The rope at low tide

The cart gave a hard sideways jump, and the crate struck the causeway stones with a sound Mae felt through her boots. Silas caught the empty handles before they followed it over the southern edge. One wheel stood upright. The other lay flat beneath the cart, its axle broken at the hub.

For a moment all three of them looked at the crate. Stenciled on its side were the words BEACON HOUSE CLINIC. Its lid was still fastened, though one iron handle had pulled away enough to show a line of fresh wood.

Silas had brought it from the harbor in his cart. He looked back toward the mainland, where the west slip was still clear of water. “I’ll fetch the dock barrow.”

“Fetch someone to help with it,” said Rusk.

Silas left the cart where it stood and ran. His boots slapped the dark stones until the bend hid him.

Mae wished he had stayed. Two more hands would have been useful, and Silas knew exactly what she had said at the harbor when Rusk asked whether she knew the way across.

Every part of it.

She knew the causeway from the slip to the first bend. Beyond that she knew its shape from the harbor wall and from an old chart pinned beside the tide board. The chart showed the main road climbing a low hump where Silas’s cart now lay, then running east to the steps below the lighthouse. On the north side, a narrower line of stones curved past an abandoned net shed and rejoined the road nearer the west slip. South of the road was open water even at low tide.

The north line was supposed to give them a second way home. Mae had never set foot on it.

Rusk rested a hand on the crate lid. He had piloted the ferry before Mae was born and still wore his old blue coat, though the cuffs had gone soft and gray. “We can leave the cart. Box is the thing.”

At the lighthouse, a woman in a yellow apron stood on the upper terrace watching them. She was too far away to hear. Behind her, Beacon House rose white against a bank of cloud. The clinic occupied two rooms at its base. For a week it had been borrowing a lamp from the keeper’s kitchen, and the crate held its replacement along with other ordered equipment. The harbor punt could take supplies over on a calm flood tide, but it lay grounded now, and a squall was coming in from the west.

Mae knelt by the crate. One end had sunk into a mat of weed. Its leaves looked black until she pressed them aside and saw green shining through. Cold rope from her shoulder coil slipped across her wrist.

“The net shed way is firmer,” she said. “We can get the box back toward the slip and wait for Silas.”

Rusk looked north. “You’ve taken it?”

“Plenty.”

He accepted that with a nod. Mae picked at a knot in her rope, though nothing was wrong with it.

Rusk pointed to the western edge of the hump. “Water’s below the third white mark. We’ve time to get it off.”

The marks were painted on a square post at the road’s edge. At low tide the lowest two stood in the air. Now a small wave washed over the bottom one and fell away. Mae’s watch read ten past ten. When they had left the harbor, the tide board had given low water as nine forty.

Rusk took the sound handle and Mae took the other, keeping her fingers clear of the loose iron. They lifted. The weight surprised her. Something inside slid heavily toward her end, and the handle rang against its fitting.

“Put it down,” Rusk said.

They lowered it. He studied the cart’s remaining wheel, tested it with his boot, and pulled the broken axle free. “The rim’s sound. We can turn the cart on its side and carry the weight on that wheel.”

Mae looked at the thin dark split running from one of its spokes. “I don’t think it is.”

“Dried paint. I know these wheels.”

They got the crate onto the tilted cart. For the first few yards, the wheel rolled and Mae took enough weight at the handles to keep the crate level. Then the rim opened at the split. The cart tipped, and she had to let the handles go or follow the box over the edge. It struck the stones, slid a short distance, and stopped with its loose handle hanging outward.

Rusk stood over the wheel. The split had opened wide enough to take his thumb. “You saw it.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

He kicked the wheel aside, not hard. “Tell me next time.”

Mae wound the rope back over her shoulder. She opened her mouth to mention his test, then crouched by the crate and felt along its lid. One corner had separated, though the fastenings held.

Without the cart, they moved it by lifting one end, advancing it a few steps, then setting it down and taking the other. The northern spur began where three taller stones stood like broken teeth. Its surface rose above the main road, dry except where weed lay in slick patches.

