The Watermark
Extract from “The Watermark”, published in The Gettysburg Review and Pushcart Prize
A year after my parents separated, I saw my father on the other side of a narrow street. He walked straight by without any gesture of greeting. No one else was around. It dawned on me, after a second or so, that he hadn’t recognized me. I hadn’t changed from a goose to a swan, or some such nonsense; I’d simply had a haircut and stopped dressing like a boy. My first job had also nudged me from childhood into womanhood, making my walk more purposeful, less dancing, my expression less open and more reserved. I paused, aware that I felt nothing more than an aloof curiosity, and watched him walk away. If I were fanciful I would say that this was the moment I became a writer.
The archipelago of St. Kilda lies in the Outer Hebrides, three hours by boat off the northwest coast of Scotland. In the late seventeenth century, its residents worked its land and cliffs, paying rent to the MacLeod Clan of Skye with the meat, feathers, and oils they harvested from St. Kilda’s abundant population of puffins, gannets, and fulmars. The Gaelic-speaking villagers converted early to the joyless tenets of the Free Church of Scotland, scuppering their natural bent for music and poetry. The harsh misery of their daily life was matched only by the weather. By the turn of the twentieth century, the dwindling population had been riddled by poverty and inbreeding; a photograph in Edinburgh’s public library reveals a row of school children with identical thin, pinched faces framed by flat dark hair. In 1930, the last St. Kildans, mostly women, asked to be evacuated to the mainland, exhausted by their isolation.
Over the centuries, the islanders had developed their own unique postal system. They threw their messages into the sea. They addressed their letters then rolled and corked them inside medicine bottles, which were placed in a small wooden box shaped like a boat. Buoyed by inflated sheep bladders, these “mailboats” were cast into the Atlantic to snag the upswing of the Gulf Stream, which swept them toward the fishing grounds and the East. A passing trawler would scoop them up and transport them to the mainland, or they would wash onto the shores or rocks of Skye or Shetland, Norway or Denmark. The St. Kildans held their breaths till the yearly delivery of supplies and return mail arrived from the mainland to discover if their voices had been heard.
Before 1900, a few pennies enclosed in the mail boat’s hold would cover the postage, and the Post Office paid a reward to those who found it and sent the contents on. After 1900, the St. Kildans attached stamps to their letters. Not surprisingly, such stamps, such letters, are highly prized. My father is a stamp collector; he probably knew the length to which the St. Kildans went to communicate with the world around them, but he never told me…
