My mother’s life was in the house and in the community. She was a big woman too, in her way, and I do not mean her physical size. No, I mean she was respected and known. She had a soaring singing voice and she sang in the church choir and she sang hymns as she scrubbed the floors and she sang as she chopped and cooked. She wore an apron every day, except on Sundays, when she wore a hat she kept in a box on top of the only cupboard in the house. On weekdays, she carried a basket and she tied a headscarf on her head. She bought our food at the Calabash Bay market, where the donkey men brought yam and sweet potato and tomato from the hill town of Mandeville and traded the produce of the land for sea fish caught by the men of the Treasure Beach fishing villages.
She hardly ever touched us. I did not ever wonder if I was happy.
3
Sales were good that Saturday, although the fish they had for sale was not Gramps’s fish, not the best quality, and Lloyd was kept busy digging through the sharp chunks of ice to find the right type and size for the customers, wrapping the fish in newspaper, laying them in plastic bags. His mother had slapped him when she saw him, but it was a light blow, more for the benefit of Dwight’s mother than meant to hurt him. Miss Beryl did not believe in giving harsh beatings to her son, although everyone in the community predicted badness as a result of this lack of discipline.
She punished him in other ways, and that morning he stood for hours at the side of the road, holding a large snapper in his hand. His arm hurt and so did his icy fingers, and the sun made him narrow his eyes to slits. His grandfather had shown him that trick—how to protect his eyes from the glare of the sea. As he stood at the side of the road in Liguanea, he thought of Gramps’s gear—his hand lines, hooks, sinkers, anchor, knife, and gaff; his yellow rain jacket that smelled of plastic and salt and fish scales; his flashlight, cooler, bait holder. And his cell phone, now silent.
Traffic thinned out after lunchtime and there were only a few small yellowtail snapper left in the cooler. Miss Beryl sniffed at them. “Don’t make sense take these home,” she said. She never ate fish herself. It seemed strange to Lloyd that fish fed his mother but his mother never tasted them, did not know or care to know anything about the sea, or about the fish, where they were born and grew. She threw the leftover fish to the brown dogs that lived behind the supermarket.
That night, Lloyd’s father visited for the first time since Maas Conrad had left for Pedro. He greeted the boy as he always did. “Wha’ppen, yout’?” he said. “You hear anything?” he said to Lloyd’s mother.
She shook her head. “You hear anything?” she said. There was something hidden in her voice. She held out her hand and Lloyd’s father gave her a bundle of folded notes. Lloyd saw it was much larger than usual and his mother stuffed it in her apron pocket without counting it. That was how they lived, how they ate—the money his father gave them sometimes and what they earned each week from the sale of Gramps’s fish.
Late that night, Lloyd heard the muffled voices of his mother and father. He heard his grandfather’s name more than once, and he wanted to get up and ask them what they knew but he was sure that would earn him another slap or worse. He was sure it was not worry that kept them talking about Gramps. He heard his own name, and he listened for anger in his mother’s voice, or fear, because he was sure his mother loved the old man, but she did not seem to be angry or afraid. He thought he heard urgency in her voice. Black crab, she said. Perhaps catching crabs for sale was to be Vernon’s next venture. He heard his own name and other words repeated. The dolphins. The dolphin people.
Lloyd knew there was a new thing in the Caribbean islands, places where tourists went to see dolphins kept in pools, where they paid a lot of money to touch them and swim with them. About a month ago, he had seen a dolphin stranded on the beach at Lime Cay, only fifteen minutes by boat from Kingston Harbour. The weekend uptown beachgoers had arrived to see the dolphin on the white sand beach washed by gentle waves, rocking this way and that.
Lloyd was at Lime Cay that day to help Miss Lavern with her bar and fried fish cook shop. He had walked over to the crowd around the beached dolphin and saw the uptowners on their cell phones. Soon the government officials arrived along with the dolphin people, who covered the animal with wet towels, and even held a tarpaulin for shade over the sleek animal, stuck on the beach. Lloyd wanted to kneel beside the dolphin, to look into its eyes, but a Syrian man with a big stomach and a loud voice kept everyone back.
Eventually, one of the big boats from the Yacht Club came and all the people helped to push the dolphin back into the water, scraping its skin on the sand, leaving faint trails of
