Short story · 4 min read · Set in Maes-y-Dydd ·
The Toll of Names
A country toll booth above Maes-y-Dydd charges travellers by the one they name rather than by coin, and its receipts read like a litany.
The booth stood at the first bend above Maes-y-Dydd, where the road narrowed between two grey walls of the same stone as the hills. It had a slate roof, a stove whose chimney never drew, and a flap window with a brass slider worn smooth by a hundred years of thumbs. The sign, repainted every few springs by the council that had stopped answering letters about it, read plainly:
*Tolls by name only. Have your name ready.*
Motorists from the far side of the valley — the ones who had come through from the motorway with maps that did not show the bend — always braked at the flap window and asked what the charge was, and the keeper, Mrs Prichard for the last eleven years, gave them the same patience she gave the weather.
*It depends who you name,* she said.
The rule was a rule of the road, older than the ledger it was kept in. You paid by the person you spoke as you paid. Name the wife you were travelling home to, and the charge was small; she was expected, and expectation honours a road. Name the man you were going to see about money, and the toll rose, because debt is freight. Name nobody at all — the commonest thing, on the evening runs — and the booth charged you nothing and gave you a blank receipt, and you drove on lighter than you deserved, and the wind through the window gap all the way to the top of the hill was the wind of that.
Two of the council men still called the tolls *receipts* and would not say what they were receipts *for*, and the ledger, kept in a drawer on a bed of felt, was written like service paper. Down the left margin, dates in pencil. Along the lines, names in copperplate: not the payers' own names, mostly, but the names the payers had spoken. *For Agnes. For the boy, both of them. For my mother, meaning it.* Twice a year, Mrs Prichard read the half-year's page aloud to the empty road, the way a sexton reads the stones, and the wind took the names up the hill, and the hill, if you stood in the right place at dusk, had the look of a place accepting an accounting.
The last Thursday of October 1971, a saloon car came down from the far side at crawling pace, stops in the fog, and the driver at the flap window was a young man in a suit too thin for the season. He asked the charge, and she gave the rule, and he sat a while with his hands at ten to two on the wheel, and then he said, in the voice of a man paying out of his own pocket at a counter:
*My father, then. Say it's for my father, who died in March.*
Mrs Prichard had taken tolls by name for eleven years and had never once been asked to name the dead, because the dead owe no freight and bring none. But the ledger had a page for the unsorted, the way every honest book does, and she wrote him into it, and the toll she named was the smallest she knew — a name said kindly, which is fairer than a farthing and harder to carry.
He asked what would happen now. She told him the truth, which was that she did not know, and that was the whole of what the booth knew: receipts went up the hill and nothing came down. He drove on, and she noted it in the ledger beneath his line: *spoken for a stranger. no return expected,* because that was how it had always been done, and a keeper does a thing the way it has always been done or she is not a keeper.
The following week the fog stayed at the bend all seven days, and no one came through, and on the eighth day the council sent a man with a paper clip on his lapel to ask why the takings were nil and why nobody, in eleven years, had ever handed her a coin. She passed the ledger out through the flap, and he read a page of it, and his face did the thing faces do at ledgers in this county, which is to go courteous.
*These is receipts,* he said, not asking.
They is, she agreed.
She struck the booth from the road schedule the next spring, and the flap window stayed shut that summer for the first anybody could remember, and the hills went on all the same. But the bend still slows drivers who have never been told to slow there, and more than one has wound down the window at a closed window and read the flap's dust.
Written there, by nobody the parish will put a name to, are the words she used to say.
Whom will you name?