The Last Ride Across The Ferry

The cigar box that would not shut

The cigar box sat on the little shelf by the winch, the way it always had. It was an old King Edward box, soft at the corners, that had held the ferry money since before I was born.

By noon it would not shut.

I need you to understand how strange that was. A dollar a head, forty-one years, and I had never once in my life seen that box full. It held the day’s dollars and my mother emptied it every night.

But the people were not putting in a dollar. I saw it when I went to straighten the lid. There were fives in there. There were tens. There was a twenty folded small.

A dollar was the toll. But people were paying the crossing what they thought the crossing had been worth to them, which was a great deal more than a dollar.

I started to understand, standing there with the lid that would not close, that something had been organized. This was not just a sad goodbye. The dollars meant something. They were going somewhere.

I looked up the bank and Lyle was standing by his hearse with his hands folded, watching my father work, waiting. And I knew then that he knew something I did not.

I did not ask. It was not my morning to ask. It was my father’s.

My father kept crossing. He did not look in the box. In forty-one years I do not think he ever once counted it himself. That was my mother’s job, and after she passed, it was mine, and he never looked.

So he did not know what was piling up in that soft old box. He just kept ringing the bell and running the cable and carrying the county across, one truck at a time, with a bridge shining new a mile downriver.

The last truck came across a little after noon. It was a young couple with a baby I did not know, new to the county, who had heard what was happening and driven down so they could tell that baby someday that she rode the ferry on the last day.

My father carried them across, and brought the boat back, and there was no one else on the bottoms road.

The line was done. The crossing was done. Forty-one years was done.

He cut the diesel. The winch went silent. The cable stopped creaking. The river went quiet, just water sliding by, the way it must have sounded before any of us were ever here.