Nevertheless, it paid to be careful. That’s why homes owned by foreigners had caretakers, a hereditary position often handed down from father to son.
The caretaker for Windswept was Forbes Albury; his family had lived in the settlement at Hawksbill Cay ever since 1780 when great-great-great-something grandfather Albury was shipwrecked on South Man-O-War reef during deadly hurricane San Calisto. Mr Forbes (as everyone called him) took a proprietary interest in the property, not surprisingly, since his father, Mardell Albury, had constructed it for a Canadian horticulturist, nail-by-nail and board-by-board, back in the mid-sixties. Mr Mardell and his father before him, Mr Bertram, were legendary shipbuilders. Mr Forbes was married to Mrs Ruth; Mr Ted, who owned the grocery, to Mrs Winnie – on an island where more than half the phone book was taken up by Alburys, what was the point of a last name?
Leaving Mr Paul to pound his chest manfully in celebration of his triumph over Mother Nature, I, Mrs Hannah, dashed barefoot to the orchard and snatched some underwear, clean shorts and a T-shirt off the clothesline. Hopping around on the front porch a few minutes later with one foot in and one foot out of my shorts, I called over my shoulder, ‘You caught it, you clean it, sweetheart,’ then trudged off through the casuarina and dense mats of Bahamas grass to introduce myself to our neighbors and see how they felt about joining us for supper.
TWO
HAVE A GOOD DAY! UNLESS YOU HAD OTHER PLANS.Doc Thomas, aboard Knot on Call
The moon woke me, shining so brightly through the window that I thought it was already dawn.
Wearing the oversized T-shirt that was about as sexy as my sleep wear got in the Bahamas, I padded to the kitchen and punched the button that would turn my coffee pot from an inanimate chunk of glass and plastic into a magic elixir machine.
Alerted by the gurgle, Dickie, the stray tabby we’d adopted, emerged from under the back porch, stretched luxuriously, then waited patiently at the back door for his morning bowl of kibble. A hard-knock-life cat, Dickie was difficult to approach, but I was gradually making headway. Strangely, I’d never heard him meow.
After feeding Dickie, I carried my coffee to the front porch, settled into the overstuffed cushions tied to the wicker love seat and waited for sunrise, sipping slowly. Across the harbor, boats rocked gently on their mooring balls and somewhere in the settlement Radio Abaco was playing gospel music, a raspy voice so amplified as it drifted across the water that I could make out every word: Never would have made it, Never could have made it without you.
The moon floated low in the western sky as the east became tinged with gold, and then peach, and then pink merging with a swathe of red so intense and so bright that the whole horizon appeared to be on fire.
‘Oh, wow!’ I commented to the cat. He’d finished his breakfast, padded from the back porch to the front, and plopped himself down at my feet. He began cleaning himself with elaborate tongue strokes, straightening his fur, stripe by stripe after a hard night’s work in the orchard.
‘Catch any Bahamian ground squirrels, Dickie?’
Dickie paused in mid-lick, favored me a languid stare, but otherwise didn’t comment.
‘Squirrels?’ Paul appeared out of nowhere, settled a kiss on the back of my neck, slopping coffee on to the wooden deck as he did so. ‘Oops, sorry.’ He tried to erase the spill with the toe of his deck shoes. ‘I didn’t know they had squirrels in the Bahamas.’
‘They don’t.’
‘Don’t? What are you talking about, then?’
‘Rats. Fruit rats. Rattus rattus, if you want to get technical.’
Still holding his mug, Paul walked to the bench-like wooden railing that separated the porch from the sea and sat down on it. ‘I haven’t seen any rats.’
‘That’s because there’s a bumper crop of oranges in the orchard. Why would they go out for hamburger when they can have steak at home?’
Paul laughed out loud. ‘Remind me about Rattus rattus the next time I’m harvesting oranges for your Bahama Mamas.’
The oranges in our orchard were bumpy-skinned, large and plump, far seedier and juicier than their Florida counterparts, but way too sour to eat. We used them in drinks, and for cooking, just as you would a lemon.
‘You, sir, are the hunter-gatherer. The fish last night, for example. The vote is in. Delectable. I rest my case.’
‘Nice to get to know the Westons. Too bad they aren’t staying longer.’
Nick and Jenny, we had learned at dinner, were just down for a long weekend, preparing the house for the arrival of Nick’s mother, Molly, in a few days’ time. Molly, her daughter-in-law claimed, was a sprightly seventy-two. Molly’d been coming to the Abacos since the mid-fifties when her parents first sailed there in a fifty-two foot wooden ketch. I looked forward to meeting her.
Paul turned a chair to face the sunrise, and sat down. He propped his feet up against the rail. ‘Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning, red sky at night, sailor’s delight.’
‘Huh?’ I’d been distracted by the cat who had gone from a sprawl into a crouch, his rear in the air, tail switching. He’d spotted a curly tail, and if the silly lizard didn’t move, he was going to be somebody’s breakfast.
Paul gestured with his mug. ‘Red sky. Maybe rough weather ahead.’
I scanned the sky from horizon to horizon. ‘There’s not a cloud in the sky, Paul.’
‘We’ll see what Barometer Bob has to say about the weather on the Cruisers’ Net, then,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘An hour to go.’
‘Do you have anything that needs washing?’ I asked, thinking that if all that red-sky foolishness came to pass, I’d better run a load through and get it hung out to dry while my solar dryer – the tropical sun – was still operational.
‘Plenty of time for that, Hannah. Come on.’ Paul grabbed my hand, pulled me to my feet, and led me down to the end of the dock where Pro Bono, the little outboard that came with the rental, was tied. There was a wooden bench there, too, with Windswept stenciled in white letters on the side facing the harbor, so people could find us. Houses had names, not numbers, in the Bahamas.
It was our habit to take our morning coffee on the bench, admiring the passing show, and we were seldom disappointed: night herons, sea turtles, the occasional dolphin or two. A magnificent eagle ray cruised by, white spots freckling its inky-blue body. As he broke the surface, I recognized him by a nick on his right wing: ‘Ray’ we had named the big one. His wife ‘Marlene’ sleeked along behind, followed by two smaller rays that we imagined were their children, ‘Dick’ and ‘Jane.’
After some impressive acrobatics, Ray and his family moseyed on.
Paul and I sat in companionable silence until the first workboat of the day steamed into the harbor at high speed. As it neared our dock, the vessel slowed its engines politely, then chugged past, leaving a wake that gently licked the sandy shore. The open-deck boat was packed with Haitian workers from Marsh Harbour, laborers who constructed the island’s homes, built its boats, and tended its gardens, sweating all day in the hot sun until the boat took them away exhausted at five.
‘Does Daniel come today?’ Paul asked. Daniel was the gardener employed by our landlords to keep the tropical vegetation under control.
‘What day is today?’ I wondered. It’s easy to lose track of time in the islands.
‘Hmm.’ Paul closed his eyes as if a calendar was written on the inside of his eyelids. ‘I think it’s Thursday.’
‘If it’s Thursday, it’s Daniel.’
‘Do you want to pick him up, or shall I?’