Without a Grave (2 page)

Sun and clouds above, light and shadow below. I smiled inside my mask. It was like living inside the Monterey Aquarium, only a thousand times better. I floated over the secret underwater world until its inhabitants began to take me for granted.

Ink-black sea cucumbers waved at me from their crevices. Yellowtail damselfish frisked about, their electric-blue spots twinkling like jewels. A bright-orange squirrelfish, his eye a black-ringed target, pecked at something in the sand.

But I was looking for my friend, Big Daddy.

He was hard to miss, Big Daddy, a two hundred and fifty pound grouper as big as a college linebacker. I swam on, checking behind an outcropping of brain coral, peering down into ragged holes that damaging storms had torn into a delicate organism already bleached out and weakened by global warming. Corals grow slowly, painfully slowly, some no more than the width of a dime in a year. If something isn't done . . .

I shook away the thought as a splash of green caught my eye. A moray eel gaped at me from his hidey-hole like a malevolent snake, displaying an impressive set of needle-like teeth. I gave the eel a wide berth, and swam on, still looking for Big Daddy.

I found him a few minutes later, lurking territorially behind a purple fan coral. He floated there soberly, considering me with large, lugubrious eyes, mouth turned down in a perpetual frown, like Winston Churchill after the Blitz, but without the cigar.

A school of yellow jacks flashed by; Big Daddy ignored them. He ignored a pair of stoplight parrotfish, too, as they nibbled away on the coral – algae for breakfast! – with an audible click-click-clicking sound. Suddenly Big Daddy shied away, ducking, squeezing his enormous body – unsuccessfully – under an overhanging coral shelf.

I barely had time to wonder what had spooked the big fellow when something flashed in the periphery of my vision. A dark shadow was speeding in my direction, sleek as a dolphin, fast as a shark.

I froze, heart pounding, wishing I had worn my swim fins so I could paddle out of there in a hurry.

False alarm! No need to panic. The newcomer was my husband, wearing only a mask, flippers and a weight belt, and carrying a Bahamian sling, the slingshot-like speargun locals used for fishing.

When Paul surfaced next to me, I yanked the snorkel out of my mouth so I could say, ‘I thought you were working.'

Paul grinned, his cheeks creasing handsomely around his face mask. ‘I got bored.'

‘You? Bored? With your buddy, good old Andy Whatshisname?'

With his free hand, Paul caught my arm and pulled me gently toward him. ‘It might have had something to do with looking out the window and seeing a naked woman on the beach.'

He planted his lips firmly on mine and drew me under the water. When we came up for air, I said, ‘What will Big Daddy think?'

‘I don't know,' Paul said. ‘Let's try it again and see.'

I waved him off, indicating the speargun. ‘What's that for then?'

‘Dinner.'

I splashed water in his face. ‘As tired as I am of frozen, oddly shaped cuts of could-be-pork, could-be-lamb, if you shoot any of my friends . . .'

‘Don't worry,' Paul said. ‘Until I get the hang of this gizmo, your friends are perfectly safe from me.'

An hour later as I was standing in the outdoor shower, rinsing off salt and sand under a jet of warm water, Paul called to me from the other side of the latticework screen that separated me from the outside world, in the unlikely event that peeping Toms were lurking in the mangroves.

‘Mutton snapper!' he crowed.

I rinsed shampoo out of my hair and reached over the door, groping blindly for the towel I'd left draped over a hook on the dry side of the screen. ‘Mutton?' I asked, thinking I hadn't heard him correctly. Eventually, my hand made contact with the towel and I was able to drag it into the enclosure with me.

‘It's a beauty,' he said. ‘Come see.'

I toweled off vigorously, wrapped the towel around my body and tucked the loose end under my arm to secure it. When I stepped out on to the concrete apron surrounding the shower stall, Paul was standing so close that I nearly ran into the catch of the day. He held the fish by a gloved finger hooked into its open mouth and was turning the creature slowly, giving me time to admire its size, and the way the sun glistened on its iridescent, peachy-gold scales. ‘Ten pounds if it's an ounce, Hannah. Dinner enough for four.'

‘You, me and who else?' I wondered.

‘Someone's home at
Southern Exposure
,' Paul said. ‘Must have arrived on the ten o'clock ferry.'

We'd met only a few of our neighbors, the island being largely deserted during hurricane season, but I knew from the printout our landlords left tacked to the wall next to the telephone, that a family named Weston owned
Southern Exposure
, and that they came from somewhere in North Carolina.

