He feels inexplicably rattled when he finally opens his eyes. He remembers this place from that summer long ago. Before Martha’s miracle, the unexpected inheritance that would take them away from the old neighbourhood forever. Before she put her son beyond the reach of Taj and his kind. He walks along knowing that beyond that tumble of rocks, there’s a cove, like an afterthought to the beach. On a summer’s day, it’s an undisturbed pool, freshened by water heaving over a broken circle of limestone. In winter or during storms, the surge floods through and the cove becomes part of the beach again. He gropes blindly towards the cove’s entrance, hearing the soughing of the night. He plays back his exchange with Taj. Not tomorrow. I hear you, Patrick.
As a young boy, Taj claimed he could read minds, and had told Patrick how. ‘Can’t figure out words on a page, but I can read somebody’s face and hear the words they’re not sayin.’ Not tomorrow. Did he hear Not ever? Patrick’s toes feel the stealthy touch of the water. Much warmer here! He makes a decision. He will stay here until the sun comes up. He will drive home and become himself again.
At that moment, the bank of cloud veiling the moon clears and he sees something near his foot. A formless shadow lies black and stupendous in the dark shallows of the cove. Patrick blinks hard and looks again. Through the blur of this distorting moonlight, something emerges. The shadow becomes a shape that fills the cove. The shape lets out an agonised sigh.
Patrick leaps back. Struggling to understand, he creeps forward to take another look and freezes as a second breath reverberates around the walls of the cove.
He dashes to his car. His trembling hands can barely hold the phone. Who will he call? What will he say? Taj. The word itself allows him to exhale. He takes a few deep breaths and talks long enough to hear the words I’m comin. He feels good about their brief conversation. Taj had growled and snapped at being woken up while he had remained calm.
Patrick does not budge from the car park, does not even look in the direction of the cove until he hears the wail of an approaching bike. No word is spoken as he leads Taj down the embankment. With each step, Patrick’s breath becomes more erratic. A soft hiss escapes from the shadow in the water and Taj stops dead. He leans forward and sweeps a beam from his flashlight across its body. The shadow tries to shy away but is stuck fast on the sand.
‘A calf,’ Taj says at last.
The flashlight plays over the immensity of this infant, its length occupying the width of the cove, its tail end covered with water, its head a prow rising up from the sand. The two men stand staring and speechless.
Taj turns to go. ‘I’m goin back home. Stay here.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’ Patrick’s attempts at composure collapse.
Taj hands him a large knife. ‘Take this.’
‘What’s this for?’ The knife almost falls to the ground.
Taj groans and switches on the flashlight again. Its beam picks out a length of rope, one end trailing in the water and the other cruelly entwined around one of the whale’s flippers.
‘Cut the rope that’s in the water so it don’t do no more damage. Don’t try to free the flipper. You’ll end up stabbin yourself. Keep away from the tail. It can kill you.’ Taj pauses. ‘And, Patrick, it’s probably dying. Beached whales usually do.’
‘Why do you have to go home?’ And leave me here hangs unspoken in the air.
‘To get some supplies. Some help. Gonna have to wake Reece up. She won’t be happy.’
‘Is that your wife?’
‘You don’t remember her from school?’
‘No. Nobody called Reece. You mean – Chereece?’
‘Yes,’ Taj chuckles. ‘And she can still cut your tail, too.’
‘You married Chereece?’
The flashlight’s beam floods Patrick’s face before he can arrange it, and as the other man stalks away towards the car park, he can see the offended stiffness of Taj’s back. Slow-talking, unruffled Taj is married to the roughest, toughest girl at their primary school. Tall, rangy, cursed with a light skin in a dark neighbourhood, she was the girl who could and would beat up anybody, male or female, who did or said the wrong thing. Oh, Taj!
Watching him speed away, Patrick’s thoughts drift back to their conversation outside Larry’s.
‘I’m OK. Except I’m on the no-fly list.’
‘Why?’
‘Went down for nine months a few years back. For possession.’
‘Sorry, man.’
‘It’s OK. Got my queen. And our three yout.’
‘You can’t ever travel? To the US?’
‘That’s what it means, my brother. So I’m pretty much stuck on this rock, until there’s a new law or a new president or a new world or something.’
