Continental Drift

À Table, Dabord, Olande, Adonai

The young Haitian woman, with her infant in her arms and her adolescent nephew standing beside her, watches the sea behind them slowly swallow the Haitian hills. The small, crowded boat plows northward through a choppy, slate-blue sea, toward America, Vanise believes, toward Florida, where everything will be different, where nothing except the part of her that’s inside her skull will be the same, and gradually even that will change. First the village of Le Mole at the base of the green hills is devoured, then the low slopes checkered with cane fields and coconut palms go under, gone to where the dead abide, and at last the familiar dark green hills succumb. There is no known place peering back at her from the horizon, and now she faces only a point on the compass, an abstraction called south, Adonai, that refuses to speak to her in any voice but her own.

This is a new kind of silence for Vanise, one that frightens her, and she begins to chatter at the boy, Claude, scolding him for having stolen the ham from the wrecked truck, pointing out his stupidity in having brought it back to the cabin in Allanche, his deceit in not telling them immediately where he found the ham, before they had eaten at it, so that he could have put it back uneaten before anyone discovered that it and the rest of the meat had been stolen and Aubin came looking for him, and not finding him there would punish his mother and her and her baby, unless Aubin did find him there, in which case Aubin would have taken him off to jail. We would still be at home in Allanche, she reminds him, cooking a chicken and yams on the fire, if you were a good boy. You would have your mother, and we would all have each other, if you were not a thief.

The boy looks down at the rising and falling deck. Slowly he turns away from the south and faces north. Yes, he says, but now we are going to America.

Vanise feels the weight of a huge, swelling stone in her belly. She sighs, turns away from the southern horizon to the north and starts waiting for the sight of America rising from the sea.

For centuries, men and women have sailed this passage north of Hispaniola waiting for the sight of one idea or another rising all aglitter with tangible substance from the turquoise sea. Columbus approaches from the east in search of Cathay, and Ponce de Leon cruises north from Puerto Rico looking for the fabled Bimini, and now comes Vanise, huddled by the low rail in the bow of a small wooden fishing boat out of Haiti, scouring the horizon for a glimpse of America. None of them is lost. All three know they’ll recognize the substance of their idea as soon as they see it, Columbus his Cathay, Ponce his Bimini, Vanise her Florida.

And so they do. Columbus, with a globe in his mind half the size of Ptolemy’s, knows at once that he has reached the fringes of the Empire of the Grand Khan. Ponce, coming upon an island he believes has not been seen before, in his excitement brushes too close to the uncharted reef and has to beach his ship for repairs on the shore of what, for several days, he knows is the Island of the Miraculous Waters. And Vanise, sighting a finger of green land just before sundown blots it out, knows that she has seen Florida.

Columbus, of course, has merely reached part of an archipelago that extends from continents he does not know exist, an unbroken land mass emerging from ice in the north and ice in the south and creating an almost insuperable barrier between old Europe and old Cathay. Ponce has merely landed accidentally on a small, uncharted, brush-covered island where the Indians, though peaceful, will not come out and speak to him of Bimini while he waits for his men to repair the ship.

Vanise has come to North Caicos Island, an easy place to locate exactly. With a map in hand, you can sit at a table in a city in North America, and by marking a point at 21 degrees 55 minutes north, 72 degrees 0 minutes west, you can locate where the Haitians will land tonight. Or you can draw lines, 100 nautical miles north from Cap Haitien, 400 nautical miles south-southeast from Nassau, 575 nautical miles southeast from Miami and 150 nautical miles north-northeast from Guantanamo Naval Station in Cuba. The four lines will converge over North Caicos Island, where there are a few tiny villages, Kew, Whitby and Bottle Creek, a small hotel and miles of deserted white beaches.

Vanise wakens. The air has changed; she can smell trees. She raises her head, moving with care so as not to waken the boy or her baby, lifts her body at the waist, looks over the rail into darkness. The engine chugs slowly belowdecks, and she can hear waves breaking nearby.

They have arrived! America! Opening her eyes as wide as she can, she stares intensely into the darkness, but she can see nothing. No lights, no hills outlined blackly against a lighter sky — nothing. But she knows, despite the blackness peering back, that they have come to America, and smiling, she lowers her body, lies on her side and lets herself drift into peaceful, trusting sleep.

If a man believes he is happy, he is. If not, not. And if a woman, a young, illiterate Haitian woman in flight from her home with her infant son and adolescent nephew, exchanges all her money for a boat ride to America, and without knowing it, gets dropped off instead at North Caicos Island, six hundred miles from America, and believes that at last and for the first time in her hard life she is happy, then she is happy. The truth of the matter, the kind of truth you would get with a map, compass and rule, has no bearing on her belief or its consequences.

