Over the next five years he carved forty little Suspirras. They were stowed under his bunk, numbered on their bases, and once in a very great while he would take them out and stand them in a long file before him, from first to last, the position of each slightly changed, the eyes and lips slightly opened or closed. Something about this silent throng oppressed him and bothered him at once, as though he should infer some meaning that evaded him. He still spoke to the drowned woman, and she still answered him, but this throng of small Suspirras seemed to shout at him in silence, a mute demand: “Pay attention.” He looked and looked, not understanding.
“Are you alive?” he asked her.
“What is alive? Perhaps you stopped the blight before it was finished with me.”
“Do you want me to put you back in the River?”
“It is cold in the River, and lonely. Perhaps you will let me stay a while.”
So for five years he let her stay, carving each new expression as it showed itself, recording this strange slow life, if it was life, in every minuscule manifestation. Day succeeded day, river, pier, town, boatmen leaving and new ones coming aboard. Blint grew grayer and Blint-wife more loquacious. They had made almost a round since the drowned woman had come aboard. They had come to Xoxxy-Do to find Thrasne’s aunt long dead, had passed it by, and were almost at Baristown once more.
“I wish you’d carve a baby for that woman,” said Blint-wife in an unaccustomed tone. There was worry in it, and sorrow, and a kind of aching that Thrasne had never heard her use before. He was surprised.
“What woman?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
“That woman, those women, the little ones. All in a row, saying, ‘My baby.’ “
He went below to look, she behind him, peering over his shoulder at the array. “I came down to change your bed. I hadn’t seen them all standing that way before. You see, look from the front to the back, that’s what she’s saying.”
He was only puzzled. His artist’s eye had missed it. Blint-wife left him, returning after a time with a box of children’s toys from the hold.
“See here,” she said, handing him one of the little books they had traded all along the River.
On each page a festival clown was drawn, each drawing slightly different. When one flipped it rapidly between thumb and fingers, the picture of the clown seemed to cavort and jump. Seeing his puzzlement, she went away.
That night he drew Suspirra’s faces and arms on small squares of paper, binding them into a similar book. When he flipped the pages the hands and eyes moved, the mouth said, “My baby.” Blint-wife, of course, had talked to Blint of the matter.
“Murga, that is, my wife, she lost the only baby we ever had,” said Blint. “She used to sit before the mirror down there crying, saying it over and over, ‘My baby, my baby.’ It’s no wonder she thought your carvings were saying the same.”
The carvings weren’t, but the drowned woman was. “My baby.” The little girl at the end of the pier, the one saying so hopelessly over and over, “Papa. Papa.”
“I’d like some time ashore in Baristown, sir,” he said. “There’s some private business I’d like to attend to.”
He had no real idea how to find her. He had left Xoxxy-Do when he was twelve years old, not old enough to have perceived or understood the intricacies of town life. He had had no substantial contact with a town or village since. Still, intuition told him that there would be someone who made it his business to know things, all kinds of things. It did not take long to find him.
“Fulder Don?” the barber asked, waving his scissors in a vague gesture toward the center of town. “Oh, surely, I know Fulder Don. Him and the old lady, and isn’t she a termagant. Makes his life a misery, she does. Oldest girl got married young just to get out of the house, and the story is that Pender, that’s the middle one, can hardly wait for the same chance.”