Sect Year 4 · fourth month · night of day 3 · the thirty-sixth life: Wrack Ledge, her fifty-second year
She scraped one seam a season. That was the arrangement she had made with herself in the first autumn after the keel, and she kept to it for twenty years. In the dry months she worked the port side, and in the wet months the starboard. Each time she finished a seam she tied a knot in the cord at her belt, a small hard knot, so she could feel the count go up.
The knots gathered slowly along the cord. By the time the planking reached the gunwale there were more of them than she cared to count with her fingers, and there were still seams left to scrape.
Nobody on the shoal asked her why it took so long. The village had seen worse work. Boats were finished here in pieces, one season at a time, and the men who ran the salt-trains down the coast road said a hull was never done until the tide had tested it. Ilke did not argue with them. She only kept scraping.
Once an old woman from the salt-pans stopped at the stern to watch. She asked how many seams were left. Ilke said she didn’t know. “Then you’ll be scraping when I’m dead,” the old woman said, with some satisfaction, and went on along the planking toward her husband’s boat. Ilke scraped the seam in front of her and thought…