Until, that is, she gets her own map, which at first would resemble one of Columbus’s early, wildly speculative drawings of where he thought he was. A person’s map tells more about where that person thinks he is than about where he is not, which is, of course, everywhere else. Columbus, when he drew this, thought he was in the Philippine Sea:

Vanise, believing she was a hundred yards off the beach at Coral Gables, Florida, would have drawn something like this:

On Vanise’s map, you are ten hours off the north coast of Haiti, and Florida is on the horizon, or would be, if you could see the horizon. It’s a dark, moonless night. Victor, whose boat this is, comes forward to where Vanise and the boy, Claude, encircle the baby like the halves of a clamshell. They lie surrounded by a crowd of eight or ten people, who are also lying down or seated hunched over, men mostly, dressed in their best clothes, shoes, hats, and clutching battered suitcases and rope-tied baskets and bundles.

Ignoring upturned faces, Victor steps over their bodies with care, as if afraid of getting his feet tangled in ropes. He is a tall, thin, nut-colored man with a skinny neck and large Adam’s apple, tufts of a beard, acne scars on his cheeks, a crumpled captain’s hat on his head. Leaning back against the bulkhead in the bow of the small boat, he studies his cargo for a moment. The boat rides the swells lightly and holds its position; the engine, cut back, throbs like a bass drum. One man from the group huddled on deck, a short, middle-aged man with a cane cutter’s body, lifts his head and broad shoulders and peers over the starboard rail. They hear waves breaking nearby.

Keep down! Victor barks, and the man drops to the deck as if shot.

Vanise believes she is happy, and she almost laughs out loud at the poor man, his sudden, wide-eyed motion, his face that of a little boy who stole someone’s pie and unexpectedly saw the victim coming along the road.

That’s comical, she whispers to her nephew, who smiles also. She squeezes the boy’s hand. She is very dark-skinned, the color of freshly ground coffee, and she is short and in the shoulders and hips small as a girl. Because of the baby, her breasts are large and full and seem to push against her blouse. Her thick black hair is wiry, chopped off a hand’s width from her skull and wrapped in a band of scarlet cloth that brings her high, strong cheekbones, broad nose and full mouth forward toward the light, giving her the appearance of a serious, powerful woman. A man would not confuse her with a girl, or with a woman he could fool easily. If she gave anything to anyone, it would be because she wanted to. Or had to — and then it would not be a gift. Back in Le Mole, when she first appeared at Victor’s pink cinder-block house, led there by the old man from the docks who does that work for him, sorting from the crowds of supplicants the few who have both the money and the need to get away, Victor looked her over carefully, first to be sure that she had the money and would give it to him, but also to see if she might be fooled into giving him something extra, to see if, like many women, she confused her need with his worth. But no, she saw Victor for what he was, despite her need, and so he had not bothered to try to fool her. He would take her money and treat her like the rest.

Beyond the reef, Victor informs his passengers, is Florida. Biscayne Bay. He says the words slowly, lingering over the consonants and lengthening the vowels, making the words sound like the name of a powerful and beneficent loa. Now, you must pay attention to me, he tells them. It is very, very difficult to get through the reef. We must do it quickly, when the tide is at its highest, which is very soon now, and then we will drop you at a landing on the shore and quickly return. Or else we cannot get back through the reef. Someone will be there to guide you to Miami. He says this word slowly also — Mee-ah-mee — and several of the people at his feet make broad smiles.

I must collect the money now, he says abruptly. There will be no time later. Because of the tide’s turning. And the reef.

There is a general groping into pockets and scarves, parcels and bags, while the captain moves among the crowd, reaching down, plucking and counting out the bills, moving to the next one, and on, until soon he has accounted for everyone. They seem relieved to have paid him, less tense than before, as if, by taking their money from them, five, six hundred dollars per person, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the bargain struck back in Le Mole, he has taken from them an anxiety, a burdensome responsibility, for now they are smiling easily at one another, whispering and nudging shoulders and thighs. They seem to feel less alone than when they possessed so much money.

The captain has moved to the cabin and has climbed up to the controls, and his mate, a shirtless, shiny, Rasta-locked youth, has replaced him in the bow of the boat, peering over the rail and down at the water. He waves to the captain like a pilot, turns and searches the water below. The engine spins faster now, and the boat moves forward, while the mate waves the captain on, holds him suddenly back, gestures to the starboard side, then to port, then leads him straight ahead again, and the wet, rattling sound of the waves breaking on the reef grows louder.

All the people on the deck are up on hands and knees now, peering over the rail, studying the white foam where the water gets slashed by the reef, looking in vain for the deep, dark cut that the captain must know is there, that the dreadlocked youth in the bow, too, must know is there, for haven’t they made this journey many times, isn’t this the knowledge and skill that Victor is famous for all over the north coast? He has taken hundreds, maybe thousands, over to Florida, and each time he has done it, he has had to cross through this reef to Biscayne Bay, they tell themselves. Even so, they pray. They pray to the loas, to the Virgin and all the saints, to their mait’-tête, if they have one, and to their parents, if they are dead. They pray to anyone who has the power to slide this small wooden boat filled with people between the shark’s teeth of the reef into the calm, deep waters of the bay.

