by Susan Cooper
Lou and I stood watching one day as the fence was being put up, with a crane hauling each section upright. He made his soft little hooting noise and nudged me, and holding his hand sideways like a fence he went one-two-three on the ground, showing three barriers. It was a moment before I realized what he was saying to me: Look, that fence is like the ones we saw somewhere else. We’re being turned into the Otherworld.
An American voice yelled at us from the group of workmen near the crane. “Hey, you kids—get outta there!”
We weren’t on his land, we were on our own island, but it didn’t seem worth arguing.
I went to get the dinghy. I wanted to go to Long Pond Cay, even though Grand had told us he thought we should keep away, for fear of causing trouble. We hadn’t been back since the day we rescued the fossil star shell, though we’d been looking in vain on every beach on Lucaya to find another one.
Lou trailed after me. He didn’t seem enthusiastic. I couldn’t understand him.
“Don’t you want to look for the third shell?” I said. “That must be where we’ll find it.”
He shrugged. He got into the boat with me, but he wasn’t hurrying. It baffled me; I thought he would be feeling a big sense of urgency—but then, he was the one who would know when we were called back to the Otherworld, not me. All I could do was wait. And after all, time in the Otherworld moves in a different way from the way time passes here. A second in one could be a month in the other, it seemed to me.
The developers had brought a huge dredge into the shallows round Long Pond from the open ocean. It made very slow progress because it had to dredge as it came, sucking up the sand, spitting it out into barges to be dumped on the parts of the island they wanted to build up. Gradually it dredged a channel through the flats, the shifting shoals where, once, only Grand and the bonefish guides and Lou and I had known how to find the way at low tide. Then it began to suck out the sand of the lagoon, the long pond that gave the cay its name.
Watching that dredge, I found myself with a hot feeling in my throat and tears in my eyes. Where would the bonefish go, now that their safe quiet tidal flats were being destroyed?
Grand said that bonefish were more intelligent than humans, and would very soon transfer themselves to other breeding grounds among the sandy uninhabited cays on the south side of Lucaya. He and his guides had new routes already, new favorite places where they could take the fishermen who loved to spend their holidays trying to catch a bonefish, fighting to bring it in, and then throwing it back to be free again. But nothing would make up for the loss of Long Pond Cay.
Big flat barges went to and fro over the shallows between Lucaya and the cay, taking machinery over to start moving the sand and rock around. The developers put up more of those tall notices on wooden legs at all the places where people used to land for picnics, as well as the beach where Lou and I went. They still said DANGER HEAVY MACHINERY AT WORK, and though they didn’t actually say KEEP OUT, that was the effect they were meant to have.
The developers had no legal right to keep people off the cay, Grand said, because the Government hadn’t sold them the island, but only let them lease it. Besides which, he said, the land between high and low watermarks anywhere in our country belongs to the people, even on private islands. But those notices worked. Tourists don’t want to land on a beach for a peaceful picnic and risk having to listen to bulldozers—specially when they know there are plenty of other beaches on other islands, with no sound but the wind and the sea.
And as for the local people—well, the first time that Lou and I went ashore on Long Pond after more of the notices went up, a man came yelling at us before we could get halfway to our casuarina tree. He had a machete in his hand; he was cutting brush, I guess. He was Bahamian, but I didn’t think he was from Lucaya. In spite of all their talk about Lucayan jobs, the developers had brought in a lot of workers from Nassau.
“Hey!” the man shouted. “You can’t read? Get out of here!”
I stood where I was, and glared at him. “We below high-water mark,” I yelled back. “This free land, you can’t throw us off!”
He came closer. He wasn’t threatening us, but he was scowling, and he did have that machete. “Danger notice mean danger,” he said. “An’ that mean if you get hurt here, ain’t nobody’s fault but yours. You don’t want to make trouble for you families, right? Go play somewhere else, babies.”
I took a deep breath, but Lou took my hand and pulled me back toward the boat. It was another of those times when he was the sensible one, and I was the little kid.
After that, we didn’t go back to Long Pond Cay, even though it was our gateway to the Otherworld. When I lay in bed at night I would think of the Otherworld and wonder if we would ever get back there. Half of me hoped that we never would. As the months went by, it all seemed more and more like a dream, something I’d imagined, that had never really happened at all. It was only when I was alone with Lou, looking at those thoughtful dark eyes of his, that sometimes I would know with sudden awful certainty that the Otherworld was real, and that it was waiting for us.
But I wasn’t alone with Lou much during schooltime. I got the bus to school in town every day, and he was going to the little local school now, where they had a new teacher, Miss Rolle, who seemed to know just how to cope with him. His reading was coming along pretty well, she said, though as Grammie pointed out, he wouldn’t be able to show us that until he could write as well. He still got fussed under pressure, and of course he still didn’t speak, but he hadn’t had a seizure for a long time now.
Then something happened to change that.
I was coming out of school with my friend Kermit, both of us kicking a ball to and fro, when a car stopped in the street just in front of us. The ball was already on its way up from my foot, and it hit the car’s side window. Didn’t break it, but it made an impressive noise. The driver wound his window down.
