Lloyd recognized a few Port Royal fishers on the deck of the big boat. They lowered a kind of sling into the water, and the woman in the wet suit pushed the dolphin into the sling, her head lowered, her mouth moving as she whispered to the injured dolphin. Then the men strained and pulled and the sling came up, streaming water with a faint pink tinge. The dolphin twisted in the sling, trying to get away, bouncing against the hull of the big white boat, marking it with blood. The crowd on the beach clapped their hands and whistled when the dolphin disappeared over the weather rail of the boat and everyone returned to their beach towels and Red Stripe beers.
Later, Lloyd heard from fishers on Gray Pond beach that the dolphin had not been let go at sea, as he had imagined, but had been taken to one of the tourist places—attractions, they were called—somewhere in the north to be nursed back to health. The fishers laughed about this, the stupidity of it, the amount of money spent to rescue a single animal. They calculated the fuel cost to take the big boat to Lime Cay and then all the way around the coast to wherever the dolphin places were. Bare foolishness for a fish, the fishers said, even though they knew dolphins were different from fish. And after that, Lloyd heard that foreign men speaking Spanish came to Jamaican fishing beaches asking fishers to catch dolphins for them.
It was not steady work. Months or even a year would go by before the foreign dolphin traders would come to the fishing beaches. It was never the serious fishers who considered looking for dolphins for the traders, but Lloyd heard the talk. A young female them want, the men would say. A pretty one with a pink stomach. No mark on the skin. There were various stories about the traders—that they were friends of Slowly’s from prison and he explained things to them in Spanish. Others said they were from countries on the other side of the world.
Listening to his mother’s and father’s voices, Lloyd wondered if somehow his grandfather had become involved with the dolphin traders. No way, he thought. Gramps loved dolphins. But perhaps he had seen something he should not have seen.
Lloyd stared into the darkness of his small room and made plans to find his grandfather. The Coast Guard. Pedro Cays. Maybe finding the woman in the wet suit. He thought about Maas Rusty and Maas Benjy talking about the words between his father and grandfather. Maybe his father was the place to start. Black crab, his mother said again from the next room. Listen to me, nuh?
I am thinking about the boats of my life, starting with the split surfboard my brother Luke and I found washed up in Great Bay one morning. We played with it in the shallows, daring each other to push it into deeper water. We were very young. And then we found a canoe made from one entire cotton tree, the tree felled, the inside scooped out, as long as the legs of the long-dead fisher who made it. We found it in a clump of macca bushes. We rocked it to get it loose, but it was too heavy for us. The seven Saunders men got it to the beach on one of the carts the fishers used to move their engines around, and it became our canoe. We scrubbed her sides with sand and we found an almost finished can of paint on a rubbish heap and we named our boat in crooked but proud letters—Birdie. I have always liked bird names for boats.
Birdie had no modern features, no engine, of course, but also no oarlocks, no cleats for tying a rope, no thwarts to sit on, nowhere to store gear so it would keep dry. You could see the marks of the tools that had been used to make her, although where we sat in the bottom was worn smooth by contact with human bodies. The hull was a half circle so there was no keel. If a man sat in her, she settled low in the water and had almost no freeboard, but Birdie never leaked—she was the most watertight boat of my life. She was a sturdy craft—once a wave carried us into the reef and it was the reef that suffered. She was most suited for a river, we thought, not for the risks of the sea, although we knew the Arawak Indians, who were Jamaica’s first peoples, made such boats and went to sea in them. Birdie was our playground and playroom, not that we knew such things existed then, and there my boyhood and my youth was spent, in half of a felled cotton tree, a tree that lived on, a tree that went to sea.
Then there were my father’s fishing canoes, two of them. He went to sea in one—Survival—and my oldest brother, Ben, in the other—Silver. My father had wanted to name his second boat after my mother, Sylvia, but the painter man had misheard him or perhaps could not spell and my father’s second canoe, bought when I was about seven, became Silver. In time, I came to see it was a good name, a perfect name—so much about fishing had the color of silver.
Before our father took us to sea, we merely played with the sea. Going to sea with our father was different—it was the first step to becoming a fisher. And Luke went to sea without me. While I waited for his return, I told myself stories about