What did Taj do to deserve to be stuck on this lump of coral with Chereece and a pack of snot-nosed kids? Patrick imagines their lives, feels a rush of pity, followed by a prayer of gratitude to Martha. Because of her, he’s a role model for Back-a-Town kids to aspire to. At only thirty-four, he’s on the top tier of this tiny island with nowhere to sow and nothing to reap, with only the wit of its people to keep it afloat. Canny, pragmatic people have always stood on this small rock in a huge ocean, scanning the horizon for a way to survive. And, fifty years ago, a point of light became a beacon. International business. This has become his world, and where’s the dishonour in that?
The whale breathes again and wrenches Patrick back to the present. Stumbling backwards, he lands with a splash within an inch of the tail, immobile and black in the shallow water. Moments pass without either moving. It can kill you, Taj had said – so Patrick slides away from the tail and hunches over, head between his knees. A tight knot lodges in his chest as he relives his fourteenth summer when he and Taj had combed the island’s twenty-five square miles, checking out its beaches. Hurtling on rickety push bikes, racing up sand dunes, spying on lovers, jumping off jagged cliffs, swimming out to the breakers. It was the last summer before the Miracle and his new life. And the sorcery with which Martha made the old life disappear.
Rubbing his chest, Patrick remembers the task he has been assigned. The end of the rope ensnaring the whale’s flipper is within easy reach. He grasps it but cannot cut it, can only feel the sharp edges of its barnacles. With a crab-like movement, he creeps over as close as he dares to the whale’s head, never letting go of the rope. He talks as though in his sleep, without logic or reason, stopping only to hear the rhythmic exhalation of breath that becomes as normal as the filling of his own lungs, the beating of his own heart.
Taj returns. Patrick scrambles to his feet, trying to untangle his thoughts – and his face – before the stern eyes of this muscular stranger. Moments later, Papa Dickey and two fishing bredren arrive, acknowledging him with cool nods. Patrick remembers the bredren from school, one tall, one short, not a shred of grey matter between them. With scarcely perceptible steps, Patrick backs away as the strip of dry sand fills with old bedsheets, rubber gloves, shovels, buckets and a giant blue tarpaulin, the kind used during hurricane season. Papa Dickey, small with a tensile strength, starts to walk the length of the whale. The old man places one gloved hand on the head, leans over, pulls a length of sargassum weed from the blowhole and continues his inspection.
‘Ten ... twelve-footer ... maybe a humpback. Maybe not. Some scars. Fresh. Comin through them rocks. Amazin she ain’t sliced up much worse.’
Papa Dickey steps back, shaking his head.
‘Don’t look good. Gotta cut that rope. That’s what got her in this mess. Can’t steer properly with only one flipper. Taj! Gimme the knife.’
With one swift action, Papa Dickey severs the tangled rope. Taj and the bredren gather round and there is a ripple of pleasure when the injured flipper makes a slow paddling movement.
‘Patrick! What you doin over there?’ Taj says sharply. ‘Come hear Papa’s plan.’
He takes a step towards the others, but when he sees an abandoned fragment of rope, he puts it in his pocket and si
ts back down. From his vantage point beside the heaped equipment, Patrick listens and watches, but from afar.
To him, Papa Dickey’s plan sounds simple but preposterous: dig a trench, wait for the high tide to join the beach and the cove, get the whale on the tarpaulin, drag it along the trench to the beach and release it into the ocean. First, the old man shows them how to cool the creature down. He plunges a bed sheet in the seawater and smoothes the sodden cloth over the animal’s back. Despite his famous motto – hook ’em, gut ’em, sell ’em – he carries out this operation with a sensitive hand.
‘Get crackin!’ Papa Dickey barks, pausing to look in Patrick’s direction. ‘Need a special invitation?’
There is no invitation special enough to make Patrick spring into action like the others, immersing the sheets, spreading them over the sleek skin, hauling water in buckets, dousing the whale down. Paralysis grips him. Their feverish activity holds no interest for him. There’s something missing. The rhythmic hissing breath. Can he hear it? How can he, with Papa Dickey’s orders ricocheting off the bristling rocks? More water! Not over the blowhole! You guys dumb or what? Not on the flippers! Not on the fin! Not on the tail! Taj, start diggin ...
