Unspeakable Horror

by Joseph B. Healy

  This was a very poor place. Wooden houses, sadly in need of paint and repair, were situated all around the village square. Dignity stopped in front of a tiny food shop. It was about four o’clock. I got out and walked into the shop to ask directions. A woman with rum-colored skin stared sullenly at me from behind the counter. On the floor behind her was a corrugated box filled with small, torpedo-shaped loaves of bread and behind that a shelf stacked with tins of corned beef. I asked her where the fishermen would be putting in. Instead of answering me she pointed across the square toward the black, sandy bay where, apparently, all of the fishermen in the village kept their boats. I bought a loaf of bread and a bottle of Hairoun beer. As I crossed the square, I looked back over my shoulder toward the shop and saw the woman staring at me from the doorway.

  I cut diagonally across the square, which a group of nearly naked children playing kickball shared with a herd of tethered goats and a mangy clutch of chickens, reached the beach, and walked out onto a battered concrete jetty to wait for the fishermen. Large nets had been spread out on the beach to dry. More chickens scavenged among them for bits of fish that had stuck to the green cords, small fish with names I had yet to learn—dodger, jackfish, sprat, and robin—baitfish used by the blackfishermen to lure the larger bonito and skipjack that they caught by trailing a line behind their boat. A large skull, bleached and weathered, sat by itself in the black sand. It must have been two feet across with eye sockets wide as cups. Its jaws were like a bear trap, different than a shark’s but just as unnerving. It gaped up at the sky above the horizon like a ritual mask.

  It was five o’clock. I had been waiting about an hour. The edge was just coming off the heat of the day. The sea was calm, pewter-colored in the distance, dark green as it was enclosed by the bay. There was no breeze at all. I looked for some sign of an incoming boat, but I couldn’t see a thing. I had been told it was possible the fishermen wouldn’t come in at all. Sometimes they stayed at sea for two or three days at a stretch. Since they had no radio communication system, there was no way of knowing whether they were pursuing fish or had gone to the bottom. Nobody knew until they saw them again. Or didn’t. Some children were playing cricket on the beach with a slat from a crate, but no one else was walking about. It was dinnertime, and smoke from cook fires curled from the houses and small pits dug into the sandy backyards. For a minute more the sea was empty; and, then, there it was—a wooden boat at the very outer edge of the bay slicing through the water with a make on the jetty. Its sail was down, and I could hear the put-put of an old outboard as it pushed the boat along. The children playing cricket stopped their game and ran to the water’s edge. Other children joined them, as did quite a few adults. They just stopped what they were doing and came to the beach. It was like a communal sigh of relief. The sun rose; the fishermen went out. The sun set; they came back. The boat came near enough to shore for everyone to see that today it was empty, so the villagers left the beach as quickly as a suburban crowd when a movie’s over, without even a look back at the final credits.

  The hull slid from the surf and skidded through the sand with a hiss. Even before it came to a stop half-in, half-out of the water, I had already decided I wanted to go to sea with them. There were six men in the boat, and it was obvious they were hunters—as all good fishermen, whether they are after a fifty-foot cetacean or a Dolly Varden trout, are hunters. They moved with grace and silence as they leapt from the boat and began unloading it. There was no rush, just method and purpose and complete attention. It was obvious, too, that this was something they had done hundreds, even thousands, of times. One shouldered the outboard, another handled coils of rope, but the one I watched was the gunman. The piece looked about as delicate as an anvil, but he folded an oiled cloth around each part as a jeweler would black velvet around a precious stone. All of the equipment was stored in a cinderblock shed at the back edge of the narrow beach. Not one of them paid any attention to me. They had to have seen me—they beached within ten yards of the jetty where I stood—but my presence was never acknowledged, not in a way that I could discern, anyway. While the others stored the equipment, one of them took a long, stout pole and punted the boat to its anchoring place in deeper water. I watched him jump into the water and begin to swim back to shore when I sensed something behind me. I say “sensed,” but, in truth, I’m not sure what alerted me. I may have heard the padding of bare feet on concrete or the clinking of equipment, or maybe it was my personal radar signaling that the space around me had changed. I turned and saw the fishermen—all except for the one in the water—walking up the jetty toward me. They were grim-faced, and they moved quickly. I knew what I wanted, but did they? It suddenly felt very dangerous out there with nowhere to go except through them or into the sea. In an instant the distance between us would be closed, and I felt I had only that single instant to establish myself as a person they would either welcome or not. My mind raced. I had to bring it to a halt, and what it said was, “Be still.” It said, “Don’t do. Don’t posture. Trust who you are. Simply meet them.”

