Short story · 6 min read · Set in Cantor's Shoal ·
The Memorial Fares
The ferry has begun taking payment in one memory each, stamped onto the ticket, and the manifest of what was paid grows longer than the crossing.
The ferry to Cantors Shoal changed its fare in the week the new notice went up, and the notice was worded so politely that it took the islanders two days to be certain they had read it right. FARE: ONE MEMORY EACH, PER CROSSING, it said, in the slight indent the office used for permanent matters. PAYABLE ON BOARD. RECEIPTS GIVEN.
The office had always played its changes slow and small — the fare up twopence one winter, the Wednesday sailing dropped the next — so a change this wide arrived like a step where a stair should be. Ruta Vellik, who kept the ticket booth and the ledger and, in practice, the crossing itself, taped the notice inside her hatch without comment, and the first passengers through the gate paid the old fare, in coins, because that was what was in their hands, and she took the coins and said nothing, and the boat went out on time.
It was the boat that refused the coins. That was how the matter was understood afterwards: the boarding the next morning went as usual until the two men from the oyster beds put their coppers down on the box by the gangway, and the boat sat there, dead in the grey water, engines turning over and nothing going anywhere, until one of the men said, half as a joke, what he had given up on the crossing the winter his wife went — that he could not any longer remember her voice, only that she had one — and the boat moved.
The ferry office did not publish an explanation. The office never did. What it did, the same week, was fit a small brass plate inside Ruta's hatch, with a stamp in it, and a pad of tickets the colour of wet slate, and a second ledger, bound in canvas, with MANIFEST stamped on its front and nothing else on any of its pages at all.
The way it settled into practice was this. You bought your crossing in the usual manner, at the usual rate, coins and all — the coins were still wanted; wages still ran and bread still had a price — and then, at the gangway, the ferryman or Ruta herself would ask you, quietly, as one asks for a surname: what will you be giving today? And what you answered was taken and stamped on your ticket in letters you could not quite read from the outside. They came out in a fine grey ink, smaller than the office would ever print, and they were not your words exactly. The woman who gave the memory of learning to swim received a ticket reading: THE WATER, AND BEING HELD IN IT, SO FAR AND NO FURTHER. The man who gave his first funeral received: THE RAIN STANDING IN THE GRAVEL, AND NO URGE TO LEAVE IT.
At first nobody minded, and that is the part people at the mainland end of the crossing will not believe. The memories given were rarely big ones. An islander crossing twice a week to the yards could not have afforded, in the sense of remaining a person, to give twice a week anything precious. So the fare was paid small, on purpose, the way you pay small: the smell of the tarry rope before it rots; the name of a dog dead sixty years, and the shape of its lying in a doorway; an afternoon when it rained and nobody minded. The bus to the yards, someone said, was dearer.
It was the tickets that undid them, or began to. Because the stamped words were so exact. A memory given away, a person expects to lose the thing itself and keep the loss, a sore place, a gap — and this is what happened at first only in a mild way. The woman who could no longer be held in water swam badly ever after, and said it was worth it, she supposed, and let it be. But the stamped tickets were kept — receipts given, the notice had promised, and receipts are what offices are for — and it was not long before a crossing taken twice a week produced a wallet thick with slate-grey tickets, each one a memory stated better than it could ever have been stated from inside. People read them on the boat, out at the swell, where there was nothing else to read. People read them at home. Ruta, checking the day's takings against the manifest, read every one, because she copied them in, and her hand improved over the months to a fine grey upright lettering the office could not have taught her.
The manifest grew. That is the fact the whole matter comes to. The canvas ledger began with blank pages by the yard, and by the end of the first year the daily entries ran to four and five, and the ink of the copies made by no visible pen was a shade darker than the ink made by Ruta's hand, entry by entry, the two alternating down the columns like plaited rope. The blanks went on out past the cellar wall into the dark of the storeroom, a whole unbegun winter of pages, and the office ordered no more.
Nobody at the mainland end of the crossing will believe the least of it, which is the smallness of the condition: that nobody whose memory had been stamped ever once asked for it back. Islanders are thrifty, but this was not thrift. When the oyster man — the same who had joked his wife's voice back into existence — was asked at the yard gate why he did not go to Ruta and say the fare had risen too far, he looked out at the water like a man selecting his words and said: it would be like asking them for the change back. And when asked who he meant by them, he said: whoever keeps the manifest inks that dark, and went in to the beds.
Which left exactly one question open in the town, and it was not the ferryman's, and it was not the office's, and it was not, in the end, Ruta's, though she knew it best of anyone. The question was raised by her niece, home for a visit, who read four pages of the manifest over her aunt's shoulder and asked, with the honesty of visitors: who are they for? Who reads them, once they are in?
Ruta copied her answer into the manifest, because by then an entry had its own weight and wanted keeping. She wrote it in her own hand, in the ordinary ink, so it would sit visibly among the darker pages and be known apart.
The manifest is not growing. she said. It is being answered.