Patrick hates them all, with their noise and shouting. But as long as he can hold the barnacle-encrusted rope in his hand like a string of prayer beads and as long as he can hear the breath of the whale, he cannot leave.
Papa Dickey starts in with the fishing yarns, talking about his grandpa’s time, when whaling was the international business of the day. The bredren are all ears, want to know if they ate whale back then. Sure! Sea beef, they called it. But what really counted was the blubber ... If it’s not blubber, it’s flensing with the blade they used to scoop out the blubber from the head. If it’s not flensing, it’s ambergris. Papa Dickey is in high gear, talking, talking, his unconscious hands wetting the back of the motionless figure.
‘Know what ambergris is?’
‘Know it’s something to do with the whale, Papa.’
‘Cho! Finding ambergris washed up on a beach was like – strikin it rich on the stock market.’
‘Chingas!’
‘I said, do you know what ambergris is?’
‘No.’
‘It’s ... whale shit!’
Papa Dickey is so convulsed with laughter he falls over. Splashing in to pull him up, Taj and the bredren make the air shudder with their squawks and hoots about ninety-year-olds not knowing how to act.
A strange kind of rage flashes through Patrick in his dark corner by the rocks. He feels something warm in his hand and sees he’s been clutching the barnacled rope so tight, it has cut into his palm. The drops of blood sit like quivering spheres until they are absorbed into the sand.
He stands and begins his walk towards those clamouring around the whale. They need to stop their clamour. When he reaches them, their laughter turns into a palpable hostility for the boy who left them so many years ago, the one who is not laughing.
‘Shut the fuck up. This noise is stressing her.’
‘The only stress around here is you.’ Taj’s voice cuts the air, and when the moonlight strikes him, his face is disfigured with all the anger at Martha’s treatment of him, all the anger of being left behind.
But for Patrick, this moment has no room for human recrimination or regret. He pours water slowly over the whale’s back, kneels and presses his chest against the massive side. He does not know if it’s his body that’s quaking or the whale’s. But after a long and absolute silence, there is a loud rush of expelled air and a slight motion of the great tail.
From then on, Patrick does his share, working with the tall bredren to dig a trench from the cove to the beach. Taj shows Patrick his back as he murmurs to his grandfather. There’s no other talking. The tide that minutes ago seemed to have been inching ahead is now surging forward, making little rivulets bending towards the cove.
The time has come to move the whale.
Papa Dickey calls them over and takes off the large white handkerchief tied in four knots around his head. Smoothing out the cloth square, he picks up a piece of driftwood.
‘This is our baby,’ the old man says, lifting the stick. He rolls up half of the cloth and places the stick on the sand next to its rolled edge. ‘We rock our baby onto her side and over the rolled part of the tarp.’ So said, so done. ‘She’s still on her side as we open out the tarp like this – then rock her onto her stomach. Then we drag her along the trench into the beach. And let her go.’ Five sets of eyes move from the demonstration to the whale. Only Taj dares to ask.
‘Done this before, Papa?’
‘Sure! Lots a times.’ They’re all convinced he’s lying. It’s the lots a times that gave him away. But they also know he has spent almost all of his ninety years in, under and around the water. How do you refuse a man like that?
Because of the incoming tide, only the whale’s head is fully on the sand. The rest of its body sits in two feet of water. The tarpaulin is rolled halfway with the rolled edge pressed against the creature’s side.
‘Taj! Fold the flipper against her body so it don’t get crushed. Then hustle your ass outta there – so it don’t get crushed.’
Taj takes position.
‘Taj Mahal Robinson!’ A high voice rings out. ‘Step away from that whale!’ The woman takes a few threatening steps forward. ‘I’m not planning to bring up three children on my own!’
With her full-grown body and her head wrapped in white, Chereece seems so different to Patrick. She sounds different too, not the fishwife or the dancehall diva he’d imagined. But the attitude of combat is familiar. Taj heads straight for her, walking with a controlled fury that Patrick has never seen before. Husband and wife turn their backs on their observers, their muted, charged dialogue punctuated by the occasional discernible word.