I squinted eastward over the mangroves and fringes of casuarina that separated our compound from the Weston's and noticed the Bahamian flag – turquoise, yellow and black – flying from what had been a bare pole that morning. As a courtesy to the host country, it was customary to fly the Bahamian flag any time one was in residence. A similar flag was beating itself to a frenzy on our flagpole at that very moment.

An odd custom, I'd thought, when we first arrived on the island. Why announce to potential thieves, once the flag was pulled down, ‘Hey, fellas, we're gone! Come help yourselves.' Good thing crime was practically unheard of in the islands. Hawksbill Cay had a constable, though, uniform and all. I'd seen him. He ferried over from Marsh Harbour, the capital of the Abacos, every Wednesday from ten to two, the only hours in the week that the bank was open.

Nevertheless, it paid to be careful. That's why homes owned by foreigners had caretakers, a hereditary position often handed down from father to son.

The caretaker for
Windswept
was Forbes Albury; his family had lived in the settlement at Hawksbill Cay ever since 1780 when great-great-great-something grandfather Albury was shipwrecked on South Man-O-War reef during deadly hurricane San Calisto. Mr Forbes (as everyone called him) took a proprietary interest in the property, not surprisingly, since his father, Mardell Albury, had constructed it for a Canadian horticulturist, nail-by-nail and board-by-board, back in the mid-sixties. Mr Mardell and his father before him, Mr Bertram, were legendary shipbuilders. Mr Forbes was married to Mrs Ruth; Mr Ted, who owned the grocery, to Mrs Winnie – on an island where more than half the phone book was taken up by Alburys, what was the point of a last name?

Leaving Mr Paul to pound his chest manfully in celebration of his triumph over Mother Nature, I, Mrs Hannah, dashed barefoot to the orchard and snatched some underwear, clean shorts and a T-shirt off the clothesline. Hopping around on the front porch a few minutes later with one foot in and one foot out of my shorts, I called over my shoulder, ‘You caught it, you clean it, sweetheart,' then trudged off through the casuarina and dense mats of Bahamas grass to introduce myself to our neighbors and see how they felt about joining us for supper.

TWO

HAVE A GOOD DAY! UNLESS YOU HAD OTHER PLANS.

Doc Thomas, aboard
Knot on Call

T
he moon woke me, shining so brightly through the window that I thought it was already dawn.

Wearing the oversized T-shirt that was about as sexy as my sleep wear got in the Bahamas, I padded to the kitchen and punched the button that would turn my coffee pot from an inanimate chunk of glass and plastic into a magic elixir machine.

Alerted by the gurgle, Dickie, the stray tabby we'd adopted, emerged from under the back porch, stretched luxuriously, then waited patiently at the back door for his morning bowl of kibble. A hard-knock-life cat, Dickie was difficult to approach, but I was gradually making headway. Strangely, I'd never heard him meow.

After feeding Dickie, I carried my coffee to the front porch, settled into the overstuffed cushions tied to the wicker love seat and waited for sunrise, sipping slowly. Across the harbor, boats rocked gently on their mooring balls and somewhere in the settlement Radio Abaco was playing gospel music, a raspy voice so amplified as it drifted across the water that I could make out every word:
Never would have made it, Never could have made it without you
.

The moon floated low in the western sky as the east became tinged with gold, and then peach, and then pink merging with a swathe of red so intense and so bright that the whole horizon appeared to be on fire.

‘Oh, wow!' I commented to the cat. He'd finished his breakfast, padded from the back porch to the front, and plopped himself down at my feet. He began cleaning himself with elaborate tongue strokes, straightening his fur, stripe by stripe after a hard night's work in the orchard.

‘Catch any Bahamian ground squirrels, Dickie?'

Dickie paused in mid-lick, favored me a languid stare, but otherwise didn't comment.

‘Squirrels?' Paul appeared out of nowhere, settled a kiss on the back of my neck, slopping coffee on to the wooden deck as he did so. ‘Oops, sorry.' He tried to erase the spill with the toe of his deck shoes. ‘I didn't know they had squirrels in the Bahamas.'

‘They don't.'

‘Don't? What are you talking about, then?'

‘Rats. Fruit rats.
Rattus rattus
, if you want to get technical.'

Still holding his mug, Paul walked to the bench-like wooden railing that separated the porch from the sea and sat down on it. ‘I haven't seen any rats.'

