PodCastle 879: The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead
* Author : E. M. Linden * Narrator : Louise Hewitt * Host : Alasdair Stuart * Audio Producer : Eric Valdes * Discuss on Forums PodCastle 879: The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for grief, infant death, and a reference to suicide Rated PG-13 The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead E.M. Linden The living have been leaving Tawlish for centuries; this evacuation is only the latest and last. There are good reasons for it: the freshwater spring gone brackish; the water, always encroaching; the colicky, relentless wind. No schools for the children. No doctor. We should have seen it coming, but sometimes we forget what the living need. We cannot cross salt, so we watch from shore. Our loved ones and descendants wade into the sea. The men strain to hold the boats steady against the waves. Everyone’s weighed down by possessions, a village crammed into sacks and lifeboats. Spoons, spindles, fish-hooks, balls of yarn. A clothes-peg doll in a twist of old apron. Seabirds’ eggs wrapped in blankets: habits ingrained by generations of scarcity. They’ve even dug up their potatoes. Katie Zell’s mother is already on the boat. The songbook is tucked inside her jacket. Thirty-seven people. Only some of them look back. They leave cold firepits and fulmar bones, middens, empty crofts with the thatch already collapsing. Sheep they’ve blessed and turned loose to fend for themselves. And us. The dead of Tawlish. Katie Zell’s father has been dead longer than she’s been alive. Before he drowned, he’d hoped to sing her lullabies: the ones he sang to her older brothers, the ones his grandparents sang to him. Now, in farewell, he rests his hand briefly on her curls. Most of the living are oblivious to the dead, but the Zells are a noticing kind of family. Katie raises her hand to his; perhaps she mistakes the cold brush of it for sea-spray. It’s enough. He smiles. That’s all there is time for: Katie’s uncle lifts her from the shore, over the churn of the sea, and seats her next to her cousin on the boat. Old Maureen Stornaway is furious, sees evacuation as defeat. She clenches a knuckle of island rock in her pocket. Tiny luminosities watch her from shore: the ghosts of three of her children. She strains her eyes and peers back through the sea-mist. Maybe something shines there. After decades of loss, of wishing them still with her, this is the first and last time that she almost makes them out. The rector, smug, takes nothing. He doesn’t need to. He has a house on the mainland, and — as far as he’s concerned — he’s saved thirty-seven souls. A Tawlish tradition: the living and dead send each other gifts. The living give tobacco and carved pipes, posies of sea-vetch, griddle-cake. Packets of seeds for Lizzie Knell. Wooden rattles and teething rings. Handkerchiefs embroidered with our names. They slip our gifts into the flames so that they’ll cross over to our side. Burnt offerings. The wind chases the sparks out of the sky. The gifts arrive smelling of smoke. Our gifts are less generous. All we can send are dreams. Tonight, all together, we dream safe passage for the living. Grudgingly, because they’re abandoning us; jealously, because we want them here: their songs and laughter reminding us who we are, their bones buried beside ours in the thin Tawlish soil. We dream them returning.