Without a Grave

TWO

HAVE A GOOD DAY! UNLESS YOU HAD OTHER PLANS.Doc Thomas, aboard Knot on Call

The moon woke me, shining so brightly through the window that I thought it was already dawn.

Wearing the oversized T-shirt that was about as sexy as my sleep wear got in the Bahamas, I padded to the kitchen and punched the button that would turn my coffee pot from an inanimate chunk of glass and plastic into a magic elixir machine.

Alerted by the gurgle, Dickie, the stray tabby we’d adopted, emerged from under the back porch, stretched luxuriously, then waited patiently at the back door for his morning bowl of kibble. A hard-knock-life cat, Dickie was difficult to approach, but I was gradually making headway. Strangely, I’d never heard him meow.

After feeding Dickie, I carried my coffee to the front porch, settled into the overstuffed cushions tied to the wicker love seat and waited for sunrise, sipping slowly. Across the harbor, boats rocked gently on their mooring balls and somewhere in the settlement Radio Abaco was playing gospel music, a raspy voice so amplified as it drifted across the water that I could make out every word: Never would have made it, Never could have made it without you.

The moon floated low in the western sky as the east became tinged with gold, and then peach, and then pink merging with a swathe of red so intense and so bright that the whole horizon appeared to be on fire.

‘Oh, wow!’ I commented to the cat. He’d finished his breakfast, padded from the back porch to the front, and plopped himself down at my feet. He began cleaning himself with elaborate tongue strokes, straightening his fur, stripe by stripe after a hard night’s work in the orchard.

‘Catch any Bahamian ground squirrels, Dickie?’

Dickie paused in mid-lick, favored me a languid stare, but otherwise didn’t comment.

‘Squirrels?’ Paul appeared out of nowhere, settled a kiss on the back of my neck, slopping coffee on to the wooden deck as he did so. ‘Oops, sorry.’ He tried to erase the spill with the toe of his deck shoes. ‘I didn’t know they had squirrels in the Bahamas.’

‘They don’t.’

‘Don’t? What are you talking about, then?’

‘Rats. Fruit rats. Rattus rattus, if you want to get technical.’

Still holding his mug, Paul walked to the bench-like wooden railing that separated the porch from the sea and sat down on it. ‘I haven’t seen any rats.’

‘That’s because there’s a bumper crop of oranges in the orchard. Why would they go out for hamburger when they can have steak at home?’

Paul laughed out loud. ‘Remind me about Rattus rattus the next time I’m harvesting oranges for your Bahama Mamas.’

The oranges in our orchard were bumpy-skinned, large and plump, far seedier and juicier than their Florida counterparts, but way too sour to eat. We used them in drinks, and for cooking, just as you would a lemon.

‘You, sir, are the hunter-gatherer. The fish last night, for example. The vote is in. Delectable. I rest my case.’

‘Nice to get to know the Westons. Too bad they aren’t staying longer.’

Nick and Jenny, we had learned at dinner, were just down for a long weekend, preparing the house for the arrival of Nick’s mother, Molly, in a few days’ time. Molly, her daughter-in-law claimed, was a sprightly seventy-two. Molly’d been coming to the Abacos since the mid-fifties when her parents first sailed there in a fifty-two foot wooden ketch. I looked forward to meeting her.

Paul turned a chair to face the sunrise, and sat down. He propped his feet up against the rail. ‘Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning, red sky at night, sailor’s delight.’

‘Huh?’ I’d been distracted by the cat who had gone from a sprawl into a crouch, his rear in the air, tail switching. He’d spotted a curly tail, and if the silly lizard didn’t move, he was going to be somebody’s breakfast.

Paul gestured with his mug. ‘Red sky. Maybe rough weather ahead.’

I scanned the sky from horizon to horizon. ‘There’s not a cloud in the sky, Paul.’

‘We’ll see what Barometer Bob has to say about the weather on the Cruisers’ Net, then,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘An hour to go.’

‘Do you have anything that needs washing?’ I asked, thinking that if all that red-sky foolishness came to pass, I’d better run a load through and get it hung out to dry while my solar dryer – the tropical sun – was still operational.

‘Plenty of time for that, Hannah. Come on.’ Paul grabbed my hand, pulled me to my feet, and led me down to the end of the dock where Pro Bono, the little outboard that came with the rental, was tied. There was a wooden bench there, too, with Windswept stenciled in white letters on the side facing the harbor, so people could find us. Houses had names, not numbers, in the Bahamas.

It was our habit to take our morning coffee on the bench, admiring the passing show, and we were seldom disappointed: night herons, sea turtles, the occasional dolphin or two. A magnificent eagle ray cruised by, white spots freckling its inky-blue body. As he broke the surface, I recognized him by a nick on his right wing: ‘Ray’ we had named the big one. His wife ‘Marlene’ sleeked along behind, followed by two smaller rays that we imagined were their children, ‘Dick’ and ‘Jane.’

