Gathering the Water

by Robert Edric

  I am a man between elements, just as this place is, a man who has long since ceased to hug the shore and who has cast himself out into deeper waters to navigate the shoals and reefs of uncertainty and deception there, to make new landfall and forever afterwards to wander the wrack between all that lies behind him and all that lies ahead.

  I know these are over-elaborate and convoluted thoughts, but such, increasingly, is the natural cast of my mind.

  There is a stronger draught than usual this evening, and the room will not allow a single good candle to burn without it constantly spitting and guttering, and the result of this – this crop of flattened pearls – lies scattered on my table like windfall fruit around its tree.

  Is there a valid distinction to be drawn, I wonder, between a man despising himself for what he is, what he has allowed himself to become, and another man despising himself for the excuses he makes?

  These winds and the cold seeping into my bones are once again death to all clear and rational thought.

  53

  Mary Latimer’s floating corpse was eventually sighted two days later by a man crossing the dam who saw it thirty feet below him on the rising level, face down and close to the wall, and moving slowly back and forth in the sluggish current there.

  I was not sent for; a miner I encountered told me what had happened.

  Everyone else was already gathered on the dam or on the shore, and had a single one of them possessed a boat or even a skiff, then the retrieval of the body might have been effected in minutes. Some fell silent at my approach, but others, by far the greater number, did nothing to hide their feelings from me.

  ‘What need would we ever have of boats?’ said the man I asked.

  At that distance the body was not clearly revealed, merely an uncertain shape in the water. There were no women, only men, on the rim of the dam looking down. The few children on the shore were held at a distance by their mothers.

  The men on the dam had ropes, and one, I saw, had made a harness for himself, and his companions were in the process of lowering him as I arrived. I saw how futile the attempt would be. Below them, the body continued to wash back and forth against the dam wall. The man descended only half-way to the water before calling to be pulled back up. He stood breathless, tugging at the ropes which cut into his shoulders, his only real achievement having been to verify that the body was that of Mary Latimer.

  As I approached closer this same man repeated everything to me. I was still their official seal, still their blotter rolled in sanction over every fresh event. He stood waiting for my praise, but I said nothing, and went past him to where the others stood rewinding their ropes.

  I looked over the rim of the dam at the corpse below.

  And where will you go? It is something I prefer not to think about until Martha has gone and I have convinced myself there was nothing I could have done to prevent her going. Have arrangements already been made? Arrangements are always made, you of all people should know that.

  She was still face down. Her legs were spread and only one arm showed. Her head rested closest to the dam and she was sucked gently back and forth by the natural pull of the structure on the water.

  The voices faded around me, and I wondered how many of them had expected or hoped to see my own corpse down there, for I saw only too clearly how much more fitting an ending that would have been in their scheme of things.

  The men still holding the ropes stood undecided about what to do next. One of them held an iron hook, and he suggested grappling for the body, snagging it and then pulling it to the shore. Another suggested returning to the shore and throwing the hook from there, but I saw how unlikely this was to succeed. The body lay at least fifty yards from the shallows, and the hook and rope were heavy.

  Eventually, the man holding the hook looked to me for advice, and I recommended the first plan. Others nodded in agreement with this, and in the midst of this concurrence the man came to me and handed me the hook.

  ‘You do it,’ he said, making it clear to me that I still had some unavoidable involvement in the matter. It was a small trap and I had entered it.

  I took the rope and went back to the edge. The body below had not moved.

  My first instinct was to throw the hook into the water further out, let it sink and then draw it towards me until it caught on the corpse, but I saw what damage this might do, and so instead I lowered it down the slope of the dam, letting it slide over the blocks until it swung only a few feet above the body. A woman on the shore started wailing and her voice was echoed by others; several of the children began to cry.

  I expected further advice on how best to secure the body, but the men beside me remained silent and watchful.

  I unwound several more coils until the hook disappeared beneath the surface of the water. I calculated how many days had passed since Mary Latimer had gone missing. It was at least fifteen, possibly closer to twenty. I tried to imagine what that length of submersion would do to flesh and bone, and I was grateful, looking down, that she remained partially clothed.

