The harbor pilot at Corran Sound talked every vessel in the same way.
It didn't matter if it was a ferry or a coal barge or a rich man's yacht with brass on every surface. He stood on the pilot boat with the radio in one hand, and when the hull came round the point he said, "Easy, lady. Easy now. Bit to port, lady. That's it." Forty years of it. The fishermen did impressions of him in the pub. The ferry captains said they could hear it in their sleep.
His apprentice was a girl named Tess who had come to him at sixteen. She thought the habit was a little foolish, though she didn't say so. The ships had names. They were painted on the bows in letters a yard high. She learned the names. She thought he ought to use them.
In her third winter a trawler called the Brannagh came in on a falling tide with a fouled rudder and the wind pushing her sideways onto the Skerry. It was the worst hour Tess had seen on that water. The pilot took the radio.
"Easy, lady," he said. "Bit more on the port engine, lady. Good."
The trawler kept sliding. The rocks were close enough that Tess could see the weed moving on them.
The pilot was quiet for a breath. Then he said, in a different voice, lower, "Brannagh. Come on, Brannagh. Please."
The skipper got the engines to answer, the stern swung, and the trawler cleared the Skerry by a length she didn't measure. Then it was "lady" again all the way to the quay. "Easy, lady. Lovely. Make fast."
That night Tess asked him about it. She had expected him to say he'd forgotten himself, or that he couldn't remember doing it.
He didn't say either. He poured his tea and thought about it.
"Lady is for steering," he said. "I say it so they hear the same thing every time. Same voice, same word, nothing for them to wonder about. A man at the wheel in a strange harbor doesn't need to wonder about anything except the water."
"And the name?"
"The name's for when steering isn't enough." He turned the cup in his hands. "When I say lady, I'm telling. That once, I was asking."
"Why not ask more often? Use the names every time. They'd like it."
"They would," he said. "For a month. Then the name would be the steering word, and I'd have nothing left for the Skerry."
She thought he was wrong about that for a long time. She used the names when she started bringing ships in herself. The captains liked it. Then, a year or two in, she noticed she was saying the names the way he said lady. Flat, even, for steering. The names had gone to work.
She didn't go back to lady. That was his word. But she found a word of her own for the ordinary days, and she stopped spending the names.
Tess was older than the pilot had been when she thought of something else from those years. She had been trying to remember how he used to call her across the yard. "Girl." "You there." "Apprentice," if he was teasing. Every day for six years.
She could only remember him saying Tess once.
It was the day after the Brannagh. She had been standing at the edge of the pilot boat watching the swell, too close, the way she always stood, and he had said it from behind her. Not loud.
She stepped back. She had always thought it was because of the swell.
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