After some impressive acrobatics, Ray and his family moseyed on.

Paul and I sat in companionable silence until the first workboat of the day steamed into the harbor at high speed. As it neared our dock, the vessel slowed its engines politely, then chugged past, leaving a wake that gently licked the sandy shore. The open-deck boat was packed with Haitian workers from Marsh Harbour, laborers who constructed the island’s homes, built its boats, and tended its gardens, sweating all day in the hot sun until the boat took them away exhausted at five.

‘Does Daniel come today?’ Paul asked. Daniel was the gardener employed by our landlords to keep the tropical vegetation under control.

‘What day is today?’ I wondered. It’s easy to lose track of time in the islands.

‘Hmm.’ Paul closed his eyes as if a calendar was written on the inside of his eyelids. ‘I think it’s Thursday.’

‘If it’s Thursday, it’s Daniel.’

‘Do you want to pick him up, or shall I?’

I patted my husband’s bare knee. ‘I don’t mind. I rather fancy a boat ride this morning. Besides, we need eggs, and the grocery opens at eight.’

We carried our empty mugs back to the house where I changed quickly into shorts and a T-shirt. A few minutes later I was back at the end of the dock slipping my feet into the bright-orange Crocs I kept in a plastic milk crate under the bench. I untied the rope that held Pro Bono to the dock, slipped a loop around the piling, then climbed down the wooden ladder into the boat. I twisted the throttle to the full position, and pulled the starter cord. The engine sputtered to life on the first go. I flipped the rope off the piling and rammed the gear into forward, setting off across the narrow channel at a pretty good clip. Once I reached Hawksbill harbor, I eased Pro Bono into a space at the government dock between two rubber dinghies, cut the engine, climbed up the ladder, and made the boat secure.

Daniel Noel, a tall, ebony-skinned Haitian dressed in clean, but well-worn chinos and an open-neck shirt, was waiting for me as usual, leaning against a telephone pole in the shade of a sapodilla tree. He carried his lunch in a blue and white Igloo Playmate.

‘Bonjou, Daniel.’

‘Bonjou, Missus.’ Daniel picked up his Igloo and waited politely for me to proceed down the dock ahead of him.

‘Komon ou ye?’ I asked.

‘N’ap boule.’

I raised a finger. ‘En minit,’ I told the gardener, not completely exhausting my Creole vocabulary, but close. ‘J’ai besoin des oeufs,’ I said, switching into French. ‘Eggs,’ I added in English to cover all bases.

Daniel touched a finger to his ball cap, nodded in acknowledgement, and headed toward Pro Bono with a loose-limbed stroll.

At the end of the dock where it T-bones with the Queen’s Highway, there’s a vacant lot. Well, not completely vacant. Twisted tree stumps languish among waist-high weeds, and the cinder block foundation of a house sits on the corner, with five concrete steps leading up to nowhere. Victims of hurricane Jeanne. I stopped for a moment, puzzled, because the yard looked more vacant than usual.

The signs. That’s what was missing. Protest signs hand-painted on plywood sheets of varying sizes that until recently had been nailed to the tree stumps and propped up against the stairs.SAVE HAWKSBILL CAY REEF!SHOW THE DOOR TO EL MIRADOR!OUR HERITAGE IS NOT FOR SALE TO FOREIGNER DEVELOPERS!RESPECT THE LOCALS!

Ninety-eight percent of Hawksbill Cay residents had petitioned against the development, so sentiments ran high.

Still wondering what had happened to the signs, I turned left and followed the road one hundred yards or so to the Harbour Grocery, a building the size of your average two-car garage and painted Pepto-Bismol pink. Neatly stocked, the Pink Store, as it was known, carried just about anything you’d need, and if they didn’t have it, Winnie Albury would order it for you. I’d already put in a request for disposable diapers (Huggies, size three) for when my daughter, Emily, and her brood came to stay over the Christmas holidays.

I opened the glass door, appreciating the blast of air conditioning that immediately enveloped me, then browsed my way along the neatly stacked shelves. Pasta and spaghetti sauce, soups, olives, jams. I remembered I needed tomatoes, so I picked up a can, then turned the corner, snagging a box of Dorset cereal, before hustling to the end of the aisle where the six-packs of soft drinks were stacked. ‘Boat came in yesterday,’ Winnie called after me.

Oh, joy! I knew what that meant. Half and half. I passed up the sodas and opened the sliding glass door of the fridge, selected a pint of half and half – ultra-pasteurized, but who was complaining? – clutched it lovingly to my bosom, then added a pound of bacon to the pile. On my way past the vegetable cooler, I seized on some fresh strawberries.

