The Fare Was One Button
Ferris Cloud-Ferryman remembered everyone who had ever sat on his passenger cushion. He could say who had sat there on any morning in all his years on the ferry, what they had said about the weather, and whether they had been right. Mostly they had not. He did not hold it against them. He only remembered.
He kept a tin of old fare tickets under the tiller seat. When he had something to say and nobody to say it to, he wrote it on the back of one. The notes followed a rule, though Ferris would not have called it that. The more he minded about a thing, the fewer words he used. A complaint to the harbor office about the mooring fee ran to both sides of a ticket and onto a second. Mora once kept his supper warm at the Last Cup three nights running, and the note he left her said “Mora.” She pinned it up over the teapots.
Ten days before the fourth, Ferris wrote what was, for him, a very long note, and tucked it under the passenger cushion. He and Sorrel had passed notes that way for years. Ferris was always just casting off when Sorrel came running down the quay with a cargo tally in one hand, and the cushion stayed where it was.
Sorrel. The fourth will be twenty years since your first crossing. I would like to take you over and back again, the same as then. Just you, on the cushion. There is something I have meant to tell you for a long time, and the boat is the place for it. F.
Sorrel had come up from the Hollow on that cushion at six, the winter the stars kept falling. Sorrel loved the harbor from the first night: the noise, the ropes, the hot food sold after midnight. These days Sorrel ran a cargo basket at the West Mooring, lent things to everybody, and paid everybody back for everything, usually before they had finished doing it. Sorrel called the fourth Crossing Day. Every year on Crossing Day, Sorrel pressed something on Ferris to pay for that first ride. A scarf. A crate of oranges. Once, a lamp for the ferry’s bow, which already had one.
Ferris wanted one plain crossing, the same as the first, with nothing pressed on anybody. And he wanted, at last, to tell Sorrel that the first fare had been paid in full, and how.
The reply came the next morning.
Load 1 of 3. YES. Twenty years! I didn’t think you’d counted. Leave it all to me. I’ll bring packets from the hot stall on the quay, the pepper ones, because you like the pepper ones. I might bring one or two people. Only people who’d like it. S.
Ferris did not like the pepper ones. He had eaten one in front of Sorrel eleven years ago, to be polite, and had been given one every Crossing Day since.
The next note came before he had answered the first.
Load 2 of 5. Moss and Tace from the Ropewalk would like to come. So would the basket crews, and the tally clerk, who has never once been over to the Hollow. That’s about eighteen. I have ordered forty packets so there are seconds. S.
Ferris wrote back on a ticket from a wet Tuesday in the spring. A woman with a hatbox had told him that day it would clear by noon. It had not.
The ferry takes six.
Load 3 of 9. Six! Then we need a second boat. Don’t worry, I’ve worked it all out. Moss is going to lash one on behind with a proper line. She says she already made the line last month as a spare, in case anyone ever wanted to tie two boats together. Pell has an old envelope lining in red and gold that would make lovely cushions. We could take the whole West Mooring in one go. S.
The second number, Ferris noticed, went up with every note, the way Sorrel’s plans did.
He wrote his answer that evening on the tiller seat, with the stub of pencil from the tin. The ticket had been rained on. Ferris had a habit of putting a little tail on the end of a word, as if he were tying it off.
No.
Load 4 of 10. NOW? Ferris, it’s a week off! But you know boats. I’ve told everybody it’s on. Moss has brought the line down. It’s lying beside your ferry in a coil the size of a table. Tace has already played two hands of cards on it and lost one, and says it was a different card. S.
Ferris looked at the coil. Then he looked at the ticket. Then he looked at the coil again. He took a dry ticket from the tin and wrote the same word, and made the O so round that a parcel could have been posted through it.
No.
Load 5 of 11. Oh. NO. I see it now, the rain had got at the first one. The line’s gone back to the Ropewalk. Moss says it’s a spare again and she doesn’t mind, she likes having it. So: one boat. Everybody is still coming. They’ll wave from the quay and eat packets and it will be lovely.
Also I have done some sums. Ilex found the old ferry fares in the back ledgers and wouldn’t let me touch the page. A child’s fare twenty years ago, with twenty years of the harbor’s interest on it, comes to a great deal, and I am paying it. I’m paying for the whole day. It’s only fair. S.
Ferris wrote his answer on the smallest ticket in the tin.
Don’t.
By Ferris’s own rule, it was the most he had ever minded anything. He sat with it on the tiller seat for a long time, while the lamps came on one by one down the quays in the blue evening. Then he tucked it under the cushion and went up to bed.
