Before there were radio towers, the fishing people of the northern coast said the water sang at night. Not always, only in certain months, in certain conditions of tide and temperature, and not every ear could catch it. Those who did described it similarly: structured, like something arranged.
The woman they called the keeper had been born in the coldest month and given that name. She came to the shore alone most evenings for forty years. Her husband said it was the current. Her children said it was the depth pulling at the shoreline. She did not disagree with them. She came to the shore and listened.
She had no instrument, no training. She could not describe what she heard in any terms her family shared. But in her last years she began to hum something at the doorway of her house in the evenings: a fragment, six or seven notes that circled without settling. She did not seem aware that she was doing it. She sat in the doorway and hummed and watched the road.
Her grandchildren grew up with the fragment in the house. It was not taught. It was there the way certain smells are in a house: present, unremarked, absorbed. When they were old they still had it, though none of them could have said where it had come from.
Their children were adults before any of them heard it again. One of her great-grandchildren (a man by then past forty) had a small radio receiver on the kitchen windowsill, a new thing, given to his wife by a cousin in the city. One winter evening it caught something: the fragment, extended, a full piece built around it.
He said: that is grandmother's sound.
His wife did not know what he meant. He said his grandmother used to hum it in the doorway. She asked which station it was. He said he did not know.
No one moved the receiver from the windowsill. It stayed where it had been set, and they listened to it when they remembered, and sometimes it played the fragment again and sometimes it did not.