Timothy of the Cay (3 page)

Stew Cat's leg drummed against the bedspread down by my feet. He was scratching an ear. The navy captain who ran the hospital had said he'd let Stew stay in the room, against all rules: "You two look like you belong together."

We did belong together. We'd shared a lot.

I kept looking toward my father. "His name was Timothy," I said. "That's the only name he had. Without him I wouldn't be here. He died and I buried him. He's now my guardian angel. We talk back and forth..."

They were silent, maybe thinking the sun had fried my brain. I'd buried another human in the sand and now talked to him. Maybe they didn't know what to say to me? Maybe they were still in shock that I was alive? Maybe...

The first few minutes after the nurse had shown them in, saying, "Here's that heartthrob son of yours" (which embarrassed me), my mother held me tightly. She said, over and over, "I'm so sorry, so sorry..." My face was wet with her tears.

Yet I felt uncomfortable in her arms. I didn't want her to be sorry for me. Timothy had never taken pity on me, and there were times when I'd thought I deserved it. But I learned from him that pity is often a deadly enemy.

It had been my mother's decision that we leave Curaçao to go back to our regular home in Virginia and what she thought was safety. But I'd long ago stopped blaming her for what happened.

As Timothy once said, "She started dis turrible wahr, eh, young bahss?" No, she hadn't started World War II, I knew. She was just frightened of it and wanted to flee once the U-boat attacks began.

"How did they find you?" my father wanted to know.

"Smoke from my fire pile was spotted by an aircraft working with the destroyer." It would take days to tell them everything that had happened on the raft and the cay.

First, I wanted to hear what happened to my mother after the torpedo hit, without warning, at three
A.M.
, the darkest part of the night.

I remember that when I came up on deck with her the whole after part of the ship was on fire. Everything was red against the moonless night. There was a lot of fright and yelling. Then we were told to climb into the lifeboat so that it could be launched. As it was being lowered, the bow tilted sharply down, and we were thrown into the water.

My mother said, "I swam around trying to find you but you'd floated away. Then a sailor grabbed me and towed me back toward the lifeboat."

They'd gotten it into the water, after all.

"I fought him, Phillip. I didn't want to get into that boat without you. Then he slapped me and someone lifted me up—" Her voice broke again. "I thought you'd drowned and it was my fault, my fault..."

She said they had to hold her in the lifeboat to keep her from jumping overboard.

It was hard for me to imagine my mother jumping overboard and swimming off alone to find me. Yet I knew she was being truthful. She loved me, I also knew, though she seldom said so. People change in emergencies, Timothy taught me.

"We tacked back and forth all that day and the next one, going toward land. There wasn't much breeze. I thought of nothing but you and didn't care whether I lived or died..."

Then a tanker bound for Aruba, another of the Dutch islands, came along, and soon all the survivors of the
Hato
—except three—were safe.

"I told the tanker captain that you were in the water and had disappeared. I knew you had a life jacket and might still be alive. There were sharks..."

She stopped, voice fading.

"The captain then sent a message to the navy telling them the ship was sunk and that he'd picked up survivors," my father said evenly. He added, "I had no idea the
Hato
had gone down until that message was relayed."

He had a copy of it at home. He read it to me later:

 

PLS ADVISE PHILLIP ENRIGHT CARE CURACAOSCHE PETROLEUM MAATSCHAPPIJ SS HATO SUNK APPROXIMATELY
76
WEST
12
NORTH
6
APRIL X MRS. ENRIGHT SURVIVED IN GOOD CONDITION X IS EN ROUTE ARUBA X SON PHILLIP ENRIGHT BELIEVED MISSING X

 

He said he learned that the Dutch Navy had sent out a search plane from Curaçao and the American Navy sent three out of Coco Solo, here in Panama. Not even an oil slick was sighted. He had a pilot friend and they took off in a light plane and looked for me, too. They almost ran out of gas and had to land in Barranquilla, Colombia.

By that time, Timothy, Stew Cat, and I had drifted slowly northwest on our eight square feet of wood and barrels, toward the cays off Nicaragua.

"Tell us what happened on the raft, Phillip," my father said.

