The Dead Pay in Song

My hands were on the pole before the light was.

I had taken the coat off its hook in the kitchen before I was fully awake. The hook was black iron, driven into the doorframe by Maeve’s father, and the plaster around it was a shade paler than the rest of the wall, worn clean by thirty years of wool. I stood in the cold kitchen and put it on. It smelled of river water and old wool. The house ticked around me, the way old houses do when the heat has not come on. The coffee could wait. I walked down to the landing with the sleeves pushed to my elbows, and by the time my boots hit the gravel they had slid down again, covering my hands to the fingertips.

October 1. A Thursday. The first crossing of the season, and the first one I would run alone. The dock boards were cold through my boots. The river lay in front of me the color of weak tea in the half-light, and the mist was already on it. Too early. It should not have been there yet. It sat low over the water in a white sheet, and the far bank was gone behind it.

The coat hung past my wrists. Maeve’s oilskin coat. I had not adjusted the straps. The shoulders sat two inches wide on either side of mine, and the sleeves swallowed my hands until I pushed them back. I had been meaning to fix the straps for three weeks, since the funeral, since the morning I took the coat off its hook and put it on. I had not fixed them. The coat was a room I had not grown into yet. I wore it the way you wear a house you just inherited: careful of the walls, unsure where the floorboards creak.

I unlatched the bow compartment and lifted out the ledger. The oilskin wrap was cracked at the spine from five generations of opening, and the leather strap was worn smooth as a river stone. I unwrapped it far enough to see the top page: iron gall ink, brown and fading, a melody in the old notation, a name I could barely make out. I wrapped it again and set the stone on top. The stone was flat and grey and cold from the night. Then I set the pole in the water and pushed off.

I poled The Wren out into the mist.

The ferry moved the way she always moved, flat and steady, the hull sliding over the cold slip of the water. The pole found the riverbed and pushed. My shoulders took the weight. I had been poling since I was fourteen, and the work had its own memory in my arms, separate from anything I was thinking. Left hand guiding, right hand driving. The current pulled at the hull. The mist closed around the boat. Within ten strokes I could not see the landing behind me.

The crossing takes ten minutes by pole when the current is with you. I knew every yard of it: the deep hole off the point, the shoal where the pole scraped gravel, the eddy on the far side that tried to turn the bow. I worked the ferry across by feel, the mist on my face, cold and fine, settling on my eyelashes. Somewhere ahead of me the far bank was waiting, invisible. I did not need to see it.

I hummed The Fallow Hymn .

It is the oldest entry in the ledger, and there are no words to it. Only a line. It falls and it falls, open-throated, the way water falls over a low stone, and it asks nothing of the throat. I hummed it to open the season the way Maeve had, low and unhurried, and I did not hurry the notes. The mist took the sound and gave it back thinner, like the river was humming along a half-step behind me. The hymn asked for an open throat and a slow breath. I gave it both. The notes sat in my chest without weight, the way they were meant to, and the cold air came back into my lungs clean. Maeve had hummed it every October for sixty years. I had hummed it beside her for eighteen of those. This was the first year the harmony was missing, and the single line sounded thinner than I remembered. Or maybe I was only hearing my own part for the first time.

Then they were there.

Two of them. At the water’s edge on the near bank, where the gravel shelved into the current. The first crossing of October always brought someone. That was the pattern, and the pattern had held for five generations. I brought the ferry alongside, the way you bring it alongside for anyone, and the hull scraped the stones once, soft.

The first was an older woman in a faded housedress. Her hands were folded in her lap before she even sat down. She stepped aboard without a sound and took the middle thwart, and she did not look at me. She hummed as she sat. Low. Tuneless. The sound of someone trying to remember a melody they set down a long time ago.