Load 6 of 12. You can’t stop me paying, Ferris. Ask anybody at the West Mooring. The tally clerk lent me a pencil in the spring and I bought him a box of forty before he’d noticed it was gone. Noon tomorrow. Everybody knows. S.
Load 7 of 13. The packets came. I wrote 6 on the order because the stall is number six, and they read it as six o’clock, so forty packets came at six this morning instead of eleven. They’re in a crate under my coat to keep warm. My coat is not big enough for forty. S.
Load 7 of 13. Have you looked over the rail? S.
There were two notes marked Load 7. Ferris noticed, because Ferris noticed everything, and he put them both in the tin in the order they came. Then he looked over the rail.
Fog lay under the harbor. It was not the ordinary cloud the ferry went over every day, with its gaps and its moods. It was a thick white floor pulled right up under the quays, smooth and flat and still, with the bottom steps of every stair tucked into it like feet under a blanket.
By noon there were eighteen people at the quay rail in their working clothes and their good scarves. Sorrel stood in the middle of them with a crate of forty packets, all cold.
“It’ll lift,” said a woman from the basket crews. “By one o’clock. You watch.”
“You said that on the ninth of last month,” said Ferris. “It lifted at four.”
He looked at the fog for a long while, the way he looked at all weather, as if it might like to argue. Then he said what he would have said to anybody.
“No crossing today. I can’t see the far landing, and I don’t go where I can’t see the landing.”
“Right,” said Sorrel. “Right. Then we’ll do it next week. I’ll tell everybody. I’ll order new packets, hot ones this time, and I’ll stand at the stall till they’re done, and I’ll—”
Moss had taken a packet out of the crate. She ate half of it at the rail while Sorrel was still talking.
“They’re better cold,” said Moss. “Don’t tell the stall.”
So the West Mooring ate forty cold packets at the quay rail and argued about the fog, and Tace dealt a hand on the crate lid and lost it again. Ferris ate a cold pepper one and found, after eleven years, that he liked them cold. He did not say so. Sorrel would have ordered forty.
Then he went down the steps to the ferry and held it steady against the quay.
“Sorrel,” he said. “Get on.”
Sorrel looked at the fog, and at the crate, and at eighteen people with their mouths full, and got on.
Ferris took the ferry out fifty yards over the white, and no farther. The quay lamps stayed bright behind them, near enough to read a ticket by. The fog lay flat and quiet under the hull, like snow on a field nobody had walked on yet, and the noise of the quay went small. Sorrel sat on the passenger cushion with every one of the notes still under it, and for a little while said nothing at all, which Ferris had not known Sorrel could do.
Then Sorrel leaned over the side and looked down at the white, grinning, the way a child does the first time on a ferry.
“Is the cloud soft?” said Sorrel.
“Very,” said Ferris. “We’re not checking.”
Sorrel laughed so suddenly that a few people at the rail laughed too, without knowing why. Ferris turned the boat and brought Sorrel back to the steps, and that was the whole of the ride. It was the ride he had wanted, to the yard.
He had meant to say the thing on the way back. He found he had used up all his words on the fog.
That night, with the lamps lit down the quays and the fog still lying under them, Ferris took the oldest ticket from the bottom of the tin. On the front it said Child, Hollow to Cloudbreak. Under it, where it had been for twenty years, was a small green button.
He wrote “Paid.” Then he looked at it for a long while. He could see exactly what Sorrel would do with “Paid.” Sorrel would read it as a bill, and go to Ilex, and come back with sums.
So for the first time in his life, Ferris used more words, not fewer, on the thing he minded most.
Sorrel. Twenty years ago today you came up from the Hollow on this cushion. You were six, and you had on a green cardigan, buttoned wrong. When I asked for the fare you thought about it very hard. Then you twisted off the top button and gave it to me. Then you looked over the side and asked me whether the cloud was soft, and I told you the same as I told you this morning. I have kept the button in this tin ever since. It is the only fare I ever kept. The fare is paid. It was paid in full the day you gave it, and there is no interest on a button. F.
In the morning there was a note under the cushion. It was the shortest note Sorrel had ever written, and Ferris, who had kept every one, could say so for certain.
Then I won’t pay you back. Thank you.
Underneath, in small careful figures, as if to make quite sure there would be no more loads:
Load 1 of 1.
Ferris read it twice, which for Ferris was a great deal of fuss, and put it in the tin beside the green button. It was the first time in twenty years that Sorrel had been given something and not paid it back. The fog had gone in the night, and Ferris was glad of that note all the way to the Hollow and all the way back.