“This way,” Mae said.

Rusk followed. Twice he stopped to catch his breath. Mae could feel him watching the ground she chose, and each time she spoke before he could ask.

“It stays high past the shed.”

From the harbor she had always seen the shed roof beyond a narrow black ridge. Up close, the roof was missing. Only two walls remained. The stones between them and the causeway had fallen into a channel full of brown water.

Mae stopped so abruptly that Rusk nearly walked into her. Across the channel, the spur continued for perhaps twenty yards before joining the west road. There was no place to carry the crate across.

“Where did you last walk it?” Rusk asked.

She stared at a fresh face of stone under the water. Part of the ridge had fallen since the chart was drawn. Rusk waited for her answer.

Behind them, water washed around one of the three tall stones. Their route to the hump was still bare, but its lowest seam had begun to shine.

“Back,” Rusk said.

They lifted the crate again. On the return, Mae’s heel went sideways on weed. She kept hold of her end until her knee hit stone. The crate dropped from Rusk’s hands, struck on its damaged corner, and came to rest against her boot.

He helped her stand. Her knee hurt, but it held her weight. They carried the crate back to the main causeway, where Rusk set it down and bent with his hands on his thighs.

Mae’s watch read ten thirty-four. She looked toward the west slip. They had moved the crate perhaps fifty yards from the broken cart and brought it all the way back.

“I saw that spur from a boat,” she said. “I hadn’t walked it.”

Rusk straightened slowly. “You should have told me at the slip.”

“I know.”

A low sound came from the lighthouse terrace. The woman in the yellow apron was blowing a horn. She pointed west, then raised her hand over her head.

Behind Mae, gulls wheeled above the harbor wall. They were calling one moment and silent the next. A gray edge advanced beneath the clouds, dimming the mainland houses one by one.

Rusk looked at the painted post. Water touched the second mark. He looked east along the road to the lighthouse steps, then west toward the slip.

“We carry it west,” he said. “Silas will meet us.”

They got the crate between them. Wind reached the hump first, pressing Mae’s coat against her legs. At the western edge of the hump, beside the painted post, the road narrowed. Water poured over from the north and ran in a thin sheet across the stones toward the south. Rusk stopped.

“That shouldn’t be here yet.”

Mae had been watching the marks on the post. “It’s still below the third.”

“I was counting from the south face.” He looked north, where a dark channel cut through the exposed flats. Water was moving up it toward them. “They opened that channel last spring.”

He had told her about the harbor work when they set out. Neither of them had mentioned the causeway.

The crate’s weight pulled at Mae’s fingers. The west slip was visible beyond the bend, its upper stones pale and dry. Silas was there with another man and the dock barrow. They had stopped at the water crossing the road.

Rusk lifted his end. They carried the crate to the flowing sheet. Water pushed weed along it in clumps. Mae stepped forward, felt stone under her boot, and took another step. The crate knocked against her knee. Rusk was still behind her, waiting for a firm place to set his foot.

Silas called something. Wind stripped the words away.

Mae took one more step. At her side, the loose handle tore free with a rusty ring. The crate dropped. Its lid split at the corner, and one sealed paper parcel slid out into the water. Mae caught it against her shin. The paper softened under her hand. She put it back inside the crate and looked at Rusk.

He was braced on the higher stone, both hands empty. Between them and the slip, water had begun to run through the road’s joints.

“We can come back with the barrow,” she said.

Rusk shook his head. “Silas can’t bring it through now.”

Mae looked east. The steps to Beacon House were much farther than the slip, and the horn sounded again above them. The woman on the terrace had come down as far as the upper landing. She waved both arms toward the mainland.

The crate sat askew in the water. Mae could still lift one end of it. She imagined Rusk taking the other, the two of them gaining ten yards before they needed to stop, then ten more while the road vanished beneath their boots.

She let go.

“Go,” she said.

Rusk hesitated only long enough to pull the empty coil from Mae’s shoulder. “I’m behind you.”