The second was a man in a work shirt, the kind with the elbows gone. He sat in the stern with his knees apart and his boots planted, and he was silent. His shirt was damp at the collar. He folded his hands once, unfolded them, and let them rest on his knees. He looked at the water. He did not look at me either. They never do, quite. They look at the river, or at their hands, or at the place where the far bank should be.

“Easy now,” I said. Not to them. To the boat, maybe. To the current. It was habit. “Mind the current.”

I opened the ledger in the bow and found the entries by feel. The first song sat high in my throat, a counting rhythm, and I breathed it in fours. The notes stacked neatly behind my teeth, each one placed like a stone set on a wall. I kept my eyes on the water while I sang. The pole was shipped; the ferry drifted. The woman’s folded hands loosened in her lap as the phrases turned, finger by finger, the way a fist opens in sleep. Her humming had stopped. Mine carried the tune alone. When the last note left me, it did not fade so much as go somewhere, downstream, out of my keeping. She stood. She stepped onto the far bank. She walked into the mist and did not look back. The second song sat lower, a rocking cadence that pulled at my shoulders the way the pole did. The phrases were long and the rests were short, and I had to breathe deep and low to carry them, the air going all the way down to the bottom of my lungs. The man’s boots shifted once on the deck. His head dropped a fraction, the way a man’s head drops when he is finally allowed to rest. I sang the last phrase twice through, the way the notation asked, and the second time the tune seemed to loosen its hold on my ribs and go. He stood. He stepped onto the far bank and followed her into the white, and the mist took him the way water takes a stone dropped in: without comment.

The songs left me as I sang them. That is the rule, and it is not a figure of speech. Each one went downstream with the current, out of my throat and into the river, and I did not carry the melodies after. I could not have hummed either of them again if I had tried. The ledger keeps the name and the date and the notation. The river keeps the sound. I was lighter for it and heavier for it, both at once, the way your arms feel after you set down a full bucket: the ache stays, and the weight is gone. I wrote the crossings in the ledger with my pencil. Graphite on cotton. Pencil can be erased and ink cannot, and I was not sure I had the right to make permanent what Maeve had made permanent. The pages were hand-pressed cotton, thick enough that the pencil left a shallow track. I could feel the older entries under my fingertips as I wrote, the iron gall lines slightly raised, brown and fading at the edges. Maeve’s ballpoint entries were smoother, the blue ink sunk into the fiber. Mine sat on top in graphite, grey and provisional. I wrote the two names and the date, and the short notation of each tune — the little marks for the rise and the fall. Then I closed the book.

I closed the ledger. I wrapped it in the oilskin, folding the wrap the way it had folded for five generations of hands. I set the river stone on top. The stone was cold and smooth and fit my palm the way the pole did. The four-pound anchor of it sat in the bow compartment, and I felt the ferry settle a fraction lower in the water, or thought I did.

My thumb found the last page by touch. The tear in the corner, where Maeve’s thumb had pressed too hard for ten years — thinner than the rest, worn at the edges. I did not open to it. I did not need to. I had read the last page once, the first night alone. Maeve’s note. Six lines. Blue ballpoint, unsteady. *Sing it for me. Sing it for her. Forgive me.* I had read it once, straight through, and closed the book, and not opened it again. The house had still been full of the particular quiet that comes after a death, the quiet of rooms that have not decided what they are yet, and I could not sit in it — so I had gone down to the ferry with the lamp, and sat in the bow with the ledger open on my knees, and I had read the last page straight through, once, and then I had closed the book and wrapped it and set the stone on top. I had not read it again. I knew the words the way you know a scar: by touch, not by looking. I put the stone back. I poled for home.

The way home was upstream and slow. The mist was thinning in strips, and between the strips I could see the sycamores on the bank, the leaves going gold at the edges. My arms were tired in the particular way they got from poling, the deep burn in my shoulders. Maeve’s arms had done this for sixty years. Mine had done it for eighteen. The coat sleeves kept sliding down, and I kept pushing them back with the heel of my hand, and the river kept moving under the hull, tea-brown and unhurried, and I thought: I can do this. The thought came and went, the way a leaf goes past the hull. I did not hold it.

