36. Listening
He washed his hands for a long time.
The water was cold and he stood with his wrists under it and worked the soap up past the knuckles and into the webbing, the way you were taught once and then did forever. Under the nails. The pads of the thumbs. There was nothing on them. He washed them anyway, because the ritual was the point.
The reeds had been harder than he expected. He'd thought of them as soft. Everyone thought of them as soft, the way they moved in a wind, but a bulrush cut green has a spine to it, and you have to work it in, and the sound it makes going is not a sound he had prepared himself for.
That was fine. He hadn't wanted it easy.
He dried his hands on a towel and folded the towel and hung it straight.
The thing about her, the thing he kept turning over, was how little surprise there had been. He had waited for it. He had wanted the moment where the shape of him arrived in her eyes, where all the years came up at once and she understood. He had earned that. He was owed it.
But she had just looked at him.
Not blankly. That would have been better. There had been something in it that was almost patient, almost the expression of a woman waiting for a bus in the rain.
He filled a cup and drank it standing up and looked at the blank wall.
He had thought about the placement a great deal.
Where to put her. In the end the answer had been obvious and he'd almost laughed at himself for taking so long over it.
The most important things didn't need to be explained.
With something like this, he only had to position her correctly and the place would do the explaining, forever, to anybody with the wit to stand still and look.
Hardly anybody had the wit. That was the joke he'd been telling himself for 30 years and there was still some life left in it.
He rinsed the cup. Dried it. Put it back.
Outside the light was turning a dirty pewter, bouncing off the water and contaminating everything with its dull, gritty sheen. He watched it thicken and felt the old anger settle across his shoulders like a coat. He'd thought maybe this kill would help him slough it off, but not yet.
The work wasn't yet done.
He'd come this far by taking each part in its turn and never once reaching ahead, and the discipline of that had become a kind of body he lived in.
But he was permitted, tonight, a small trespass.
He allowed himself to think about the marsh as it had once been.
Before the 'world of men' had encroached too far, with their sewers and pumps.
Back when it had been truly wild. Chaotic.
He imagined everything they'd built going under and staying down, the roads and the walls and the drains and the pumps and the hundreds of years of careful order.
He thought about how quiet it would be.
The tap dripped once. He tightened it. Then he sat down in the dark and listened to the wind get up, angry still, but calmer than he had been in years.