Signal and Soil

The ferry dock at Broadhaven still had its old-world bones sticking up out of the water, and every time I came down here with a cart of grain I tried not to look at the rusted hulk of the container ship wedged in the shallows, because looking at it always put me in a mood I didn't need before a sales day. The energy collapse hit this coast ten years back, when I was eighteen and skinny in a way I don't remember fondly, and the whole shoreline changed shape after that, harbors silted up, roads cracked into garden paths, and people like my family learned to grow food sideways on hills because flat land was a rumor nobody believed anymore.

Our terraces climb the headland in long green steps, forty rows of barley and oats and beans, and I built half of those steps with my own two hands, hauling stone and digging drainage ditches until my shoulders turned into something a sculptor might charge money for. The work made me proud, real proud, the kind of proud you feel when you stand at the top row and look down at what used to be scrub and bramble and now feeds three hundred people, but it also made me broad, and I never quite made peace with that part. My arms are thick, my waist is thick, my thighs could crack a walnut, and there's a soft roll at my belly that never left no matter how many stones I carried, and some mornings in the washhouse mirror I looked like exactly what I was, a farmer built like a hay bale, and it sat wrong in me in ways I couldn't explain without sounding ungrateful.

My ma always said a body is just the tool the work picks for you, and I believed her on most days, but believing a thing and feeling it are two different crops, and only one of them comes in reliable.

* * *

I hauled my sacks down to the co-op hall on a grey Tuesday, the sixth of the month, and I was twenty-eight years old and knew better than to expect the world to hand me anything easy, so when the notice board by the ferry office had a new paper on it I read it twice before I let myself get angry. Ferry Workers United, all chapters, indefinite action until wage talks conclude, no sailings, no exceptions, no cargo, and underneath it somebody had written in pencil, sorry folks, which somehow made it worse. I stood there doing arithmetic I didn't like, because I had four sacks of surplus barley to sell, a ledger that needed the money, and a home port two days up the coast that I now couldn't reach except by walking cliffs that would break an ankle and a cart axle in the same afternoon.

"Well, that's my week ruined," I said to nobody, and nobody agreed with me, which was about the level of support I'd come to expect.

The co-op hall was packed, and packed is a strong word for a room that used to be a surf shop before the collapse, all salvaged boards stacked along the walls like firewood somebody loved, and the back rooms behind a locked partition that the co-op had never gotten keys for. Every stranded traveler, trader, and fisher in Broadhaven seemed to be in there, arguing about beds and boat shares and whether the strike committee would take riders from outside the union, and I wedged myself and my grain sacks into a corner near the trading desk and tried to look like somebody who belonged there and wasn't quietly panicking about her ledger.

That's when I heard the argument by the partition, a tall man with sandy hair going grey at the temples early, thirty-one maybe, dressed like someone who climbed towers for a living because his knees had paint scuffs and his jacket had a radio clipped to the strap. He was leaning over the desk with a paper in his fist, talking at a dockhand named Perch, who I knew from previous trips like someone who could sleep standing up and often did.

"I filed the report Friday, Perch, Friday, and you told me it'd be in the lost property locker by Monday," the tall man said, tapping the paper on the counter. "It's Tuesday. I've got a tower inspection at Marrow Point on Saturday and the ferry office won't even let me on a boat that isn't sailing to show my credentials."

Perch shrugged with the enthusiasm of a man being asked to move a mountain with a spoon. "The locker's not ours, Foster. That whole back partition belongs to the old surf shop lease, and nobody's had a key since before the collapse. If your passport's in there, it's in there, and that's all I can tell you."

"It can't be in there, it was in my coat, and my coat was on the dock chair, and the dock chair was six feet from your chair, and you were sitting in your chair."

"That's a lot of chairs," Perch said, and a couple of us in the crowd laughed before we could stop ourselves.

The tall man, Foster, apparently, turned around and scanned the crowd with the look of a drowning man checking for flotation devices, and for one horrible second I thought he was going to land on me, and he did, because of course he did, I was the only person in the room standing next to a stack of grain sacks looking like I had nothing better to do than watch a man lose an argument with a chair.

"You," he said, pointing at me. "You came in on the morning ferry, the milk run from the north terraces. Did you see anything on the dock? A coat, brown, canvas?"

I thought about it, honest, and then I did see it, a brown canvas coat left folded on the bench by the ticket window, and a dockhand kid, Denna's boy, Wills, picking it up and carrying it back toward the partition doors with that look kids get when they think nobody's watching. Everybody's always watching. That's the first lesson of small harbors.

