The Reckoning Tide

The Sogmarsh Year — Saltgate, the Cold Coast, in the Short. A radio half-hour: being the reckoning of the year's catch before the Dark, and the tally that very nearly added up.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless presents Saltgate in the Short, and the Reckoning Tide; in which the harbour counts the year's catch before the Dark comes down, Harbour-Master Cleat very nearly makes the figures add up, and Loomis Skerry has, as ever, a very good explanation.

The back room of the Saltgate Arms. An autumn gale on the glass. Cups, a low crowd of the harbour, the scratch of a tally-pen, the fire spitting.

CLEAT (presiding, grand): The Reckoning Tide! As our fathers reckoned before us —

LOVEDAY (dry, the real book open in front of her): — get on, Mordecai.

CLEAT: — so reckon we: every boat's catch, every share set down, that no house on this coast go into the Dark short. Skerry! The Kittiwake. Your season's catch.

LOOMIS (easy as a calm tide): Officially empty, Harbour-Master. Whole season. Never caught a thing.

CLEAT (writing): Officially empty. Good. (pauses) ...Then why's the Kittiwake sat six inches lower in the water than she ought, all year?

(a small silence. GRIMBLE, in the corner, lugubrious.)

GRIMBLE: Aye. I've wondered that and all. Six inches. Regular as the tide.

LOOMIS (not missing a beat): Ballast, Harbour-Master. Grief. She's a sad boat, the Kittiwake — been low in the water since her last skipper passed. Weighed down with sorrow.

CLEAT: ...Weighed down with sorrow.

LOOMIS: Six inches of it. You can't put a figure on grief, Mordecai. (beat) Well. You can. It's about six inches.

SFX: a ripple of the room not-quite-laughing. CLEAT, pompous, pressing on.

CLEAT: The figures do not balance, Skerry. Six inches of boat is a great deal of — of sorrow — that I cannot enter in a —

LOVEDAY (flat, cutting clean through, the true authority in the room): Leave it, Mordecai.

CLEAT: But the figures —

LOVEDAY: The figures balance. I keep the figures. You keep the ceremony; I keep the figures; that has been the arrangement since your grandfather, and it has kept this harbour fed through worse Darks than you've seen. (beat) The Kittiwake is empty. Write her empty. And ask yourself, before you don't — who goes short this winter, if she isn't.

(a pause. The gale. The fire.)

CLEAT (a beat; then, writing, with immense dignity): ...The Kittiwake. Empty. As stated. Sorrowfully empty.

GRIMBLE (to no one, funereal, satisfied): There'll be a hard Dark on the back of this. Ice in the roads by the Loaf. Two boats lost afore spring, I shouldn't wonder. (sips) ...Lovely to have it all wrote down proper, though.

SFX: the tally moving on; the winter shares being dealt out round the room, basket by basket.

LOVEDAY (quiet, reading the shares): — the Pells short a third this year, the near shoal missed them. Nan's people short. Widow Kell short. (beat) Make them up.

CLEAT: Make them up from what, the catch is —

LOVEDAY (not looking up): From the Kittiwake, Mordecai. Which is empty. (beat) Funny how much an empty boat has in her, at the Short, when a house’d otherwise go hungry. Don't ask. It's the one figure in the book that balances by itself.

SFX: coin and quiet arrangement under the talk; the short houses made up; nobody, by the end, short.

ANNOUNCER. And so the year was reckoned at Saltgate, and every house came out of the Reckoning Tide with enough for the Dark — the short ones made up, quietly, from a boat that had officially caught nothing all year and somehow, sorrowfully, had exactly enough aboard to see the harbour through. Harbour-Master Cleat entered it all in a fair hand and slept the sleep of a man whose figures had balanced. Loveday Sackett, who knew to the penny how they'd balanced, kept the real book, and her counsel, and the light in her window. And Stan Grimble forecast a terrible winter, with enormous relish, and was, as it happens, wrong; but nobody holds that against a man for whom being right was never quite the point.

SFX: the gale. A door. Out into the wet dark.

The Late Line — after the cups come down

The same night, the Reckoning done and entered fair; Cleat gone home to his balanced figures, the children of the harbour abed, the Wireless kept open. The back room of the Saltgate Arms thins to the harbour's own, the grog comes down off the shelf, and the talk gets frank.

ANNOUNCER (drier, later, the gale still on the glass): Sogmarsh Wireless keeps the line open a while, the reckoning being reckoned and the young ones home. And in the back of the Arms, with the Harbour-Master safely abed atop his balancing figures, the harbour says plainly among itself what it would never say to a fair hand and a ledger.

LOOMIS (the grog making him fond): Six inches of sorrow. I'm proud of that one. Give me a pompous man and a straight face and I'll grieve a boat down to the gunwales, so I will.

LOVEDAY (dry, the book shut now, one of her own poured): You'll grieve yourself onto a revenue-cutter one of these Darks, Loomis Skerry, and no story'll refloat you off that.

LOOMIS: Ah, Loveday. The run's the run. Out past the Hard Isle on a black tide, load what wants loading, ask no man his business and tell him less of yours, and home before the seventh bell with the Kittiwake full of — (grandly) — grief.

GRIMBLE (funereal, into his cup): One o' these years the grief'll be yours, Loomis. I see it. Cold water and a short prayer.

LOOMIS: You've seen it every Short since we were lads, Stan, and I'm still here drinking your health, which is more than your forecasts ever —

A DECKHAND (bawdy, warm, cutting in): — He's home before the seventh bell for the Widow Tarrant, not the tide. That boat runs to her window regular as she runs to the Isles, and sits about as low in the water after, by all —

LOVEDAY (flat, not even looking up, killing it stone dead): — Nobody's boat. Nobody's window. Nobody's business but the harbour's, which is fed. (a beat, then, allowing it, dry) Though the Kittiwake does sit low coming and going both, now you mention it. Busy boat.

(the room creasing up, low and warm)

LOOMIS (raising his cup, unashamed): To the busy boat. And to the short houses, who'll never know whose window kept 'em fed, and don't need to.

LOVEDAY (quiet, the true toast under it): To nobody short at the turn. However it's carried, and wherever from. (beat) And not one word of the wherever leaves this room.

ALL (low): Not one word.

SFX: the grog, the gale, the fire; the harbour easy with its own secret, which it keeps, which keeps it. Out.