Teague Mollard’s Missing Word

The signal pole on the Saltmarrow landing stayed bare for thirty-four minutes, and for all thirty-four of them Teague Mollard sat on the bottom step of the cliff stair counting on his fingers and coming up one short.

Orla Benbow stood above him with her shawl pinned at the throat. She did not prompt him. She couldn’t have if she’d wanted to; his name was his, and the only place it lived was behind his own forehead, where it had mislaid its ninth word somewhere between breakfast and the tide.

“Write it down this once,” he said. “I’ll burn it on the far side.”

“You said that last spring. I’ve still got the taste of that paper in my memory, never mind yours.”

The pole went up at last with the Antswarm’s pennant on it, and the boatman began calling two drops and seven-tenths a span over the wind, dear enough that a fish-wife turned round and climbed back up. Teague’s fare was in his pocket. Eight words were in his head, then a hole, then three more.

He watched the Antswarm’s boat fill and cast off without him. Then he took his hand out of his pocket, left the coins in it, and asked Orla for another season in the cold rooms.

She made him say the eight, and the three, and the hole, out loud every morning until the hole had a word in it.