Night came. He thought briefly of the wall on Gray Pond beach, of his wait for his grandfather, his role as sentry, as witness—but he was too tired and his grief hurt. He left the beach and walked home. He would look for Django the next day.
Django’s taxi was an old Toyota Corolla. It was closing on midday before they left Harbour View, with Lloyd in the back between two women. Another friend of Django’s sat in the front. Lloyd held no particular hope.
“How long to Rocky Point?” he asked Django.
“Mebbe three hours,” Django said.
They drove through Kingston traffic onto the Mandela Highway and through Spanish Town. One of the women got off and Django waited in a gas station for another fare. Lloyd closed his eyes. He hoped he would get to Rocky Point before nightfall.
He woke when the taxi fell into a deep pothole and Django swore. They were driving through cane fields. “Soon reach now,” Django said.
“When you going back?”
“Early tomorrow. ’Bout five-thirty. Need to beat the traffic into town. You comin?”
“Dunno. Tell me where you leavin out from and if you see me, you see me.”
Django took Lloyd straight to Maas Roxton’s small concrete house on the edge of a salt pond. There were other similar houses scattered around. The yard was dirt. Clothes flapped on a line. Lloyd estimated it was close to four o’clock. He walked up to the front door and knocked. There was no answer. He sat on the front step. He would just have to wait. People walked past on the marl road and looked at him waiting but no one said anything. After an hour, he saw the old man coming up the road. Lloyd stood.
“That you, Lloydie?” said Maas Roxton, limping into the yard.
“Ee-hee.”
“Him dead, Lloydie? Is that you come tell me? Me know, yout’, me know.”
Lloyd held his breath. “You see him dead?”
“Me no see him, but . . . come inside. Not good to talk these things where man can hear.”
Lloyd followed the old man into the house. The small dwelling had almost no furniture, and fishing gear and engine parts were scattered around. It was more storage space for fishing gear than a home. It was very hot inside. “Sit,” Maas Roxton said. Lloyd sat on a broken couch covered in plastic near the only window. At least he would soon know what had happened to his grandfather. It had been a very long day and he was weary.
At first, Luke only slept, ate, and drank. He used the chamber pot—the chimmy—and my mother studied the contents before she emptied it. The color of Luke’s urine changed from a rusty brown to pale yellow. My mother waited for him to move his bowels. That took days. His skin sloughed off in big flakes. He spoke in monosyllables and only about food or water. I climbed every coconut tree in the four villages of Treasure Beach and brought the nuts home in clusters and Luke drank the water and ate the jelly. The pale, sandy color of the grass in Treasure Beach turned green and shining after the rain, and water rose in the pond.
My mother moved a chair from the big room and one of us sat in the bedroom with Luke, day and night. We slept where we could find space. At the time, the hours Luke lay still in bed seemed endless—but now, I know my brother recovered quickly. Soon he needed no help to use the chimmy. Soon he was ravenous—he ate brown stew chicken, curry goat, oxtail, rice and peas, roast breadfruit, sweet potato pone, bulla, boiled yam, even steamed fish and mackerel run down. I had thought he would turn away from all things of the sea, but he did not.
He could not stand his mouth to be empty. Miss Faith brought him a bag of the hard sticky sweets we called Bustamante Backbone and he sucked on them through all his waking hours.
What happen? we asked. Where you were?
Luke’s story emerged. It had been a mistake to go to sea with Donovan—he had carried a full bottle of white rum and had drunk it all on the outward journey. They had spent three days on Top Cay, finding meager shelter in an abandoned shack. Donovan had refused to go to sea and Luke had set his pots alone. Then they waited and Donovan cursed the sea and the small coral island and threatened to kill everyone and everything on Top Cay—the men, the birds, the turtles that came to land at night to lay their eggs. An elder, Maas Leroy, told Luke he had to leave. Luke argued with Donovan, who did not want to help him draw his pots, but eventually he agreed and they set out at dawn of the fourth day.
The pots were full and Donovan became exuberant. They filled the plywood iceboxes of the packer boats that took fish from the Pedro Cays to mainland fishing villages with red snapper and grouper and lobster and parrot fish. As the full weight of the sun fell on the sea, they left for Great Bay with money in their pockets and a small amount of fish for their families.
Me open the throttle wide, Luke said, and the sea flat calm and we going be home in four hours, the most.
But two hours into the journey the engine died and they could not get it started. What had seemed a flat calm sea held a deep, irresistible surge and they were pushed and pushed to the southwest. Here Luke stopped his account and his eyes became vacant. We ate the