Prié pou’ tou les morts:

pou’ les morts ‘bandonné nan gran bois,

pou’ les morts ‘bandonné nan gran dlo,

pou’ les morts ‘bandonné nan gran plaine,

pou’ les morts tué pa’ couteau,

pou’ les morts tué pa’ épée,

pou’ tou les morts, au nom de Mait’ Carrefour et de Legba;

pou’ tou generation paternelle et maternelle,

ancêtre et ancètere, Afrique et Afrique;

au nom de Mait’ Carrefour, Legba, Baltaza, Miroi….

Then, suddenly, they are through. The reef and the white crashing waves are behind them, and before them lies the land, extended like a dark wall beneath velvet sky, with a white seam of beach between the water and the low palmettos. A rickety pier reaches like a bony arm from the beach, with a clearing in the trees beyond and what looks like a sandy road or lane leading inland.

The captain cuts quickly from the reef across the bay and brings the boat around and against the pier. He shuts down the motor, and the mate leaps from the boat and swiftly ties the bow and then the stern to the pilings.

Be quick! Be quick! he says, and the people scramble from the boat, lugging suitcases and baskets, shoving one another to get free of the boat. Quickly! the mate repeats. Already he is untying the line at the stern.

Suddenly, with one arm curling her baby against her breast, Vanise steps away from the group of refugees and touches the mate on his naked shoulder.

Eh? What do you want?

With her chin, she points toward the shore and the bush beyond. This, she says, This is not Miami.

He’s silent for a second. Over there, he says at last, pointing east along the beach. Then he runs forward to untie the bow of the boat. They’re ready to depart. The captain races the engine impatiently.

But Vanise has pursued the mate, and when he stands to leap aboard the boat, she grabs his wrist and yanks him back. Where is the man to help us? she demands. Where?

Soon! Let go of me! he shouts. Then, suddenly, his voice changes, goes soft, and looking way down at her, he says, Don’t worry, miss. Miami’s not far. We land you here to avoid the American police. It’s not so easy now as it used to be. Just don’t be afraid.

She releases him, and he takes one long stride and is aboard the boat. The captain guns the motor, the propeller churns a foamy wake behind it, and the boat wallows a moment and pulls rapidly away from the pier. Vanise watches the small, dark boat cross in a straight line the silky waters of the bay and slow briefly before the low white ridge marking the reef, where it picks its way through, and is gone.

Then, slowly, in silence, the people walk one by one down the narrow length of the pier toward land, step to the hard-packed beach and begin their wait. Some lie down on the witchgrass and watch the sky, star-pocked, circle overhead, some stroll slowly up the beach a ways and talk in low, nervous voices to one another, some sit on the pier and dangle their legs over the edge. Vanise and her baby and the boy, Claude, walk to the end of the pier and look out to the sea, to where the boat has gone, back to Haiti.

This is not America, she says in a low, cold voice. The boy places the basket down, and Vanise sits on it, opens her blouse and starts nursing her baby.

Are we lost! the boy asks, his voice about to break.

No! she answers. Then, more softly. No. But this is not America. Vanise, landed, dropped off, abandoned on the north coast of North Caicos Island, a nearly empty, flat, impoverished island six hundred miles from where she’d expected to land — what’s one to say to her now? Sit down, Vanise, be rational and find out where you really are, Vanise, and then find out where America really is, and then Haiti, Le Mole, Allanche, your sister-in-law’s hurricane-battered cabin up on the ridge. Get it all in perspective.

No, Vanise, don’t. Don’t find out where you really are. That will only make you believe that you are indeed lost. To the boy’s frightened question, Are we lost? you would have to say, Yes, Claude, lost.

To be lost is not to be able to return or go on, for the world is not lost, you are. It’s the fear behind the old joke told by parents about their child, who, they say, got lost, and when they found her the child calmly said. No, I wasn’t lost, you were. And the parents chuckle gratefully, knowing that if the child had not believed that she would have fallen into terror.

In one sense, Vanise knows where she is. She just doesn’t know where America is. She’s standing on a hard white beach at high tide in the Caribbean. The wind blows from the east. Immediately before her is a lane that winds into the low bush, and when she walks along the lane, she discovers that it connects to a marlpaved road, chalky white, now that the moon has risen. As she walks, her map gets extended ahead of her to the horizon, which keeps receding in the distance. Her map is a living, coiling and uncoiling thing, moving in undulant waves before her the way a manta ray sweeps the bottom of the sea. Her map is a process, the kind of map you must keep moving into, if you want to read it.

By dawn, Vanise and her infant and the boy are within sight of the inland village of Kew. Though they do not know the name of the place yet, they do know that this is still not America. There are goats here, tethered in the gutters alongside the road, and roosters crowing, and tin-roofed cabins the same as in Allanche, set off the road a ways, with tiny outhouses and laundry lines in back, patchy vegetable gardens, pole beans, yams, spindly corn stalks. A scrawny brown dog yips at them as they pass, and Vanise hurries the boy along ahead of her, looking back over her shoulder.

What are we going to do? Claude asks his aunt. Where are we?

Don’t worry! she snaps. We’ll find out soon what we’re to do. She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as if to scold the boy.

