Sleep. It will keep till morning, same as everything else." It did not keep. Morning came, and a week of mornings after it, and no name arrived to fill the space where one ought to have been. The village, needing something to call him, settled on John, for no reason he was ever given, and he answered to it because there was nothing else on offer, and because Tams and Gail said it without hesitation, as though it had always been his. He stayed nine weeks in her father's cottage, in a village that measured its whole existence by tide and weather, and he learned in that time several things he was fairly sure he had not known before.
He learned that he was strong in the back and useless with a net old Gail watched him botch a fourth mend with the long-suffering patience of a man too kind to say so and took the twine away and gave him an axe instead at which he turned out unaccountably to be good. There, Gail had said the first time the split logs fell away clean. A man's good for something even without his name to tell him what. He split enough wood in 9 weeks to have warmed the cottage through two winters, and there was a satisfaction in it. He could not account for the simple complete honesty of a task that either succeeded or did not.
With no ledger and no title standing between the effort and the result. He learned the tides the way a man learns a new language by immersion and error until he could stand on the shingle and tell from the color of the water and the pull of it against his boots. How many hours remained before it turned. He learned too the particular rhythm of the village's evenings, the men coming up from the boat smelling of salt and tar, the women at their doors calling children in before the light failed, Tamson's father smoking his one pipe of the day by the fire, and asking nothing of the stranger who sat across from him, except that he passed the poker when it was wanted. Nobody in Bartsy seemed to find it strange that a man had arrived from the sea with no history.
They simply made room for him, the way the tide made room for a boat coming in, and he found himself some evenings forgetting to wonder who he had been at all. What he did not learn, because no one in that cottage ever once asked him, was anything at all about who he had been. He noticed it first as an absence and only later as a kindness. Other people hearing that a man had lost the whole of his history in a shipwreck, wanted to help him find it. They asked leading questions, offered guesses, watched his face for the flicker that would mean a door opening.
Tamson never did. She set his supper down and spoke to him about the day's catch and the state of the nets, and whether the wind would back around by Thursday, and left the great locked room of his past entirely alone, as a woman leaves a shut door in a house not her own. "Doesn't it trouble you?" He asked her once in May, when the wound at his temple had healed to a thin white line, and his balance no longer betrayed him on the rocks. Not knowing what manner of man you've taken in. "I know the manner of man you are now," she said, mending a net by the window with the quick economy of a lifetime's practice.