Sect Year 5 · second month · night of day 2 · the forty-second life: Pallow, her forty-fourth year
Jenne waded out to the float line in the last of the light. The families had gone up the stones, and the water had taken on the dull sheen of the dusk. Only Bett stayed, a dark shape on the highest step with her shawl drawn tight, and two of the boys who would not go home until they had seen what happened. They whispered to each other with their hands cupped.
“Is she going to drown?” one of them said.
“She’s only holding on,” said the other, sure of nothing.
Jenne went in to the knee. The cold closed on her shins like a clamp, and as she moved it climbed her thighs and settled in her hips. The shelf fell away under her boots. Then the water was at her elbow. The float line ran past her hand in a thin dark strand, and she could feel through the cord that the knot was down there, twelve deep-water lengths under the float. She held the net to the rock.
It was Sim’s knot. She knew it the way she knew the weight of a full pot. She had never once watched him tie it. He had tied it on the last good morning while she was in the drying yard with her back to the water. She had thought nothing of it, as one thinks nothing of a husband’s…