  My first attempt to secure her was a failure. I let the hook sink alongside her until the rope rested against her shoulder, but then I lifted it too quickly and it came up out of the water without catching her.

  As I made my second attempt, it resumed snowing, a fine, sifting snow which covered us all in its powder and melted into the lake below.

  This time I let the hook draw beneath Mary Latimer’s outstretched arm, and feeling the drag of the rope against her, I pulled more sharply upwards. I had expected some resistance, and then for the rope to remain taut, but again I had been over-optimistic, and instead of catching in the corpse, the hook came through it, perhaps tearing it in the chest or beneath the arm, before rising out of the water with a piece of cloth attached. The rope felt loose for an instant, and then the hook fell back, striking Mary Latimer on her head and causing the whole of her upper body to sink beneath the surface. There were further cries from the shore, and this time from the men beside me.

  I pulled the hook back out of the water and waited for the waves to subside and for the corpse to become still. I thought for a moment, watching it hang suspended beneath the surface, that it might not come back up at all, that my clumsy exertions might have been enough to send it back to the depths and for it to remain there.

  But eventually it settled on the surface and the ripples around it died. I let more of the rope sink beneath it, and then moved several paces to one side, so that on this occasion when I struck I would be striking into her chest, her ribs, where the hook might lodge more firmly. These were all silent calculations, and I believe every man beside me made them.

  This time the rope rose beside her neck and the hook found some purchase beneath her, and feeling it connect, I gave several shorter tugs, forcing it deeper into whatever it held. Thus caught, Mary Latimer spun and rolled, and for the first time she was turned face up to us, her head a foot beneath the water, but thankfully the surface was so broken by her motions that none of us, neither I nor the watching men beside me, could see her clearly.

  The man closest to me told me to start pulling. Others began walking back across the dam. The shore would need to be cleared. I, too, began to walk, knowing that with every step I took the hook might yet come loose and everything would have to be attempted again. I knew myself incapable of doing any more than I had already done.

  I moved slowly, testing the grip, and watching as the body below began to float along the dam wall.

  It turned as it came. Her arm rose above the surface, her limp hand held in the semblance of a wave. The rope then wrapped itself around her neck, further securing her. Her legs rose and fell as they were dragged behind her, looking from above as though she were moving them of her own accord.

  It took several minutes to drag her the length of the dam. I descended to the new shore. The women and children were held back. The snow began to fall more heavily, cutting out the wider view.

  Two men waded
into the shallows to retrieve the body. They had once been shepherds and each man held a crook. I stopped pulling and the corpse continued to the shore under its own momentum. I let the rope fall into the sludge at my feet.

  I stood alone, but rather than go to join those gathering in the shallows, I climbed back up the steps of the dam to stand above them.

  The upper and the lower valley were now hidden by the falling snow, and nothing of the wider surroundings or of the sky above was visible. All I could see was the small, lost world beneath me. I tried to look beyond this, but saw only as far as its white, shrouded edges where the gulls still hovered disturbed and ghostlike above the water, fading and then magically reappearing as they came and went through the falling snow.

  The men on the shore finally reached the body. The other watchers came closer. All Mary Latimer’s remaining clothes had been stripped from her by the water. The crying women and children were no longer held back.

  I turned from the distant, closing view back to the silent drama beneath me. I saw the outspread corpse at its centre. I saw too the frayed rope still tied to one of Mary Latimer’s ankles, her face and her nakedness now covered in decency by a dark cloth, beneath which the water streamed from her and lay around her in a pool, making her an island amid the wet.

  54

  Five more days have passed, and it has snowed with increasing vigour during that time. It falls even when the sky looks ready to grow clear, but then darkens again with the trigger of the sun. Sometimes there is a wind and the powder is driven into the smallest spaces and piled in mounds higher than a standing man. At other times it falls in a stillness of large flakes which hang in the air as though reluctant to settle and forsake the intricacies of their individual designs.