I thought about Maeve’s hands on the pole. I could remember the exact shape of them: the knuckles swollen, the nails short, the left thumb with the scar from the fishhook. My hands did not look like that. My hands looked like mine. The pole went in. The pole came out. The ferry moved.

At the house I tied up, coiled the rope, and set the pole against the dock. The garden behind the house was winding down. The tomatoes had gone soft on the vine. The last of the beans hung yellow. Maeve’s sunflowers stood in a row along the fence, gone to seed, their heads bowed and heavy. I pulled the dead vines and left them in a pile for burning. The beans I left for seed. The tomatoes I pulled and carried to the compost in two trips, the vines heavy and wet. My shoulders ached from the poling, a deep ache between the shoulder blades that I knew would be there again tomorrow. I worked until the sun was fully up and the mist was gone off the fields. Then I washed my hands at the pump and went in. The pump handle was cold enough to sting. The water came up tasting of iron, the way it always did in October. The air smelled of turned earth and the cold coming.

Inside, I made coffee. I sat on the porch with the cup between my hands and watched the river. The mist was lifting off it in long, slow veils, and the water showed through underneath, tea-brown and moving. I hummed Pole in the Water . Low. Barely audible. Not for the dead. Not for the ledger. For myself. It is the only song that is not a fare. The only one that belongs to me. I do not write it down. I do not sing it for anyone. The coffee was strong. Tess had told me once that I made it too strong, and Maeve had told Tess to mind her own business, and I had kept making it the same way. I drank it black. The sun came over the ridge and hit the water and turned the tea-brown to gold for about a minute, and then the angle changed and it was brown again.

Ruth’s letter was on the kitchen table, half-answered. I owed her three pages. I had written one and a half. She had written from Roanoke about the rain there, about the apartment stairs, about a man at the library who shelved books wrong on purpose so she would have to fix them. I would finish the letter tonight. I read instead, for a while, a novel I had read twice before. Not poetry. I liked knowing what happened next.

By midday the mist was gone and the day was warm for October. I went down to the ferry and checked the hull. The starboard rail was soft under my thumb where the wood had gone punky. Three, four more years and it would go through. I marked it in my head. I would cut a new rail before the frost. Sycamore, probably, though Maeve had always used river birch. The birch rotted faster, but Maeve had liked the way it took the oil, the way it darkened. I ran my thumb over the soft spot once more and let it be for now. I coiled the spare line. I oiled the cleats. The work was the work. It did not need me to feel anything about it.

That evening I sat on the porch again. The water kept its pace past the pilings. The mist was coming up early, earlier than yesterday, a thin white line forming over the middle of the channel where the water ran coldest. I watched it come. I did not wonder about it. The mist was weather. The water was cold and the air was warm and it was October, and the world was turning the way it turned. The river made its low sound against the bank, steady as a pulse. Somewhere up the hill a screen door banged. A dog barked once and stopped. The town was going in for the night.

I set the pole against the dock when I came up from the landing. The mist was thinning again, going to nothing. I looked at the far bank. Empty. The gravel, the dock, the trees. Nothing waiting. But the mist would come back. It always came back.

In the bow of the ferry, under the stone, the ledger held a page I had not turned. The tear in the corner. I could feel it through the oilskin when I set the stone down, the small rough edge of it under my thumb. I knew it was there.

Inside, the lamp was still on in the kitchen where I had left it. Ruth’s letter waited on the table. I sat down and picked up the pen, and I wrote her the rest of the three pages: the crossing, the two passengers, the mist coming early. I did not write about the last page of the ledger. Some things you do not put in letters. I sealed the envelope and left it by the door for the morning post. I stood at the window a moment, looking down toward the water. Then I turned away. I did not look back at the river.

But the river was still moving.