Someone has already brought a pot, someone has already scooped up water from a wave, someone now sets a lit stick to a pile of sticks, and what’s inside the bag is dropped into the water. Lacking a lid, the men cross their sticks over the top, they push what they’ve caught back into the pot.
Children chase the smoke that’s left, they chase it all around me. I shiver because I don’t run and shout after the smoke like they do. I want to keep on hiding.
Leaning against the tree, I hear from inside it another creature like the one they’re cooking, its sound moving like the wind’s inside a tree, the way the ocean sounds inside a shell. Of course I think that faint scrabbling is me, my blood inside my head, it is the kind of sound that you always think is your own, the sound of fear. And then the sound stops.
They eat it, they crack its shell, they eat more of it, the claws, they litter the beach with its pieces. There’s only one for all of them, but the meat is good, very good. The children pick up the claws and chase each other through the smoke with them, they scrabble sideways, knowing how to move with that kind of claw.
A shadow fixes me. I’m already saying, What? when Harry pulls me from behind my hiding place. He brushes the sand off me. It was one of the last ones, he says without saying hello, as if he knew I was behind the tree all along.
One of the last ones? I repeat.
A nice red it turned, he says. See, there’s a bit of the claw left.
The children try to bite each other with the claw.
What if you ate the last one?
I suppose you could let it die of old age, he says. There’s always that. It was tough enough anyway. What’s last anyway but dead?
The shells protect them, protected them from what fell.
Maybe they ate what fell, he says. Maybe that’s why it was the last, or could be. Maybe that’s why it was tough.
I watch the men pour a crab’s worth of water from the pot into shells. No, thank you, I say when Harry offers his.
A moon rises free of the water while Harry and the others and the children pretend with their sticks to couple again with the trees, to bring forth the crabs, to give birth to them and eat them. Even the smallest of them pretends with his stick. Then — who calls them? — all of them go off.
Harry is going off too when he stops where I sit, free of the sand he has brushed from me, watching the moon and none of them, and he asks whether I can dance? He says none of the ladies he has can.
My never doesn’t even figure, I can’t even hold it in my mouth. As if I am always thinking of dancing, I take his arms, I grab hold of the ones that held the stick, the ones that beat on the last crab and then lifted the juice of its last self up to his lips in a cup, and I dance in those arms in the moonlight over the stink of the shells and the old fire.
It’s a slow, slow dance, the kind sometimes you don’t even lift your legs for, or turn, and sometimes you nearly fall over it’s so slow. Of course I hum while he says he’s not leaving here, he’s never leaving here, it’s his place forever.
~ ~ ~
Beseech thee, I am not lost.
Ngarima lies face down on the sand, coughing and moaning.
I beseech thee, she moans.
I sink my feet deep in the sand and study my way. And study Ngarima, yes, I must study her. It is only a little time since her son sailed off — I think. I am not sure anymore. So many nights, and if you sleep in the day covered by leaves, the days are nights too. It all gets to be night.
I am not walking anywhere when I walk here in the dark, so I walk closer, but not too close. Her grand bulk is so prostrate, her coughing so loud, those moans so hollow, like an echo off the moon. In the glow of that moon, what glows green in her hand? What hot piece of what?
Ngarima kisses that ghostly glow, then she plants it in the sand inches from her fingers, upright so it looks like it’s standing.
It’s a plastic Jesus. A car Jesus that glows.
Light is power, she says. She knows I’m here, I think. She coughs.
Are you all right? I ask because that’s what everyone asks me.
I am fine, she coughs. Nothing is wrong. Nothing. She says nothing the way Barclay says yes, the way I say nothing. And you are walking? She sits up. If you walk alone in the bush, you know, a man is always walking too.
I like the moon.
She looks at its shine on her hands.
The moon is the whole island at night, she says. At night the island lives and we are ghost people. Whose eyes can see in the midday light? Then there’s too much light. Light is power, isn’t that what you call it? She coughs. Light is the sex of life, it is what keeps us going, light is what happens in the night to get the day to rise.
The Jesus falls over in the sand in front of her. She picks it up like it’s a shell she’s found, turns it over, and pockets it very fast as if I don’t see. She looks up from her pocket. She says, The light that came over the island was in the day, that light, you never think again without thinking of that light, that second sun.
The palms cut the moonlight into jagged beams that sway.
She begins to sing “O Little Star of Bethlehem.” Some of the words are hers, high and cracked and coughed. When she stops, she says, That was just the first star. I learned that when the army came and taught us songs.
She begins to swing her hips in dance. We take what we want of them. You see, she says, flaring her fingers, this is the star. We change the song to include that other light. This is how we do that. She covers her face. You see, we did see. That is what we did do. Light is power, she says. She rises and stumbles forward onto the hem of her vast dress.
I move to steady her, but she backs away.
You’re lost? she asks. Not to be here is lost, she says. She says, No one is lost here.
But she takes the Jesus back out of her pocket and pounds her chest with it.
~ ~ ~
I look out to sea the way an old man might, the way a Crusoe might who has not yet eaten his friend or, anyway, has not yet come to that moment of to eat or not to eat that all castaways must either physically or mentally come to, and I ask, Where is a friend?
This is a Sunday, and everyone is nowhere, they’re all decked out and gone, matching flowers, bolt after bolt, all the women wrapped neck to ankle, all the men in shirts white as seacrest, gone off to that Latter Day preacher’s, to his mission, the cement hut behind the flagpole that says what it says about love.
I know because I went once, in the pitch of my tourist fever when I had to divine all things island in my few days, the soul and the soup, the mean and the aberrant. I am not an every-week or even every-year churchgoer. I said to Ngarima long ago, The sea is what I worship, but now what is worship when there is no boat? No vessel, such as the son, to float out past the brimstone, to seek rest.
I’m restless.
I scratch my bites bloody, the ones that I get in the pit where the wind doesn’t blow, where it’s warm all night and bugs feast. I forget the bad parts while I scratch, I forget what I do every day, whether it’s Sunday or not, I forget and I scratch because that’s the best I can do. I scratch at my scalp, where I haven’t had soap for how long? My scalp itches. I dig into the hot sand with the top of my head where it itches, I stay upside down until the itching is over, and who notices?
I let my son drain out.