Wave and quote on a calf

He came out on a grey morning with a clerk and a rolled deed in a tin tube. Forty fathoms of water, he said, from the point to the Gull Stones, were his by right of a charter his father had bought off a bankrupt wine merchant. He wanted the fishing boats to pay a penny a keel to cross his line. My grandmother listened with her arms folded over her apron, and when he was done she asked him whether he'd ever seen the water come up the cliff path on a spring tide. He had not.

So the squire had his men string a chain of buoys across the bay that night. Come morning there was a swell rolling in off the open Atlantic, grey and white and bigger than any the parish had seen, and it lifted that chain like cotton thread and laid it on the rocks. The deed went in with the tide too, though the clerk swore on his mother he'd kept it dry inside his coat. Grandmother watched the paper turn in the foam and said only, I am the sea and nobody owns me, then went back up the stairs to trim the wick.

Lean out now, carefully, and look. There, where the white comes up against the black rock. That's her saying it again, and she's not finished.