What the Fog Brought to Kingsport

Old Hosea Bright had piloted ships into Kingsport harbor for forty-one years, and in all that time he had kept a tally in chalk on the inside of his wheelhouse door. One stroke for every hull brought safely past the rocks. When the door filled up he painted it over and started again. There were eleven coats of paint on that door, and he could tell you the year of every one.

The fog that December came in off the water like wet wool and stayed. It muffled the bell buoy and swallowed the lighthouse and made the whole town sound as though it were speaking from inside a coat. Ships still came, because ships always came. Hosea went out to meet them.

On the night before the solstice he brought in six. A collier, two coasting schooners, a fishing smack with a split mainsail, a Boston packet, and a black-hulled barque with no lights that followed the others through the channel as neatly as a dog at heel. He counted them at the harbor mouth and he counted them at the wharves. Six.

He made six chalk marks on the door. When he stepped back there were seven.

He rubbed one out with his sleeve. In the morning there were seven again.

Hosea did not drink and he did not believe in ghosts, so he did the practical thing and walked the wharves at dawn with the harbor master's list. Five vessels were tied up and accounted for. The sixth berth, where he was certain he had brought the barque alongside, was empty water, black and still, with the fog lying on it like a sheet over a bed.

But there were footprints on the planks of that berth. Many of them, wet and bare, leading up from the edge of the wharf and away into the steep lanes of the old town, toward the hill where the church had stood before the new one was built.

None of them led back.

That night the bells of the new church did not ring for evensong. Hosea stood at his door and listened to the fog, and somewhere above the town, on the hill, he heard people singing in a language that had no business being sung in Massachusetts.

He took the chalk and made one more mark on the door. Then he painted it over, the twelfth coat, and did not go out on the water again until spring.