The Spring Rise

The Sogmarsh Year — Sodden Bottom, the Drownings, in the Light. A tale: being the melt, the first floor-raising of the year, and a village that will not be hurried under.

When the Light comes to the Drownings it comes as water. Up in the dry countries the Light is a lengthening of the days and a greening of the hedges; at Sodden Bottom it is the melt of the whole realm coming down at once, and the mark on the third stilt climbing, day on day, until the morning it stands a hand above the boards and Ma Skeel says, without turning from the fire, "Floor goes up today" — and the year has begun.

Grandfer Skeel, from the warm corner, declares that this will be the last time. The water has very nearly stopped; he can feel it in the stilt, he says, a slackening. He has felt it slacken every spring for sixty years. Smoke Rudd — who came up out of the city long enough ago that only his vowels still remember it — allows that in that case they had best raise the floor one final time, just to be sure, and heaves himself up off the bench with the groan of a man who has agreed to a great many final times.

It is not a Skeel job. It is a village job, and no one is sent for. By the time Wet Tom has the trestles braced, boats are already poling in out of the murk — the neighbours, unasked, unthanked, poling over the flooded lane that is the only road they have — because in the Drownings no floor is short at the turn, the way at Saltgate no boat is short and at Drudgeford no tab uncleared: the same old creed, poled here from stilt to stilt. Curly and the men take the weight; Dib and Dab pass the pegs, poling between the stilts with the pegs held in their teeth, too small yet to lift and too Drownings to be idle. And the whole floor comes up, six inches, onto fresh blocks — the furniture walking up the room after it, the fire relaid higher, the good weather-glass rehung a hand nearer the sky.

Everyone raising that floor knows the mark will stand a hand higher next Light, and the Light after that, and that a village cannot out-raise a sea. Nobody says it. It is the plainest fact at Sodden Bottom and the one thing never spoken aloud, because to say it would be to make it a grief, and the Drownings has decided, collectively and without discussion, that it will go under without ever once making a grief of it.

Grandfer says the opposite, loudly, all the day long — she's stopping, I tell you, feel it, this is the last raising we'll ever do — and the young ones half believe him, and lift with light hearts, and that is exactly why he says it. A man of ninety spends his certainty on the children the way another man spends coin: so they may carry the pegs and laugh and not yet feel the weight of the water. Ma Skeel lets him spend it. Ma Skeel raised this floor the first time as a bride, and will raise it a last time as whatever it is she is now, and made her peace long ago with a home that goes down an inch a year and holds its head up the whole way.

The only fright of the day is a new neighbour's. Halfway through the lift the drowned-chapel bell tolls out over the water, and the young man — lately come to the parish, not yet broken in — hears it and goes white and lunges for his boat, certain it is a warning, a surge, the water coming to take them all; and he half tips the raised floor in his scramble. And the village, without hurry, sets him right: steady, lad. That's only the chapel. That bell's told the hour an hour wrong since before any of us, and always will. A bell you can trust to be wrong the same way every day is as good as one that's right. Now — lift. And the false alarm is folded into the work like everything else, and the floor goes up.

By dusk it stands. Life is exactly as it was, six inches nearer the sky. The neighbours pole home into the murk, called across by children who count them off the way children here count everything, and Ma Skeel sets the kettle on the new-high floor. Grandfer settles into the warm corner at its fresh height and looks out through the black window at the mark on the third stilt.

"There," he says, satisfied. "She'll stop now."

And the water, which will not stop, laps the third stilt in the dark, patient as it has always been. And the house above it is warm, and lit, and dry, and entirely unhurried — and that, not the winning, which was never on offer, is the whole art of the Drownings.