Winnie kept the eggs out, British style, unrefrigerated. I plucked a carton off the shelf, added them to my stack, and laid everything on the checkout counter where Winnie rang them up. ‘Ives,’ I reminded her.

‘At Windswept,’ she said with a smile, easing open the drawer where she kept the receipt books. She extracted the book with ‘Ives’ printed in block capitals on the spine, added the total ‘12.35’ to the figures already on the page, then rotated the book on the counter so I could initial the entry. At the end of the month I would visit the store with my checkbook and pay our bill in full. I liked that in a grocery.

‘What happened to the signs?’ I asked Winnie as she tucked the box of cereal into my bag and snuggled it up to the cream.

‘Vandals broke ’em up, set ’em on fire,’ she explained in a lyrical island drawl. A little bit Southern with a touch of Merrie Olde Englande.

‘Kids?’ I was appalled.

Winnie shook her head, raised an eyebrow and fixed me with a look that seemed to say, Our kids? Wouldn’t put up with any of that foolishness, I can tell you. But Winnie was a woman of few words. ‘Wasn’t, was it?’ she said.

‘Who, then?’ I asked. It was hard to imagine any churchgoing, law-abiding grown-up on Hawksbill Cay stooping so low. Nobody even locked their doors in the settlement.

Another customer had come in, so I stood at the end of the counter while Winnie rang him up, punching the keys on her adding machine a bit more energetically than absolutely necessary. She jerked her head in an eastward direction. ‘Someone at that development, I reckon.’

She was referring to El Mirador Land Corporation, the developers of the Tamarind Tree Resort and Marina, the people responsible for the naked slash that spoiled the view of Hawksbill Cay from my living room window. ‘Is anyone going to replace the signs?’

‘Wood’s expensive.’

Too true. Everything was expensive in the islands. From groceries to engine parts to generators and refrigerators, all had to be brought in by boat. And the Bahamian government added insult to injury by tacking a 30 percent duty on to items imported from non-Commonwealth countries. That’s why we suffered without Cheerios and Fritos and bought Irish Gold butter for one-third the price of Land O’ Lakes.

‘That’s the second time it’s happened,’ Winnie said after the other customer had left the store.

I picked up my shopping bag and adjusted the loops over my shoulder. ‘Has anyone complained to El Mirador about it?’

Winnie plopped down on her stool, slumped against the wall, looking small and defeated. ‘What good would it do?’

If it had been up to me, I would have marched out to the Tamarind Tree Resort and Marina, demanded an audience with the manager and insisted on an explanation. There might have been some finger pointing and fist shaking involved in the confrontation, too. I wondered who was in charge over there.

‘I’ll look around Windswept and see if there’s any spare plywood lying about,’ I said as I went out the door. ‘Could you use it?’

Winnie crossed her arms over her bosom and smiled. ‘Could do.’

Daniel was waiting for me in Pro Bono, reading his Creole Bible. He’d had a hard-knock life, too – leaving a wife and two daughters behind him in Haiti when he immigrated to Abaco looking for work. Meanwhile, he was living in a migrant workers’ community on the outskirts of Marsh Harbour, a community with a name that pretty much said it all – The Mud. No tourists of my acquaintance were standing in line to acquire a foothold in paradise by purchasing property in The Mud, or in Pigeon Peas either, the other area of the island where foreign workers were allowed to build their shanty towns.

Yet Daniel always seemed happy. Perhaps his faith kept him going. He certainly carried that Bible with him everywhere. One day at lunchtime I’d come upon him sitting on the porch of the bunkhouse, reading it aloud: Seyè a se gadò mwen, mwen p’ap janm manke anyen. I’d majored in French at Oberlin, so I picked up the gist of it: the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. From Daniel’s lips, the Psalms of David. I had hurried away before he noticed the tears in my eyes.

‘Votre famille va bien, Daniel?’ I asked as I joined him aboard Pro Bono.

‘Tre byen,’ he answered in Creole.

I cranked the engine to life, and before long, Daniel and I were racing back across the harbor in Pro Bono, the wind tearing at our shirts.

‘Quel beau jour!’ I shouted in French over the roar of the engine.

‘Bel jou, bel jou,’ he agreed.

At Windswept Daniel swung his Igloo up on the dock, climbed the ladder with the rope in his hand, looped it around a piling in a neat half hitch, then waited for me to climb the ladder, too. Then he picked up his Igloo and headed in the direction of the tool shed where he kept the machete, rakes, and shovels with which he held the tropical vegetation at bay. Daniel didn’t need any instruction from me. He’d been working steadily at Windswept for over a year.

