There was a trader from Kariba, in the province of Mashonaland West, who bought flour and soap and oil in town and carried them to the other side of the lake, to Chalala, where no road goes.

No road goes to Chalala, and what there is comes by water, and by water it came on the big ferry, which is the ferry that had run that route for forty years.

The big ferry had been given to the government as a gift in nineteen eighty-five, and from the day it was given the government kept it on that route, and the route took three hours when the weather was good.

Of good weather she was a good judge, they say, as those who live by crossings are; but the thing most known about her is another, that she knew the weight of a sack by touch better than the steelyard, and that when there was wind she tied a second knot in the headscarf she wore, and that second knot could be seen from far off and was how they knew her on the jetty.

She had the second knot on the eleventh of August too, and it was one of those days when the lake ruffles in patches and then goes calm and then ruffles further out.

Further out, that day, it did not go calm. The ferry left all the same, with about a hundred and eighty people aboard and the goods, which is more than that boat could carry.

Of the engines, one was working. The engine that was not working was known about, and many knew about it, and no one has ever said they did not know.

The passengers, after half an hour, said the weather was getting worse and asked to turn back or to take shelter behind the island. What was answered to that request has not been learned, and it was not learned afterwards either, when the commission people came to ask their questions: of those who could answer, some are no longer here and some do not speak.

The waves began to come over the low side. Water that comes over the side stays inside, if the pump is stopped, and it stays inside on the side where the weight is.

The weight was where they had put it in the morning, that is astern, up on the deck, in among the people.

Of what happened next, ninety-two dead are counted as confirmed at the date of the seventeenth, and seventy-seven people pulled out alive from the water and from under the capsized hull; and they were pulled out by a boat that came from Tashinga, the parks men and the local boatmen, who arrived towards two in the afternoon.

She had stayed on shore with the second half of the load, as she had stayed other times, because the load did not all fit in a single trip.

The load did not all fit, and that is why she was alive, and this is a sentence that in Kariba, in those days, many said and none of those it concerned said.

Three days later, on the shore, they put a smaller boat into service so as not to leave Chalala with nothing. The smaller boat needed the goods as the ferry had needed them, and the boatman was waiting under the shelter, and there was wind, and she tied the second knot.

The boatman held out his arms for the first sack. His arms were out and open, and she had already lifted the sack half a hand off the stack.

The stack was twenty-two sacks, and the twenty-two sacks were the ones left on shore for the next trip, and it is because of the twenty-two sacks left on shore that she had not gone aboard that day.

Loveness put the sack down again, with both hands. She put it back on the stack, not on the ground, and turned it so the seam was on top, which is how sacks are set when they have to stay still.

Then she said, out loud, so they could hear her as far as the shelter, that the other sacks were hers.

She said nothing else. She did not raise her voice. She did not explain how many there were or who had loaded them for her, and the people on the jetty did not ask her, and this is what is known for certain; the rest are things said in the evening.

A woman near the shelter, who sold roasted groundnuts in newspaper cones, said that she wore the headscarf the way her mother had worn it, with the knot in front and the second knot to the side, and that her mother wore it that way when she went to the market on the other shore. She said it to no one in particular, the way such things are said.

On the other side of the jetty, at that same moment, the parks boat was coming in, bringing back the bodies recovered that morning. It came alongside slowly, and they kept the engines running a while longer.

The boatman lowered his arms. He lowered them without hurry and dried them on his trousers, and said the thing everyone says in those parts, that without goods there is no run.

And the run without goods does not pay, because at Chalala the passengers pay half and some do not pay at all, and what holds the crossing up is the freight, and it is the freight that brings the flour, and the flour reaches Chalala only that way.

He was right, and even the ones under the shelter, who were not talking, granted him that.

The people on the jetty said nothing. Whoever was loading their own things went on loading them, and whoever was waiting went on waiting, and this they still tell now.

The boat left half empty, at a little past eleven, with nine passengers and two bicycles.

The twenty-two sacks stayed on the shore. On the shore they covered them with a green trailer tarpaulin and put two stones on top, one to a corner, on the side that takes the wind.

She put the stones there herself, and to put them she took the headscarf off her head and held it in her hand, and with the headscarf in her hand she stayed there while the boat went out of the bay; and she held it with both hands, one inside the other, the way you hold a thing that usually belongs somewhere else.

And who knows whether at Chalala, next month, when the flour does not come, anyone will ask whose flour it was that did not come, or whether they will only ask why it did not come.