A Coin for the Ferryman
I always thought I would be prepared for my death. In these parts, where you are just as likely to get caught under the wheels of an oxcart or trip off the edge of the pier as you are to hear birds singing in the morning, it is advisable to make ready.
Not one soul on this island dares to step out of doors without their demis – a small satchel, sometimes a pouch tied to one’s belt, containing all one might need on the other side. A book to pass the time perhaps. A pipe and a pinch of tobacco. A scrap of your mother’s favourite scarf to remind you of home. Pressed roses that won’t survive the journey but are packed anyway.
No one really knows what will be needed on the other side, and what will be lost to the void between life and death. There are whole stalls on Market Day devoted to telling customers what they will need when they make the crossing.
Buy this candle, they shout. It’s dark over there.
The next week they’ll be touting lanterns because any exposed flame is sure to be blown out by the harsh winds that howl through the night.
You wouldn’t want to be cold out there, so why not purchase this new fur coat?
Take a roof tile from the far-off kingdom of Agar – you won’t want to be without shelter.
Many a fool has been drawn in by their hawking. Old Dumas was so taken in by their insistence he need this or that to live a good death that his demis became a large trunk he had to haul along behind him wherever he went. He used to joke that at least he always had something to sit on at parties and festivals. It was, however, commonly agreed that when the trunk came loose from its bindings on the back of the little river ferry and sank below the surface, Old Dumas would not have drowned had he not insisted on jumping in to save it.
There is one thing that all the folk of the island agree cannot be left behind. A single, copper penny. The legend of the ghoulish ferryman has been told since the land was first settled and has become as much a part of the fabric of the world as harvest in the autumn and lambs in the spring. Some may joke that it is merely some old wives’ tale, but even they stitch a copper into their shirt collar, or the picket of their breeches.
A poor man will not spend his last coin on bread – he’d rather starve and keep it for his death.
I have a copper stitched into the waistband of every one of my skirts. Yet, when I met my end, all my hems were muddy from walking the fields and had been hung up to dry. I borrowed my sister’s spare, only to remember too late that she keeps her coppers in the breast of her blouses.
And so, it was without a coin in sight that I slipped and fell from the roof of our cottage while clearing abandoned nests from the chimney. Had she been nearby, my sister might have run to me, might have pressed a coin into my palm just in case, as is the custom. But she was elsewhere, and I went penniless to my grave.
My life ended in a flash of pain that came and went so abruptly that when I opened my eyes on the bank of a black river that was not a river but a liquid cosmos, it was all I could do to breathe in and out for a few minutes.
A fragile-looking rowboat bobbed on the surface of the stars before me, just beyond my reach. At its head stood the ferryman in his white robes, leaning heavily on the pole he used to guide his vessel. He seemed to know already that I would not be his passenger. Not today or tomorrow. Not ever. We simply surveyed one another in mutual acknowledgement of a death poorly had.
Beyond him, over that expanse of black, I could see the distant shores of Paradise gleaming. He would ferry other souls over to those lands every now and then. I saw half my village and eventually my sister, now wrinkled with mortal years, cross over the midnight water. The ferryman always returned to watch me standing on the wrong shore.
Not once did he bring his boat close enough for me to board.