The sky is turning pearly white, like the belly of a fish, and the palm fronds, the glittery leaves of nmhoe trees and the pebbled sides of cabins stand sharply forward from the shadows. It’s a familiar light to Vanise,’falling at the same crisp angles with the same clear intensity as at this hour and season in Haiti. But the soil is different, pale gray here instead of blood red, and the houses seem more scattered, less clustered against one another, with narrow, unpaved roads instead of footpaths leading from one house to another.

The roosters arch their short backs and cut the still air with harsh calls from the edge of town down to the square in the middle and back out to the opposite side, and soon the dry, clean smell of new woodsmoke reaches Vanise and the boy, and they realize at once that they are hungry.

The boy speaks of it first. Should we stop to eat? he asks. We have the ham. And the yams, he reminds her, and the rose apples and guavas they picked on the walk from Allanche to Le Mô1e — when was it? Only yesterday morning? Is the last dawn they saw yesterday’s, and that on Haiti? Has it all happened so quickly? How did they move so soon from a known world to an unknown one, and why aren’t they more frightened than they are? The boy cannot understand this. He can ask the questions, but he cannot answer them, and that frightens him more than any answers might. He feels like a boy in a dream, not quite responsible for his actions. If something appears in the dream that can kill him, he knows he will just fly up and over it.

At the center of the town there is a crossroads and a low wall encircling a Cottonwood tree. Here Vanise stops and sits. The boy stands before her, looking around him at the four roads that seem to come from above to this low place in the middle, there to cross and rise up on the opposite side. A half-dozen houses, mostly un-painted masonry buildings tacked onto smaller, older, daub-and-wattle cabins, face the several roads, with overgrown yards in front and here and there an old American car, dented and rusting, parked beside the house. Doors open now and then, and a person, usually a child, appears, runs to the outhouse and returns slowly, languidly, walking barefoot across wet grass, opens the door and disappears into the warm darkness inside. Little girls in short cotton smocks march out and back, little boys in white saggy underpants, lean shirtless men wearing jeans or gym shorts, fat women in sleeveless, baglike dresses.

It’s as if no one sees the young Haitian woman in the red headscarf and blue-gray skirt and blouse, her baby in her arms, and the boy, a lad slightly taller than she, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and dark pants and black sneakers. Their baskets lie at their feet next to the low marl wall, and while the woman sits on the wall and nurses her infant, the boy gropes through the baskets in search of breakfast — fruit, a pair of egg-shaped, pale green jambosien and a pair of lemony goyaoiers. It’s almost as if the strangers are invisible in this tiny town, for though no one stepping from his door could fail to see them at the crossroads in the milky dawn light beneath the tall cottonwood tree, no one calls them or even hails them with a tentatively raised hand.

Vanise and Claude hear them call and hail one another, however: Tyrone, you fetch me wood now, bwoy, or me beat you! And: Get dat dog from out de house! G’wan now, get ’im from de house, y’ hear? There’s a familiar enough roll to the words, the grumpy, early-morning sounds they themselves make back in Allanche, but Vanise and Claude can’t understand the words. It’s garble to them, as if the people are speaking backwards. The boy’s eyes open wide in wonder, and Vanise cocks her head, listens more closely. She hears music from a radio, not Haitian music, certainly, and nothing like it, either, not calypso or reggae or salsa. It’s a twangy, slow music, and though thinned by the cheap transistor radio inside the cabin, it’s unmistakably American country and western music. They’ve heard that sound before, now and then, from the radio and on records brought back on holidays from Port-au-Prince by cousins returning to the country intent on impressing those who refused or weren’t able to move to the city.

The boy says, Maybe this is America. Only not Miami, that’s all. Miami’s probably someplace near here, that’s all.

Vanise looks at him with scorn. America doesn’t look like this, she says in a low voice, almost a whisper.

But where are we, then?

Vanise shoves her face close to the boy’s and hisses. We’re in the center of a village, at a crossroads, and we’re eating our breakfast there! Anybody can see that. You can see that. She’s not angry at the boy, but she sends her words to him as if they had been heated and cast into cold water. Give me the jambosier, she says.

He passes her the fruit, and she tears off a fleshy chunk with her teeth. The baby, finished sucking at her breast, has fallen asleep and lolls back against her shoulder. Holding the rose apple with her teeth, Vanise buttons her blouse quickly and resumes eating. She hadn’t realized how hungry she had become, with all the excitement — first the fear of the boat ride and the sea, then the joy at the sight of land, and then the disappointment and anger, and now the complex fight to stave off being lost — and she’s almost startled by the intensity of her own hunger and the pleasure she takes from satisfying it. The boy, too, eats ravenously and with sudden joy.

When they have finished the fruit, the boy decides to risk another question. What are we going to do, Vanise? He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and studies the door of the house across the road from them.

We shall wait. She says it firmly, as if waiting were an action, like hiding or running away or building a house. She passes the boy the sleeping baby, which he holds expertly in the crook of his skinny arm, and she breaks off a leafless branch of the tree behind them, squats in the dust and begins to draw. As she draws, she prays in a broken way that she knows is amateurish and incomplete, but it’s all she can remember from her sister-in-law’s teaching. She knows the names of the cardinal points, and she addresses them properly: to the east, À Table; to the west, Dabord; in the north, Olande; and in the south, Adonai. She draws a long horizontal line from east to west in the dust, then two verticals, one long and one short, that cut the horizontal into three parts. She crosses herself, and while she draws elaborations and curls, circles and lines around the crossbars, she salutes the two trinities, first the Christian God, his son Jesus and the Holy Ghost, then les Mystères, les Morts, and la Marassa, the sacred twins.

