Chapter One

I sewed for the dead that year as well as for the living, and the dead were the steadier custom.

The Boykin girl came to me on a Tuesday, in the shape of her mother and a paper parcel of her best dress. The dress was lawn, white, with a ruffle at the collar that had been let down once already — I knew the work, because it was mine — and it had fit her at fifteen and would not fit her now, and both of us stood there knowing that now was not a thing Addie Boykin had any more of. Drowned Friday. Found Sunday, on the flats, eleven hundred yards from a dock she had stood on all her life.

“High at the throat,” was all her mother said. “You’ll know why.”

I knew why. Water is not kind to what it keeps, and it had kept Addie two days. I said the collar would come up to the jaw and there would be lace over the buttons, and Mrs. Boykin put her hand flat on my counter a minute, not for balance. Then she went out. The bell over the door said what neither of us had.

I did such work by daylight only. Not for superstition. Black thread wants good light, and grief wants it more; a burying dress sewn after dark comes out with the sorrow stitched in, my grandmother said, and whatever I believed, my hands had been trained by a believer. So the lawn dress lay on the table through Wednesday and Thursday, and I sat with it from first light until the light went off the water, and I let the collar up and laid the lace and made the small necessary lies of my trade: a body shaped as it had been, a throat covered, a girl going into the ground looking like a girl asleep.

The fit was the best I ever gave her. She had stopped being able to mind the pinching.

Two drownings by March, that year. The first was a Dupree, off his own deck in January, in a calm his crew swore could not have put a man over the rail. The second was Addie. The town had words for such years, and did not use them. You could measure the not-using. I did it without wanting to, just as I could tell across the church that a hem was dropping. The Fenwicks moved the salt to the front of the store without being asked. Old men took the long road home, the one that kept the water out of view. At the funeral there would be more hands than usual touching the soil, and nobody would speak of it, and the minister would notice nothing, because ministers were sent to us from the mainland and were mercifully slow students.

I kept the customs myself. Salt at the sills, because my grandmother had kept it and her mother before her, and the keeping had come down to me along with the shop, the needle, and the name. Cane. The island wore our name, and I could not have told you, that spring, what the name had bought it. I was twenty-three. My mother had died of my arriving; my father the influenza took in 1918, along with better men and worse; my grandmother was two years in the ground, and there was a man at the far end of the island the town called the hermit and did not count, and that was the whole of us. The last of the Canes, sewing burying dresses for the daughters of luckier houses.

I don’t say I was unhappy. I had work, and a stove, and rooms above the shop where the light came in off the water all morning, good strong working light that cost nothing. But a house empties slow. Mine had been emptying around me for two years, one habit at a time, and by that March I had stopped sleeping in any fashion worth the name. I would lie down tired and lie there thin, all night, the sheets never warming, and get up at first light feeling like a seam picked out and sewn again with the old holes showing.

I finished the Boykin dress on Thursday while the light lasted, and pressed it, and folded it in paper, and the funeral was Friday and is no part of this story. What is part of it came Saturday, at dusk.

Dusk is a dead hour in a dress shop. The married women are home cooking supper and the girls are wherever girls contrive to be, and I kept the shop open anyway, out of habit and a horror of the upstairs quiet. I was picking basting out of a sleeve I had all but ruined — my hands that week were nobody’s friend — when the bell over the door went, and the evening came in, and a woman came in with it.

She was a stranger, which on our island was an event on the order of weather. Gray coat, gray gloves, a gray hat with no flowers on it, and under the hat a face I could not put an age to. Handsome was the word the town would settle on later, once it had gathered its wits enough to discuss her, which took less than a day. She stood a moment inside the door and looked at the shop — the bolts, the cutting table, the dress form wearing Mrs. Ravenel’s half-made Easter suit — and her looking had a thoroughness to it, an inventory taken at leisure, as if she had all the time there had ever been.

Under one arm she carried a bolt of cloth wrapped in brown paper.

“You would be Luella Cane,” she said.

She said it whole. Both names, full measure, nothing trimmed. Everyone on the island said Lu, and had said it since before I could stand, and the sound of my own name given its entire length sat me up straighter than the hour deserved.

“I am,” I said. “Shop’s near closing, but near isn’t closed. What can I do for you?”

“They tell me you keep the needle on this island.” Her voice was low and unhurried, with an old-fashioned turn to it, the grammar of somebody who had learned her manners a long while ago and seen no cause since to change them. “I have cloth that wants making up.”

“Making up into what?”

“A dress. For myself.” She came forward and laid the parcel on my counter and drew the paper back, and I stopped being a woman in a conversation and became a pair of hands. The brown paper beneath the silk stayed dry.

It was silk, and it was gray, and I want to be understood: I had handled silk. Charleston silk, mainland silk, one bolt of French the Ravenels imported for a wedding and never let anyone forget. This was none of those. It was a gray with water under it, a color that moved when the cloth did not, and the hand of it — I took a corner between two fingers, with permission, the trade’s oldest courtesy — was cool and heavy and alive, and it ran over my knuckles the same as the ebb runs over a sandbar, without hurry, without weight, taking something with it that I couldn’t name and didn’t miss until later.

There was no selvage on it. I looked, because a seamstress always looks; the edge tells you the loom, and the loom tells you the maker. Both edges raw, and neither edge fraying. Cloth without a selvage should unravel. This had no intention of it.

“I don’t know this weave,” I said, which cost me something.

“No,” she said. “You wouldn’t.”

“Where does it come from?”

“It was salvage.” She smoothed the paper flat beside the bolt with one gloved hand, tidy as a housekeeper turning down a bed. “Most of what I own was got at sea, one hour or another. I find it holds up.”

I should have asked more. A wiser woman, a better-slept woman, would have heard the shape under that sentence, the seam sewn over something structural. I heard it. I want that recorded, whatever else is said of me: I heard it, and I ran my thumb along that impossible raw edge that refused its own unraveling, and I chose, the first of many times, to be a pair of hands instead of a Cane.

“I’d need measurements,” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “I am at your disposal, Miss Cane. My name is Mercer.”

She said that whole, too. Full volume, plain as a price, in a shop on an island where I had only ever heard the word said in the hush-mouthed once-a-year manner of women shaking out a quilt they feared, and never as a name a person would answer to. And because no living soul would say that name out loud in Cane’s Folly — because saying it plain was the one proof the town would ever accept that she could not possibly be what she was — I did not run, and did not reach for the salt, and did not so much as blink.

I said, “First fitting’s Tuesday. Come at morning light. It’s the only honest light I get.”

She inclined her head, gray hat and all, and was out the door with the bell falling quiet behind her, and the shop stood warmer for minutes afterward, the stove not accounting for it, the dusk sitting easier in the corners than dusk had sat in that room for two years.

I locked up. Upstairs, without deciding anything, I left the window over the bed open one hand wide.

I slept the whole night through, and if I dreamed, the dreams were taken from me kindly, and I woke at first light with the sheets warm.