"Ferryman"

He put the oar in and pulled, and the canoe came forward out of the dark and into more of it.

The motor died at the last bend. He did not restart it. The oar was quieter. The river kept what it was given. So he rowed. The oar went down into the black and came up and went down. His hands were big and the work had made them into one hard thing. They had counted a great many things. They did not tell him the numbers. They only kept them.

A kerosene lamp burned yellow at the bow, and past its reach the channel was the color of nothing at all. Reeds close on both sides. He could have reached out and touched them without changing his stroke. The smell was crude and rot and green. He did not separate them.

Behind him the boy had not stopped shaking.

The boy sat low in the stern with a plastic bag held against his chest, and his breath came quick and shallow. Now and then his hand went into the bag and found the thing he kept there and came out again. A photograph, soft at the corners from the handling. He did not show it. Osogó had seen men hold things that way before.

"---they made us watch," the boy said. "You hear me? They made all of us. And he wasn't even, he wasn't---"

Osogó rowed.

"---is it true they take anyone. In the west. I heard you don't have to be nobody, you don't have to be---"

Osogó had not asked the boy his name. The boy had paid in dried fish and a fist of cartridges, and the fish was wrapped in cloth in the bow and the cartridges were in his pocket, and that was the whole of what lay between them. The river did not ask for names. It took the named and the nameless the same.

He said the words to the water without hearing them. Ùdò. I am crossing. I am small. Let me pass. His mouth had made them countless times and his mouth made them now, low, under the slap of the oar, and the water took them without acknowledgement.

Far off to the south, the gas burned. It had always burned. A pillar of fire standing up off the water where the company had opened the river's body and set a flame to what came out of it, and the fire did not go down in the rain season and it did not go down in the dry, and at night you could see it leaning from a long way off, red, doubled in the black water beneath it like a wound that had learned to give light. The old men said the god did not sleep well anymore. Osogó did not look at the fire. He had crossed under it too many times to look.

Somewhere in the reeds, a crow woke and said one hard word and went quiet.

"You ever fight?" the boy said. "You. Did you ever---"

His jaw worked. The teeth came together and held. He counted the strokes and lost the number, and his hands went on without it.

The light came around the bend. A lantern on a mudbank. The black shape of sandbags against the dark, and above them on a pole a flag that did not move because there was no wind to move it. He knew the flag. Black, and on it the red spiral the Mouth's men painted on everything they owned. The Whirlpool. The god's open mouth.

The boy made a small sound and started to come up off the stern.

"Still," Osogó said.

The boy went down.

Osogó put his hand over the lamp and the light died, and the dark came in close, and the canoe went on drifting on what it had been given.

He let it carry them in.

A soldier stood at the water's edge with a rifle, and behind him another held the lantern up, and the lantern found the canoe and found Osogó at the oar and stopped. They knew the canoe. Everyone on the water knew the canoe.

"Ferryman," the soldier said.

"I am the boat."

The soldier was young. Eighteen, maybe less. He moved the lantern off Osogó and onto the boy in the stern, and the boy sat with the bag against his chest and tried to be a thing without a face. The soldier looked at him a moment. Then, the light came back to Osogó and stayed.

Osogó looked at him and did not blink. The river went by under the hull. It was a long count---the boy in the stern not breathing, the soldier's eyes on Osogó's, and then the soldier's eyes went away to the black water. To something out there that wanted his looking, and the lantern went with them. When his eyes came back, his face had decided not to have seen anything at all.

Osogó took the pouch from inside his shirt and held it out. Palm gin. A few rounds. The soldier took it without looking at it.

"Go," he said.

Osogó pushed off the mud with the oar, and the canoe came around, and the checkpoint slid back into the dark and was gone. He uncovered the lamp. The yellow eye opened again on the water.

The boy let out a long breath with a shake still in it and put his face in his hands. Then he lowered them and looked at Osogó's back.

"Why are they scared of you?" It was not all the way a question. "There were two of them. Plus the ones hiding in the bushes. They had guns. Why are they---"

Osogó's jaw worked.

The boy did not ask again. He turned and faced the water and held his bag against him and did not look at Osogó's back, and the quiet that came into the boat then had a different weight to it than before.

The mangroves closed in. The channel narrowed until the reeds dragged at both sides of the hull.

Then, the channel opened onto shallows. Vegetation so thick it choked the water. The water the color of old blood, barely moving. The air changed and became heavier, warmer, something underneath the rot-smell that was almost sweet. There was no current here, only stillness.

The Father's water. Where the maps ended and the old names began again.

Osogó stopped the oar. The boy looked at the mud, and looked at Osogó, and did not move.