Standing, she crosses her arms and examines the drawing at her feet, a vever for Papa Legba. Now, she says, we wait.

The boy relaxes and sits down on the low wall, the baby still in his arms. He’s no longer afraid. He did not know that his Aunt Vanise possessed so much rada knowledge, that she was a mambo, or he would not have been frightened before, when he did not know where they were. They will wait now, here at the crossroads under the sacred cottonwood tree, for old Papa Legba to help them.

The sun rises above the trees, and soon the day is dry and hot. A car rumbles down the lane to the crossroads and slows as it passes; the driver, a skinny black man wearing a painter’s cap, does not seem to notice them. A few minutes later, a boy on a red Honda putts by, changing gears and gunning his motor at the intersection, spinning his rear wheel as he turns to the left and heads up the rise and over it out of sight. Soon schoolchildren emerge from the houses and from the woods on narrow pathways. They are dressed in white and blue uniforms and carry books and papers under their arms and in satchels. Behind them, on the far side of the crossroads, a store has opened to the street, and several of the children stop there in the shade for box milk or Coke. They ignore Vanise and Claude and the baby as they pass, but look back at the trio when they have got behind them.

At the tops of breadfruit trees and utility poles, turkey buzzards perch and show their backs and stretch dew-wet wings to the sun. Doves coo in the crackling underbrush, and long-legged egrets stalk the marshes and gutters and now and then rise awkwardly from the moist ground and soar, suddenly graceful, against the cloudless blue sky. The sun moves slowly higher in the sky, and the shadow of the cottonwood tree in the center of the village of Kew shrinks until it is no larger than the circumference of the tree itself, a blot on the dusty gray round. Vanise and the boy are thirsty now, and the boy, Claude, finally, after thinking about it for close to an hour, asks his aunt if he can try to buy a Coca-Cola at the store behind them.

No, she says. We must wait for Papa Legba. We cannot leave. Besides, we have no more money. She reaches down and plucks from the ground next to the vever a smooth round pebble she has suddenly spotted there, as if it were a new plant that broke through the ground a second before. There, she says, passing the pebble to the boy, who puts it into his dry mouth. You see, Old Bones is looking after us.

The lad smiles and sucks contentedly on the stone. After a moment, he, too, reaches to the ground and retrieves a smooth pebble, which, with a broad, understanding smile, he gives to his aunt.

The hours pass, and as the afternoon comes on and the day begins to cool slightly, women and older girls emerge from the darkness of their houses and stroll down the road past the cottonwood tree to the store, to the butcher over the low rise beyond, to their neighbors’ houses. All of them ignore the strangers, the boy and the woman and her baby. They see them, of course, but this is a shy, careful people, a patient people as well, not like Jamaicans or Bahamians, not like Cubans, either, all of whom would have accosted the strangers by now and demanded to know why they were sitting in the center of their town, where did they come from, what do they want here.

It’s nearly four in the afternoon when a yellow, three-legged dog steps with precise delicacy from the brush at the top of the rise in the road facing Vanise and Claude, looks toward them, turns and approaches them at a lopsided trot. Vanise saw the dog the instant it emerged from the trees and recognized him at once.

With the baby asleep in her arms, she stands, pulling the boy off the wall to a standing position beside her, and together they watch the yellow dog draw near. He has an intelligent, slightly cockeyed face, one ear perked, the other flopping, and he moves on two front legs and one hind more easily, it seems, than if he had all four. He walks with a slightly airy lope, as if gravity did not hold him quite the same way other creatures are held.

A few feet away, the dog stops and stares orange-eyed up at them, one eye looking straight at Vanise, the other studying the boy. He sniffs the air, then suddenly darts toward the basket at the boy’s feet.

Feed him! Vanise whispers hoarsely. He wants to be fed!

The dog pokes his muzzle at the bottom of the boy’s basket and then looks up and says in a smooth voice, What have you got in there? I want what I smell in your basket.

The boy looks wonderingly over at his aunt. Feed him! she commands. He wants the ham. Feed him.

Quickly, the boy yanks the top from the basket and reaches down, gropes past the clothing and comes to the ham his mother carefully wrapped two nights ago in Allanche. He draws it out, unties the knot in the red kerchief and lays the meat and bone on the ground next to the drawing in the dust. The dog watches warily.

Put it at the top, above the cross, Vanise says in a calm voice.

The boy obeys, moves the ham and stands, and the dog leaps upon the offering, grabs the meat with his mouth near the smaller end, sinks his teeth deeply into it and lifts it, the heavy end dragging the dog’s head down on one side like a man with a pipe in the corner of his mouth.

