Green Boy (18 page)

Grammie made us fill big plastic jugs with water, and she heated some soup and put it in two thermos flasks. We collected all the candles and flashlights we could find, and rain jackets, and stuffed four blankets and pillows into garbage bags, along with Lou's yellow boom box and an ancient little primus stove. Then she had us pick up every loose object in the house—magazines, cushions, vases, pictures from the wall—and shut them inside cupboards.

“Last hurricane was when I was a little girl,” she said, “and I remember. It took our roof off, and everything that wasn't tied down blew right away.”

We heard thumping sounds from outside; Grand had come back and was closing the big wooden storm shutters over the windows. The wind was beginning to whine and moan in the roof. He came indoors, wet from the rain and the sea, and within a few minutes all the lights went out.

Lou started to make his nervous gasping sounds, Lou who had been so silent and brave in the dark in the Otherworld, and I felt hastily for a little flashlight I'd shoved into my pocket, and turned it on.

“Power lines are down,” Grand said. He took a deep breath. “Well, Mrs. Peel, I think we all need a good supper.”

So we did. Grammie had things simmering and smelling good on the stove, which runs on bottled gas, and we suddenly realized we were all ravenous. So we ate chicken and peas and rice at the kitchen table, by candlelight, with the wind howling outside and bursts of rain spattering the shutters, and it was the last meal we ate in that room for a very long time.

When we'd finished, Grand and I put on our rain jackets and went outside. The wind was whipping at the trees now, and the air was full of leaves. Grand shone his biggest flashlight down at the jetty, and we could see the waves breaking over it, and spray leaping up. High in the sky, for a moment, the moon broke through, and we saw the dark clouds, huge, racing.

“It's time,” Grand said. We packed our things into the truck and he drove slowly to the church, through the woods, up the hill. Once, he had to stop where a small tree had been blown down across the road, and it took all four of us to lift it out of the way. You could see the rain slanting down in the beams from the headlights, and feel the wind gusting against the side of the truck. Lightning flashed like a great jagged split in the sky as we
came to the church, and there was a huge clap of thunder. Lou whimpered, and I held his hand. The parked cars were all clustered close together, like cows in a field in the rain.

The church was full of everyone we knew. All night, people sang and prayed, and talked, and slept. The singing was the best. It was the only thing that drowned out the roar of the wind.

Around four in the morning, curled on the floor in my blanket, I woke up into the biggest noise I'd ever heard in my life. The hurricane was directly over us, hurling broken branches and uprooted trees at the church walls, and a crowd of people were pushing against the big front doors of the church to keep them from being blown in. Grammie had Lou on her lap, snuggling close. She reached out and gave me a reassuring pat.

There was a tremendous crash outside, and the whole building shook.

“What was
that?”
I heard my voice rise to a squeak.

Grand stood up, to peer vainly out of a window. “Someone's car, I reckon. Or their roof. This wind, it picks things up and throws them round like tennis balls.”

But gradually after that, the noise of the wind began to die down. The crowd at the door grew smaller, and people relaxed; they lay down, or shared hot drinks they'd brought with them.

“Oh dear me,” Grand said. He shook his head.

I said, “But it's stopping! Listen!”

“When it stops that fast, only means one thing,” Grand said. “We right in the eye of the hurricane. Pretty soon, that wind come back just as strong—but blowing the other way.” He reached for his rain jacket and pulled it on. Other people were doing the same, all around us, and I could see the rector, Father Dunn, unbarring the tall wooden doors.

Grand reached out his hand to me. “Wrap yourself up and come outside, Trey. You too, Lou. I going show you.”

Grammie said unhappily, “Not safe out there, James.”

Grand smiled at her. His white hair was all curly and wild from the salt and the wind. “There's time,” he said. “You want to come? Most folks don't see this in a lifetime.”

“Nor want to see,” said Grammie, but she did come outside, with her blanket round her shoulders like a shawl.