"Is there---do you have any---"

He got nothing. He waited and got nothing more, and so he gathered his bag and put one leg over the side into the mud, and it took him to the knee, and he hauled the other after it and stood swaying in the black ground with the reeds at his back.

"Don't tell them you ran." Osogó's voice, low, half to the water. "Tell them you were sent."

The boy turned his head. Maybe he had heard it. Maybe the reeds had it. He stood a moment more and then he turned and went up the bank into the mangroves, and the dark took him a piece at a time---the bag, the shoulders, the pale back of the neck---and then there was the sound of him for a while, and then not even that.

Osogó did not watch the place where he had gone. He put the oar in and brought the canoe around and started back.

⁂

He rowed the way he had come, alone now. The oar and the water. The lamp burned low and he did not trim it. Low light was its own kind of cover. The river ran black and slow. It carried him. It carried everything else the same. In the reeds the crow woke again, or another one did, and threw its one hard word across the water, and got no answer, and went still. The mist came up off the river the way it did in the last hour of the dark, and the world drew in to the lamp and the oar and the count, and he was a thing the basin moved from one place to another, and he asked it for nothing, and it gave him that.

⁂

By the time the light went again, he had the canoe back in the reeds where he kept it---near enough to the channel to leave fast, far enough back to be hard to find. The day had been nothing. He had eaten the boy's dried fish and watched the water. Now, the sun was down behind the mangroves and the river had gone the color it went in that hour, gold to blood to black, the blood hour, the hour the ambushes liked, and across the water on a broken jetty a woman stood and watched him come in.

She wore white, and she did not move.

She wore a long woven scarf wound around her shoulders and over her head. It fell past her hips. The edges were frayed from handling. Under it, a wrapper of finer cloth---patterned, still white. She held the ends of the outer cloth bunched in her fist, the way you hold something that might slip away. Gold at her ears. Gold at her wrists. On her feet were leather sandals worth more than a week's wages at the refinery, and the mud had ruined them past saving, and she had let it. At her feet lay a bundle wrapped in white the length of a teenage body. Back where the path met the bank, two others waited. A teenage boy and a teenage girl, a rifle slung on a strap between them, and they had the stillness of people who had been told to wait and would wait past reason.

He brought the canoe in along the boards and made it fast and did not climb out and did not speak.

"Ferryman," she said.

Her voice was low and went down at the end, a voice carried in a careful hand.

"I need to reach Òsè."

Òsè. The shrine in the deep water, far up where the channel ran narrow between the Mouth's banks and his men sat on both sides of it under the black flag, and the old women said the god's voice was loudest there. No one took the river up to Òsè in the daylight. No one took it there at night. He could put the oar back in the water and leave her standing on the boards with her gold and her dead and her two children who would not move, and she could not stop him.

"How much," she said.

He did not answer right away. The water moved under the hull.

"Three sacks," he said. "Dried fish. Or the equivalent."

She was quiet. Three sacks was a month's catch for a village.

"I have cartridges," she said.

"I don't need cartridges."

"Then what do you need."

He did not answer.

She reached into the white cloth and brought out a small pouch and held it across the gap to him, and he took it, and the weight of it told him before he opened it. Gold. Three times what he had said.

He took a coin between his teeth---his hands were too big for the small bright disc, and it gave the way gold gives, soft and true.

She was looking at the water.

He put the pouch away inside his kaftan.

The shape under the cloth was a boy's length. Narrow shoulders. The white had been wound close and even, and it was clean. Dry.

When he looked at her, her eyes were already on him. They held. There was nothing wet in them.

"Now," she said. "We go now."

She lifted her hand, and the two by the bank came forward and took up the bundle between them, carefully, and brought it down the boards and laid it in the bow near the lamp. The girl steadied the woman's arm as she stepped down off the wooden platform into the boat, and the woman sat in the bow with the bundle against her, and the canoe took the weight and settled.

"Tago," the woman said, to the bank. "Isheni. Go back now. I will come on my own."

They did not move. The boy and the girl stood with the rifle between them and looked at her in the boat and did not move so much as a hand, and Osogó understood that they would stand on that bank in the dark and the mosquitoes until she came back to it, and that nothing she said now would move them.

He put the oar in and pushed off the rotten boards, and the jetty went back and the bank went back, and the two children on it went back into the dusk and were gone. The canoe came around to the channel and the mist took the edges off the world. There was no sound but the oar going down and coming up. In the bow the woman sat with the body held against her, her face to the front, to the black water and the deep country it ran into, and she did not look down at the thing she carried.

The lamp threw its small light forward over her hands.

On the third finger of her left hand there was a thin band of gold. She turned it once, around, with her thumb.

Then it was still.