  We met in the center of the jetty, and I have a vague memory of shaking hands. I remember them smiling. Their teeth were rotten, most of them missing, and it occurred to me that, perhaps, one of the reasons for their grim faces was that they hadn’t wanted me to see how decrepit their mouths were. It amazed me that the mouth of the whale skull on the beach was in better shape than theirs. I do not remember what we first said or how we introduced ourselves to one another. It seems to me now that one instant we were on opposite ends of the jetty and the next they were showing me the whale gun with pride and telling me how it worked, and I was telling them about hunting deer and elk in snow-covered mountains. I hunted because I sought in myself what the animals always were, that they lived where I sometimes visited. I searched out this existence when the season came, when the game laws would let me. I needed to know I could take game because I did not feel complete without this knowledge. The blackfishermen needed to take game because they would not be alive without it. I hunted to feel. They hunted to eat. But hunting was not our common bond. It was much simpler than that: we liked one another.

  I doubt that we were together more than an hour that first day, but I asked if I could come back and go to sea with them. They said yes, no problem, just make sure I came when the blackfish were running. It was nine years before I was able to return; by that time, all the men of this original crew were dead.

  How was I to know, when I first met the fishermen, that I was soon to start a new cycle in my life, one that would keep me from returning to St. Vincent for nearly a decade? I was emerging from a period where the impulse to act and the action itself were very nearly simultaneous. If I wanted to do something, I did it, and I had managed to survive. Good fortune kept me alive when good sense was in remission, but there were moments I would have considered myself more fortunate if it had been otherwise. What a mistake that would have been! This new cycle included a new marriage, a farm in the Catskills of New York, and a family. I fully intended to go back to Barrouallie the following year, only I was suddenly very busy nesting. Barrouallie assumed dream status—the “mongoose,” wide around as a truck tire, and the men who read the water as easily as I could read a book. As my life became more settled, more bound to the earth, I would think of them not out of envy, but in wonder at the differences in our lives. When it was 90 degrees in the West Indies, it was 20 below in the fields surrounding my house. When the agonizingly beautiful melancholy of autumn settled over our valley, hurricanes tore across the island of St. Vincent. The mountains around us were old, worn, and rounded; thick rainforests make the mountains of St. Vincent appear lush and accessible. However, this is deceptive because their mountains are steep and young and, therefore, still re-forming themselves. Soufrere, the largest of these mountains, is an active volcano that has already exploded twice this century pulverizing villages, torching the forests, and covering the natives with a pasty gray ash so thick it had to be scraped off.
Soufrere dominates the island like Skull Mountain does in King Kong. And, yet, their climate is so temperate that if a seed merely drops to the ground it will sprout full and bear fruit, while my growing season in upstate New York is a scant couple of months.

  The desire to go to sea with these men as they hunted the blackfish never abated. It was just bumped and tabled by more immediate realities. Life was different but certainly not dull. My wife and I had gone to Colombia and adopted a child, which turned into an adventure through the systems of men—courts, social workers, government bureaucracies—an infuriating and frustrating complex of legalities designed to keep you from the child you want. But a son was eventually the issue of all this. Then facing another winter in the Catskills where it took an hour to dress the boy for a fifteen-minute trip outside, I began to seriously consider the possibility of going to St. Vincent again. I called a friend who owned a marine supply house in Kingston, the capitol, to discuss it with him, and when he told me the fishermen were retiring and dying off, that only a few were left, and that their season was coming to an end, I knew I had to go back. My wife knew it, too. She had only one condition—that all of us go.

