What the Tide Refused

There was an argument, of course. Villages are made of arguments the way walls are made of stones, and Carrow had been stacking this particular one for a very long time without ever needing to finish it. It happened in the mill, because the mill was the largest dry room in the village and because my father, by setting the bowl on his own table, had made himself the man the question belonged to. The salt sat between us all evening, white in the lamplight, and people came and looked at it and went away and came back, and the talk went round and round like the wheel outside. Old Henrik the boatwright said the obvious thing first. He said that nothing had been taken because nothing had been owed, and that perhaps the debt was simply finished, paid off at last, and we should be glad and go home. A few people liked that. It is a comfortable thought, that a debt could end quietly, without a final letter, without anyone coming to collect. My grandmother, who was very old by then and sat closest to the fire, did not like it at all. She said that a debt that ends sends back nothing. A debt that ends, you simply stop being asked. She said that salt returned was not the same as salt unrequested. Salt returned was a message. And a message, she said, has to be answered, or the silence that follows it is worse than the message. "Answered how?" said Henrik. "Someone goes down," said my grandmother, "and stands at the water, and asks what we have failed to pay." The room did not like that. I watched them not like it. They were good people, Carrow people, and not one of them was a coward, but there is a difference between facing a storm at sea, which is a thing you understand, and walking down to a tideline at night to ask a question of the water. The first is danger. The second is something with no name, and people will face almost anything sooner than face the thing with no name. "And who," said Henrik at last, "goes down?" That was the real argument, and it lasted past midnight, and I will not write all of it, because most of it was men talking themselves slowly out of a thing they had already decided not to do. The lots were suggested. The drawing of straws. The sending of the priest, who was a kind man from inland and had never carried the tithe in his life and went pale at the very idea. The sending of the strongest, the sending of the eldest, the sending of no one at all and the locking of the bowl in the church and the praying that next autumn would go better. I sat in the corner by the flour sacks and I listened, and somewhere in the third hour of it I understood a thing that made my stomach go cold and steady at the same time. It was already decided. It had been decided the moment my father said someone will have to go down and ask. Because the tithe was carried by the same hands every year, and had been for three years, and the sea knew those hands. The sea had taken the measure from those hands and set the bowl higher up the sand each morning, scoured clean, as if to say, yes, you, I know you, you are the one who brings it. If Carrow sent anyone else, the water would not know them. The water would not answer a stranger. It would only answer the hands it had been doing business with. I stood up. I was not brave. I want that written down plainly, because the songs they made afterward have me brave, and I was not. I was seventeen and my mouth was dry and my knees were no better than my mother's. But I was the one the sea knew, and a debt is not paid by the brave. It is paid by the one whose name is on it. "I'll go," I said, and the whole room turned to look at me, and not one of them said no, and that was how I learned exactly how frightened they all were.