The Tide Tables
My grandfather left me his cottage on Pell Inlet, a boat that hadn’t floated since the nineties, and a shelf of composition notebooks filled with tide tables written in his own hand.
I knew about the notebooks. Everyone in the family did. He’d sit at the kitchen table after supper with a pencil and a mug of black tea and fill in the columns, date, high water, low water, the way other men did crosswords. My mother called it his hobby. My aunt called it his condition. When I asked him once, as a kid, how he knew what the tide would do, he said, “You listen to it long enough, it tells you its plans.” I thought that was the most wonderful thing I’d ever heard.
I was thirty-four when he died, and I didn’t think it was wonderful anymore. I thought it was something a lonely old man said.
Then I compared his notebooks to the harbor office’s printed tables.
They matched. Not roughly. To the minute. I checked a week, then a month, then I sat up until two in the morning checking a whole year, 1987, which he’d written out in 1979. Every high. Every low. He had no instruments in the house, no almanac, no training. He’d been a postal clerk. And the notebooks went forward, too, well past his death: neat pencil columns marching on through this year and into next, stopping in the middle of a page in early November, as if he’d simply put the pencil down.
It took me a few days to notice the third column.
It was narrow, squeezed in along the right margin, and almost always empty. You’d turn ten, twenty pages without an entry. But every so often there’d be a time written there, always the same time, 3:12, and a short note.
3:12 — stay in.
3:12 — stay in. Lamp off.
3:12 — to the second post.
I didn’t know what the second post was until I walked down to the water that afternoon. When the tide is out at Pell, it leaves a long apron of grey mud and eelgrass, and out in it stand the black stumps of an old pier, a row of eight or nine pilings leaning like bad teeth. Counting from the far end, the second one is about four hundred yards from the cottage steps.
The next entry was for the following Tuesday.
3:12 — to the eelgrass.
I want to be clear that I didn’t believe anything. I set an alarm because I was curious, and because I’d been sleeping badly in that house anyway. The old wallpaper ticks as it cools. The wind finds the chimney and hums in it.
At 3:05 I was standing at the kitchen window in the dark with a cup of instant coffee. The tide, according to both the harbor office and my grandfather, had been high at 1:40 and would be low at 7:58. The water should have been sitting most of the way up the mud, black and flat, maybe a hundred feet from the steps.
At 3:10 it started to go out.
Not the way a tide goes out. A tide is slow; you don’t see it move, you only notice later that it has. This was like watching a bath drain. The water slid back across the flats with a soft, continuous hiss, past the eelgrass, past the pilings, past the place where it goes on the lowest spring tides, out and out until I couldn’t see where it ended. The whole inlet lay open under the moon, shining wet, silent.
And then, a long way out, the mud began to take footprints.
I couldn’t see anything making them. Just the prints themselves, appearing one after another, small dark hollows filling with water, walking in toward the house. They weren’t hurried. They had the patience of someone who has walked a long way and knows exactly how much farther there is to go. They came in past the far pilings. Past the second post.
They stopped at the edge of the eelgrass.
At 3:14 the water came back. It didn’t rush; it simply rose up out of the mud, as if it had been there all along, and closed over the prints, and the inlet was a black mirror again with the moon in it. My coffee had gone cold in my hand. I hadn’t drunk any of it.
I went back through the notebooks after that. All of them, every page since 1966. Once you know to look, the third column tells a story.
3:12 — to the far pilings. That was 1971.
3:12 — to the second post. 1998.
3:12 — to the eelgrass. That was supposed to be the following Tuesday. It had been.
3:12 — to the steps. Next Thursday.
3:12 — to the door. Nine days from now. Then nothing. Just two more lines of ordinary tides, high and low, and the pencil stops.
In the margin beside that last entry, smaller, in handwriting that shook in a way the rest of his never did, he’d written:
It asks every time. Let it in or go with it. I could not choose. I am sorry. You will have to.
I called my mother. I didn’t tell her about the water. I asked her, carefully, how Granddad had died, because I’d only ever been told peacefully, at home.
There was a silence on the line long enough that I checked the call hadn’t dropped.
“They found the door open,” she said finally. “In the morning. His bed hadn’t been slept in. The coroner said his heart, and we didn’t argue, because he was eighty-nine, and because—” She stopped. “He was on the steps, honey. Sitting on the bottom step. Facing the water. Wet to the knees.”
I asked her what day.
She told me. I didn’t need to look it up. It was a day the third column said stay in.
He’d been going out to meet it. Not letting it in, not going with it. Just going out, a little way, to say not yet. For forty years.
It’s Thursday now. I’ve been sitting at his kitchen table with the notebooks open and a pencil in my hand, and I’ve noticed something I should have seen the first night.
There’s a second line on tonight’s date. Squeezed in under to the steps, so light I took it for a smudge. I had to tilt the page to the lamp to read it. It isn’t in his handwriting.
It’s in mine.
I don’t remember writing it. I’m looking at the pencil in my hand and the point is worn down flat.
3:12 — he isn’t coming out anymore. So I’m coming in.
It’s 3:09. Outside, very softly, I can hear the water starting to drain.