Gone to Drift

by Diana McCaulay

  “Just checkin, seein if him come back. You been out at Pedro?”

  Maas Rusty shook his head. “Too many people out there in conch season. Me comin from Bowditch. But me did hear Maas Conrad was at Pedro.”

  “Yeh. Him call Tuesday, say him leavin Thursday mornin at first light. But him shoulda reach back now.”

  “What him was doin out there? Me never know Maas Conrad go Pedro yet.”

  Lloyd shrugged. He did not know why his grandfather had gone to Pedro.

  “You check with the Coast Guard boat?” Maas Rusty said. “Them go out every Monday night. Everybody know Maas Conrad. Mebbe them know somethin. Mebbe him get sick and him restin out there.”

  “Me never see him sick yet.”

  “Any man can sick.” Maas Rusty went back to mending the net and Lloyd felt there was more he wanted to say. A boat engine rattled behind them. Lloyd turned. Not Water Bird.

  “You talk to you father?” said Maas Benjy.

  “No. What him know? Him don’t go sea more than so.”

  Maas Benjy shrugged. “Me hear them did have words, that’s all.”

  “Words? What kinda words?”

  Maas Rusty made a shushing sound and waved his hand at the other man. “Stop run up you mouth,” he said. “After you no know nuttn. Check with the Coast Guard, Lloydie. That’s you best bet. Go over Port Royal. Ask for Commander Peterson. Him awright. Him will talk to you. Mebbe him even take you out there.”

  “Lloydie!”

  Lloyd turned and saw Dwight running across the sand. Gramps is back, he thought, Dwight has seen him, no, Dwight has seen his body, and he felt breathless and afraid, as if he had run to escape a beating. “You find him?” he said.

  “Find who? You mother is at the house and she mad as hell. She say she need you to help sell. You best get youself over there.”

  Lloyd turned to the old fishers. “Respect,” he said. “You tell me if you hear anything?”

  “Coast Guard,” said Maas Rusty. “That’s where you to ask.” Lloyd turned and ran across the sand with Dwight to face his mother.

  The sea was more real to us than the land, so now I find I cannot remember many details about our house, our school, or the look of the land. I know we slept three to a bed, by age, and as I was the youngest, I slept crossways at the foot of my brothers’ iron bed. Often, I was kicked, but if I complained, they would push me onto the floor, onto my mother’s rag mat, so I learned to make myself small and still. I can see the sash window, swollen from the salt air, stuck half open. I can see the kerosene lamp on an oval wooden table, the only other piece of furniture in our room. We took this lamp to bed at night and I can hear our mother’s voice telling us to make sure the lamp was really out; we were to stare at it to make sure its last embers died because lamps had a way of flaring up again and burning down houses with children inside.

  There was a big pond far behind our house, a salty lake that grew and shrank with rain and time. There was a time when it dried out completely and the sea breeze scraped the stinking dust from the bottom of the pond and coated our villages with it. That is why I remember the stuck sash window because while the dust whirled and settled we could not shut it out and our one thin sheet was full of grit. I did not mind the smell—to me it was a sea smell, caused by dying fish and a host of other animals. We did not know their names.

  When the rain came, the pond filled and filled and found its way to the sea in small canals and winding trickles and the crocodiles—we called them alligators—came in and out. I do not remember ever being on the pond in a boat and now I wonder why.

  Some boys tended their families’ goats. Others had to weed the skellion fields. We all played fling-fling and roamed the area for whatever was in season—cashew, guinep, mango, pear. Our feet were tough from running on the few roads, made by women who broke the bigger rocks gathered by men. Mettle, we called those stony roads. Mostly the beaches were our roads. The fishing beaches were each of slightly different shades of brown and gray, with a black metallic tint that the waves pulled into swirling patterns in the sand. Great Bay had the widest beach and the sandiest bottom.