It was hard to recognize the land around the church. Trees stood up bare and broken, and everywhere a thick layer of leaves and branches lay on the ground. Coconut palms looked like worn-out dish brushes, their fronds all battered and torn. The cars in the carpark were scattered about every which way, some of them lying on their sides. One was upside down. The roofs were gone from two little houses near the church, and there was no sign of a bird or animal anywhere.

No wind was blowing. The trees were absolutely still,
and the sky was solid grey, sullen, ominous. The only sound came from the sea, and the sea was all around us, covering far more land than it ever did at the highest tide. And it was angry, it was furious, crashing against rocks and walls, throwing spray high into the air. It was the sea that was telling us what was going to happen next.

“This the eye,” Grand said.

He bent down and picked up a paper plate, from the rubbish that the wind had scattered all around us. He folded it in half, tore out the center, and opened it up again, peeking at us through the hole in the middle. Lou laughed, for the first time in a lot of hours.

“Hold out you hand, Trey,” Grand said. He was teaching again, even in the middle of a great storm. He held the paper plate flat, and brought it sideways toward my outstretched hand. “Wind blows clockwise round the hurricane, so when she hit you, she blowing right to left, see? Then the eye go over you. No wind. Then the other side hit you, and she blowing left to right. You wait—you tell
your
grandchildren about this.”

The plate moved over and away from my hand, and he held it up by its edge, very lightly, between two fingertips. It shifted just a little, toward the right. A small breeze was beginning to pick up again.

Everyone went back inside the church and barred the doors, and the wind grew and grew and began to shriek and batter us again. It was the same angry roaring
storm as before, the other side of the hurricane, but this time it seemed much worse. Perhaps there was more broken stuff already lying on the ground for the furious wind to snatch up and throw about. The church shook from great crashing blows that came from who knows what. It was as if there was a huge giant out there swinging a hammer at us.

I looked at Lou, sitting on the floor between Grand and Grammie with his face pressed into Grand's shoulder, and I thought of the towering Green Man, and wondered if the hurricane was an echo of him, if the power from one world had burst through into the other. In Pangaia he had destroyed the works of humans and reclaimed the land for Nature. Here, Nature was erupting to claim land and sea for itself. Himself. Herself.

Herself seemed the most right, somehow. Maybe Nature was just another name for Gaia.

 

When it was all over, when we had all been in the church for most of that day and night, when the angry sea had gone back from the land to something like its normal level, we could see what the hurricane had done. The whole island was brown; there wasn't a green leaf anywhere. The wind had stripped every leaf from every bush and tree; it had snapped the taller palm trees like pencils, and left the short ones in tatters. Sand and seaweed had been blown and washed inland, so that half the soil in the fields seemed to have turned to sand.

Boats left at anchor or on moorings had been picked up and thrown bodily against rocks or land; some were sunk, or half-sunk, and others lay smashed on the shore. Three of Grand's five remaining bonefish boats, and our little dinghy, had been hauled by Will and Grand into a concrete boathouse, and they were okay. The other two boats, which had been lashed to a tree, had vanished right away, and so had most of the tree.

There wasn't a single house in our settlement that wasn't badly damaged, and some were ruined. Grand's farm was a little lake of sandy brown mud, and when we reached the house, after struggling through the fallen trees and branches blocking the road, we found that the roof of the front porch had blown off, taking with it part of the house roof and most of one wall. Just one central piece of the wall was left, sticking up like a solitary tooth. It was a place where a big mirror had been fixed to the wall between two windows, and though the windows were gone, the mirror was still there on the piece of wall. It was very weird to stand looking into the mirror, seeing your own reflection among the chaos, and seeing the open ocean on either side.

The house was full of water and broken glass, and every object inside, from the rugs to the books, was soaking wet. A lot of the furniture had been crushed by splintered roof timbers and chunks of concrete. Grammie stood there looking at it all, and I could see that her eyes were full of tears. Grand put his arm round her.

“Oh James,” she said sadly. “We got to start all over again.”