OCTOBER
1884
—Hannah Gumbs was out behind the thatch-roofed shanty, using a long-handled wooden paddle to lift up steaming, dripping clothes. Charcoal from nearby Porto Rico glowed beneath the large cast-iron tub. Lye water boiled. Fumes rose from it and lodged in the light, warm rain, clearing nostrils in one whiff. Back o' All smelled of poverty, rain or shine.

Timothy shouted happily, "I be goin' to sea, Tante Hannah!..."

Hannah was not Timothy's aunt. She was no kin at all to him. She'd found him asleep on her doorstep at cockcrow time just before he was of crawling age. The note attached to the box, painfully written, said, "Timothy." Nothing else. But real aunt or not, she'd raised him like a son.

A faded blue bandanna on her head, she was wearing a worn cotton blouse and a long skirt, no shoes. She turned and gazed at him. "Yuh goin' to 'prentice."

She'd been talking to a woodworker on Frenchman Bay Road, where she delivered wash, about Timothy becoming an apprentice. Learn to make furniture from Brazilian mahogany. A craftsman he would be. That was her hope.

"I be a cobbin boy, Tante Hannah," Timothy said stubbornly, hurt that she wasn't pleased he was going to make his way in the world. Grasp his own goal, at last.

A large, handsome woman with a face nearly as round as a pie, she narrowed her wise, deepset brown eyes. "Who said?" She was not one for
yaba-yaba
talk, senseless chatter.

After she was freed, she had refused to work for Estate Alborg, the sugar plantation where she was born and had lived most of her early life. She was proud and independent, though sometimes hungry. Her husband had died the year before she'd been blessed with Timothy. She never had a child of her own.

Until six years ago she had been a coal carrier, ninety-pound baskets of it pressing down on her padded head as she went up the steep gangways. Sweat had run down her body in thin rivers, even in winter. An
øre,
penny a basket, was what the singing coal girls got. They sang about hard life, keeping a rhythm with their steps.

Then her legs and neck gave out and she took up washing and ironing. Hannah Gumbs knew how cruel life could be. Timothy didn't, as yet—that was what her eyes were saying to him.

"De
bukra
mate o' dat schooner said. Four masts dat schooner, goin' to New Yawk. Dey be gibbin' me four
kroner
a mont' an' feed." His own eyes glittered with victory.

Hannah sighed, picked up an armful of dirty laundry, and dropped it into the pot. "Bes' yuh stay wit' me."

"I be goin', Tante Hannah," Timothy said again, picking up the paddle to stir the gray water for her.

"'Tis a hard life yuh oskin' foh," she said.

"No harder dan wark in de feels."

A slight nod said she might agree. And there wasn't that much field work on St. Thomas anymore. The early plantations were mostly in ruins.

"Yuh bes' wait to mek de chair an' table" was her final pronouncement.

Not wanting to look at her, knowing he'd miss her night and day, he looked at the huge pot. "De sea is whar I mus' go, Tante Hannah."

Her silence told him she would not interfere.

He added, "Someday I'll be a coptin. Den yuh can cease hard wark foh de
bukra...
"

Hannah laughed softly. "Don' tie de rope till you cotch de goat," she advised, pushing more charcoal under the pot.

Timothy knew what she meant: Don't get your hopes too high. He laughed back, "Coptin Timothy o' de schooner
Hannah Gumbs,
I be..."

She moved a few feet to take the boy into her arms. Neither paid any attention to the downpour or the fact that they were both getting soaked, head to foot. The sun would likely shine in a while and they'd dry off soon. It was nearing the end of the rainy hurricane season.

Then she stepped back, as the mate had done, to take another look at Timothy, but hers was a loving one. She'd raised him well. Despite his lack of schooling, he was a smart boy. Wisdom seldom came out of books, anyway. He was strong and healthy, she knew.

A weedwoman, she'd used her knowledge of herbs and plants to keep him that way. Callaloo, the green leaves of the
dasheen
plant, always worked wonders at the supper table. Tea from
gritchee-gritchee
bush leaves kept his body tuned. A sliver of bitter sempervivum, the aloe plant, had fought off colds.

There were two dozen other bush wonders she knew about. The soapberry bush helped burns and scalds. So did fresh banana leaves. The toothache tree relieved jaw pain and "better-mahn-better" knocked down fever. Everyone in Back o' All came to Hannah Gumbs with physical complaints, leaving a few
øre
if they could afford it.

