The ferry at the narrows kept a log. Every crossing went in it: the hour, the names, what they carried, what they paid. The woman who ran the ferry had kept it for eleven years, in a small slanting hand that leaned toward the far bank like the boat did.
She trusted the log the way you trust a floor. It was where you stood.
One evening in the slack before the last crossing she was reading back over the day, the way she always did, and she came to a line that said: Weaver's family, four, two goats, a loom frame. Paid in cloth.
She could not remember them.
She could remember the morning, the mist, a boy who was sick over the rail. She could remember the afternoon wind. She could not find the weaver's family anywhere in herself. No faces. No goats.
It was her hand on the page. She knew her own hand. But the not-remembering felt louder than the ink, the way a missing step in the dark feels louder than all the steps that held. So she took her pen and wrote in the margin, small: I don't think this happened.
Then she ferried the last crossing and went to bed.
In the morning she opened the log to start the day, and the first thing her eye fell on was the margin.
I don't think this happened.
It was in her hand too. And it was newer than the entry, which made it feel wiser, the way the last thing anyone says in an argument sounds like the conclusion. She read the weaver's line again and this time it looked thin. Made up, almost. The kind of thing you'd write if you were tired and wanted the day to look full.
She looked at the line above it. A fisherman and his nets. She remembered him, mostly. But mostly now seemed suspicious, so she wrote beside it: Uncertain.
That afternoon a man on the bank shouted for her while she was halfway through writing a crossing. She went out to him. When she came back the line on the page stopped in the middle of a word, two sacks of bar, and the broken line sat there on the page looking exactly like something a confused person would write.
Which was what she was now looking for.
By evening she had written uncertain and not sure and no record of this, really beside half the week. Each one she wrote made the next one easier, because there was more and more of her own hand telling her the book could not be trusted. Nothing in the book argued back. The entries had no voice of their own. Only the margins did, and the margins were all saying the same thing.
On the third morning a passenger asked whether she had carried his cousin across last Tuesday, and she said, with real sorrow, I'm afraid nothing was ever carried. The log is broken all the way through.
She believed it. She had eleven pages of her own handwriting that said so.
The man who mended her rope came on the fourth day. He was not a reader. He sat on the jetty while she told him, very calmly, that the book had gone bad and she didn't know for how long.
He listened. Then he walked down the jetty to the post where the weavers had tied their goats, and he picked at it with his thumbnail, and he held up a little twist of white goat hair caught in the splinters.
He went to the cash box and took out a folded square of cloth, coarse and blue, the kind nobody on the near bank made.
He went to the rail where the boy had been sick and said nothing about it, which was a kindness.
"Your book's fine," he said. "You stopped asking anything but the book."
She did not, then or later, ever find out why she couldn't remember the weaver's family that first evening. She was tired, maybe. Maybe the goats had been quiet and the family had been quiet and nothing had snagged. Maybe there was no reason anyone would ever find. She turned it over for a long time and it stayed smooth.
What she did understand was the part after. The first doubt might have been an honest mistake. Every doubt after it had been made out of the first one. She had been checking her book against her own notes about her book, and a book can't be checked against itself any more than you can weigh a stone with the same stone.
She did not cross out the margins. That felt like a second lie on top of the first. And she did not burn the old log. The weavers were in it, and the fisherman, and the man with the sacks of barley she could now remember perfectly well, now that she wasn't afraid of remembering.
She put the old book on the shelf, where anyone could take it down. She opened a new one, clean, and wrote the morning's first crossing in her slanting hand.
And on the inside of the cover, where she'd see it every day, she wrote one line. It wasn't trust the book — a book can be wrong, and some day hers would be.
It said: When you doubt a page, go and touch the post.
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