My time to go to sea came and I wanted to be alone with my father for my first journey, but Luke was there. I complained and my father cuffed the side of my head. Watch you mout’, bwoy, he said. After that we worked in silence in the dark. I was afraid but full of anticipation too. The first trip was never to the Pedro Bank—that would come later—but would we go out so far that there would be no sign of land? How would we find our way back in the day, without the shining lighthouse?
What I can still see from that first trip: the sunrise. It had been a night of fast-moving clouds, the moon just past full. The sea shone in the moonlight. The only sound was the throb of the engine. Luke stood in the bow, I sat facing forward. Our father stood behind me with his hand on the tiller. How did he know where to go?
We motored for what seemed like an age, but was probably only an hour. Then I realized I could see my hands and feet as a gray light stole across the sea. And to the east I saw the sky turning into a hundred different colors—from the blue of a summer day to the dark purple of the thickest squall, from the pale pink of the inside of a conch shell to the bright orange of a ripe mango, until the round ball of the sun itself came up and the colors of the sky spread over the water and even warmed our faces. I knew then that the best place to see a sunrise was at sea.
When the sun came up, I saw it was the same sea I knew and my nervous anticipation left me. After that, it was just a long learning of all the things my brothers had already learned: the gear, the methods, the times and places of a fisherman. I absorbed this learning with ease, it was nothing like the torture of a school desk, of chalk and blackboard; this was a learning of the body, of all the senses. My father hardly spoke to us; he showed us what to do. This way, he would say. Sit beside me and take the tiller. You see that over there, that funny flat cloud? Time to run for home.
That first morning, the best thing I saw was the dolphins.
9
Lloyd got up at fishing time. He had hardly slept. He had to get out of the house before his mother woke—she would not let him miss another day’s selling. He wrote her a note saying he was crewing for a fisher nicknamed Popeye; he was not sure when he would be back, but he would be home with money. He knew his mother might go to Gray Pond beach to speak to Maas Benjy or Maas Rusty, but he hoped she would not do it until the next day and by then he would be long gone.
He had thought about the trip for most of the night. He had no idea how long the Coast Guard boat would take to get to the Pedro Cays so he had packed a bottle of water in his school bag and three bullas from the food cupboard. He had put a cap, his rag, and a change of clothes in a plastic bag to keep them dry. He counted his money. He would need another plastic bag for that. He dressed in his fishing clothes—the torn up ones in the darkest colors—they would not stand out in the night as he tried to find a hiding place. Then he looked at the bag and shook his head: fool-fool. He had to swim to the boat and then climb up a rope and through a small hole—how could he take a bag with him? Could he put the whole bag in another plastic bag? Could he find an old piece of Styrofoam and float the bag along with him? He thought that was worth trying and if he mashed up his school bag, he had more than a month to find a new one before school started again.
He spent the day on Princess Street among the vendors. It was one of the most crowded parts of downtown Kingston and he made his way unnoticed through the vendors’ stalls on sidewalks and in the streets, past the jelly coconut men, the dry goods vendors, and the pan chicken cooks—you could buy anything in downtown Kingston—clothes, shoes, food, drugs, guns. He searched the narrow lanes between the wider streets and found a pile of cardboard and he went through it looking for Styrofoam. He was glad to be out of the sun. He found several plastic bags and the kind of bubbly plastic wrap that was used for packing; he remembered how he and Dwight had scared their teachers by popping the bubbles in the same kind of wrap at the back of their classroom. Even a small noise could make a teacher spin around in a Kingston primary school, fearing gunshots.
He wished Dwight was coming with him. This day and night would be an adventure then, a prank, like the time they rowed Maas Braham’s dinghy around the point at Gray Pond beach and hid it behind some sea grape trees. He found a long roll of twine—part of it plastered with dog doo-doo. He unrolled the twine and used his pocket knife to cut away the dirtiest part. He could now tie up his plastic bag and maybe his clothes would be kept dry. He did