Yes, looking at him now, she knew she'd raised him strong and well; and now, sadly, it was time to let him go. She'd miss him as if he'd come from her own loins, but it was time. Time for him to be as proud and independent as she was.

He hurried off to tell everyone in Back o' All that he was going to be a cabin boy aboard the
Amager.
By nightfall, he'd located his two best adult friends, Charlie Bottle and Wobert Avril. They lived down island. He excitedly told them he was going to sea, at last.

The
Hato's
two sturdy rafts, one located on each stern quarter, were slotted wooden frameworks of boards about two inches thick, built over four empty but sealed oil drums. The slots let any water that splashed aboard fall back into the sea. Ours was the starboard raft, off the right side of the ship.

It was about four feet deep, I remember, and in the middle was a trapdoor so you could get to the galvanized tin box of supplies that was suspended between the drums. Also down there were two kegs, each holding five gallons of fresh water. Carefully doled out, the water could last four people a few weeks in high heat. Two people and a cat could share it for a month.

The box held emergency food such as hardtack, saltless biscuits almost as hard as rock; squares of chocolate wrapped in tinfoil; a signaling mirror and flares; a first-aid kit; fishing tackle; a kerosene lantern; and a box of sulfur matches in waterproof waxed paper.

I saw the trapdoor, the water kegs, and the tin box before I became blind.

The rafts were not made for comfort. They were made for survival.

***

I don't remember being hit on the head by the piece of timber that eventually caused my blindness. The first thing I knew I awakened on the raft with a stranger asking me, "Young bahss, how yuh feelin'?" For a moment I didn't recognize him as the old man I'd seen chipping paint the previous afternoon.

It was daylight by then, and a big black-and-gray cat sat nearby on the boards, licking his haunches.

The
Hato
was gone. So was my mother. I saw nothing but empty ocean everywhere I looked. The water was calm and blue. The sun glittered. The air was warm. The raft barely moved.

That first sight of the man I soon knew as Timothy was like waking from a nightmare and finding out it was true. In the moment before I realized he was from the
Hato
I thought maybe I was still in the ship's cabin, having a bad dream. No torpedo had hit us; no fire had roared. I hadn't even been in the lifeboat. But when he spoke, asking me how I felt, I knew it was no dream. There was no escape from him.

Just his face, let alone his size, frightened me. I immediately thought the deep, curved scar on his cheek was from a knife. My mother had said that West Indians were a violent people. His mouth was wide and his lips thick. Either scarred hand could have spanned a banjo—could have easily snapped me in two. But his voice was musical, West Indian—gentle, like a warm breeze in palm fronds; his smile was wide and toothy.

I remember weeping and throwing up.

On the third morning I awakened and thought it was still night. Puzzled, Timothy said, "'Tis day."

I put my hand in front of my face and could not see it. I remember screaming.

I was blind.

OCTOBER
1884
—Donkeys brayed and cocks crowed when Timothy awakened at first light beside Tante Hannah on their shared plantain-leaf bedding. The only other sound, besides Tante Hannah's soft snoring, was the
zee-e-e-e-swees-te
of the banana quit. The ani, a long-tailed crow, wasn't awake yet, wasn't flying over the village with its shrill
weu-ik, weu-ik.
Wake up! Wake up!

Soon, human voices would float in from the outside as others in Back o' All awoke.

Tante Hannah rolled over.

A patchwork cloth hung between their sleeping space and the rest of the dirt-floored hut, which was always fragrant with the musky bundles of weeds. The cloth was raised during the day hours but at night formed the bedroom that Tante Hannah demanded.

She groaned and yawned and said, "G'marnin'."

Soon, there was a pungent smell of wood smoke and frying fish in Back o' All, helping to stifle the strong, ever-present odor of open sewage.

Water had to be lugged up the hill in buckets filled from a common well, then dumped into wooden barrels. After Timothy brushed his teeth with a soapvine chewstick, lugging water was his first chore of the day. Timothy had been carrying it since he was four or five. Wooden catchment troughs helped keep the barrels full during the rainy months, May to November.

Timothy never complained about down-and-out Back o' All, living in the hut, carrying water, or stirring the wash pot, squashing the
kakaroachee.
He knew no other life. Both Tante Hannah's parents had come from the Slave Coast of Africa. Compared to what they'd gone through—chained, starved, branded, robbed of every freedom—life was pleasant in Back o' All.