Home by Another Way (7 page)

Sometimes the sunset round begins as much as two hours before the sunset actually happens, occasionally less. The time passes with reading and paddling around and talking about what you have read. Or about what you want to read next.

You keep an eye out over the railing around the pool deck, checking the western sky from time to time so you can be ready to move when the sun starts down. You have to be sure that you leave enough time to get out and dry off and take up your place in one of the chairs. When the time comes for the sun to make its daily plunge into the sea, you do not want to miss it.

Miami is twelve hundred miles away straight over the straits to the north, and London is four thousand
miles away if you turn your head a little bit to the right. Look left off the corner of the pool deck, and Mexico City is out there somewhere behind the spot where the sun is about to disappear.

Take your binoculars in hand, and you can see the last ferry heading into the harbor before darkness overtakes it. You can see a water taxi make its last daredevil sprint across the straits before the darkness closes it down for the evening. The last of the day’s six incoming flights drones overhead, and you can see the lights of a cruise ship now along the horizon and gloat a little bit because you know this island is too small for the ship to stop here. The sugarbirds are hurrying to their nests, and the seabirds make their long, last fishing flights for the day. The mourning doves begin to coo and call, looking for each other, and the tree frogs begin to strike up their chorus.

The sky begins to streak red and pink and then orange and blue and gray. The breeze freshens just a bit as the air cools, and you pull on a shirt and wrap a towel around your legs. When there is nothing left of
the sun save a white line on the horizon—no red streaks in the sky, no long golden fingers coming across the sea in your direction—the sunset round is over.

For dinner we sometimes go down the hill and down the road to one of the restaurants. Sometimes we cook at the cottage.

Either way, these are dinners where you take your time between courses and you linger over coffee. For when dinner is over, unless you have to drive back to the cottage or wash the dishes, there is not much to do. It is glorious. No telephone, no television, no early appointments to get ready for. Not much more than cards and quiet talk, books and gentle laughter, and the stars and the moon. You can even go to bed at sundown if you like; there is nothing to keep you from it.

The surf crashes below on the rocks, the breeze comes through the windows, and the ceiling fan creaks. There is the occasional cheerful honk of a car horn on
the road below, and sometimes the laughter and the music will filter up the hill from the hotel restaurant down at the beach. The tree frogs sing their peaceful two-note lullaby, the evening hymn of St. Cecilia. And then sweet sleep comes.

When the time comes for you to buy a beach, I recommend you pick one facing directly north or directly south so that the sunrise and the sunset are on your right or your left as you look up and down the beach. Then in the morning you can get up to watch the day begin and to scribble and to have your coffee—all of which you will be required to do if you have been blessed enough to buy a beach. You can watch the day end as well while the breeze freshens and the fishing boats hurry home and the last rays of the sun warm your skin. And you can watch the seabirds as they slowly fly their way along the shoreline toward the sun.

They are fishing. I do not know the science that goes
with this—whether they are drawn to the light or the warmth, or if the breezes are more helpful for them to cruise along slowly in the air when the sun is close to the horizon, or if the angle of the sunlight enables them to better see the shape of a snack that is swimming below. I only know that when you are up at first light and you watch the sun as it rises, you will see them flying along the shoreline, heading toward the sun.

And I know that in the evening you will see them headed the other way. Slowly, languidly, occasionally dropping straight down out of the sky from as much as a hundred feet, face first into the water. It looks as though someone has thrown them from a cliff.

And sometimes in the evening, if you can bear to take your eyes off the sunset itself, you will see them circle higher and higher, drifting on the currents of the wind in great circles that spiral upward toward the clouds and toward the sun itself.

We watched one put on a show for us one afternoon at the sunset hour on St. Cecilia. He started out circling the water along the bottom of the cliff, a few
feet above the waters of the straits. And then he began making circles and going higher and higher.

He kept arcing his way back so he was almost over us on each turn. I think he knew he had an audience. After a few minutes we had to break out our binoculars and lie flat on our backs and stare straight up to see him. As the sun disappeared, he did as well, far above us; we lost him in a cloud or the shadow of one. He was circling toward the sun when we saw him last.

So am I these days.

One way or another I have spent most of my life watching for certain signs and wonders of the Something Unnamed that is at the center of everything.

Over the years I have come to see that some sitting still is required if one is to see such things. I think that is why I am drawn to the still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow. And it is why I wait at the railing to watch the sun slip away.

I have also come to believe that it helps to keep circling as well, which is as good a name for my scribbling as anything else I can think of. So I do, circling round and round, from scribbling round to sunset round, day after day, season after season, year after year.

I do not know the name of what it is that I will finally come to see. Home may be as good a name as any.

Four

O
nce we arrive on St. Cecilia, we have only two appointments to keep. The second one, we try not to think about. It is the appointment with the boat that will take us off the island and start us on our journey toward the north and the cold, toward the gray and the brown. Toward the off-season, we baseball people would say.

The first appointment is the one we look forward to—it is with Victor, the car-hire man. We are not actually hiring Victor; we are hiring a car from him. Which is the same thing as renting a car from him, only if we do not say “car hire,” no one knows what we are talking about here. We do not really hire a car either. We hire one of those small Japanese Jeep things with four-wheel drive and a good bit of space for piling groceries in the back and a convertible top that folds down into the boot. It has windows that zip out and invariably do not zip back all the way into place until after we turn in
the car at the end of our stay. Zipping the windows back in properly is not one of my gifts, nor is it a skill I have yet acquired.

The appointment with Victor is important, because we need the Jeep for going to the market a few times while we are here. And we need it so that we can go to dinner on the days that we decide to tear ourselves away from Seastone. Though, to be sure, we could call a taxi in either case, and someone would be glad to pick us up and drive us around. By my unscientific survey, there are three taxis per tourist on St. Cecilia.

The real reason that we set the appointment with Victor is that, unless we do, we cannot go riding around.

Sara is from a small town in Mississippi. She claims that most of the Sunday afternoons when she was growing up were spent in the backseat of a car wandering through the back roads of the Delta. Sunday mornings were for church, and Sunday evenings too. Sunday afternoons were for driving through the countryside, through the farms and villages and fields that her parents had been raised in and on and around.

After lunch on Sunday, her father would say to her mother, “What would you like to do this afternoon?”

“Let’s just go ridin’ around,” would be the reply. And they would fill the backseat with kids, and off they would go.

I never got to ride around with LeRoy, but I did get to go with Mozelle one afternoon before she passed away. She was right; it was a fine way to spend an afternoon.

We think riding around is a fine way to spend an afternoon on St. Cecilia as well. So we make an appointment with Victor for the first morning we are there.

Victor is not always on time for our appointment. That is not quite true, now that I think of it. Victor operates on island time, which generally means that whenever Victor shows up is the actual time that had been set, no matter what time had actually been set.

He pulls up about fifteen minutes after I have called
to see if he is on the way. It is a telephone call I hate to make because it reveals that I am not yet living on island time and that my stateside impatience is still with me. “Still twitching like a live wire,” is the way James Taylor once referred to it in a song about a trip he made down this way once.