Then the dog turns away from them, takes a few steps and looks back. He puts the ham carefully down in the middle of the road and says, Come along now. Hurry. Then he grabs onto the ham again, lifts it and starts trotting quickly up the road in the direction he came from. Vanise and Claude reach for their baskets, hoist them to their heads and follow along behind.

The dog moves swiftly, and they can barely keep up. At the top of the hill, he stops a second, looks back at them and steps into the bush. Then it’s down into a tangle of liana vines and low, dense mahoe trees and macca, with the yellow dog darting up and down and over limestone outcroppings and underbrush, the woman, baby and boy with their heavy baskets scrambling along behind, panting in the heat, lashed in the face and on the arms by vines and low branches, losing sight of the dog for an instant, then spotting him again and clambering over stones and fallen trees after him. The baby is awake now and crying, frightened. Vanise ignores the child and scolds Claude, telling him to hurry, run on ahead, don’t lose sight of him!

Soon they find themselves running along a sandy pathway that winds down a narrow defile between two limestone ridges. The dog stops ahead of them a ways and watches them stumble along behind. He drops the ham again, as if to rest a moment, and says loudly, with tricky laughter in his low, smooth voice, Come on, now, Vanise! Don’t tell me you can’t keep up with an old, three-legged dog! He laughs and grabs up the ham and races on, suddenly leaving the path and scrambling up the steep side of the defile to the top of the ridge and over. They follow, out of breath and wet with sweat, Vanise pushing the boy from behind, urging him on. Hurry, Claude, don’t lose sight of him! Get to the top and find him.

At the top, they stop for a second and search the underbrush beyond, low palmettos all the way to a turquoise streak of sea in the distance. They see the tin roofs of scattered cabins and small, cleared patches of ground here and there. He’s gone! the boy wails. I can’t see him. Then, a second later, No, there he is! and he points ahead at a yellow flash of fur on the ridge fifty yards beyond.

When the dog at last picks his way down the rocky side and enters the palmettos, they leave the ridge and in the palmettos come upon a mud flat, circle it halfway, following the dog’s three-legged tracks in the gray mud when they cannot see the dog itself. Then, beyond the mud flat, the ground rises slightly and opens to a grassy field, and they see at the far end of the field a small, unpainted cinder-block house. The dog heads straight for the house, through a corn field, old, dry corn stalks clattering in the afternoon breeze, across a packed-dirt front yard and around the side of the house to the back.

Vanise and Claude run along the windowless side of the house, their breath rough, their clothing wet and stuck with burrs and leaves, and they suddenly come upon the dog lying in the center of the backyard, gnawing at the ham with deep concentration, as if he has been there all afternoon.

There is a door and stoop on the back side of the house, closed, curtainless windows on either side of it. Beyond the dog there is a shed or henhouse made of old doors and roofed over with green corrugated plastic, and beyond the shed, a garden plot with yam poles stuck in the ground and tiny, bright green corn shoots peeping through the dirt. In the distance is a field, then woods, then sea.

Vanise sits heavily down on the stoop, and the boy sits next to her. Before long, their breathing slows, their hearts stop pounding, and their clothes, in the cooling breeze off the sea, loosen and dry. The yellow dog goes on chewing at the ham quite as if they were not present. Beside them squats a large metal drum, a rain barrel with a spout leading to it from the low roof. Lying on the ground next to the barrel is a white enameled cup, and the boy grabs it up, fills it with water and hands it to his aunt, who drinks and hands the cup back in silence. The boy drinks, then sits down again next to Vanise, and they resume waiting.

Will Papa Legba speak to us again? Claude asks.

Just be silent, she whispers. See, even the baby knows how to behave, she adds, looking down at the infant asleep in her lap. Give him water, she commands, pointing toward the dog with her chin, and Claude quickly obeys, filling the cup and placing it with great tenderness a few feet in front of the animal.

The dog studies him, and when the boy has returned to the stoop, lets go of the ham, steps warily toward the cup and slurps at the water. Returning to the ham, the dog curls around it, and holding the meat with his front paws, tears at it with renewed concentration, getting down to the white bone now, licking and chewing, gnawing against it and poking his long pink tongue after the marrow.

Suddenly, they hear from the other side of the house the sound of a car, loud and blatting, a car without a muffler approaching the house rapidly, bumping across rocks and ruts and coming to an abrupt stop. A door slams, a man shouts, a harsh, loud voice that carries no sense to Vanise and Claude but is filled with the sound of anger and impatience. Robbie! Where de fuck you at, mon? Come get you out here, mon! You goddamn bumba-clot, me gwan tan you hide, mon! Then silence again, until the front door squeaks open and is flung shut, and the man hollers again, this time from inside the house. Robbie! Lazy sonofabitch! Me cyan leave dis house a minute widdout trouble.

Vanise and Claude do not move. They hear the sounds of someone rummaging through the house, hear pans clatter behind them, then silence. A moment passes, and the screened door at their backs opens, bangs against them, forcing them quickly off the short stoop, and when they turn, they face a large, coal-black man, balding on top, with a thick, bristly gray mustache and wearing a bright green safari shirt and khaki trousers. He puts his fisted hands on his hips and stares down at them. His large brown eyes are covered with a film, as if behind a pane of yellow glass, and several shiny scars lie across his cheeks and upper arms, raised and thick, like serpents. Vanise sees the cross-eyed dog peer across the yard at the man and flop its thin tail against the dusty ground.

