The Word That Cannot Be Said Alone

There were only two people left alive who could speak Kessin, and they lived four hundred metres apart on the same wet road, and they had not said a word to each other in forty-three years.

I learned the distance on my second morning in Fallow Hook, pacing it out in the drizzle with my hood up, counting steps like a surveyor. Four hundred and six, if you went the short way past the chapel. The whole village smelled of creosote and cold herring. Gulls stood on the seawall with their shoulders hunched, looking exactly like men waiting for a bus that had been cancelled in 1980.

"You'll want them separate," Mrs. Tarn had told me at the guesthouse, setting down toast. "Whatever it is you're doing. Separate."

"I'm making a dictionary," I said.

She considered this the way you'd consider a man announcing he intended to knit the sea. "Separate," she said again.

The Uphill Man

Emrys Fane was eighty-six and lived in a house with a barometer in the hall that he tapped every time he walked past it, out of habit, the way other people touch a doorframe. He sat me in the good parlour, which was cold, and answered my questions in the manner of a man being examined by a doctor he doesn't rate.

"Say the word for fog," I said.

"Murrish."

"And thick fog? The kind that stops the boats?"

He almost smiled. "Murrish-ta-vann. Fog with a floor in it." He watched the reels of my recorder turn. "You've been down the hill."

"I've been to see Mr. Kerr, yes."

"Then you'll have a lot of rubbish on that tape," said Emrys Fane, "and you'll want to know which half to keep."

Over eleven days I filled fourteen hours with him. Words for weather, for rope, for the six stages of a fire going out. Words for kinds of tiredness. He gave me a verb that meant to pretend not to have seen someone across a harbour, and when I asked if that really needed its own verb he said, "In a place this size it needs three."

The Downhill Man

Tolly Kerr was eighty-four and did his talking in a shed, sanding a dinghy that was never going in the water again. He laughed more than Emrys and corrected me more gently and was, I came to understand, just as ruthless about it.

"Play it back," he'd say, every session. "Play the uphill man."

I shouldn't have. It's terrible practice. But a dictionary is built out of disagreement, and these two disagreed about everything: whether the word for gull had one l sound or two, whether you said good morning to the sea or only to people, whether the old song about the three sisters had four verses or five.

"Four," said Tolly, sanding. "He adds one because his mother added one. His mother added one because she couldn't sing."

They had never once asked after each other. Not a word. But both of them, by the end of the first week, had started timing their answers to my visits, and both of them knew precisely which day I'd been where.

By day sixteen I had one thousand three hundred and eleven entries, and two problems.

The first was a word. Skaith. Emrys gave it to me as to mind a thing for a man until he comes for it. Tolly gave it to me, flatly, as to hand a thing over for good. I went back and forth twice, and each of them grew colder about it, and neither would move. In a dying language you learn to record both and move on. I underlined it and moved on.

The second problem was a hole. Kessin distinguishes we two from we all — a dual pronoun, nessu, meaning the two of us and nobody else on earth. But it is a call-and-answer form. One speaker says nessu; the other must answer with nessai, or the word simply hasn't been said. It's grammatically incomplete alone, the way a handshake is.

I asked Emrys to demonstrate it. He tapped the barometer, though he was sitting down and couldn't reach it, so he tapped the arm of his chair instead.

"You want nessu," he said. "Then bring me the other half of it."

It was Tolly's daughter, Bree, who gave me the boat.

She met me outside the shop with two paper cups of tea and the air of someone who had decided something on the way over. "He won't tell you," she said. "So. Nineteen seventy-nine. Cannery shut. Emrys went to the mainland for work — three years, as it turned out. He had a boat, the Little Gale. Dad had nothing. Emrys stood on the slip the morning he left and said one word to my father, in Kessin, about that boat, and then he got on the bus."

"Skaith," I said.

Bree looked at me. "Dad fished her four summers. Then the engine went and he sold her for parts and paid for my teacher training with it. Emrys came home the next spring and asked for his boat and my father told him there wasn't one, and — " she shrugged, that small coastal shrug that closes a subject. "That's it. That's the whole of it. Forty-three years off one sentence."

I stood in the drizzle with my tea going cold and thought about the uphill families and the downhill families, and about how a village of two hundred people can hold two slightly different dialects the way a cup holds two temperatures of water. Mind it for me. It's yours. Both true. Both spoken in good faith. Nobody ever said it in English, so nobody ever found out.

Kessin has no separate verb for lending and giving. I'd written that in my notes on day four and thought it charming.

I did the only dishonest thing of my career the following Tuesday.

I went to Emrys and told him I had a recording I couldn't gloss, and played him Tolly singing the second verse of the three sisters — low, off-key, the sanding block going in time. Emrys sat very still. Then his mouth moved. Then, without seeming to decide to, he sang the answering line, the one that comes underneath, because in that song the second voice carries the tune and the first only tells you where you are.

When it finished he said, "Four verses," and his eyes were wet, and he was furious about it.

"Mr. Fane," I said, "what does skaith mean downhill?"

It took him a long moment.

They met the next afternoon in Mrs. Tarn's kitchen, because neither would enter the other's house and the chapel was too much like an occasion. Emrys came with the barometer under his arm, for reasons he never explained and I never asked about. Tolly brought a photograph of a boat.

What followed was two hours of Kessin at full speed, and I understood perhaps one word in nine. I caught engine. I caught the verb for pretending not to see someone across a harbour, used twice, once by each. At one point Tolly shouted and Emrys laughed, a single bark of a laugh like something coming loose, and then both of them were quiet for a while and the rain went across the window in one long sweep.

Near the end, Emrys pushed my recorder into the middle of the table with one finger, the way you'd move a teapot.

"Write this one properly," he said.

And he said: Nessu.

And Tolly Kerr, eighty-four, sitting in a kitchen four hundred and six steps from his own front door, cleared his throat and answered: Nessai.

Entry one thousand three hundred and twelve. Nessu, pron.: we two, and nobody else. Cannot be spoken alone; must be answered to be true.

It's on the tape, if you ever want it. Two old voices finishing a word neither of them could finish by himself, and after it, for a long time, nothing but the rain and the reels going round.