Seawater and Grief

The tide at Ard Rhun goes out further than anywhere else on the coast, and the glassmakers walk out after it with buckets, which is the first thing any visitor finds ridiculous and the second thing they stop finding ridiculous. You cannot blow saltglass from a barrel of seawater carted up from the harbour. It has to be drawn at the turn, from the flat, by hand, by someone who intends to use it.

Oisín had drawn the morning water for two years and eleven months. He was good at it, which nobody said aloud, because in the Ard Rhun guild the praise for a thing done properly was that nobody mentioned it. He filled six buckets, carried them two at a time up the causeway, and had them on the bench before Master Cadhla came down.

She checked them the way she always did: a finger in each, a taste, a long look at nothing. "Third one's wrong," she said. "Third one's from the same place as the others." "It is not." "It is from four feet to the left of the same place, which is the same place." She tipped it out into the runnel. "Go back. The tide has another twenty minutes in it and you have wasted six of them arguing."

He went back. The flat at that hour was the colour of the inside of a shell, and the wind came off the water carrying the particular cold that Ard Rhun people claim to be able to distinguish from every other cold on the coast. He found a channel he had not drawn from before, half hidden under a shoulder of weed, and filled the bucket, and stood a moment with it heavy against his shin, watching the water settle. It went clear faster than the others had. He had no idea what that meant and did not yet know enough to ask.

The second thing a visitor finds ridiculous is the grief. It goes into the batch — not metaphorically, not as a manner of speaking. A saltglass vessel is drawn water, kelp ash, sand from the black beach, and something the maker gives up while the gather is still hot. Every apprentice is told this on the first day. Every apprentice assumes it is a figure of speech until the first time they watch a piece fail.

Oisín had watched eleven pieces fail. He had made nine of them, which he did not think about more than once or twice a day. The guild kept the failures in a crate behind the annealing oven, and once a season somebody took the crate down to the flat and gave the pieces back to the water at the turn of the tide, and nobody made a ceremony of it, and everybody attended, and afterwards there was bread in the workshop and nobody discussed what had gone into any of the pieces.

He came up the causeway with the corrected bucket. Cadhla put a finger in it, tasted, and said nothing at all, which meant he could start.

The furnace at Ard Rhun had not gone out in four hundred and some years. That was the guild's one boast and it was, as boasts go, an honest one: there was a rota, there had always been a rota, and being on the night of the rota when the furnace went out would be the sort of thing your family stopped mentioning.

Oisín gathered on the pipe and turned it, and felt the weight come onto his forearms the way it did, and thought about nothing, which is the only correct thing to think about at that stage. Cadhla stood at his shoulder and did not touch anything. "Now," she said.

He gave it the memory of his brother's hands on the oars. Not the whole of it — you never give the whole of anything, not at nineteen, not for a common bottle — but the specific detail of the two split knuckles on the left hand and how they had looked wet. It went out of him and into the gather, and the glass took a colour it had not had a moment before, a green with grey underneath it.

"Better," said Cadhla. "You gave it something true. Last week you gave it a sadness you had gone and looked for, and the piece knew." She watched him blow the first bubble. "It always knows. That is the entire craft. The rest is heat and patience and not being clumsy."

He worked the piece for forty minutes and it came off the punty clean, and went into the annealer, and Cadhla looked at it through the little window and made a sound that in another woman would have been approval. "That will hold," she said. "Somebody will keep tea in it and never know what it is, which is the correct fate for a common bottle and the one you should want for it. A vessel that gets admired gets put on a shelf, and a vessel on a shelf is a vessel doing nothing."

"Do I get the knuckles back?" It was the apprentice question. Every apprentice asked it, usually around the second year, and the answer was famous, and Cadhla gave it to him anyway because that was the point of it being famous. "You get the fact of them," she said. "You do not get the look of them wet. That is in the bottle now, and the bottle is going to Tullow with a merchant on Thursday."

Oisín thought about that on the walk home along the sea wall, and found, prodding at the place where the memory had been, that he could still say his brother had rowed them out and could no longer see it. It did not hurt. That was what nobody warned you about. It did not hurt at all.

The merchant came on a Tuesday in a carriage that had no business on the causeway, and the whole village watched the driver discover what the whole village already knew about the causeway, and nobody helped for slightly longer than was kind.

His name was Ardan Fell and he had the manner of a man who has been rich long enough to have stopped enjoying it. He came into the workshop without knocking, looked at the furnace, looked at the racks, and then looked at Cadhla in a way that suggested he had been told what she was and had decided to test it.

"I want a memory bottle," he said. "Everyone wants a memory bottle," said Cadhla. "We make four a year and they are spoken for until spring, and I do not take commissions from people who walk in off the causeway, and the answer is no." She had not put down the shears.

"I will pay eleven hundred." "The answer is still no." "Fourteen." "Mr Fell." Cadhla did put the shears down then. "I am not haggling with you. A memory bottle is not a bottle with a memory in it. It is a vessel that will hold one whole — the entire thing, the smell of it, the temperature of the room — and it takes a year and it takes something out of whoever makes it that does not come back. There are two people in this village who can make one and one of them is eighty-one."

Fell reached into his coat and took out a folded paper and put it on the bench, and did not open it, and that was somehow worse than if he had. "My daughter is four," he said. "She will not be five. I have been to nine physicians and I am not going to a tenth. I would like one hour of her in a bottle so that when I am seventy I can have it again, whole, and not the thin dishonest thing my memory will have made of it by then."

The workshop was very quiet. Down the bench Oisín had stopped pretending to sort punties. Cadhla stood with her hands flat on the wood and looked at the folded paper for a long moment, and Oisín watched her face and could not read a single thing on it, which was itself unusual.

"Come back Thursday," she said at last. "Not with the money. With the child."

The child was called Rosaleen and she was not what Oisín had prepared himself for. He had prepared himself for something wan and translucent out of a ballad. What arrived was a small furious person in a good coat who wanted to know why the fire was that colour, and then why it was that colour, and then whether she could hold something.

Cadhla let her hold something. It was a failed piece from the crate, thick and lopsided, and Rosaleen carried it around the workshop for an hour and a half asking questions and did not once ask about being ill, and Oisín understood after a while that she probably had not been told, or had been told and had decided the way four-year-olds decide.

Fell stood by the door the entire time and did not come further in. Watching him was uncomfortable in a specific way: he was not looking at his daughter, exactly. He was looking at the room she was in, the way you look at a place you intend to remember, and failing at it, and knowing he was failing.

Afterwards Cadhla sat on the bench with her boots swinging and did not say anything for some time. "I will make it," she said finally, to the furnace rather than to Fell. "Not for fourteen hundred. For eleven, which was your first number, because a man who opens at eleven and goes to fourteen in one breath is a man who would have gone to forty and I do not want that on the piece."

"When?" "A year. You will bring her here on the ninth of every month and I will sit with her for two hours and you will wait outside, and if you come in, or ask what we talked about, or bring a physician, the commission ends and I keep nothing." Cadhla finally looked at him. "That is not cruelty. The vessel has to hold her. I cannot pour her into it out of your description."

Fell agreed to all of it, which surprised Oisín, and then did not surprise him at all. The carriage went back down the causeway at the pace the causeway insists on, and Rosaleen waved out of the window at the furnace rather than at any person, and Oisín found himself waving back at a four-year-old on behalf of a fire.

"Boy." Cadhla was still on the bench. "You will assist. Every step. And there is a thing you will find out before the year is up, and when you find it out I want you to come to me and not to anybody else." She got down and went to bank the furnace for the night. "That is not a warning either. I am simply too old to be surprised twice by the same door."