The Last Ride Across The Ferry

All morning on the cable

I want to tell you that my seventy-year-old father got tired and had to sit down and let somebody else run the cable. He did not.

He worked that winch all morning long, crossing after crossing, the way he had for forty-one years. His hands knew the lever. His feet knew the deck. He never missed his footing once.

That is the picture I will keep of him until I die. Not a man being shut down. A man at the top of his work, doing the thing he was best at in the world, in front of everybody he had ever carried.

The line did not shrink. Every time I thought it was ending, I would look up the bottoms road and there were more taillights coming out of the morning.

People had taken off work. The elevator slowed down for it. The school let the buses come. I found out later the Methodist preacher had moved his Tuesday morning prayer group down to the landing so they could ride across together.

At one point my father crossed with the Baptist van full of the oldest women in the county, the quilting circle, every one of them past eighty. They sang the whole way across. I could hear it over the water.

My father did not charge them. He never charged a church van. He waved the dollar off the way he always had.

But the driver had already slipped the dollars into the cigar box on the way down the ramp, every woman’s dollar, and my father did not see, and that was part of the plan too.

He crossed those women singing, and he rang his bell, and he brought the boat back empty, and his face was doing something I had not seen it do in years.

I brought him coffee in the green thermos, my mother’s thermos, around the middle of the morning. He drank it standing up, watching the next truck come down.

He said to me, quiet, Carolyn, I did not know this many people even remembered the crossing was here.

I said, Daddy, they never forgot. They just had a bridge now and they were being polite about it.

He laughed at that. A real laugh, out loud, across the water. It is one of the last times I heard him laugh like that, and I am grateful I was standing right next to him for it.