  We left the Catskills early on a dreary morning, the first day of March. The sky was drab, deadeye drab. A veneer of ice from a freezing drizzle coated the trees, the road, everything. When you stepped on the grass it crackled. This was the time of year when the cold seemed as if it would last forever. Admittedly, the Catskills are not the Arctic Circle. There are colder places in the world than these mountains in winter. But our snows start about Thanksgiving, continue through April, and are known for an occasional roar right into May. They are deep and blinding. The thermometer plummets to 20 degrees below zero. Skin sticks to metal at that temperature. Again, admittedly, this is not 40 below, but I defy you to walk out on my front porch and tell me the difference. As far as I was concerned, it was the perfect time to head for the gentle weather of the Grenadines. The rainy season was another month off, and light winds floated in from the sea to keep the islands mild and pleasing. Slippery mangos and juicy grapefruit waited to be plucked off the trees, and my wife would sleep the sleep of angels without the goose-down quilt, which covered our bed twelve months of the year.

  We flew directly to Barbados and then took a local puddle-jumper over the sea to St. Vincent. Old friends, descendants of the British who colonized the island, met us at the airport. After staggering through customs (an event that included a change of diaper, six milk crackers, a jar of strained spinach, and the frantic retrieval of Mutsy, the stuffed animal that had fallen off the stroller to the tarmac on our walk from the plane to the terminal), they drove us first to get a car then to the little house in a section named Rose Cottage where we would spend the month. We settled in and immediately drove to the open-air market on the other side of Kingston, the capital and largest city—actually, the only city on the island—a teeming brew of buildings, most of them one story, none more than two, narrow cobblestone streets, donkeys, vans, and old cars. There were sidewalks, too (depending on the block), but the citizens didn’t seem compelled to use them, as there were just as many people walking in the street. Traffic was supposed to drive on the left, due to the British influence, though it didn’t seem to matter to the drivers which side of the road they were on as long as they were pointed forward. Our friends had thoughtfully put in a basic supply of food and provisions for us, so our purpose in heading for the market was not to shop but to find a woman named Esther Irene. She operated a fish stall in the marketplace. According to inquiries placed by our friends, Esther Irene knew the whalers well and would, if she felt like it, facilitate meeting them. Finding her was the next step.

  Only foot traffic was allowed in the space designated for the marketplace, so we parked the car, and, armed with the stroller, Mutsy, and diaper bag, we joined the swarm of islanders buying and selling their daily bread. The marketplace was a medley of rickety stalls and blankets spread on the ground displaying coarsely ground chocolate sticks, West Indian hot-pepper sauce, dasheen, tanya, herbs, beans, peppers, tomatoes, grapefruit, mangos, squash, bananas, and the morning’s catch of fresh fish. I wondered if the voices of the people sounded as beautiful to one another as they did to me, that exquisite West Indian lilt that transforms even the most common string of words into an incantation. And nobody seemed to be in a hurry. They ambled from stall to blanket, dawdling over this and that, quibbling and sweet-talking, sometimes exchanging one parcel of goods for another, all on island time.

  With my son spearheading the way in his stroller, we negotiated our way through the packed marketplace. Where was Esther Irene? We asked at each stall, each blanket. Everyone seemed to know who she was, but no one seemed to know where she was. A little girl tapped me on the arm. She was eight, maybe nine, shoeless in a raggedy dress with tight black braids like spider legs every which way all over her head.

  “You lookin’ for Miss Irene? Miss Irene’s over there.”

  The little girl pointed off into the crowd, but I couldn’t tell at who or what. I shrugged. She seemed exasperated. Without another word, she took the handles of the stroller and made her way into the thick of things. She carried herself royally, and I’m sure she thought herself very important, which, indeed, she was. We followed along behind her as she picked a path through all those people. She stopped at the blanket of a very old man who was displaying an assortment of wonderfully carved bamboo flutes. He put one to his lips and played a few notes. The tone was delicate and lovely, like a birdsong floating from deep within the forest.