"There was a coat," I said. "Wills took it inside. He went through the partition door with it, the locked side."

The man closed his eyes like he was praying to a god of paperwork. "The locked side. Of course. Of course it's the locked side." He opened his eyes again and came over to me, hand out, and I shook it and his grip was callused in the pattern of a rope climber. "Colin Foster. Signal engineer, tower maintenance, Marrow Point relay, which will fall over in spirit if not in fact without an inspection, and my passport, my spare radio license, and half my tools are apparently locked in a room that hasn't opened in ten years."

"Robin Harrison," I said. "Farmer, north terraces, and I'm apparently stuck here until the union and the ferry company remember they hate each other less than they hate losing money."

"So we're both marooned," he said, and then he did the thing I didn't expect, which was grin, tired but real, the way a man finds one dry sock in a wet bag. "Well then, neighbor, do you know anybody in this town strong enough to open a door that's been shut for a decade, because I've got a pry bar and a bad attitude and neither of them opens leases."

I looked at my grain sacks, my ledger, my ruined week, and then at this tall tower man with his radio and his lost passport, and something in me that had been sitting heavy since the notice board shifted just a little, like stone settling into place on a terrace wall.

"I'm strong enough," I said. "I move boulders for a living. But if we're breaking into a surf shop, Colin Foster, I want first look at the boards."

Colin Foster looked at me the way people look at a goat that has just offered to do their taxes, and then he laughed, a real laugh, the kind that comes up from the belly and surprises the laugher most of all. "First look at the boards," he repeated, shaking his head. "You break into a decade-old lease with me and your price is surfboards."

"They're not a price, they're a bonus," I said, hoisting my grain sacks onto the counter so Perch could sign them in. "And I've been hauling barley past those stacked boards for three years, Colin. I delivered seed grain to the co-op two springs back and I saw the partition up close. It's not a real lock."

He stopped mid-motion, one hand still on his pry bar. "What do you mean, not a real lock."

"I mean somebody bolted a hasp across the frame and hung a padlock on it, but the hasp screws go into old salt-eaten timber, not into anything structural. The co-op never got keys because the co-op never needed keys. The lock is theater. The door is just a door that somebody asked to be left alone." I signed Perch's ledger with the stub pencil he kept on a string, because that is the level of security Broadhaven runs on, string and trust. "Give me a day with my hands and a pry bar and we don't even need to break anything. We ask the door politely."

Perch leaned both elbows on the counter and regarded us with the expression of a man watching entertainment arrive free of charge. "I didn't hear any of this," he said. "And if the co-op asks, you two picked that lock with the blessing of nobody, because the co-op doesn't want the lease people down the coast writing letters."

"Understood," Colin said, and then, when we were outside in the flat grey light with the gulls yelling over the wedged container ship in the shallows, "Why would the lease people care? The shop's been dead ten years."

"Dead and owned," I said. "Half the coast is like that. Something belongs to somebody who hasn't seen it since the collapse, and the something just sits there until somebody like me needs to store grain in the front half of it." I started walking toward the co-op and he fell in beside me, and I noticed he walked the way tall men walk who spend their days on steel lattice, quick and careful with his feet. "The screwdriver I need is in the co-op's own toolbox, which is the funniest part. We'd be robbing the surf shop with the co-op's blessing and the co-op's tools."

"That's not robbery, that's infrastructure maintenance," he said, and grinned at me again, and I was beginning to learn that grin came out when he'd thought of something he liked. "Robin, I want you to know I appreciate this. I've spent three days being polite at a counter and you've solved it in four sentences."

"I haven't solved anything yet. Wait until the door insults me and I take it personally."

* * *

The back partition was exactly as I remembered it, a plywood door with a hasp and a padlock the size of a fist, rusted orange at the shackle, bolted into timber that had been drinking salt air since before either of us was allowed to vote. Colin crouched with his pry bar and looked at it like it was a transmission tower with a fault, all professional interest, and I knelt beside him and put my fingers on the hasp screws. Two of the four turned with fingers alone. The other two surrendered to the screwdriver in about a minute each, and I am not going to act like I didn't enjoy it, because I did. There is a pleasure in unmaking a thing that some confident person bolted together badly.

"Padlock's just hanging," I said, and lifted the hasp away, and the door swung inward on a hinge that shrieked like a gull with opinions, and there it was, the back room of the old surf shop, dark and smelling of wax and old salt, boards stacked along the far wall in ranks like coffins for very tall thin people.

"Careful," Colin said, ducking in after