“Man is just flesh and blood, Lloydie. Man is cruel. Life cruel. The sea cruel. It easy to die.”
“Please, Miss Vie. Say you is my mother. This uptown woman, she not go to sea without everything, everything—life jacket, radio, GPS, two engines at least, extra fuel, flares. Everything. You know how it to. It going be safer than what I do every day of life.”
Miss Violet considered. And then she said, “What she name?”
Jasmine had a son after a short sharp labor in the house in Great Bay attended by a midwife from Black River. We named him Vernon, after her father. She lost interest in me. The two women still fought and the house closed tight around us, unpleasant with Vernon’s bawling and his smells and needs. I was not needed. We were living on what Luke brought in from dynamite fishing and I was not going to sea.
Luke quickly learned that our first efforts at dynamite fishing had been done all wrong. You were supposed to go at dusk on a calm day. You did not go to a random spot over the coral reef and take what floated up. You went to a place where fish schooled and you attracted them with bait or chum, and then you threw the dynamite. Luke became expert. I did it that one time only and ever after we were divided, almost enemies. Yet still I ate Luke’s fish.
We never talked about the day we first threw explosives into the sea, but when Vernon was six months old, Jasmine, the baby, and I left Great Bay and moved to Kingston. She had a cousin in Gray Pond, a fishing beach just like Great Bay, she told me, although she had never seen it, with a pond like ours. I could not imagine a fishing beach in a city. Perhaps I would get construction work.
When we packed up all we owned I was surprised how small a pile it was. I said good-bye to Luke on the front steps of the house I had grown up in; Cordella was in the kitchen and did not come out. I knew she was glad the house would be hers alone. Maas Leroy took us in his taxi to Kingston and I looked back at the coastline only once at the top of the escarpment. I lived on an island and the sea would always be there, and it would always be the same sea, whether or not I was a fisher. I was twenty-five years old.
31
Jules shook her head when she saw Lloyd, sitting on the sidewalk of Windward Road, waiting for her. He had not been home. “Lloydie,” was all she said. She handed him a plastic bag full of sandwiches and an icy Pepsi. He ate the sandwiches—bully beef, with just the right amount of pickapeppa sauce and Scotch bonnet—and he found every leftover crumb with his tongue. “Stretch out in the back,” Jules said. “Go to sleep. It will take us a good three hours to get to Treasure Beach.” Lloyd crawled into the back seat, lay his head on his backpack, and was instantly asleep.
Pressure in his bladder brought him awake. He was stiff, but he felt rested and strong. He was still thirsty. The sun was setting and they were driving down a winding road, the sea ahead of them far below. The soil was reddish with rocky outcrops and the grass was rough and gray. “Miss? We can stop for a minute?” he asked.
Jules pulled over beside a large limestone rock. Lloyd got out and relieved himself against a fence post. When he had finished, he looked out to the coastline. The hill they were on fell to a large flat plain containing a huge pond. Straggly trees leaned all one way. There was a large hill on the coast to the east. He could see the small houses of a village. “Where is that, Miss?” he said.
“Treasure Beach,” she said. “That’s Pedro Bluff. And the Great Pedro Pond. The Pedro Bank is out to sea. All these places named for someone called Pedro. We leave before first light. You alright? You feel better?”
“Yes, Miss.” He caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a cave in the limestone outcrop off to one side and a faint path leading to it. He saw a small tree had sent its roots right into the rock and its roots framed the entrance to the cave. He turned his gaze to the sea. He was anxious to get down to the coast. He would tell Jules about Black Crab’s warning; of course he would. As soon as they came back from Portland Rock, he would tell her. She had been going there anyway. It would not be any more dangerous than her regular trips.
Portland Rock. A dry breeze has torn half of the tarpaulin away and I can see the other half will follow. Then I will lie fully exposed to the sun and my life will be soon over. My leg pounds ceaselessly, like the sea itself. The rocks are full of the skeletons and marks of sea creatures—will I one day become one of these marks? They are like the pencil drawings we had to do at Sandy Bank primary school so many years ago. Will some future visitor see the faint traces of a man imprinted in rocks? Despite my long determination to avoid this place I am going to die alone on the Pedro Bank.
I hear the soft breath of dolphins nearby and they are a comfort. They came after the last rain and they have stayed. A crab runs across my leg. I think of the one I ate when I was first here. It was a female—her underside held reddish eggs. I ate them all. I smashed her shell. I never caught another crab.
There are piles of human excrement nearby. My hope has
