out, and Grandfer said it were the damp, and it weren't the damp, it were Tom —"

And from inside the hut, through the boards, hoarse and shaking and perfectly unanswerable: "Course it were Tom."

Wet Tom sat in the big boat with his mouth open. Then he tied off beside his sister, at his own pole's length, and said, "It were not me," and his mother said, "It's always you, Tom," and he found that his eyes had gone wet, which is nothing new for Wet Tom, but this time was not the water.

By the second night, word had gone boat to boat, the way word does in the Drownings.

At the fifth bell there were three boats tied off in a ring around the Quarantine Hut, each at its own pole's length, lanterns low. By the sixth, there were seven. Nobody organised it. Nobody said it was anyone's turn. A boat simply came out of the dark and tied off in the ring, and a voice said, "Evening, Ma," and the hut said, "Who's that? Is that Smoke Rudd? What are you doing here, you've no business with sick folk, you'll catch your death," and Smoke Rudd said, "I came to see you catch yours first," and the hut laughed so hard it had to stop and cough, and everybody in the ring waited until it had.

They talked to her all night. That was the whole of it. Nobody went up the ladder; nobody touched the stilts; the pot went up on the pole and came down again and was boiled. But from dusk to first light, every night, there was a ring of boats around the Quarantine Hut and a voice in the dark close enough to hear her breathing — and the Drownings, which is scattered by water into a hundred separate little islands, was for once in its life all in one place, in a circle, round the loneliest building it owns.

And they said the things you say. Clem Wherry told her the new stilt was in on the Drench side and it was a good stilt, it would outlast them both, and she said it had better. Curly told her about the dry land up the fen he meant to go and see, one day, and she said he'd hate it, there's nothing to do on dry land, and he said he knew. Grandfer Skeel was rowed out by Smoke at the eighth bell and resumed, through the boards, the tale of the Pike of Sodden Bottom, and for once got a good deal further on than usual, because Smoke let him, and it was the kindest thing anyone had ever seen Smoke Rudd do.

And Ma Skeel, shaking, burning, alone inside four walls in the middle of the water, complained about every single one of them.

She said Nobby's voice kept her awake. She said Grandfer was telling it wrong. She said whoever had put onions in the broth wanted drowning, and the whole ring went quiet, and then a small voice from a boat on the far side said, "It were Tom," and the whole ring of boats in the dark broke out laughing.

That was how they knew. You can hear it, in the Drownings, when the ague's winning — the voice goes thin and polite, and starts thanking people. On the fourth night Ma Skeel told Nobby Sculls he was a disgrace to the water, and Nobby, bobbing in his boat at a pole's length, put his face in his hands and wept like a child, and everyone pretended not to see.

On the ninth morning, the door of the Quarantine Hut opened.

Ma Skeel stood in it, thinner, grey-faced, holding the door-frame, with her shawl over her head and her tin cup in her hand. She looked down at the ring of boats. The night's watch had fallen asleep in them, curled in the bottoms under blankets, lanterns burned out — Dab and Dib together in the little boat, Wet Tom sprawled in the big one with an oar for a pillow, Nobby Sculls snoring on his back with his hat over his face.

She looked at them for a long time.

Then she looked at the board on the door: WAIT WATCH WASH. health first. welcome later. And she took the charcoal stub out of her apron pocket that she uses to mark the tide on the third stilt, and underneath, in her own square hand, she wrote one more line.

Then she shouted for somebody to fetch a boat, because she had a floor to see to and her fire was out, and she'd lay money it was Tom.

What she wrote under the sign is still there. The weather has had most of it, but you can make it out, if you pole close enough — which nobody is supposed to, and everybody does:

talk anyway.