I found Paul in the dining room tucking into a bowl of generic cornflakes. The VHF radio was on and tuned to Channel 68. It sputtered to life every minute or so as cruisers and local businesses called in to request spots on the Net. I toasted a slice of coconut bread, slathered it with butter, then sat down next to my husband to listen.

‘Good morning, Abaco! This is the Abaco Cruisers’ Net, on the air every day at this time to keep you informed with weather, news and local events. This is Jim Thomas aboard Knot on Call broadcasting from our peaceful anchorage in Marsh Harbour.’

‘Where’s Pattie?’ I pouted, disappointed that the regular anchor, Pattie Toler, wasn’t moderating the Net that day. VHF radios are like glorified walkie-talkies: you can pick a channel, but only one person can talk at a time. And everyone tuned in to that channel can hear everyone else, like an old-fashioned party line. Pattie, who invented the whole Net idea back in the mid-1980s, famously kept everyone organized, and was a natural-born comedienne, too.

‘Pattie’s dealing with potcakes,’ Paul told me.

I’d enjoyed many Bahamian dishes during our time in the islands – like boil fish and souse and Johnny cake and guava duff – but I’d never heard of a potcake. ‘What’s a potcake?’

‘It’s a dog,’ Paul explained. ‘A mongrel. A mutt. Heinz 57. Some creep abandoned a couple of potcake puppies behind the Buck-a-Book trailer a couple of weeks ago. In an incredible downpour, too. Pattie’s delivering them to adoptive homes in Ft Lauderdale.’

Poor potcake puppies. Did everyone have a hard-knock life in the islands?

‘Someone figured Mimi would take care of them,’ I said. Mimi Rehor’s passion was the wild horses of Abaco. The Buck-a-Book used bookstore – a dollar a book – helped to support that effort. But she took in stray dogs, too.

‘Gentle to moderate breezes, southeast to southwest at five to ten knots. Scattered clouds. High 86, low 72. Same for tomorrow. And the day after that. But what else is new? It’s July in the Abacos.’

When Jim moved on to the ocean passage reports, Latitude Adjustment called in from the Whale where the waves could be high and the going pretty tough if the wind and the tide were against you. But there were no worries that day at the Whale. ‘Flat calm,’ the caller reported. ‘You could waterski through there.’

‘Guitarist Clint Sawyer at Curly Tails on Friday night,’ Jim announced, continuing with local events. ‘Come hear the “Music Man” and watch the sun go down.

‘Steak BBQ at the Jib Room on Saturday. Music and dancing to follow.

‘Sunday pig roast at Nippers Beach Bar and Grill, starting at 12:30!

‘Nightlife as usual in the Abacos.’

I had moved away from the table and was busying myself with the breakfast dishes when an announcement on the Net caught my attention.

‘Here’s your invitation to an arts and crafts show and wine tasting this coming Saturday at Island Designs in Marsh Harbour. Starting at two thirty it continues till – well, until you’re done. Wine is provided courtesy of Brenda Claridge at Tupps, and Cassandra from the Cruise Inn and Conch Out is cooking up a storm, so bring along your appetites. You’ll find Island Designs near the turn-off to the Abaco Beach Resort, just down the road from Ziggy’s. No tickets required, just show up. US dollars, Bahamian dollars, or max out your credit cards. Be there or be square.’

Paul read my mind. ‘That sounds like fun, Hannah. Want to go?’

I shook out the dish towel and draped it over the oven door handle to dry. ‘You bet.’ The last event I’d attended in Marsh Harbour was a session at the Anglican Parish Hall on the predatory lionfish. It concluded (unexpectedly, at least for me) with a lesson on how to cook the critter without getting stung by its poisonous spines. Too much information, to my way of thinking.

‘A rubber dinghy lost somewhere between Hope Town and Matt Lowe’s Cay.

‘A boat seat cushion found floating at the entrance to Marsh Harbour.’

And the Net, for that day, was done.

Paul gathered up his papers and his laptop and headed off to the porch while I checked the water level in the cistern, the 30,000 gallon concrete tank that was under the front porch. This involved getting down on my hands and knees, lifting the two-by-two-foot hatch and peering into the dark, drippy depths where water bugs the size of mice were likely to play. Nearly full. So I washed a load of laundry and hung it out in the orchard to dry.

While Paul worked, I spent the rest of the day lying in the hammock reading and feeling guilty. But not very. I’d had a bit of a hard-knock life, too. I gazed over the top of my book, past my bare toes and beyond to the porch railing where a curly tail crouched, puffing up his red throat to attract the attention of some invisible lady lizard. In the front yard, Daniel was raking, drawing lines and gentle swirls in the sand, like a Zen garden. It was therapeutic just to watch him. Past Daniel was the beach, and beyond it, the vast turquoise expanse of the sea.

Yes, I thought, after all you’ve been through, you deserve a little time in paradise, Hannah.