They left the crate on the hump. Mae went first through the shallow water, keeping to the stones she could see. It rose over her boot tops near the bend. Silas came toward them from the slip, but Rusk shouted for him to stay where he was. By the time Mae reached dry stone, Silas was close enough to catch her arm.

The other man helped Rusk up. Rain came hard a few seconds later. From the slip, Mae watched a wave turn the crate against the painted post. Its broken corner dipped. Then rain hid the hump altogether.

---

By evening the squall had passed, but water still covered the causeway. Silas brought Mae a dry coat at the dock office. She sat beside the tide board while he told her that the woman at Beacon House had gone back inside after seeing them reach the slip.

“You could send over what happened,” he said. “She’ll be waiting on that box.”

Mae took a pencil and wrote the time of the axle break, the failed wheel, the route they had tried, and where they had left the crate. She began a line saying the net shed spur had collapsed since the last crossing. Then she crossed out the last three words.

Rusk, sitting across the room with his shoes by the stove, watched her. “Put the north channel in too. I thought we had longer.”

Mae added it. Beneath that she wrote that she had claimed to know the spur and had not walked it. Silas read the page before taking it to the harbor office, where the clerk would send the account to Beacon House by lamp signal.

The next morning was clear. With water still covering the causeway stones, the harbor punt could pass above them. Rusk took its helm, with Silas and Mae aboard. A length of lime rope hung from Mae’s wrist, cold where the spray had reached it.

They found the crate jammed against the painted post. The lid had come away. One inner case lay beneath it, its metal sides dented but closed; a second had caught among the stones nearby. The lamp housing was broken. Several paper parcels had burst, their contents spread through the weed.

Rusk reached toward Mae’s coil. “We could bring the box too.”

Mae looked at the handle that remained. It hung from a single bent fitting, and the wood around it had swollen away from the iron. Yesterday she would have put a loop there before he finished asking.

“The cases,” she said. “Leave the box until the stones are bare. I don’t trust that handle.”

Rusk kept his hand out for a moment. Then he drew it back and held the punt steady while Silas lifted the two closed cases aboard. Silas put the broken lamp housing on the floor beside his boots.

They rocked against each other on the bench. Mae knotted her lime rope around them and secured them where they sat. She checked both cases with her hands before stepping away. Rusk watched without reaching to change the knot.

Silas asked about the loose parcels. Mae looked at their torn seals and shook her head. They left them for the water to uncover at the next ebb.

At Beacon House, the clinic attendant met them at the landing. Her name was Iona Vale. She recognized the metal cases as soon as Silas set them down. She did not touch either one until Mae told her where they had been found.

“The lamp?” Iona asked.

“Broken,” Mae said. “The other parcels were open in the water. These two were closed when we picked them up.”

Iona drew a pencil from the pocket of her yellow apron and wrote on the delivery sheet against the landing wall. She opened neither case there. When she finished, she handed the sheet to Mae to read.

Mae checked the two case numbers against Iona’s sheet, then signed beside the listed losses. The written account sent from the harbor lay folded under Iona’s pencil.

“The keeper’s lamp will have to stay another week,” Iona said. “He’s asked for it back twice.”

Mae carried one case up to the clinic door. Iona carried the other and called inside for someone to clear a shelf. The broken lamp stayed below in the punt. Mae could see its bent housing beside Silas’s boots.

When she came down, Rusk was holding the bow off the landing with an oar. He nodded toward the causeway, where the top of the painted post had appeared above the falling water.

“The cart at the next low water?” he asked.

Mae kept a hand on the rail. “We walk out without the barrow first. See what’s still there.”

He looked at the broken lamp, then made room for her on the bench. “You take the first look.”

She did not sit until he shifted his knee farther aside. Her own knee was stiff from yesterday, and she needed the space. Rusk waited while she lowered herself. Then he held the bow steady until Silas had cleared the landing. The lime rope lay between the places where the two cases had been; Mae gathered it into her lap as Rusk turned the punt toward home.