The widow four stools down has thrown a word a dawn for eleven years. Her voice is a scrape. Her husband holds a hundred and ninety-one.
We bring folding stools, flasks, laminated lists. Bank by six. The dead wait on the pontoon across the channel. One of us says they cannot raise the price with us sitting here. None of us agrees aloud.
One word per dawn. More washes out by noon. We teach. The dead repeat together, once. Their only permitted sound.
For a thousand years, two coins. One for the crossing. One for the ferryman's silence. Nobody living has heard him speak. Then the crossing was reformed. Words of proven retention, audited at the ramp. Two hundred last year. Two hundred and forty now. Conditions in the channel, says the board.
The boy at the rail teaches cheap words first. Bread. Rain. Thursday. He saves the dear ones for his father. Names cost one hundred. The banned list cannot be bought: the old word for the water, the word for together, whatever the gray-coated man sold at the dark end of the bank. Cash in the fold. Mouth down to the water, below the inspectors' readers.
First they struck his name. The crossing would never take him now. Then they shot him. He fell half into the channel. Blood spread warm across the dead's shins. They did not look down.
In spring the readers test the dead against the manifests. The widow's husband holds a hundred and eighty-eight. Her eleven years of receipts are correct. His words are gone. Retention is the family's risk.
A man two stools up tests at two hundred and thirty-nine. He goes to the rail-end. Stands with the others one word short. Nothing further required forever.
We begin lending each other words. Eleven of us. No written list. The word must come back before the ramp. The schedule neither forbids nor mentions it. We never lend the same word twice in a season. Each stool still faces its own dead. We speak of it away from the bank.
In autumn the widow finishes. Twice she throws the last word. Two hundred and forty. Audited. Stamped.
Her husband crosses at dusk with nine others, standing behind the ferryman. She watches all the way. Folds her stool. Leaves it against the rail. Walks in.
By year's end nine stools stand folded there. Chained through the legs with somebody's bicycle chain. The ninth is hers. The water returns the living. The water did not return her. The ferry did not stop. Stopping is not in the schedule. The ferryman watched her the whole way over.
Watching is free.
On the year's last day the board says three hundred. Attributes nothing. We are at the bank by six. We begin with the cheap words.