The Last Ride Across The Ferry

My father’s one rule

My father charged a dollar a head to cross. For forty-one years. He never raised it, not through gas crises, not through anything.

People told him for decades that he was leaving money on the table. He would nod like he agreed and then charge the next truck a dollar.

But he had one rule that was iron, and everybody in the county knew it, and it was this. He never took a dime off a hearse or a church van.

If you were carrying somebody to be buried, you crossed free. If you were carrying a load of children to Bible school or a crowd of old women to a funeral dinner, you crossed free.

He would wave the dollar away before you even had it out of your pocket. He would touch the brim of his hat and look straight ahead and work the winch and say nothing.

I asked him once, when I was young and smart and thought I understood money, why he gave away the crossings that probably needed the dollar least.

He thought about it a long time. The cable creaked. The water slid by brown and quiet under us.

He said a family carrying its dead has already paid enough that day, and a church is doing the work he ought to be doing himself, so the least he could do was carry them over the water for nothing.

I was maybe fourteen. I did not fully understand it then. I understand it now.

There is a thing I need you to know about my father, so you do not picture a sad old man on a dying boat. He was not sad and he was not weak.

He was a man who had decided, young, exactly what kind of man he was going to be, and then he was that man for fifty years without any fuss about it.

He got up at the same hour every day of my life. He kept that diesel tuned so fine you could barely hear it idle. He could read the river like a page.

He was proud of the crossing, and he had every right to be.