Be Brave Not Safe lettering with sword

Ray died in March, in a hospital bed in Oxford with the radio murmuring about floods, and the Mary Ellen came to me with the engine knocking and a bank loan I didn't want to think about. The scrapman in Abingdon weighed the sword in his palm and offered forty pounds, then sixty when I didn't reach for it. I said no. I couldn't have explained why until I was back on the water with the sword across my knees, the tiller lashed, and the sign creaking on its hinge.

The flood came in the second week of April, brown and fast, shoving whole willows past the lock gates. The Mary Ellen tore loose from her ring at two in the morning, and the stern line snapped taut, dragging the bow round toward the weir. My hands shook on the oilcloth. I stood on the gunwale with water at my ankles and hacked through the rope the way Ray must once have done, sawing and swearing, until the strands parted with a crack like a shot.

She swung out into the current, lights dead, cabin door banging, and I watched the sign slide past the reeds, every letter catching the lamp from the lock house. Brave, I thought, and then, with my teeth chattering, not safe at all. I laughed until I was sick over the side. Downstream the river took us both.