“Sorry,” I called. I grabbed up the ball from beside the car.
“Trey,” said the man. “How you doin’, Trey?”
I looked at him. He was a good-looking man, with a little fringe of a mustache, and he was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt. He grinned at me. There was a gold tooth shining at one side among all the white ones.
“I’s your daddy,” he said.
I stared at him. I didn’t recognize him one bit, not that I ever could have done from that one blurry photograph.
“Uh,” I said.
“How you doin’?” he said again.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Kermit came close, his bright eyes curious. He’s always a talker, bouncy, full of it. “You really Trey’s daddy?” he said. “Wow!”
“Working on Sapphire Island,” said my daddy, if that’s who he was.
“Long Pond Cay,” I said automatically.
He laughed. “You a chip off the old block, Trey baby. Sound like you grand-daddy. I heard about him and his campaign.”
“Well,” I said flatly. “It didn’t work.”
“Sure didn’t. You look great, kid. You got so big! Hop in and I’ll give you a ride home.”
I fiddled with the ball. “I gettin’ the bus,” I said. “But thanks.”
“This a nice car, man!” Kermit said, surveying it. “This your car?”
“Sapphire Island’s car,” my daddy said. He put it in gear again. He was still smiling, still good-tempered. “See you around, Trey. Have a good day.”
And he drove off, a bit faster than necessary. We watched him go.
“Nice car you daddy got,” Kermit said again. All you needed was a shiny car or a fast boat, and in Kermit’s book you were a real hotshot.
I said, “Who knows if he’s my daddy? Maybe he just sayin’ so.”
But he came back, and he wasn’t just saying so. I didn’t tell Grand or Grammie that I’d seen him; I pretended it hadn’t happened. That was a mistake.
Two days later he came to our house. It was a Friday. Ever since the work started on S
apphire Island, Fridays had been noisy days in town, because that was payday for the men working on the development, and they had money to spend on drinking in the bars in town. At school I heard all kinds of stories about Friday night fights, and the police were busier than they ever used to be.
My father must have been in town and come out again, on his way to the trailers on the fenced storage area where some of the workers from Nassau were living. Or perhaps he was a security guard; I never found out. It was nearly bedtime when the car drove up. We’d been watching television, and I saw the headlights slant across the wall of the darkened room.
I went to the window and looked out. Grand came behind me. Three figures got out of the car, talking in loud voices that weren’t quite loud enough to understand. A light flared as two of them lit cigarettes. In the moonlight, I saw them sit down on the little wall at the edge of our yard. The third man came toward the house, and in a moment there was a bang at the door.
“Don’t go!” I said suddenly; I didn’t know why.
Grand said reproachfully, “Could be somebody in trouble, Trey.” And he went to the door.
I heard my father’s voice, just like two days before, but slightly slurred now. “Hey, Father Peel, how you doin’ today?”
There was a pause. Grand said slowly, “William. What I can do for you?”
“Came to see my child,” my father said. Then he burped, loudly. “Pardon me,” he said.
I was standing just inside the back room, in the shadows. Grammie came out past me, and squeezed my shoulder as she came. “You rest here,” she whispered, and off she went to join Grand. I could see them standing there together like the two halves of a closed gate.
Grand said, “Technically you got two children in this house, William, but you been gone six years now, and not one word from you all that time. You switch off being a parent, you can’t switch it on again like a tap.”
“You done a good job, both of you,” said my father in a lordly way. I could see him leaning against the door-jamb to prop himself up. “But you grandparents. Ain’t no parents in this house. Lenore, she in Nassau—I back home now, earning good money. I seen my child Trey. Gettin’ big now, needing a daddy. We talked.” He burped again, more quietly. “Time I took over.”
Lou had been in bed, but now I heard him padding across to join me. He stood there in his shorts listening, looking very small, big-eyed. I gave him a quick hug.
Grammie said briskly, “Go get youself a good night’s sleep, William. You need one.”
“I want Trey,” my father said obstinately. “I got rights. Gonna take you to court.”
I heard Lou’s breathing begin to get faster. He gave a little whimper, and clutched at my arm.
Grand said quietly, “Just you try. You never married Lenore, you just give her two babies and walked out each time. Just you try goin’ to court.”
My father’s voice began to rise. “I got friends!” he said loudly. “I got powerful friends, William Peel, and last time you tangled with them you got big trouble! You just watch out you don’t find you got no boats at all!”
Lou was getting very agitated, right on the edge of a seizure; his arms and legs were trembling, and one shoulder beginning to jerk uncontrollably up and down.
“You can’t stop me, old man!” my father yelled. “I goin’ come take Trey, real soon!”
With that, Lou was over the edge. Gasping and grunting, he fell down on the ground in the worst seizure I’d ever seen, thrashing about, with spit running down his poor chin. I shrieked at my father, “Get out of here! Get out! Go away!” and I don’t know if he heard me or not, because I was so busy then, and Grammie with me, tending to Lou and making sure he didn’t bite his tongue, or break a leg, or bang his head on the floor.