Grand kissed her forehead. He said, “Well, we know how.”

The hurricane had done other things too, and one was terrible and one was terrific.

We heard about the good thing first. Long Pond Cay, like our settlement, had been smack in the eye of the hurricane. Because it was so flat, the sea had roared right over it, destroying everything in its path. Like every big storm in the islands, it swept away beaches in one place and built them up in others, moving thousands of tons of sand. It broke down sandstone and exposed coral, it shifted shoals and altered channels. It washed away anything that would move. And it completely wrecked everything to do with Sapphire Island Resort.

Every change that they'd tried to make to Long Pond Cay was destroyed. Dredged-out channels were filled up, built-up beaches were washed away. Concrete pilings had toppled into the sea, roads were broken up, jetties and wood-framed buildings were smashed into a mess of splintered timbers. All the boats and vehicles were swept away, and even the biggest bulldozers and cranes fell and were swallowed up by the tremendous combined force of wind, water and sand. Millions of dollars, and months of work, all vanished in the night of the hurricane.

And three people were killed: men who had been working at Sapphire Island Resort and who waited a
little too long to leave as the hurricane approached. They took off in a fast powerboat, but its speed wasn't enough to save them from the growing, crashing waves, and they were all lost.

One of them was our father.

T
he last image I had of my daddy was a face in which anger turned to blank disbelief, though somehow I felt the anger was still there underneath, anger that he had been cheated of what he wanted. I think all his life he had done whatever he wanted. These days, I try to think of the smiling photograph instead of the angry man.

They never found the three bodies, only the wreckage of part of the cigarette boat, washed up two weeks later. My daddy had no family left on Lucaya except a few cousins, and the other two men were from Nassau, so it was in Nassau that there was a memorial service for the three of them. The Sapphire Island Frenchmen paid for it. We flew over to Nassau with Grand and Grammie, and Mam bought us both new clothes, because she said it was very important for us to be at the service.

The big church was very crowded, and I remember a hymn about
those in peril on the sea,
and a long sermon by a clergyman with a beautiful booming voice, not only about my daddy and his friends but about all people who
suffer from natural disasters. The hurricane hadn't hit Nassau as badly as the out-islands, but people had been hurt there just the same.

Mr. Pierre Gasperi was at the memorial service, but Grand kept away from him.

The best thing about being in Nassau was that we spent a whole week with Mam. She said that come Christmas she would be back in Lucaya for a whole week too. It wouldn't be truthful to say that we miss my daddy; the missing was all done years ago. But it would have been better to know he was alive, even if he was long gone and far away.

The damage done by the hurricane on Lucaya was much worse in some places than in others. Long Pond Cay was the worst damaged of all. Grand said it was probably hit by a small tornado spawned inside the hurricane. The government decided that the cay was after all a very unsuitable place for development, and so they withdrew all the permissions for Sapphire Island Resort, and the developers had to go and find themselves another island somewhere else.

After that, the government did the best thing of all, and turned Long Pond Cay into part of the Bahamas National Park, in the protection of the National Trust. That meant nobody could do anything to the island, ever again. It would belong to the people of the Bahamas—and to the sea.

 

I went out to the porch one night before bed, when Grand was sitting out there with the only drink he ever took, a rum-and-water nightcap. We were living in the house again, though the repairs still weren't finished. Grammie was doing the ironing in the living room, and she had some soft guitar music playing on the radio; you could just hear it out here. Grand had a very peaceful expression on his face. He was sitting back looking at the sky, which was all stars tonight because the moon wasn't up yet.

“See your favorite, Trey,” he said. He pointed. “The great hunter. Son of Neptune.”

My eyes hadn't quite had time to get used to being in the almost-dark, but I could see the three stars of the belt, and the brighter stars beyond.

“Orion,” I said.

It was a kind of ritual by now, for both Lou and me—though of course Lou couldn't say the names. But Lou wasn't there, he was in bed, so Grand could just point at the first bright star, and have me name it. Then the second, and the third.