My father was a black man and my mother was St. Elizabeth red with gray-green eyes. We Saunders boys were all different shades of brown. My father, though, was truly black; his skin reminded me of the Kiwi shoe polish we had to use on our school shoes. He came from Little Bay on the north coast, near to Negril, where the beaches were made of pure white sand. Luke was the lightest skinned of us all, with the greenest eyes. The market women called him “puss eye.”
I was closest to Luke. We were the small boys, only ten months apart in age. There was a four-year gap between Luke and Colin, the next oldest son. That four-year gap was wide; Colin, Lewis, Robert, and Ben were the big boys. They called us tiki-tiki, after tiny fish. We were four to two; not three to three in our family. My big brothers were always men to me and I yearned to catch up with them. They were better at everything—catching lizards with nooses made from coconut trees, stoning mangoes, shooting birds with slingshots made from inner-tube rubber; better at football, better at cricket, better runners, better swimmers. They laughed at our efforts to keep up with them, but everyone knew not to bother the younger Saunders boys because the big ones would come to their rescue. The other members of my family swim in and out of memory, but Luke is always there, the witness of my life, and I, the witness of his. We grew up together; brothers, kin, friends. Sometimes we dreamed the same dreams.
When it came time for Luke to go to sea in his turn, I begged my father to take me as well. Ten months meant nothing, we were really the same age, I argued. My father was not swayed and although he threatened to beat me if I followed, I crept out behind them in the night and settled in the shadow of another old canoe, so long discarded on the beach that vines grew through its holes. I heard the murmur of my father’s voice as he instructed Luke. The almost full moon was hidden by cloud and my father was invisible. What age were we? I am not sure, maybe eight or nine.
We knew the sea, of course. It was the boundary of our world: the sea gave us smells and winds and weather and it was the subject of nearly all our conversation. The sea gave and it took. It was our food and our livelihood and our recreation, but it could kill men as well. My father often talked of the boat Snowboy, which went to sea with forty-odd men, twelve of them from our fishing beaches of Great Bay and Calabash Bay and Billy’s Bay and Frenchman’s. Snowboy foundered on the way from Kingston to the Pedro Bank in the deep sea. The newspapers said Snowboy had been overloaded. A search was mounted, but not a single man was ever found and the fishing villages mourned for half a year. The sea was vast and yet intimate, dangerous and yet holding us to her bosom, calm and also racked with furies. The sea was all.
It is that same sea that has brought me to this rock on the Pedro Bank, carved by the waves of centuries into jagged crests of gray and black. There is no tinge of green but there is life here: seabirds, crabs, snails, whelks. There are signs that fishers visit; human waste, a shelter made of a tattered tarpaulin, a plastic bottle tied to a rock full of warm, fresh water. I tried to catch one of the birds but they are much too wily. I catch a small ghost crab and crack it open. I close my eyes to eat the half liquid flesh and it slides down my throat. Perhaps the fishers will be back today and I will return to land with them.
5
Lloyd waited for the airport bus on Windward Road. It would take him to Port Royal where he would try to speak to someone at the Coast Guard base. He had waited until his mother left the house to buy the day’s fish and then he washed and dressed in his church clothes from the day before. The only food on the stove was an end of hard dough bread. He made himself a cup of mint tea with three spoons of brown sugar. He sat on the front step and ate the bread. He would be in trouble when his mother found him gone.
He did not feel tired, despite his night-time wait on the old wall. Staring out to sea was as restful to him as sleep. He knew he had slept for a while, leaning against the light post. Gramps had told him that a man must be able to catch sleep where he can. Lloyd had seen his grandfather sleep in the inch of dirty water that always sloshed around in Water Bird, no matter how much they baled.
He had never been to the Port Royal Coast Guard base. He knew their boats, Cornwall, Middlesex, and Surrey, named for Jamaica’s counties. He thought they looked like battleships in a war movie, with their gray bulk and mysterious tangle of gear. They were anchored in the lee of the Palisadoes strip and any fisher leaving Kingston Harbour motored past them.
The gate to the base was right opposite Fort Charles, where an old-time English admiral had walked the walls in the famous town of Port Royal, right at the end of the Palisadoes strip. Lloyd often went to the fishing beach in Port Royal to crew for other fishers or to leave with Dwight and Miss Lavern for Lime Cay, but he had never tried to go inside the