‘That's because there's a bumper crop of oranges in the orchard. Why would they go out for hamburger when they can have steak at home?'

Paul laughed out loud. ‘Remind me about
Rattus rattus
the next time I'm harvesting oranges for your Bahama Mamas.'

The oranges in our orchard were bumpy-skinned, large and plump, far seedier and juicier than their Florida counterparts, but way too sour to eat. We used them in drinks, and for cooking, just as you would a lemon.

‘You, sir, are the hunter-gatherer. The fish last night, for example. The vote is in. Delectable. I rest my case.'

‘Nice to get to know the Westons. Too bad they aren't staying longer.'

Nick and Jenny, we had learned at dinner, were just down for a long weekend, preparing the house for the arrival of Nick's mother, Molly, in a few days' time. Molly, her daughter-in-law claimed, was a sprightly seventy-two. Molly'd been coming to the Abacos since the mid-fifties when her parents first sailed there in a fifty-two foot wooden ketch. I looked forward to meeting her.

Paul turned a chair to face the sunrise, and sat down. He propped his feet up against the rail. ‘Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning, red sky at night, sailor's delight.'

‘Huh?' I'd been distracted by the cat who had gone from a sprawl into a crouch, his rear in the air, tail switching. He'd spotted a curly tail, and if the silly lizard didn't move, he was going to be somebody's breakfast.

Paul gestured with his mug. ‘Red sky. Maybe rough weather ahead.'

I scanned the sky from horizon to horizon. ‘There's not a cloud in the sky, Paul.'

‘We'll see what Barometer Bob has to say about the weather on the Cruisers' Net, then,' he said, checking his watch. ‘An hour to go.'

‘Do you have anything that needs washing?' I asked, thinking that if all that red-sky foolishness came to pass, I'd better run a load through and get it hung out to dry while my solar dryer – the tropical sun – was still operational.

‘Plenty of time for that, Hannah. Come on.' Paul grabbed my hand, pulled me to my feet, and led me down to the end of the dock where
Pro Bono
, the little outboard that came with the rental, was tied. There was a wooden bench there, too, with
Windswept
stenciled in white letters on the side facing the harbor, so people could find us. Houses had names, not numbers, in the Bahamas.

It was our habit to take our morning coffee on the bench, admiring the passing show, and we were seldom disappointed: night herons, sea turtles, the occasional dolphin or two. A magnificent eagle ray cruised by, white spots freckling its inky-blue body. As he broke the surface, I recognized him by a nick on his right wing: ‘Ray' we had named the big one. His wife ‘Marlene' sleeked along behind, followed by two smaller rays that we imagined were their children, ‘Dick' and ‘Jane.'

After some impressive acrobatics, Ray and his family moseyed on.

Paul and I sat in companionable silence until the first workboat of the day steamed into the harbor at high speed. As it neared our dock, the vessel slowed its engines politely, then chugged past, leaving a wake that gently licked the sandy shore. The open-deck boat was packed with Haitian workers from Marsh Harbour, laborers who constructed the island's homes, built its boats, and tended its gardens, sweating all day in the hot sun until the boat took them away exhausted at five.

‘Does Daniel come today?' Paul asked. Daniel was the gardener employed by our landlords to keep the tropical vegetation under control.

‘What day is today?' I wondered. It's easy to lose track of time in the islands.

‘Hmm.' Paul closed his eyes as if a calendar was written on the inside of his eyelids. ‘I think it's Thursday.'

‘If it's Thursday, it's Daniel.'

‘Do you want to pick him up, or shall I?'

I patted my husband's bare knee. ‘I don't mind. I rather fancy a boat ride this morning. Besides, we need eggs, and the grocery opens at eight.'

We carried our empty mugs back to the house where I changed quickly into shorts and a T-shirt. A few minutes later I was back at the end of the dock slipping my feet into the bright-orange Crocs I kept in a plastic milk crate under the bench. I untied the rope that held
Pro Bono
to the dock, slipped a loop around the piling, then climbed down the wooden ladder into the boat. I twisted the throttle to the full position, and pulled the starter cord. The engine sputtered to life on the first go. I flipped the rope off the piling and rammed the gear into forward, setting off across the narrow channel at a pretty good clip. Once I reached Hawksbill harbor, I eased
Pro Bono
into a space at the government dock between two rubber dinghies, cut the engine, climbed up the ladder, and made the boat secure.