Question 1 of 16 · Reading
Vocabulary in context · Curriculum connections: E2.2B
The Last Crossing — original fiction
Original classroom material; people, sources and data are fictional.
For twenty years, the village ferry bell had rung at dusk, and for twenty years Anil had closed the boarding gate when its last note faded. His father had taught him that a keeper’s duty was to hold a boundary. A traveler might complain, but a rule applied without favor was a rule people could trust. Anil repeated that lesson to his apprentice, Meera, as she swept the empty landing.
That week, the cloth workshop shifted its closing time. Several workers reached the river just after the bell. Meera suggested a later departure. Anil shook his head. He thought of all the people who had hurried to meet the old schedule. “Fairness cannot move whenever someone is late,” he said. She answered that the workers were following a new schedule they had not chosen.
At supper, Anil’s sister placed two bowls on the table but left one untouched. Her daughter had taken the longer road home because the ferry was closed. The soup had cooled while they waited. Anil recognized the tired shoulders of someone who had done what was required and still arrived too late. His sister did not ask him to change the ferry. She asked whether the bell now marked the end of a shared day or only the end of his own.
The next morning, Anil did not abandon the gate. He brought a notebook to the landing. He and Meera counted arrivals after the bell for a week and asked the workshop about its closing time. The village council agreed to consider a short trial of a later departure if a qualified crew could cover it. At dusk, Anil watched Meera write the first entry. A keeper, he thought, might guard a service by noticing when its old boundary no longer served the people it was meant to include.