Taj returns to his place by the tarpaulin. Behind him, Chereece sheds quiet tears of defeat.
‘I’ll do it,’ Patrick says, stepping forward. He feels their eyes lacerating him, the one who joined the other tribe and never looked back. The one who’s trying to impress them. Maybe they’re right. Maybe he is.
The whale breathes out with a groaning sound.
‘Taj, she’s right.’ Patrick looks directly at him, nothing concealed, no word unspoken. ‘You can’t afford to get hurt.’
He gets his instructions from Papa Dickey and wades into the water. At the level of the creature’s eye, he stops. Nobody speaks as he is drawn into that universe. He takes several deep breaths to calm himself. Placing his hand on the whale’s flank, he slips into the water, his hand fused to the animal’s side. Lying flat on the rolled end of the tarpaulin, he slides towards the flipper. It’s the injured one, and when he touches it, its flinching stirs sand up into his face. He brings his head up, says, ‘Not yet,’ waits for the water to clear, and goes down again. This time, he lies so near that he can hear rumbling noises coming from within. He presses his hand high on the whale’s flank and moves it slowly but firmly down its side until it reaches the top of the flipper. Slowly, exerting ever more pressure, his hand travels down the length of the flipper, pressing it against the belly, folding it under, out of harm’s way.
He raises his other hand out of the water – the signal for the rocking to begin. The whale tenses as the four men and one woman, using their hands and their backs, try to heave the ton of living flesh onto its side. He has to wait for the moment when the beast begins to move, when the flipper starts to disappear. Then, he’ll have to move at the speed of light. A second too long will be his last.
At last the rocking is gaining momentum and, yes, despite the swirling sand, he can see that the flipper is disappearing. Time alters and stretches into a moment of eternity as he sees the dark silhouette loom over him, suspended in mid-air.
Bathed in sunlight comes Martha, the only one, if she were still alive, who would mourn him. How can he ever measure up to her enormous sacrifice? The scheming with private schools and scho
larship committees and loan officers and universities and internships. The excising of old habits, old friends. The effort needed to hurl him into the new life had probably cost her her life. How much had it cost him?
Martha’s face fades. The silhouette is moving. He hurls himself back, scrambling over the slippery plastic just in time to see the creature crash on its side within inches of his foot.
‘Quick!’ The old man’s voice cracks. ‘Patrick! Other side!’
Breathless, he rushes over to repeat the operation, absorbing in a fragment of a second the sight of the creature’s underside – brilliant white from snout to tail. Everything is faster this time, the unrolling of the tarpaulin, the folding of the fin, the righting of the whale into its blue hammock, the restoring it to some sort of dignity.
With adrenalin pumping through his veins, Patrick is on a high that no amount of weed or ecstasy or white rum has ever given him. ‘What’s next, Papa?’
There is a pause. The beach is filling up with a boisterous tide and a thin stream is snaking towards the cove. Papa Dickey marshals his troops. ‘Come on, you lot. You too, Reece. We need everybody.’ They flex their arms, preparing for the lift. The old man seizes the edge of the tarpaulin and they follow suit. Lift and pull. Slide and lift. Make that hammock slide along that trench. It becomes his mantra.
‘Lift and pull. Slide and lift. Slide that hammock ’long that trench.’
Everybody laughs, but by the third time he says it, they join in. The hammock inches forward. Papa Dickey gets creative and adds, Tote that tarp, lift that whale, singing it to the melody of ‘Old Man River’, cursing when he finds that nobody knows the song. But they learn it, and, with what is now their song, they manoeuvre the whale hammock out of the cove and point it towards the open sea.
While singing lifts the spirits of the others, giving them strength, it does nothing for Patrick. Adrenalin now all but gone, what is left is a terrible detachment from everything except the spasmodic pulse of the whale’s breath. As the blue hammock inches forward, he senses something approaching joy among the others, their muscles burning with exertion, their voices raised in song. Taj is up front with his grandfather, taking the greatest strain, now and then glancing over at his wife and smiling. Chereece returns his smile with a sweetness that makes Patrick look away. The bredren are already celebrating the hooking of a great tale they will tell for the rest of their lives.
So Many Islands Page 8
