The Last Ride Across The Ferry

The last crossing

There was one more crossing that day, and it was just us.

After the county had gone home, after Lyle had hugged my father and driven the empty hearse back up the bottoms road, my father wiped his face and stood up and put his hat back on.

He said, Carolyn, get on. One more.

So I got on the deck of my father’s ferry for the last time, the way I had ten thousand times as a girl, and he reached up and took the old brass bell off its nail.

He did not hang it back. He put it in my hands.

He rang the diesel back to life one last time, and he ran the cable, and he carried the two of us across the Saline with no one watching and no dollars in the box, just a father and a daughter and a river.

In the middle of the crossing he stopped the winch. We hung there on the cable over the deepest part of the channel, the water sliding under us, the new bridge bright downriver.

I asked him what he was thinking.

He said he was thinking about his own father, standing right where he was standing, and about me on the milk crate, and about my mother coming down the bank with the green thermos, and about every soul he had ever carried over this water, the living and the dead, for free and for a dollar.

He said a man does not often get to see what his whole life added up to. He said most men have to guess. He said the county had come down to the river and shown him, truck by truck, what forty-one years had been worth, and it was more than he ever would have dared to count.

Then he said the thing I will carry to my own grave. He said, Carolyn, I was never trying to be anybody. I was just trying to get folks across.

He started the winch again and carried us the rest of the way, and he tied the boat off at the far bank for the last time, slow and careful, every knot right, the way his father taught him.