Marta and the Tide

The cry came up through the floor before Marta saw what made it, thin and wrong under the noise of the water. She was at the window with the kettle cold and the log open to nothing, and she stopped with the pencil still in her hand and looked down.

The sea had come up two hours early. The forecast said afternoon. It was not afternoon. Grey water folded over the low rocks at the base of Gull Rock in slabs, and where the stone split into a gap above the old landing, something small and dark was jammed, lifting its head each time the swell fell back and losing it each time the swell came in.

A young one. Alone. The gap filled and drained, filled and drained, and each time, the filling took longer to leave.

Marta laid the pencil in the crease of the page and went to the radio bolted to the wall. Her hand was on it before she had decided anything. The card taped beside it was yellow at the edges now, the print gone soft, and she knew every line without reading. The keeper does not leave the tower unmanned during a storm. There was no comma of exception in it. There was no small print about a seal.

The fishing boats were out. Six of them, maybe seven, strung along the coast, and when the dark came down early like this they came home by her light and nothing else. That was the entire job. That was why there was a cottage and a stove and a paycheck on the fourth of the month. A keeper who wasn’t in the tower was not a keeper. It was the one clean fact she had left.

She thought of the review board on the mainland, the three of them with the folder, deciding whether a machine could do this cheaper. She thought: a machine would not be at this window at all. A machine would let the little thing drown and log nothing, because there would be nothing to log.

The pup went under and came up coughing.

Marta keyed the radio.

“This is Gull Rock.” Her voice came out level, which surprised her. “Coast guard station, this is Gull Rock. I’m leaving the tower. I’m going down the stairs to the water. There’s a pup trapped at the base and the tide’s got it. I know what that means. I’m saying it so it’s on the line.”

A pause with sea in it. Then the operator, young, she thought, a night voice, came back. “Gull Rock, say again? You’re leaving the light?”

“I’m leaving the light.”

“Marta.” So he knew her. They all knew her. “Marta, listen to me. If you log that, you’re done. There’s no board decision after that. Nobody who walks out of that tower in a storm keeps the post. Doesn’t matter the reason. You understand what I’m telling you. Stay put. We’ll come when we can cross.”

“You can’t cross,” she said. “You know you can’t cross this.”

Static.

“It’ll be over the rocks in ten minutes,” she said. “You can’t be here in ten minutes. Log the time, please. I’m going.”

She let go of the button before he could answer, because if she waited she might listen to him, and he was right, and being right didn’t reach the gap in the rocks either.

The rope hung on its hook by the door where it had hung since before her, stiff and salted white. She took it. She took nothing else, because there was nothing else that would help.

The stairs down to the water were iron, open, bolted to the outside of the rock, and the spray had them slick as soap. She went down with one hand skinned along the rail and the other holding the coil, and the wind got under her coat and tried to open her like a page. Halfway, the sea threw itself up the steps and she stopped and pressed her whole body to the rail and let it wash past her waist and pull, actually pull, at her knees, and then she went on down into it.

At the bottom there was no landing anymore. There was water where the landing had been, and the split in the rock a body-length out, and the pup in the split.

She wet the rope in her hands to soften it and worked toward the gap with the swell shoving her sideways. Close up, the pup was worse than from the window. Its eyes were rolled and its flippers braced against both walls of the crevice the way a frightened thing braces, which was the very thing wedging it in. She talked to it, nonsense, low, the way you’d talk to anything. She got the loop down past its shoulders and under the front flippers on the second try, the water at her chest now, cold enough to bring her breath in bites.

She pulled.

It didn’t move. She set her heels against the rock and hauled with her back and her legs and everything left in her after fifty-eight years and the climb down, and the pup screamed and stayed. It was swollen with its own panic, jammed by its own bracing, and the sea filled the gap and lifted her feet off the bottom so she had nothing to pull against but water.

She got a breath and went under and put her shoulder to the pup’s flank to unbend it, to fold those braced flippers in, and for a moment she felt it give. Then the swell came in hard over the top of both of them and drove her back and the wet rope tore out through her fists and the pup was gone from her hands, back into the dark of the gap, deeper.

