My four older brothers became Pedro fishers. I am trying to pin down the year in my mind. I suppose it was sometime in the fifties. Men were just beginning to go to the Pedro Bank from our villages. Before, fishers had to go on a bus to a place called Complex in Kingston, where they went to Pedro on big boats, like Snowboy, the one that disappeared. But engines were improving and fishers started to make the journey themselves, leaving late at night. The journey was long and there were the twin dangers of bad weather and poor navigation that could get a man lost at sea. No fisher went to Pedro alone in those days. We had no life jackets, no radios, and hurricane warnings came over crackling transistor radios. The old fishers knew the signs, of course, the way dawn broke, the way the swells ran, how the birds flew. They would pull their boats high on the beach and they would wait. They were not always right.
The Pedro fishers brought home bounty—hundreds of pounds of fish—grouper and red snapper and parrot. They sold their fish in Kingston and with the money they made, they bought land in Treasure Beach. They bought herds of goats. The inside fishers thrived too and the Calabash Bay market expanded. The fishing beaches thrummed with activity—boats being repaired, boats being readied for sea, boats coming home. Luke and I earned money scrubbing the mossy hulls of boats with sand.
My brothers went to Pedro in twos. We went to see them off and we waited for their return. Our father did not go. He had made the trip from Complex in his time, but he said it was now time for his sons to go. He was by then using a spear gun on the reefs near the coastline of our parish, St. Elizabeth, and his catches were good. Most fishers could not swim but my father had at one time been a lifeguard for a Montego Bay hotel—he was the best swimmer in Great Bay. He taught us to swim when we were very young—I do not remember a time when I could not swim.
The first time Ben and Lewis went to Pedro, our mother left the house. We had heard her speaking to our father the previous night in a new voice. I know we must have heard the words themselves—the house was small, though the walls were thick—but I do not remember them. We knew she hated the idea and she did not return until my brothers had gone, after midnight. There was no dinner that night. We ate the remains of a roasted breadfruit, left on the coal pot from the previous day. Next morning, I saw the groove between her eyebrows was deep.
My brothers went in a four-boat convoy to the Pedro Bank. It was late when they left and I thought the night was darker than usual. We stood on the beach and watched them go. The boats made a ragged triangle formation, like a flock of birds, and for a few seconds, their wakes were visible. Then they pierced the night and disappeared. The lead boat was Resurrection, the captain was an old fisher called Maas Jerome, who spent three months at a time on Top Cay on the Bank. He was considered a good man to go to sea with. I stared into the moonless night, the stars hidden by clouds, but it was too dark to see anything. We could hear the boat engines although we could no longer see any sign of them and it was a final, ebbing connection to land. I stepped closer to my father. Why them don’t take a light with them, Dada? I said.
Close you eyes, he said and I obeyed him. Keep them closed. I stood on the beach and jumped when a wave ran over my toes, but I kept my eyes shut. I heard the sea, falling and rising and falling. Now open you eyes, my father said.
I looked and I saw familiar shapes become visible. If you take a light to sea, you can’t see inna the dark, my father said. A man at sea need him night sight.
How they will find their way back? I said.
The lighthouse, my father said. The one at Lover’s Leap. I thought about going to sea on a dark night with the only point of reference being a slim sweeping blade of light on a cliff behind me. The story goes that slave lovers jumped to their death from that cliff rather than be separated.
My brothers returned three weeks later. They were thin and their skins looked crisp, like a fish fried too long. They went straight to where we washed and they used bucket after bucket of fresh water. Then they went to bed and they slept for almost a day. They did not seem hungry. They did not speak much about what they had seen, not at first, or what it was like out at Pedro, but they brought back both money and fish, big fat snappers and groupers, the likes of which were already becoming rare around Great Bay. They talked of going again. And so Luke and I wanted to see for ourselves. We wanted to take the long journey to the Pedro Bank. We told ourselves we would be men, fishermen, if we took that ride.
7
“Where you think you going yout’?” said the security guard at the Morgan’s Harbour Hotel. He sat in a little white building and lifted the red and white barrier up and down for cars. Lloyd had simply ducked under it, not seeing the guard until too late. He stopped.
“Mornin,” he said, hoping a respectful