  He withdrew a new flute from a straw bag and handed it to my son, who promptly tried to stick the entire thing in his mouth sideways.

  “You give him what you want,” the little girl said, indicating the old man.

  I took five BWI dollars from my pocket. The currency was pronounced “BeeWee,” short for British West Indian. My wife said it wasn’t enough. I counted out five more. The old man took them and thanked us with a wink of his eye and a trill of his flute.

  My son put the end of the flute in his mouth and tried to blow through it as if it were a bugle. The little girl pressed on through the tumult of the marketplace. It was difficult to steer the stroller over such uneven ground, but her course was resolute, and my son bounced along happily sucking on his flute as if it were a peppermint stick. Soon we stopped in front of a rickety stall laden with mounds of fresh fish. Presiding over this with a machete in one hand and a voice that countenanced no nonsense was a chocolate-skinned woman no more than five feet tall, no less than two hundred pounds. Her dress was burnt orange, full but short, knee-length. Her hair was wrapped in a torn, red square of cloth. A tarp on the ground beneath her feet was littered with dozens of fish heads that she lopped off as easily as Madame Defarge. She hawked her catch like a sportscaster announcing the day’s lineup.

  “Miss Irene.” The little girl tugged at her dress. “These folks want to meet you.”

  Esther Irene put down her machete and stretched out her hand. I took it. It was slimy with fish, but her grip was very strong. I told her our names and what I wanted.

  “All dead but three,” she said.

  Would they take me out with them, I asked? She didn’t know.

  “I ain’t dem,” she said.

  Would she introduce me? She would. I was to return in an hour when the market closed and drive her back to Barrouallie. She couldn’t guarantee that the whalers would be there because if they harpooned one of the bigger whales, the giant might well tow them around for two or three days before they killed him. However, if they were there, she would certainly introduce me.

  An hour later I was driving along the road to Barrouallie, the dangerously narrow coastal road I had traveled ten years before, the only road, potholed, cracked, in terrible disrepair. I had driven my wife and son back to Rose Cottage, set up the porta-crib, and kissed them good-bye. Most dads kissed their families good-bye to go to an office. I thought how fortunate I was to be a writ
er and so have an excuse for such an escapade! How many other kids had fathers with a day job on a twenty-three foot wooden whaler, or mothers who encouraged such a thing?

  The road rose a final time then dropped steeply into Barrouallie. Nothing had changed. Goats still grazed on the rectangular green at its center; children still played there with a beat-up ball. The beach and sea lay just beyond. We parked next to the concrete jetty where I first met the whalers ten years before. It was late afternoon, but they hadn’t put back in yet. Other fishermen had, however, and their families were busy stretching their nets out upon the black sand to dry. I felt a rush of déjà vu. A decade was as nothing. The sun rode low over the sea, and the water was just beginning to take on a glow from a sunset still an hour away. I took out my camera, but Esther Irene cautioned me against taking any pictures.

  “They don’t like none of that,” she said.

  So I put the camera under the front seat, locked the doors, and walked out onto the jetty to watch and wait. It was so quiet. The people on the beach barely made a sound. I must have blissed out for a few minutes because I was startled back to consciousness by the muffled sound of what was still clearly a boat’s motor. A sharp whistle brought my head around. Esther Irene, with two fingers in her mouth and one hand pointing toward the horizon, was signaling me to look. The whalers were heading in from the sea. The people on the beach stopped what they were doing and looked, as well. They hung in a state of anticipation. Even the dogs stood still. It was obvious. We all wondered the same thing: Had they gotten one?

  The sun was behind the boat, making it impossible to stare for very long; but, suddenly, one of the nearly naked little boys who had been squatting in the sand jumped up and clapped his hands. Lashed to the side of the boat was a slick, thick, black shape that ran its entire length and a bit more. The blackfish of Barrouallie. A charge of excitement flowed across the beach as the villagers drifted into the water to greet the whalers.