She came up with nothing. She had spent the tower and the cottage and the fourth of the month and the whole clean fact of herself, said it out loud on a line that recorded, and she was going to lose the pup anyway. Her arms wouldn’t close. The next swell would have her too if she stayed low, and she was too tired to be high.

The water beside her broke open.

Something rose out of it the size of a man, bigger, black and streaming, and Marta went still the way you go still when the worst thing finally shows up on schedule.

It was a seal. Full grown. Enormous. Its head turned and one wet eye held her, close enough that she saw the old ragged scars along its side, and she waited for it to drive her under.

It drove itself under the wave instead.

It put its whole long body against the rock between her and the open sea, laid itself along the run of the swell like a wall thrown up in a doorway, and the water that had been shoving her stopped shoving. In its shadow the surface went almost flat. The gap in the rock, sheltered now, drained and did not refill, and in that sudden quiet Marta got both hands back on the rope and hauled, and this time the pup came out of the stone as if the sea had let go of the other end.

She had it against her chest. It was heavier than it had cried. The stairs were underwater now, and she did not have another climb in her arms, and she knew it.

The big seal turned in the calm it was making. It pushed its blunt head against the pup, once, moving it higher onto Marta’s shoulder, and then it came around behind her and pressed the great weight of itself against her back and pushed. Not gently. Enough. She found the bottom step with her foot because the thing behind her put her there. Then the next. It stayed low in the water and shoved her up out of it step by step, its shadow going with them and the sea staying flat inside that shadow, until her boots came down on iron that had air under it, and then stone, and then the door.

She looked back once from the top. The seal was already low and dark and turning out to the grey. It did not look up.

Inside, the tower was as she had left it. The light was turning. The stove still held its heat. She got the pup down onto the coats by the fire and knelt over it and rubbed water out of its coat with a blanket until it stopped shaking in that loose, terrible way and started shaking in a smaller, better one, and pushed its nose blindly against her wrist. Its eyes had come back into its head. She stayed on her knees longer than she needed to, dripping, her hands not quite working, until she was sure it would keep breathing without being watched.

Then she stood up and looked at the log.

It lay open on the ledge where she’d left it, the pencil in the crease, the page white. Nobody had seen the stairs. The radio call, she could say the set failed, that the storm ate the hour, that she’d been in the tower doing her job the whole time and there was no way to prove otherwise because there wasn’t. The board had the folder and the folder had nothing in it yet. A blank hour looked like an hour when nothing happened. A blank page kept the cottage.

She picked up the pen instead of the pencil, because the pencil could be argued with later and the pen could not, and she uncapped it.

She wrote the date. She wrote the time she had left the tower, as near as she knew it. She wrote: went down to the water. She wrote why, the pup in the rocks, the tide. She wrote that she had left the light unmanned and for how long, and she did not soften any of it and did not put in the seal, because the seal was not the board’s business and would not be believed, and she signed her name under it the way she signed it every dawn.

She set the pen down.

Only then, kneeling again to feed the fire, did she look properly at the pup’s mother, and she knew now it was the mother, as the memory came up on its own without being called. The scars along that flank. And near the edge of one flipper, an old notch healed pale, a clean straight cut that the sea does not make.

She had made it. A long time ago, a girl on these same rocks with a knife too big for her hands, sawing at green net where a young seal lay drowning in it with the tide coming, certain the whole time it would turn and take her arm off, cutting anyway until the last strand went and the thing slid free into the water and did not look back then either.

She sat between the fire and the window with the pup breathing against her leg and said nothing. There was no one to say it to.

The storm went over near midnight. She felt it go, the wind dropping its shoulder, the window ceasing to shudder. She went up and checked the light and it was turning, steady, throwing its arm out over water that was only water again, and one by one along the black coast she counted the small hard points of the boats coming in, all of them, home by her light.

She left the log open on the ledge by the radio so the morning boat could take it in, the signed page facing up. She warmed a little milk and poured it into two saucers, the big one for the pup and a small one for herself, out of an old habit of not eating alone, and set them on the stone by the fire.

She did not know what the board would decide. It sat in her chest like a stone she’d have to carry down some other morning, and she thought she would not sleep with it there.

She sat down in the chair between the fire and the window, and the pup put its head on her foot, and the light went round, and round, and she found that she could.