Sigrid Voss's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Sigrid Voss held the bell rope up to the lamp and counted the strands. One. A single brown thread, twisted tight, was all that kept her from silence. Tomorrow morning she would climb the tower ladder, grip the rope, and pull. If it snapped, the settlement would sleep past dawn for the first time in thirty years. She had nine years and eleven months left before her fifty-year mark. She would not lose it to a piece of frayed hemp. She pushed open the door of her small house and stepped onto the porch. The roof sagged over her like a familiar shoulder. Snow packed the boards. Her breath came out white. The rope shop had closed at dusk, and the ropemaker had gone up the pass to see his daughter. There would be no new rope before dawn. Sigrid walked around the side of the house to the woodshed. She kept things there her husband had left behind: a coil of tarred fishing line, an awl, a tin of beeswax. She carried them inside and set them on the kitchen table under the lamp. Her fingers were stiff. She warmed them over the stove, then began. She cut the fishing line into six equal lengths. She braided them the way her mother had taught her, tight and even, pulling each turn hard against her knee. She rubbed the braid with wax until it darkened. Then she spliced it into the sound part of the old rope, above the frayed thread, and whipped the joint with waxed twine. The clock on the shelf struck three. Her back ached. She tested the splice with her full weight, hanging from the kitchen beam. It held. She lowered herself down and breathed. Before dawn she pulled on her wool coat and fur-lined boots and walked to the tower. Frost had settled on the lavender bush by her gate, silvering every stem. She touched one blossom out of habit. Then she climbed the ladder. She took the rope in both hands, set her feet, and pulled. The splice caught, groaned, and held. The bronze bell swung out and struck. The sound rolled over the roofs. She pulled again. And again. Six clean strikes. Somewhere below, a shutter opened. A dog barked. Smoke lifted from a chimney. Sigrid climbed down. Her shoulder burned where she had wrenched it hauling against the splice. She rolled it and felt the joint grind. She had rung the bell. She had also hurt something that had to lift a rope every morning for nine more years. At her gate she stopped and looked back at the tower. The ropemaker would return in three days. Until then, the splice would hold only if her arm did. She flexed her hand in the cold and started up her steps to find the liniment.