Home by Another Way (17 page)

One day in the course of ghostwriting a book for the third time in my life, I realized I could write a book of my own. To this day I can tell you where I was and what time of day it was and what I was wearing and which paragraphs I was writing. But I have to say that I had no idea the line was in front of me until I realized I was on the other side of it. I had gone from wanting to be a writer to talking about being a writer to actually being a writer, and I was the last one to notice I had finally crossed over the line.

Most everything good in my life has been a surprise. I am far enough along now to stop trying to figure stuff out and to spend my time trying to be awake enough to see stuff when it happens and attentive enough to hear the clues in the sentences around me.

It could be I stumbled over some sort of line between living in the States and living in St. Cecilia one day in a rainstorm. They have a rain quota in St. Cecilia they are supposed to hit before the dry season comes, and evidently they had some catching up to do that day.

I had managed to get the scribbling round in and was headed upstairs to see if Sara was ready for the sunning round when the clouds came up and the sky started to fall.

We sat on the porch and watched the road down by Bluewater Beach being washed away. We watched as a couple of boats in the bay filled up with so much water we thought they were going to sink. So did the owners, because they came out twice during the height of the storm to bail out the boats. We watched the water back up out of the bay and up toward the hotel at Bluewater Beach. And we watched the mud line move out into the bay as the mud washed down from the hills and the ridges. It went on for eight hours.

At one point we went in to make a sandwich and realized there were three inches of water in our bedroom.
I thought the water had been coming in the windows, but it turned out the cistern under the house had been overcome by the rain, and the cool, clean, fresh water was backing up into our bedroom.

We spent the whole day on the porch, up under the veranda, watching the rain and the water and the cars getting stuck. And I realized I never wanted to leave.

Going to St. Cecilia may have started out to be about going to the sun. It is crossing a line about something else, it seems.

David says that often the people who like Windbreak Cove are the sort of people who come back to stay. I hope he is right. And I think I already knew that.

If you stay in a cottage for a few days or a few weeks at Windbreak Cove, then you cannot just stay at Windbreak Cove. There is no restaurant to go to and no coffee in the lobby and no room service. They come and clean your cottage only about every three days, and the
office is closed for more hours than it is open. You cannot just hide out at Windbreak and never actually go to St. Cecilia.

When it comes to food and supplies, to neatness and clean clothes, to information and conversation, you are on your own, by and large. You have to live a life there, your own life, and if it does not work from day to day and hour to hour, you cannot call the front desk. Most of the time, no one is there. On the one hand, you are happy for the solitude. On the other hand, you discover that you have to leave your solitude to go and find your place.

It could be I stumbled over the line to St. Cecilia one Sunday morning when I was at St. Peter’s for Mass.

St. Peter’s Anglican Church is the oldest Protestant church in the Leeward Islands. It is one of four Anglican parishes on the island, and they share a priest. The
first time we went, we happened to be there on the Sunday of the month he was there as well.

St. Cecilians consider themselves to be a religious people. The government literature declares them to be a “Bible-oriented society.” Religion is an intrinsic part of everyday life. Not, it seems to me, in an obtrusive way, but rather in an elemental way. Among the holidays—paid holidays when the island shuts down and the government closes—are Boxing Day and Whitmonday. How many places can you go where the day after Pentecost is declared a national holiday? Where I come from, even the church folks do not take the day off for Pentecost.

There is a tradition in the churches on St. Cecilia. They have a lot of visitors because of the tourist trade, and if you are a visitor to their service, then they ask you to stand and to say who you are and where you are from. Then they applaud.

Someday I would like not to have to introduce myself at St. Peter’s anymore.

We have a sort of shrine in our house now, on a small green table in a sky blue colored room. It has a small lamp we leave on night and day. The shrine has Sara’s discount card from the supermarket on the island. It has coins and bills with Queen Elizabeth on them. She keeps her St. Cecilia driver’s license there and the statue a friend gave us the last time we were there. There are sketches too, penciled onto the back of watercolor cards—sketches of the way Sara would build a house if we get the chance to build one there.

In addition to our shrine, we also have a running list of schemes to cobble together a living on St. Cecilia.

We can do our regular work there already. Writers and agents can work anywhere there is electricity and a phone line and an airport and a FedEx drop. Sara thinks if we had a small bed-and-breakfast, maybe four rooms
besides our own, then we could have guests for two weeks a month and have no guests for the other two.

The last time we were there, we visited the art gallery. There was a card in the window that said it was for sale, and the asking price was not out of reach. If my son were graduating from college this spring instead of graduating from high school, we might well have pulled a David. “We came out for our anniversary and just sort of never went home,” I can hear myself saying.

Sara has also noticed the salt flats on a sister island and thinks salt mining—for cooking salt or for some beauty product—may well be the answer. We have bought a new camera too, and Sara is working on her photography skills, and I am composing romantic greeting cards in my head.

We may well be crossing a line here.

Getting married led us to the shore for our honeymoon. Which led to our going to the beach for our
anniversary each October, and that led to an attempt to celebrate our tenth anniversary in a way we would never forget.

That led to a ride across a lagoon in
The African Queen
and the little parade, and then it led to St. Cecilia. Who can tell exactly what may happen next?

The last time we were there, I was awake early on the first morning, sitting up and about to get out of bed to begin the scribbling round, and Sara sat up in the bed. With wonder in her voice, she said, “Look at where we are.”

So we looked. Past the soft yellow walls of the little bedroom, with the first light slipping in through the windows. Out the window then and over the bougainvillea, deep purple against the white of the balcony and the early blue of the sky, a sky that still held the moon and some of the stars. Through the trees and across the grasses waving in the wind and on to the edge of the
cliff. And over the edge to the straits, all green and gray and blue, with a fishing boat off in the distance and ripples of waves and the shore of St. Catherine in the distance, lit up by the sun.