In the morning many others had gathered outside the ferryman’s shed. Some had wagons, some had handcarts, some had pigs and ponies. One man had a hooded peregrine riding on his gloved forearm. The day was mild, full of bird-song. Damselflies caught the sun on their jeweled wings.
The ferryman had no time for me. He passed among the travelers, who stood waiting in orderly clumps along the riverbank, collecting fees in a big burlap sack. He still wore the dressing gown from the night before. In daylight I saw it was apple green, and the embroidery on the back was a pair of scarlet wings. He wore nothing but that and big black boots, and smoked his pipe as he haggled with the passengers and stuffed his sack full of the wares they were exchanging for crossing.
Someone wanted to pay with a sugarloaf the size of his arm, and I heard him complain, as he had with me, “Don’t you have anything besides food?” He accepted a pair of sugar tongs instead.
Someone wanted to pay with a couple of plucked pheasants and he said the same thing, then accepted a pair of baby shoes.
“But what will you do with baby shoes?” I asked. The kitten and I were following alongside him. He acted as if he hadn’t heard. When I asked again, he said, “Busy,” and moved on to the next group. He didn’t even give me the ninny look.
The night before, I’d felt like his friend. I’d felt like his study partner.
Out on the barge, he’d told me the stories of his made-up constellations and I’d told him the stories of mine. My constellations were a magic lantern, a water skin, and a ferry-man. I thought it only right to put him in my story, since he’d put me in his.
We went back and forth, and it was like singing with my mother, singing to make the snow softer, the walking easier, the unknown destination less worrisome. I’d liked it when she and I made up our own tunes and discovered how our voices fit together even when the notes didn’t match. I’d liked it when I lined my palm up against my mother’s. Our hands were different, but they rhymed.
There on the ferry in the middle of the night I’d spread my fingers against the tapestry of stars. I could feel the ferryman turn his big head and look at my hand: dark against darkness, as if someone had snipped a hand-shaped piece out of the sky. I believed I could sense what he would do next. I was sure he was about to reach out his own hand, match it up palm to palm, splayed fingers to splayed fingers, with mine. I waited for its heat, its bigness. And my heart scraped like a whetstone against my ribs.
He did not. By and by the stars grew faint. I found I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, and the kitten and I had climbed back into the hammock, where I fell into an easy sleep. The next time I woke, it had been to the sound of livestock and human voices and there’d been no sign of the ferryman but the pot of coffee he’d left on the stove.
That was how the night had passed.
Now that I saw how seriously he collected his crossing fees, not to mention how little he seemed to have remembered our friendliness the night before, I returned to the shed and searched for something, anything, he might accept from me. As I bent over the rucksack, pointlessly looking again for anything that wasn’t food, the message-in-a-bottle necklace, still around my neck, swung into view. How could I part with that? I heard Viv’s voice, “This is the message,” and felt her mouth on my brow.
But I had little else to choose from. It would have to be that. I put the kitten in her basket and we went and took our place at the end of the line.
When next I saw the ferryman, he had traded his dressing gown for an oilskin duster, and was loading the barge with rigorous precision. He took some groups out of their place in line, moving them to the fore or making them stand aside and wait. He organized livestock according to their type, and loaded wagons and carts in tidy rows. By the time the kitten and I stepped on last, the ferry was packed and perfectly trim.
“We haven’t paid yet,” I reminded him.
“Busy,” he barked, brushing past. He undid mooring lines, pushed us off from the pilings, and took up his place at the tiller.
We set forth. The wind smelled of river. The sun lay close upon the water. The kitten and I stood at the rail and watched it grow small, the shore we left behind.