We are at the bank by six, the teachers, with our folding stools and our flasks and our laminated lists, and the dead are already on their pontoon across the channel, patient in the way of the newly processed, facing us like a choir that has forgotten the tune but not the standing. One of us says, most mornings, the same thing: they cannot put the price up while we are sitting here. Nobody has ever agreed with her out loud.
Since the spring we have been lending each other words. It began with one of us needing four and another having them spare, and now there is a list, and the list is not written down anywhere, and it is understood that a word lent is a word that comes back before the ramp. Nothing in the schedule forbids it. Nothing in the schedule mentions it. We do not discuss it at the bank, where the board can see us, and we do not use the same word twice in a season, and there are eleven of us in it now. Each stool faces its own; that much is allowed us.
We teach across the water. One word at a time; one word per dawn is what the dead will hold, and everything above that washes out by noon — it is on the board; nobody can say they were not told. The board also carries the year’s rate. For a thousand years the fare was two coins, one for the crossing and one for the ferryman’s silence, and any family could raise two coins even in a plague year. The ferryman is old the way the channel is old; nobody living has heard him speak; the second coin bought that, and he has stayed bought. Then the crossing was reformed. The fare floated. The fare is now denominated in words — words of proven retention, audited at the ramp — and this year the crossing stands at two hundred and forty, up forty on last year, the increase attributed on the board to conditions in the channel. A dead one may board when the words they hold reach the rate; not one earlier.
So we teach, and the dead repeat, each word once, all together, the only sound they are permitted, and the channel brings it back to us flat and late, like weather. The widow four stools down has been coming eleven years; her husband holds a hundred and ninety-one of it. The boy near the rail teaches his father the cheap words first — bread, rain, Thursday — the way the pamphlet advises, and saves the dear ones, hoping the price will fall. It has never fallen. Names are the dear ones. Names are taxed at one hundred to discourage sentiment at the ramp, and there are words on the banned list no rate will buy: the old word for the water; the word for together; whatever word the man in the gray coat sold, at the dark end of the bank, cash in the fold, mouth to the water so the inspectors’ readers could not lift it.
They did not shoot him first. First they struck his name from the register while he stood there, which in this city is the older sentence — a man the crossing will never afterward accept, drowned or buried or burned all the same to the channel. Then they shot him. The water took the sound and gave nothing back. He went down at the waterline, half in, and the shallows worked at him the way they work at everything, patiently, by inches; his blood went out to the dead in a slow fan, warm across their shins, iron in the channel’s smell, and the dead did not look down, being past the place where looking down is information.
At the spring audit the readers come along the ramp with their tablets and their patience and they test the waiting dead against the manifests, and the numbers come back short. Words taught are not always words kept; the manifest is corrected downward; the board reminds us, in the standard type, that retention is the family’s risk. The widow’s husband tests at one hundred and eighty-eight. She has the receipts of eleven years and the receipts are not in dispute; the words are simply gone, the way money is simply gone, and the manifest wins, the manifest always wins. A man two stools up is turned back at two hundred and thirty-nine, one word short, and goes to the pontoon’s rail-end to stand with the others of that kind, of whom there are many, and of whom nothing further is required forever.
In the autumn the widow finishes. Two hundred and forty, audited, stamped. Her husband crosses at dusk with nine others, upright on the flat boat behind the ferryman’s back, and she watches him the whole way over, and then she folds her stool and leaves it standing folded against the rail, where the others leave theirs, and walks in. By the end of the year there are nine of them along that rail, folded, chained through the legs with a bicycle chain somebody brought, and the ninth is hers. The water returns the living; it is the one thing everyone here knows. The water did not return her. The ferry did not stop; the ferry never stops; stopping is not in the ferryman’s schedule of services. The ferryman watched her the whole way over, though. Watching is free.
The new rate goes up on the last day of the year. Three hundred. The board attributes nothing. We are at the bank by six. We begin with the cheap words.