  As long predicted, I am trapped in my house here. Beneath me, the pattern of walls and enclosures along the valley sides is lost in the all-encompassing whiteness; peaks are rounded and depressions filled, and a whole new aspect is created. A man might guess at the lost paths, but he can no longer align himself to familiar landmarks and know his way for sure.

  Only the unfrozen lake shows dark through the white, stretching now in every direction as though it had been there since Creation.

  Christmas and the New Year have come and gone in the weather, and I am reminded of the tales of Arctic explorers wintering in their vessels caught in the ice, locked solid, slowly crushed and starved, and yet still celebrating these holidays, still putting on their pantomimes and lantern shows.

  I see again and again how I have been used here as the world around me has been altered and shaped to the profit and loss of water.

  My barometer – that grinning Jeremiah of an instrument – mocks me from its place on the wall and has shown not the slightest sign of movement for these past five days.

  I search the night sky in vain for the waning moon and familiar constellations. But just as here below, so too are my celestial guides denied to me.

  55

  In my dream of those nights all is different, of course. In my dream, Mary Latimer’s corpse, instead of being dragged to the shore, rises against the dam and comes up effortlessly out of the water on the end of my rope, and I look down at her, mesmerized by her slow spinning and by the way her arms move back and forth with the motion as though she were performing some dreaming dance of the dead. And in my dream I again become anxious that the hook will come loose and that she will fall and this time sink for ever into the depths and never afterwards be retrieved. Ice has already sealed shut the place from which she has risen and the falling snow is turning the surface beneath her white.

  She absorbs the twisting motion of the rope as she rises, her head tipping back and falling loosely from side to side, as though she were searching the rim above her for the face of her rescuer. The spinning motion of her arms gradually slows and stops, and then they begin to flap gently, rising and falling from her sides as though she were a swimmer not yet come to the surface, but calm, and sure of her arrival there.

  I can see down on to her unclothed breasts. Her legs remain firmly together, joined along their length to her toes, and the water which runs from them falls in a single stream and is feathered to spray beneath her, and she seems almost to rise on this spray, as though the trickling water were the trail of powder behind a rocket or a flare. Her hair, at first plastered close to her face by the water, quickly dries and resumes its more natural shape, falling back from her eyes and her mouth.

  I see all of this looking down at her. I see nothing of the corruption and decay of her time in the water. I see nothing of the river worms and leeches which cling to her flesh in places. I see nothing of the rope still fastened to her ankles.

  She comes up to me at an even, steady pace, and seems an interminable time in coming. So long, in fact, that I have ample time to look around me and to study those on the shore below to see if they too see what I see. They are mostly silent now, but with the occasional uncontainable cry rising above them, and it occurs to me to communicate with them and to ask them for their assistance. But other than look down at them, and they up at me, nothing passes between us.

  Further out, I see the passage of the shadows of clouds on the water, as though giant fish were already swimming close beneath its surface.

  And as she comes higher, so the snow briefly ceases falling and the winter sun rushes in to fill the valley with its bright and searching light, illuminating us all in this drama of impossible resurrection. I see the molten disc itself distort and then re-form on the frozen surface, and I shift my position so that it lies directly beneath her, so that what little water still falls from her falls directly on to the pale orb and fractures it further, and so that, in my dream, in my unknowing imagination at least, I might believe it to be some underwater pedestal upon which she has for so long awaited her rescue, and in whose blinding, healing glow she now rises towards me.

  And so where all of this is most real to me, where my heart beats its wildest in anticipation of what is to happen next, I stand and watch as the drowned woman comes level with the top of the dam, as she rises above it and looks directly at me, as she raises her arm to point to me, and then as she slowly opens her mouth to call out to me that she is saved and that I am her saviour, but where instead of the words there comes only more of the same dark water pouring like bile from her lips.

  I wake then, in the dead of the night, my bedclothes in disarray on the floor beside me, and as the kaleidoscopic fragments of dream, memory and reality slowly reassemble themselves into a shape more closely resembling what has truly happened, I find myself gasping for air, as though I and not she had just then struggled to the surface, lungs fit to burst, filmed with sweat and not water where I burned, and unable to control to even the slightest degree the violent tremor of my shaking chest and limbs.