  My mother’s life was in the house and in the community. She was a big woman too, in her way, and I do not mean her physical size. No, I mean she was respected and known. She had a soaring singing voice and she sang in the church choir and she sang hymns as she scrubbed the floors and she sang as she chopped and cooked. She wore an apron every day, except on Sundays, when she wore a hat she kept in a box on top of the only cupboard in the house. On weekdays, she carried a basket and she tied a headscarf on her head. She bought our food at the Calabash Bay market, where the donkey men brought yam and sweet potato and tomato from the hill town of Mandeville and traded the produce of the land for sea fish caught by the men of the Treasure Beach fishing villages.

  She hardly ever touched us. I did not ever wonder if I was happy.

  3

  Sales were good that Saturday, although the fish they had for sale was not Gramps’s fish, not the best quality, and Lloyd was kept busy digging through the sharp chunks of ice to find the right type and size for the customers, wrapping the fish in newspaper, laying them in plastic bags. His mother had slapped him when she saw him, but it was a light blow, more for the benefit of Dwight’s mother than meant to hurt him. Miss Beryl did not believe in giving harsh beatings to her son, although everyone in the community predicted badness as a result of this lack of discipline.

  She punished him in other ways, and that morning he stood for hours at the side of the road, holding a large snapper in his hand. His arm hurt and so did his icy fingers, and the sun made him narrow his eyes to slits. His grandfather had shown him that trick—how to protect his eyes from the glare of the sea. As he stood at the side of the road in Liguanea, he thought of Gramps’s gear—his hand lines, hooks, sinkers, anchor, knife, and gaff; his yellow rain jacket that smelled of plastic and salt and fish scales; his flashlight, cooler, bait holder. And his cell phone, now silent.

  Traffic thinned out after lunchtime and there were only a few small yellowtail snapper left in the cooler. Miss Beryl sniffed at them. “Don’t make sense take these home,” she said. She never ate fish herself. It seemed strange to Lloyd that fish fed his mother but his mother never tasted them, did not know or care to know anything about the sea, or about the fish, where they were born and grew. She threw the leftover fish to the brown dogs that lived behind the supermarket.

  That night, Lloyd’s father visited for the first time since Maas Conrad had left for Pedro. He greeted the boy as he always did. “Wha’ppen, yout’?” he said. “You hear anything?” he said to Lloyd’s mother.

  She shook her head. “You hear anything?” she said. There was something hidden in her voice. She held out her hand and Lloyd’s father gave her a bundle of folded notes. Lloyd saw it was much larger than usual and his mother stuffed it in her apron pocket without counting it. That was how they lived, how they ate—the money his father gave them sometimes and what they earned each week from the sale of Gramps’s fish.

  Late that night, Lloyd heard the muffled voices of his mother and father. He heard his grandfather’s name more than once, and he wanted to get up and ask them what they knew but he was sure that would earn him another slap or worse. He was sure it was not worry that kept them talking about Gramps. He heard his own name, and he listened for anger in his mother’s voice, or fear, because he was sure his mother loved the old man, but she did not seem to be angry or afraid. He thought he heard urgency in her voice. Black crab, she said. Perhaps catching crabs for sale was to be Vernon’s next venture. He heard his own name and other words repeated. The dolphins. The dolphin people.

  Lloyd knew there was a new thing in the Caribbean islands, places where tourists went to see dolphins kept in pools, where they paid a lot of money to touch them and swim with them. About a month ago, he had seen a dolphin stranded on the beach at Lime Cay, only fifteen minutes by boat from Kingston Harbour. The wee
kend uptown beachgoers had arrived to see the dolphin on the white sand beach washed by gentle waves, rocking this way and that.

  Lloyd was at Lime Cay that day to help Miss Lavern with her bar and fried fish cook shop. He had walked over to the crowd around the beached dolphin and saw the uptowners on their cell phones. Soon the government officials arrived along with the dolphin people, who covered the animal with wet towels, and even held a tarpaulin for shade over the sleek animal, stuck on the beach. Lloyd wanted to kneel beside the dolphin, to look into its eyes, but a Syrian man with a big stomach and a loud voice kept everyone back.

  Eventually, one of the big boats from the Yacht Club came and all the people helped to push the dolphin back into the water, scraping its skin on the sand, leaving faint trails of blood where the waves ran up the beach. There was a woman with the dolphin people, a slim black woman wearing a wet suit. Lloyd was impressed; he had never seen a black woman in a wet suit. She looked at home on the beach and in the sea and the men listened to her.

