“Slowly?” sneered his father. “Bare foolishness! That man don’t even have half a mind.” He staggered a little.
Lloyd wiped his eyes. It was hopeless. He would never know his grandfather’s fate. Perhaps one day the wreckage of his boat would be found, maybe a splintered plank of wood with Water Bird written on it would wash up on the coast. He would never know. There would never be a grave anywhere, perhaps not even a funeral or a nine night. Maybe he would live the rest of his life waiting for Water Bird to round the point at Palisadoes until the span of a human life was finally over. How long would wondering last, how slowly could hope die?
“How old Gramps is?” Lloyd said to his silent parents. They stood apart from each other, but there was something united in the way they looked at him.
“How old you father is?” his mother said to his father, and there was relief in her voice. This was a question they could answer.
“The old fool? Must be sixty-seven, sixty-eight by now.”
Lloyd thought of Pastor Errol’s sermons about the three score and ten years of life a person was given, according to the Bible, but he knew many people who lived into their eighties and nineties. Even many fishers—despite the life of sun and sea and hardship, they lived and worked until they were very old and sometimes their bodies outlived their minds, and they became like Slowly, talking and dancing to no one. It would be at least twenty years before he could be sure Gramps was not on an island somewhere, not on a lonely beach, not run off with a woman, not migrated to do farm work. Twenty years before Lloyd would know for sure Gramps was dead.
The anger had left the room. Vernon staggered and the smell of rum rolled off him. Lloyd wished his mother would put her arms around him but she was not that kind of woman. He thought then of Jules and the way she had whispered to the Lime Cay dolphin and the story that it had been put on an airplane and taken to another island. He thought of mad Slowly and his dolphin dance. No. He would not give up. Gramps had seen something he should not have seen and someone knew what had happened to him.
“Who is Black Crab?” he said to his mother.
She grabbed his arm again and her nails bit into his skin. “Now you listen me, pickney,” she hissed. “You forget you ever hear that name, you hear me? Some things not good to talk. Pickney must stay outta big people business!”
“Tell me what happen to Gramps,” he pleaded.
“Nuttn don’t happen to him,” shouted his father. “You hear me? NUTTN!”
The day after I abandoned the search for my brother I climbed the limestone rocks behind the villages alone. The weather was turning—there was a low bank of cloud at the horizon and as I watched, the cloud changed from the white of wood smoke to the purple of a storm. It was too late for Luke. I had not gone home the night before because I did not want to see my mother or father. I had found the long abandoned hull of Birdie, covered in a tangle of beach rose vines and bird droppings, and I had crawled inside.
In the morning, my mouth was foul and my stomach empty. I had no water. This was how Luke would have felt on that first day when he first confronted the dead engine or the loss of the expected sight of land, before he knew his life was almost over. What would it be like to count the time you had left with certainty, to know however bad you felt on the first morning, you would only feel worse on the next and worse still on the day after that? To try to hold on to hope, to let yourself feel it in tiny amounts, like scarce sips of water? My brother was dead at seventeen and rage made me short of breath. Rage at our father for taking us to sea; at Donovan—it must have been his fault because the Saunders men had always been safe at sea; at God himself for not raising his all-powerful hand to save my brother; at myself for failing to find him, for losing hope and turning away.
From my vantage point, I could see the tiny shapes of fishing canoes going out and coming in and the sea began to curl and surge. Soon there were whitecaps and the cloud at the horizon spread and grew and became heavy with rain. My stomach cramped. The limestone rocks were sharp. I thought of Jasmine sitting beside me in the Arawak cave and she seemed like someone I had known too long ago to matter. The first drops of rain fell.
Soon a solid curtain of rain obscured the coast. I stripped off my shorts and undershirt and stood in the downpour. I turned my face to the sky and opened my mouth and I drank, and my stomach churned and knotted. The rain squall was heavy and short and when it was over I pulled on my wet, filthy fishing clothes and climbed down the hill toward Great Bay. I turned onto the track that led down to Great Bay, and then I saw a crowd on the beach and I heard raised voices. Perhaps someone had landed a shark. I did not hurry. There was nothing on that beach to make me quicken my step. Then Maas Lenny ran past me and I heard Maas Jacob shout to him, them is really back? The crowd parted as I came near and I saw Silver drawn up on the sand, and I saw
