The Smell of Lake Water

The lake at low water is a different animal. It lies in its basin like something asleep with the blanket slipped, showing what the blanket is for: the grey margins of cracked mud, the black stubs of the old jetty like pulled teeth, the tide-lines of older summers ringed up the banks in fading watermarks, each one a year the water had kept its counsel. We went down at first light, the three of us, Connor and Celestine and I, by the keeper's path where no window of the house commands, and Pyke was already there, at the boathouse, standing in the mud margin in his boots with his hands behind him, reading the water the way I read a room I am about to clean: for what has been moved.

He looked a long time at Celestine when she came down the bank. I had half-expected objection, the message had said tell no one up the hill, and she was the hill's own child whatever the blood said, and I watched the pale weathered eyes take her in, the walk, the set of the head, the face that thirty years of photographs had taught the county, and something happened in the old man's stillness that I did not understand until much later and record here exactly as it occurred. He took his cap off. He had not taken it off for me. He stood in the mud with his cap in his hands looking at Celestine Ashford as though the low water had shown him something before he had stepped off the path, and he said, in the gravel, half to himself, "There's a look goes about this parish. Comes up in a face maybe twice in a working life. I'll not say whose." And he put his cap back on and was the boatman again, and Celestine, puzzled, let it go by, and I filed it, the way I had filed a Thursday churchyard and a frown like a knife-edge, under the heading I still had no name for, and the file was growing a spine.

He walked us the geography first, unhurried, a keeper's tour of a kingdom in receivership. The boathouse, stone below and black boards above, its floor a stranded beach now that had been under a foot of water every year of my life. The bank where the gravel walk comes down, the bank that was raked. And off the boathouse's seaward corner, where the water still stood black and unwrinkled however low the summer drew it, the hole the parish calls the sink, and Pyke stood at its margin and said what he had come partly to say: "Eighteen foot even in this drought. Springs feed it from under; it never gives up its cold and it never gives up its keeping. If she'd gone in there, girl, they'd have dragged a week for nothing and the verdict would have had no body to be kind about. She was found in the reeds, off yonder, two hundred yard down the wind." He let that sit, watching me do the arithmetic he had done twenty-six years before at this margin with a drag-hook in his hands. "And between here and the reeds the whole shore is shallows. Knee-deep. Less. Water a child could stand up in, and she was a grown strong girl of four-and-twenty." His voice stayed level, which was worse than any breaking. "The county signed for a drowning in a lake, and lakes have a middle, and everybody's mind goes to the middle. Nobody at that inquest asked the one question the water would have answered free of charge: how does a woman drown in the knee-deep, unless the water has help."

The smell came for me then. I had been braced for it since the path, the lake's own breath, weed and cold stone and that green underneath sweetness, the smell that is my whole inheritance, the smell I have carried thirty years as the last of my mother, the smell that ambushed me at sinks and rain-butts and once, terribly, at a christening, and I stood on the cracked mud with it filling me and waited for her to arrive behind it the way she always half-does, the warmth, the lullaby, the shape of a lap. And instead, with the actual lake actually before me, the memory came all the way in, whole, which it had never done in my life, and I understood what I was remembering, and I must write it down now, quickly, or I never will. A door. The cottage door, at night, and cold air off the dark, and the smell, the lake-smell, enormous, filling the doorway the way weather fills it, and my aunt's hands quick, and something dark taken down and away, and being carried back to bed against a heartbeat going too fast. The smell of lake water is not my mother. It never was. It came into my life on a dripping coat at midnight, off a man soaked to the skin with dragging for her, and a child too small for words folded it around the last warmth she had and called it mother, because it was all the night left her to keep. I have kept it thirty years. I stood at the low lake and let the truth of it come, that my one relic of her is actually a relic of the night she died, the smell of the water that took her, worn all my life like a locket with the wrong portrait in it, and Celestine's hand found mine on one side and Connor's shoulder came against mine on the other, and the lake lay there in its drought, keeping its counsel, and I did not weep, quite. The ache is rationed in this account. But the ration came due, and I paid it, there, on the mud, in full.

Pyke gave us his night then, or the bones of it, standing where it happened; the whole of it belongs later in this ledger, where all the nights are laid together, but the bones the low water wanted said were these. He had come to the water late, as he came most nights that autumn, the keeper who could not stay away from a thing he used to tend. From the far bank he had seen a lantern in the boathouse, where no lantern had business, and then no lantern. He had come round the long way, twenty minutes of shore, and found the water off the gravel walk still moving when the night's air was dead calm, and he had gone in to his chest in October dark and dragged with his arms and his boat-hook till past midnight and brought up weed. A man had gone away up the bank as he came round the point, unhurried, a dark shape too far for a face; by the walk of him not a villager, he said, a man who walked like the path belonged to him, and I have had twenty-six years to be tempted into swearing more than that, and I'll not, because my true word is the one thing of mine they never got.

And then he showed us why we had come at low water. The boathouse floor, stranded. The three punts on their trestles, rot gone to lace, and through their ringbolts the chain, his chain, run boat to boat and home to the great staple in the stone, padlocked, rusted since to one solid sculpture of orange, exactly as he had sworn to the coroner's man: all craft chained, none disturbed. He stood over the middle punt a long moment, the low light coming in flat off the mud through the water-doors, and then he crouched, sudden, with a grunt, and rubbed at the chain where it dipped behind the ringbolt, out of a standing man's sight, and went absolutely still, the way Connor goes still, the way we all of us in this story go still, and said, "Fetch me the light."

Connor held the lamp low. And there it was, where no eye standing in a flooded boathouse could ever have fallen in twenty-six years of high water: the third link out from the middle punt's ringbolt was wrong. Not rusted wrong. Made wrong. A repair link, a split shackle of the kind a workshop closes with a hammer, its metal a shade off the chain's own, its rust a different orange, seated in the run of forged links like a false tooth. The chain had been cut. The chain had been cut and the punt taken off it, and the chain had been closed again after with a mended link by somebody with a steward's toolbox and a steward's thoroughness, and the padlock, the padlock Pyke had inspected by lantern and sworn his soul on, had never been touched at all, because you do not need the lock if you have a hacksaw and the night and the knowledge that the boatman checks locks.

Pyke stayed crouched over it a long time. His thumb went over the false link the way Tam's thumb had gone round the cap, and when he spoke it was not to us, and I set it down exactly, because it was the sound of a man's one certainty cracking after a quarter of a century, and such sounds should be recorded where the county can someday hear them.

"All chained and dry," he said. "I told their man that with my hand on my heart, and it was true every way I knew how to know it. They didn't make me lie, girl. They were cleverer. They made my true word do their lying for them, and I've carried it twenty-six years like it was mine." He rose, joint by joint, and turned to me, and the pale eyes had gone to flint, and the last of the stopped man Marisol had known was gone out of them entirely. "A boat went off this chain that night and was put back by morning. That's what the water's been keeping. Now you know why she was found in the reeds and not where the knee-deep took her, and now you know what manner of mind you're hunting." He looked out through the water-doors, across the cracked mud, toward the house on its hill with the sun coming up its windows. "It rakes the bank, it mends the chain, it words the docket. It tidies, girl. You've been calling it a killer. I'll give it its right name for you." The gravel came down to almost nothing. "It's a steward. The question your mother's been waiting in the reeds all this time to have asked is only this: whose."