  Lloyd recognized a few Port Royal fishers on the deck of the big boat. They lowered a kind of sling into the water, and the woman in the wet suit pushed the dolphin into the sling, her head lowered, her mouth moving as she whispered to the injured dolphin. Then the men strained and pulled and the sling came up, streaming water with a faint pink tinge. The dolphin twisted in the sling, trying to get away, bouncing against the hull of the big white boat, marking it with blood. The crowd on the beach clapped their hands and whistled when the dolphin disappeared over the weather rail of the boat and everyone returned to their beach towels and Red Stripe beers.

  Later, Lloyd heard from fishers on Gray Pond beach that the dolphin had not been let go at sea, as he had imagined, but had been taken to one of the tourist places—attractions, they were called—somewhere in the north to be nursed back to health. The fishers laughed about this, the stupidity of it, the amount of money spent to rescue a single animal. They calculated the fuel cost to take the big boat to Lime Cay and then all the way around the coast to wherever the dolphin places were. Bare foolishness for a fish, the fishers said, even though they knew dolphins were different from fish. And after that, Lloyd heard that foreign men speaking Spanish came to Jamaican fishing beaches asking fishers to catch dolphins for them.

  It was not steady work. Months or even a year would go by before the foreign dolphin traders would come to the fishing beaches. It was never the serious fishers who considered looking for dolphins for the traders, but Lloyd heard the talk. A young female them want, the men would say. A pretty one with a pink stomach. No mark on the skin. There were various stories about the traders—that they were friends of Slowly’s from prison and he explained things to them in Spanish. Others said they were from countries on the other side of the world.

  Listening to his mother’s and father’s voices, Lloyd wondered if somehow his grandfather had become involved with the dolphin traders. No way, he thought. Gramps loved dolphins. But perhaps he had seen something he should not have seen.

  Lloyd stared into the darkness of his small room and made plans to find his grandfather. The Coast Guard. Pedro Cays. Maybe finding the woman in the wet suit. He thought about Maas Rusty and Maas Benjy talking about the words between his father and grandfather. Maybe his father was the place to start. Black crab, his mother said again from the next room. Listen to me, nuh?

  I am thinking about the boats of my life, starting with the split surfboard my brother Luke and I found washed up in Great Bay one morning. We played with it in the shallows, daring each other to push it into deeper water. We were very young. And then we found a canoe made from one entire cotton tree, the tree felled, the inside scooped out, as long as the legs of the long-dead fisher who made it. We found it in a clump of macca bushes. We rocked it to get it loose, but it was too heavy for us. The seven Saunders men got it to the beach on one of the carts the fishers used to move their engines around, and it became our canoe. We scrubbed her sides with sand and we found an almost finished can of paint on a rubbish heap and we named our boat in crooked but proud letters—Birdie. I have always liked bird names for boats.

  Birdie had no modern features, no engine, of course, but also no oarlocks, no cleats for tying a rope, no thwarts to sit on, nowhere to store gear so it would keep dry. You could see the marks of the tools that had been used to make her, although where we sat in the bottom was worn smooth by contact with human bodies. The hull was a half circle so there was no keel. If a man sat in her, she settled low in the water and had almost no freeboard, but Birdie never leaked—she was the most watertight boat of my life. She was a sturdy craft—once a wave carried us into the reef and it was the reef that suffered. She was most suited for a river, we thought, not for the risks of the sea, although we knew the Arawak Indians, who were Jamaica’s first peoples, made such boats and went to sea in them. Birdie was our playground and playroom, not that we knew such things existed then, and there my boyhood and my youth was spent, in half of a felled cotton tree, a tree that lived on, a tree that went to sea.

  Then there were my father’s fishing canoes, two of them. He went to sea in one—Survival—and my oldest brother, Ben, in the other—Silver. My father had wanted to name his second boat after my mother, Sylvia, but the painter man had misheard him or perhaps could not spell and my father’s second canoe, bought when I was about seven, became Silver. In time, I came to see it was a good name, a perfect name—so much about fishing had the color of silver.

