The Night Ferry

Lao Zhou has poled the night ferry on a river at the city's edge for twenty years.

The river is not wide, the water muddy. On the far bank there used to be a village, until a reservoir was built and the village went under and the people moved away. Only Lao Zhou's ferry remained, carrying the scattered few on both shores — night-shift workers, anglers coming home late, the drunk who need to cross.

On the last trip before closing, Lao Zhou had a habit: he would pole the empty boat once more toward the far bank.

Not to carry anyone. On the stone steps of that far bank there always stood a boy in rain boots, fourteen or fifteen, a schoolbag on his back, waving to cross. Lao Zhou would bring the boat close, but the boy would not board; he only looked at the water and said, "Uncle, wait for my dad to pick me up." Then he stepped back into the dark.

The first few times, Lao Zhou really waited; he waited a long while, no one came, and the boy was gone. He asked the old residents along the shore and learned that the year the village was flooded, the water rose fast; a child playing on the steps was swept away, and his father jumped in to save him, and neither came back. Those stone steps had long sunk to the bottom with the village, a hundred-odd meters of water from the present shore.

Lao Zhou never told anyone the truth.

From then, every night at closing, he still poled the empty boat once toward the far bank, the bow nudging the water as if it had docked, pausing a moment, then turning back. Once his son took over the ferry and asked why he poled an empty boat; he said, "You wouldn't understand. Someone is still waiting to cross."

Last winter Lao Zhou passed. His son kept the ferry, and kept that empty trip. The villagers say the boy, by now, should have someone to meet him.

Midnight Record note: Beneath the reservoir lies the old village, long gone from any map. But Lao Zhou knew some shores are not on maps but in people's hearts — a sunken flight of steps, a child who never got his father, and for twenty years he poled an empty boat each night, not out of superstition but to finish, for the living, what that family could not: the act of "coming to get you." We all, in life, have poled an empty boat for someone.