By the time we had him calmed down and could get him back into bed, my father had gone, and his two friends with him.
When I kissed Grand good night, he took hold of my arm. “You didn’t tell us you saw you daddy,” he said gently.
“It was only for a minute or two,” I said. “He stopped outside school and he said who he was, and he offered me a ride home and I said no. I didn’t say anything to him like what he told you, and I sure don’t need him. I hate him!”
Grand shook his head. He squeezed my arm, and let me go. “No you don’t,” he said. “You don’t need him, but you don’t hate him.”
“He can’t take me away, can he?” I hardly dared say it, I was so frightened it might be true.
“Never,” Grand said. “Never, never, never.”
One other thing was niggling at me, out of my father’s drunken shouts. “You think he was one of the people who stole you boats?”
“Maybe,” Grand said. “But he sure ain’t gettin’ my grandchild.”
School ended, and it was summer: hot, sticky weather, with no wind to stir the palms or the casuarinas. Quiet, ominous. The whole of my life then was ominous; I would wake up in the morning feeling frightened, waiting for something bad to happen. I had nightmares, though I could never remember the nightmares themselves, only the terrible fear that made me wake up trembling.
Everything seemed to be going wrong: Long Pond Cay was being destroyed, my father was threatening to take me away, and Lou wasn’t well. He had recovered from that awful seizure without ill effects, after sleeping for twelve whole hours that night, but he was very quiet and sad. I often found him just sitting, staring into space.
I said to him one day, out on the porch, “Is it the Otherworld?”
He nodded.
“I’ll do anything you want me to, Lou,” I said, though I didn’t look forward to it. “Do you know what to do?”
Lou shook his head, and looked sadder than ever. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and then held out his hand to me. The fossil star shell lay there on his palm.
I said, trying to understand, “It’s time to take it to them?”
Lou nodded. But then he held up that same hand with two fingers upright. He stretched out the other hand, palm down, and made a fierce sideways movement with it, as if it were saying no. After that he held up the two fingers again.
I said slowly, “You can’t go back, unless you have two stars to take.”
Lou got to his feet and came and hugged me round the waist. The top of his head came up to my chin. Like I told you, he’s not very big. I put my cheek on the top of his curly head for a moment and realized that the most important thing in the world, now, was not grieving over Long Pond Cay or worrying about my dangerous daddy. It was finding one more star shell that had been turned into rock by time.
So I did what I had done all my life when I had a real problem: I went to talk to Grand.
It was early the next morning, a Saturday. Grand had already left when I woke up, and I went down to the little marina to look for him. There he was, on the jetty, watching one of the bonefish boats take off for the day. Will was running the boat, as guide for two Americans who were peering eagerly ahead from under the peaks of their baseball caps. It was a beautiful day; the sky was clear blue and the water very still. A V-shape of ripples spread back toward us over the flat surface as the boat moved away. Will looked over his shoulder and waved to me before they disappeared into the mangroves.
Grand glanced down at me. His white beard looked a bit shaggier than usual; it needed trimming. “You up early,” he said.
I said, “Wanted to ask you something.”
He looked at me more closely. “You worried about you daddy?” he said. “Don’t be. He got no chance at all of taking you away.”
“Okay,” I said.
Grand gave me a big reassuring smile. “Tell you what,” he said. “I got an expedition to make today, out beyond the Plantation. You got much homework this weekend?”
“Done most of it already,” I said. I’d written a story the night before for English, which is easy for me, not like algebra.
“Let’s go,” Grand said. “I doing pictures for the book. I’ll take y
ou and Lou. It’s a long drive, mind. Think you’d like that?”
“Yes please!” I said. When Grand said “the book” he meant a history of Lucaya that a Bahamian friend of his at the University of Miami was writing. Grand was taking photographs for him, mostly of old settlements on the island that had been deserted for years. They weren’t really old by the standards of Lou’s star shell fossil, but this seemed a step in the right direction.
He said, “You wanted to ask me something?”
“Not now,” I said. “You took care of it.”
The Plantation is a settlement halfway down the island, past town, past my school, out where a lot of farming used to be done. Years and years ago, Grand says, after slavery was abolished and the cotton-growers were gone, people burned the scrub there and grew vegetables and fruit on the cleared land. But the soil is thin on our islands, and pretty soon they used up all its goodness and nothing would grow anymore. So they left their settlements and moved on, and their houses crumbled away and the vines and the scrub took the land back again. Here and there, you can find old foundations left, and that’s what Grand wanted to photograph.
There’s only one main highway on our island, one lane in each direction, and most of the way it runs along the northern shore. Once in a while you’ll turn a bend and find yourself suddenly faced with a spectacular view of white beach and blue-green sea. The tourists love that, and you never get tired of it even if you live here and see it every day. Halfway to the Plantation we turned one of those corners, and Lou let out a surprised yelp.
But when I looked out, it wasn’t just a pretty view he was seeing: it was a pair of ospreys, soaring over the water, traveling in the same direction as our car. Lou made his soft hooting sound, and almost as if it were an answer, we heard the ospreys piping their thin call to each other: peeeu, peeeu . . .