  Before our father took us to sea, we merely played with the sea. Going to sea with our father was different—it was the first step to becoming a fisher. And Luke went to sea without me. While I waited for his return, I told myself stories about Birdie, that she had been made and used by a young Arawak prince. Our school books had pictures of these Arawaks, naked to the waist with strange, sloping foreheads; peaceful people, it was written, who were expert seamen. I liked to think I had Arawak blood in me. I came—we all came—from a line of fishermen.

  A childhood memory now comes to me—I am searching for sea snails to use as bait, combing the rocks, pulling them from where they fastened themselves by tiny suckers. I would hold them up and they would send out their tiny bodies with two black antennas at the tip, like eyelashes. They would try to hold on to my fingers with their suckers. The sea snails all had black flecks on their shells but were shaded differently—green and pink and gray. Some were rounded, others triangular.

  I remember the day I found a rock pool, a small thing, the size of a plate, but it seemed to me it contained the whole of the sea, the warm, constantly replenished water, the barely visible feathery plants and the sea snails, no two the same size, no two ever alike. A whole world in a small pool. I searched for two identical sea snails for my entire boyhood. Yet, I cracked them open with a rock to get at the meat inside their shells for bait.

  I am on a rock in the Caribbean Sea. There are sea snails all around me now and I realize they are a source of food. They can neither fly away nor scuttle deep into a crevice in the rock where I now lie. These tiny morsels, full of bits of shattered shell, these will keep me from starving.

  4

  Lloyd waited outside the Tun-Up rum shop. All his mother’s fish had sold the day before, and when she had counted out the money, she said there was no need for selling the next day. If Saturday sales were not good, his mother would miss church on Sundays and go again to her place at the side of the road in Liguanea. On this Sunday morning, his mother shook him from sleep, insisted he wash and dress in his church clothes, and they walked together to the Church of the Living God in Bournemouth. Lloyd hated church. He hated getting dressed up, he disliked the sweaty women who fussed over him and the voice of Pastor Errol, always talking about sin and fire and brimstone. He sat on the hard pew and wished to be at sea. He knew that by the time the service was finished, it would be too late to offer to crew for any fishermen. He bowed his head and let the singing and the shouting wash over him. He would look for his father lat
er that day at his favorite rum shop.

  The rum shop was crowded and loud. Lloyd went around the back into a narrow lane with piles of garbage. He sat on a stone. He listened for his father’s voice, but it was hard to hear any individual voice, hard to understand what the men were saying, as they shouted and cursed and slapped down dominoes. A herd of goats came around the corner and started to eat the garbage, pulling the piles apart. How should he approach his father? And when? There would be no point if he got too drunk.

  Lloyd stood and peered through a dusty window into the dark inside of the bar. He saw the wide and solid back of Miss Lilah, the woman who owned the bar, and he saw the domino players, who sat outside on the sidewalk. The other men were shadows. He would have to go inside. He sighed. He was sure his father would not like his questions.

  He hesitated, thinking of his grandfather’s way of dealing with trouble. He remembered the time a sudden rain squall had blown over on the way home from Portland Bight, and how Gramps had turned the bow of the boat straight into the waves, away from home, the rain stinging their faces. They could not see anything except the rain and did not know what was ahead. His grandfather had held his course. He was a man who did what had to be done, the difficult thing, the right thing. When the squall was past, he turned the boat around and motored for home, the squall then ahead of them, smoothing out the sea. Lloyd walked around the side of the bar and went inside.

  He saw his father right away, leaning on the bar, off to the left, a quart bottle of white rum in his hand. Lloyd tried to see how much rum was left, but it was too dark. As he watched, his father put the bottle to his mouth and Lloyd stepped forward—no point in waiting, his father would only drink more. He walked up to Vernon Saunders and touched his arm. His father shifted to one side, not looking to see who stood so close to him. “Pa?” Lloyd said. His father drank from the bottle again. The men shouted and laughed. “PA!” Lloyd said, more urgently. His father’s head came around and Lloyd looked into his eyes. They were red.