Day 40: Emil's Request

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the only way to have a friend is to be one.

I copied it onto the blackboard on Monday morning, and by the afternoon someone had drawn a small boat under it.

Dear Grandmother,

I am back in the lake town. The bus came round the last bend at four, and the lake was still white, but grey at the edges, like milk left too long on the stove. The house was cold. The stove took two matches. Then I sat on the kitchen chair with my coat on and looked across the yard at the dark school windows until I felt ready to be their teacher again.

Emil came on Tuesday. He did not knock at the school. He waited by the gate until the end of the day, with his cap in his hands. Sami saw him first and shouted that the ferryman was here, and the whole class pressed to the window. Emil lifted one hand to them, very slowly, as if he were waving a boat in.

"How is she?" he asked, when the children had gone.

I told him what I could. That you are back in Room Twelve. That the fever has gone. That you sleep more, and eat a little soup, and that Hanne holds your hand when she tidies the bed. He listened with his eyes on the lake.

Then he said, "I would like to see her. Once. If you will take me."

I did not answer at once. I thought of my mother, who would say no before he finished the sentence. I thought of you, who might not know him, and of him, who would know you at once. I thought of the bus, two hours each way, and of his knees after the cold he had in winter. And I thought of your recipe card, the one that says "for E.", written in your neat hand when you were twenty-two.

"Yes," I said. "I will take you."

He nodded and put his cap back on, and that was all. But when he turned to go, I saw that the top button of his coat was hanging by one thread. I made him come into the house and sit by the stove while I sewed it on.

This is the small thing I tried, and you could try it too. When you sew a button onto a heavy coat, lay a matchstick across the top of the button and sew over it. Then pull the matchstick out and wind the thread a few times around the stitches underneath. That little stem of thread lets the button stand up above the thick cloth, so the coat closes easily and the thread does not wear through. Emil watched me do it. He said his mother did the same, only with a fishbone.

Old buttons keep their own history. Before shops sold them on cards, people cut the buttons from worn-out clothes and kept them in a jar, and a good coat might wear the buttons of three coats before it. My jar is a jam jar. Dora says hers is a biscuit tin, and that her mother could name the coat each button came from, the way some cooks can name the cake from a single crumb.

When the button was done, Emil stood and tried it, open and closed. "Good," he said. "Now I am fit to visit a lady."

I laughed, and he smiled, and for a moment he looked like the young man at the edge of the photograph.

Later, while I was rinsing the cups, Tomas came past the gate with Mila on their way home, and I told him about Emil's request. He thought for a moment. "Then take the early bus," he said. "The late one gets in after dark, and he will not like the steps at the stop." He said it as if he had been planning journeys for old ferrymen all his life. Mila asked if Emil was going to see his girlfriend. I said he was going to see an old friend. "That is what Dad always says," she said, and Tomas suddenly had to look at his boots.

I have written to Hanne to ask which day is best. I will tell my mother in plain words, and I will listen to what she says.

Emerson's line is still on the blackboard. Ida asked me this morning what it means, and I said it means you do not wait for a friend to come to you; you go. Emil has waited fifty-eight years. I think he has been your friend all that time, in the only way he could. Now it is my turn to be one, to both of you.

Your Vera

Day 41: The Bus to the City

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote of ships that pass in the night and speak to each other in passing: only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness.

I thought of it at the bus stop in the half-light, with Emil beside me in his mended coat.

Dear Grandmother,

We took the first bus on Saturday. It leaves at seven from the square by the village hall, and in March that means a sky the colour of weak tea. Emil was there before me. He had a paper bag on his lap and would not tell me what was in it.

The bus was nearly empty. Greta got on at the second stop with a parcel for her sister, saw the two of us, and raised her eyebrows so high that I had to look out of the window. She sat behind us and said nothing for a whole hour, which for Greta is a kind of present. Past the third village a woman got on with a basket of eggs and sat across the aisle. Emil nodded to her, and she nodded back. When she had gone, he told me he had carried her across the lake on her wedding day, and that she had held her hat with both hands the whole way, in case the wind took it before the vows did.

Emil talked. I had never heard him talk so much. Maybe it was the bus, which he said was nothing like a boat: too much shaking and not enough swing. He told me about the ferry years. How his father let him take the wheel at twelve, on calm mornings only. How the ferry carried milk churns at six, the doctor at nine, schoolchildren twice a day, and once a piano, tied down with every rope on board, for a wedding on the far shore. How in fog he steered by the sound of the bell on the landing and the smell of woodsmoke from the houses.

"And the teacher," I said. "Did she ride the ferry?"

"Every second Saturday," he said, "to the market. She always stood at the front, even in the rain. She said the wind at the front was the best part." Then he went quiet and turned the paper bag round in his hands.

I tried something on that bus that I want to remember. When he went quiet, I did not fill the silence with a big question. I asked a small one: "What was the first thing you did every morning on the ferry?" It opened him again like a key. The first thing, he said, was always to wipe the dew off the bench, so the first passenger would not sit down wet. You could ask anyone that, about any work. People who have forgotten a great deal often still remember their mornings.

He also told me how the ropes were kept. A ferry rope lives in water and sun and frost, and it rots from the inside if you let it. So every spring his father tarred the ropes, hanging them in loops in the yard and painting them black with a hot brush, and the whole shore smelled of it for a week. Emil said you could tell the season by the smell of the landing: tar in spring, fish in summer, wet wool in autumn, and in winter nothing at all, because the cold keeps every smell shut in its jar.

The city came slowly. First the petrol stations, then the warehouses, then the long grey streets. Emil stopped talking and looked at everything as if he were counting it. At the last stop Greta leaned forward between our seats.

"Good luck, both of you," she said, and got off with her parcel before either of us could answer.

We walked from the stop to the care home. It is ten minutes for me; it was twenty for Emil, and he would not take my arm until the last corner. At the door he opened the paper bag at last. Inside were three small apples, wrinkled from the winter, from the tree behind the ferry house. "She liked them sour," he said.

Longfellow's ships spoke for a moment and went on into the dark. You and Emil had one year on the same shore, and then fifty-eight years of distance. On the bus I understood that he never stopped sending his signal. Every evening at six he rings the bell. It is only a sound across the water. But a distant voice in the dark is still a voice, and somebody on the shore can still hear it.

Your Vera