The Salt-Factor Can't Sleep

A tale of Saltgate, the Cold Coast, in the Short: being the curing-salt come over from the Hard Isle, the woman who brings it, and the night the whole quay whistled.

Every year, when the Short comes in and the herring must be cured before the Dark, a stone-grey boat comes up out of the west to Saltgate with salt in her, and a woman in her who does not like you.

She is the salt-factor of Cragholm. Nobody in Saltgate has ever called her anything else, and she has never offered. She is tall and dry and upright as a gatepost, with a face the wind has been at for fifty years and found nothing soft to take, and she steps off her boat onto the Saltgate quay the way a cat steps into a wet yard: with one foot, slowly, and a look of having been personally insulted by the ground.

Because the ground is wet. That is the trouble. On Cragholm there is no standing water — the rock holds none, and what little they catch in the cisterns they keep outside, covered, and do not think about, because standing water on the Hard Isle is a thing for the dead. And Saltgate is nothing but standing water: puddles on the quay, water in the boats, water in the ruts of Anchor Steps, a harbour full of it, a sky full of it. The salt-factor walks up the quay each year with her skirts held clear and her mouth shut tight, and the children follow at a distance to watch her not breathe.

She comes for Marget Reek. Marget Reek's smokehouses cannot cure a single fish without Cragholm salt, and the salt-factor knows it; and Cragholm cannot get a single thing that grows without going through Saltgate, and Marget Reek knows it; and so every Short the two of them sit down in the back of the smokehouse, among the hanging gold of the herring, and bargain like two old dogs over one bone. It takes all afternoon. The salt-factor names a price that would make a stone weep. Marget Reek laughs, once, like a door slamming. The salt-factor says the Soft Isle is offering more. Marget Reek says the Soft Isle couldn't pan salt if you gave them the sea and a spoon. And by dusk, as it always does, the bargain lands where Marget Reek meant it to land, a little lower than the salt-factor meant it to, and the two women do not shake hands, because on Cragholm you do not touch another person's hand over money, and in Saltgate you do not touch Marget Reek.

Then the salt-factor must sleep somewhere, and there is only one place that will have her: the Saltmarsh Haven, down the coastal path south of the town, where the hearth is kept lit all night so its smoke will warn boats off the rocks.

And that is where the real trouble starts.

The Haven is a good inn. It is warm, and the beds are dry, as dry as anything is on the Cold Coast. But it is still. It sits in the lee of the headland, out of the weather, and on a quiet night in the Short there is not a breath of wind about it — only the hearth breathing up the chimney, and the sea breathing on the rocks, and somewhere in the walls the tick of water finding its way down. And on Cragholm, the wind never stops. Not for an hour. Not in anyone's life. A Cragholmer is born into it and lives in it and is buried in it, and a Cragholmer in a still room lies awake all night, stiff as a plank, listening to the silence the way you or I would listen to a footstep on the stair.

The first night, the salt-factor did not sleep. The second night she did not sleep either, and in the morning she bargained so badly over the second load that Marget Reek looked at her with something close to alarm, and asked if she was unwell, and was told to mind her own fish.

It was Sprat who worked it out. Sprat is the hired boy over the Saltgate store and misses nothing, because missing nothing is how a boy with no family of his own gets fed. He had been sent down to the Haven with a basket and had seen the salt-factor at the window at first light, grey as her own salt, staring out at the dead calm water as if it had done her a wrong. And Sprat, who reads the water better than boys twice his age, understood — the way you understand a boat that won't sit right — that the woman was not ill. She was homesick for a noise.

He told Cassie Pell. Cassie Pell is the best hand in the harbour and does not waste words, so she said only, "The net-loft," and went.

The net-loft over the Pell sheds has shutters on all four sides, for drying, and in a wind those shutters sing — every child in Saltgate knows it; it is where the tale of the Whistling Sailor comes from, and why nobody courts in the Pell loft on a blowy night. But there was no wind. So Cassie and Sprat and three children who were supposed to be in bed carried the Pell loft's spare shutters, and a coil of old net, and a great deal of borrowed twine, down the coastal path in the dark to the Saltmarsh Haven, and up onto the lean-to roof under the salt-factor's window, and set to work.

They could not make a wind. Nobody can make a wind. But you can make a draught, if you know how a chimney pulls; and the Haven's hearth, lit all night to warn the boats, pulls a great deal of air. Cassie opened the lean-to's gable end and propped the shutters in it at angles, and strung the old net across the gap tight as a fiddle, and the air the hearth dragged in across the rocks came through the shutters and over the strung net — and began, very quietly, to hum.

Not loud. Not a gale. A thin, steady, rising and falling breath of a sound, like wind round a crag. Sprat lay on the lean-to roof in the cold with his ear to the slates until he was sure it would hold, and then the children went home, and said nothing, because you say nothing.

In the morning the salt-factor came down to breakfast with colour in her face, and ate two eggs, and did not look out of the window once.

She bargained over the third load like a woman restored — so well, in fact, that for the first time in living memory Marget Reek came off the worse by a penny, and was delighted, and would not say why. And that afternoon, before she went down to her grey boat, the salt-factor walked out along the coastal path alone, and stood below the Haven for a long while looking up at the lean-to roof, at the propped shutters and the strung net, humming in the draught.

She did not thank anybody. On Cragholm you do not thank people warmly; it is taken as an insult, a suggestion that the kindness was more than a person owes. She did not smile. She did not ask who had done it, though she had seen the children watching her all week and could have counted them.

But when the stone-grey boat had gone back out into the west, and the smokehouses had the last of the season's salt, Marget Reek went to open the final sack and found, pressed down into the top of it, a second sack, small and tied tight with Cragholm cord, with no mark on it and no note. It was the finest, whitest salt anyone in Saltgate had ever seen — table salt, the Hard Isle's own best, the kind they do not sell — and there was a great deal more of it than a smokehouse needs.

Marget Reek divided it without a word. A bowl to the Pells. A bowl to the Sacketts, which went down badly with both. A bowl to the Saltmarsh Haven. And the last bowl, the biggest, up to the store eaves, where Sprat keeps his hoard of sea-glass and cork floats and the coin from a place that can't be reached; and Sprat found it there that night, and knew who it was from, and knew better than to say.

The salt-factor of Cragholm will come again next Short, holding her skirts clear of the wet and her mouth shut tight, and she will not like you. But the net is still strung under the Haven's lean-to, and nobody has taken it down, and on still nights in the Short the whole of the coastal path hums, very quietly, like wind round a rock — and the fisherfolk walking home say it is the Whistling Sailor, and the children say nothing at all.