Wal, now. Who dis? The man’s voice is low and comes rumbling from his chest, and he smiles with the expression of a man who has unexpectedly won a small prize. His two front teeth are rimmed in gold, his wide, full lips shiny like his scars.

Vanise and Claude examine the ground at their feet. The dog gnaws at the hambone, hurriedly now.

You Robbie’s woman?

Vanise knows he is speaking to her; she looks up and says nothing. The baby has awakened and turns uneasily in her arms.

C’mon, gal, talk to me. Where Robbie at? Him send you over here to say him sick again? Ras-clot, dat mon, me cyan deal wid him no more! Him s’posed to work dat patch by de salt flats, an’ me check him all day, an’ him never show once, lazy, simple sonofabitch. You tell him, sister, you tell him find himself another job. Me cyan deal wid him no more.

The man turns and swings open the screened door, stops and looks back at the woman. G’wan, now, nothin’ more to say. Go home, sister, and tell Robbie him fired.

Vanise stands there in silence, looking away from the man, waiting.

What your name, gal?

She says nothing, shifts her weight and looks down at her baby’s face. The man lets go of the screened door and takes a step toward her. For several seconds he studies the people before him, a young and pretty black woman with a baby in her arms, and a boy, and two baskets on the ground.

Suddenly, he smiles broadly. He knows everyone in town, practically everyone on the whole island, and he’s never seen this woman before, or the boy. He drives a taxi between the landing strip in Bottle Creek and the Whitby Hotel, and he moves around the island a lot, and these faces are new to him. They are strangers’ faces. You one of dem Haitians, dat’s what. Putting out his hand, he places it heavily on her narrow shoulder and says loudly into her face, Haytee? You from Hay-tee, gal? He removes his paw from her shoulder and turns to Claude. Hay-tee? C’mon, bwoy, you can tell me. Me nagwan do you no harm, bwoy. Me a fren, he says, pointing to his beefy chest. Me like Hay-shuns! Sonofabitch, fucking Haitians, dem, dey cyan understan’ English, even. Then to Vanise, Hay-tee, gal?

She nods her head slowly up and down. Haiti.

Ah-ha! The man flashes his gold-rimmed teeth. He swings open the screened door again and this time waves the woman into his house, but she stands rooted to the ground. Giving up, the man walks inside alone and returns a second later with a bottle of white overproof rum in his hand. He takes a long slug from the bottle, sighs as if relieved of a burden and sits down on the steps, looks back and forth from the boy to the woman. So, the man says to no one in particular, me kotched me a coupla Haitians. He takes another drink, extends the bottle to Vanise, who shakes her head no. You gotta name, gal? What dem call you? he tries.

Silence. Claude, wide-eyed at the sight of the large, loud man, clings to the side of his basket with both hands. Vanise’s face is expressionless, impassive, as if she has turned herself into a stone.

The man points to his thick chest. Me George. George McKissick. George, he repeats, stabbing himself with his finger. All dem other Haitians, your frens, dem, dey got kotched already, got ’em dis mawnin’ near Bellefield Landing. Jus’ sittin’ on de beach, thinkin’ dem in America. Now dey in de jail over on Grand Turk. What you think o’ dat, gal? You lucky, dat’s what. Lucky.

Vanise listens closely, but nothing the man says makes sense. Now and then a word or string of words sounds familiar, but she loses the meaning instantly. She can read the man’s face, however, and his body and the tones of voice he uses, bass tones, not harsh, not sweet, either, but rising and falling in a low range, as if he were trying to tell her a funny story.

He’s playing with them, she knows, treating them like babies. And he likes to drink, drinks quickly and deeply with obvious pleasure and need. He lives alone: the house and yard are of a man alone; no signs of a woman or children here; no clothes drying on a rope, no toys scattered in the dirt, no curtains in the windows. Except for the yellow dog, no animals, either. The henhouse seems empty, and there are no chickens or roosters in the yard scratching and pecking in the dust. No pigs or goats. The man probably doesn’t even eat here much; he comes home to drink alone and sleep and go out again. His scars tell her what happens when he is out at night in the bars. Another man must tend his crops, she decides, because this man is too bulky to be a farmer, too quick and nervous in his movements. And he has a calculating look, the look of a man who likes to buy things low and sell them high, who likes to haggle with people, not with the ground, the rain and the sun. And despite his playfulness, she can tell that he is not a kind man.

George goes on talking to Vanise, almost as if she understands his words. He tells her about the other Haitians from the boat, how they’ll be kept in jail until they can be shipped back to Haiti, how stupid they were for trusting someone to bring them all the way to America in a boat small enough to get through the reef off North Caicos. The police are used to Haitians coming ashore here, and most of them get caught and sent right back. A few hide out, they’re good farmers and stonemasons and sometimes metalworkers, and they work cheap, because they’ll be turned over to the police if they don’t, same as up north in the Bahamas. The Haitians who got caught this morning, he points out, were not as smart as Vanise. They stayed bunched up like cattle at Bellefield Landing, where they were bound to be seen. They should have separated and run into the bush, as she did, where they might have been lucky enough to meet up with someone like George McKissick, who would be willing to help them. Instead, they’re in jail tonight, and she and her baby and little brother are here, with George McKissick, on his farm.

He goes silent for a few seconds, scratches his belly, swigs from the rum bottle, stands and takes up the white enameled cup from in front of the dog. He fills it from the barrel and drinks. Refilling the cup, he passes it to Vanise, and she drinks, hands it back. Then the boy. George sets the cup afloat in the rain barrel and studies it for a moment.

He’s decided not to turn them in to the police, he announces. At least not tonight. He smiles, faces them and goes inside.

The sun has edged close to the horizon beyond the field, and the sky is splashed with long, broad, plum- and silver-colored streaks of cloud moving in from the east. The sea breeze has shifted and become a land breeze, bringing with it the smell of cassia trees and heat-dried corn stalks from the meadow in front of the low house.

What’s he going to do? Claude asks.

Vanise looks over her shoulder at the yellow dog, who lifts his pointed head and stares at them a second, then resumes working at the hambone. Don’t worry, Vanise says to the boy.

A moment later, George kicks open the screened door and comes out carrying a small, stained mattress. He motions with his burly head for them to follow and hurries across the yard past the dog to the shed. Hefting the mattress onto one shoulder, he unlocks a rusty padlock on the low door and yanks it open. Then he tosses the mattress inside. He stands away and points into the darkness and says, Dere, gal, nobody gwan fine you dere. Put you in de house, but someone soon come an’ fine you, turn you in first chance.

Vanise leans forward and peers into the darkness and heat of the hut. She smells chickens of long ago, the remnants of dried, powdered droppings ground into the dirt floor, old feathers and tufts, bits of grass and seeds, yellow hulls of ancient corn in corners, dust motes floating in the air.

The last time he used this shed, George explains, he stored some marijuana for his brother-in-law, who made heaps of money off it and went to America and never paid him a shilling for his troubles. Ever since then, he’s kept the shed locked and empty, because every time he went near it, he got mad all over again. He figures if he lets the Haitians use it awhile, he’ll forget about his brother-in-law’s betrayal.

George points to their baskets, then inside the shed. Vanise understands, swings her baby onto her left arm and drags her basket into the darkness. Claude follows her example, and when they emerge they find George seated back on the stoop, his bottle in his lap, waving them over. Like obedient children, they go and stand before him.

He explains loudly and slowly what the arrangement will be, and though they do not understand a word of what he says, they know a bargain has been struck. In a few days, it will become clear to them that George will provide shelter and food for them, yams and corn meal, rice, chicken backs, sometimes pork and maybe fish, when he can get it cheap, and they will work for him, in the fields, house and yard, and when George drives home from town in his taxi, drunk, loud and angry at the world, he’ll stumble through the kitchen, grab his bottle and cross the backyard in the silvery moonlight to the henhouse, where he’ll swing open the door and enter. Pushing the boy off the mattress, moving the sleeping infant aside, he’ll yank down his trousers and make Vanise open up to him. The first time this happens, the boy will sit shivering all night on the stoop. After that, he will crawl into the man’s car and sleep on the back seat until daylight wakes him.

Vanise and Claude and the baby, whom they soon start to call Charles, will stay on the island of North Caicos hidden away like this for many months, before they have learned enough of George McKissick’s words to speak to the young man they replaced, Robbie, a thin, lazy brown man who comes around every week or so (more often after the morning he accidentally discovers Vanise in the yard) to make vain attempts to collect his pay.

Robbie is a kindly but stupid man, and it does not occur to him that this silent woman and boy are Haitians, until finally the boy speaks to him, asks in a halting, garbled way how to find a man with a boat to take them to America. To hurt McKissick, who now believes he will never have to pay Robbie for the work he did, and also to get his old job back, he will help them escape, he says, not to America, which is probably impossible to arrange without money, but straight to the Bahamas, where boats go all the time. There are plenty of small wooden cargo boats shipping salt for food, with captains not at all averse to carrying a pretty young Haitian woman belowdecks in a corner of the hold. If she must bring along her child and nephew, no matter. They can be shoved aside when necessary.

Columbus stayed on the island for only a few days, when, no longer afraid of being lost, certain of where he had landed, he departed for Cipangu, Japan, which “the Indians here call Cuba.” North Caicos itself became lost. The admiral’s landing and brief stay here went recorded as having occurred way to the north in the Bahamas, at Watling’s Island.

Ponce de León, after fourteen days ashore, set sail and headed north from Whitby, where a small stream parted the beach and entered the sea. Glad to be rid of the place, his head once again filled with visions of a new youth, a new life, a new old age, he quickly forgot the island. He would not even have marked it on his chart, had it not been for the reef on which his ship had foundered and were it not, therefore, a place to avoid.