I patted my husband’s bare knee. ‘I don’t mind. I rather fancy a boat ride this morning. Besides, we need eggs, and the grocery opens at eight.’
We carried our empty mugs back to the house where I changed quickly into shorts and a T-shirt. A few minutes later I was back at the end of the dock slipping my feet into the bright-orange Crocs I kept in a plastic milk crate under the bench. I untied the rope that held Pro Bono to the dock, slipped a loop around the piling, then climbed down the wooden ladder into the boat. I twisted the throttle to the full position, and pulled the starter cord. The engine sputtered to life on the first go. I flipped the rope off the piling and rammed the gear into forward, setting off across the narrow channel at a pretty good clip. Once I reached Hawksbill harbor, I eased Pro Bono into a space at the government dock between two rubber dinghies, cut the engine, climbed up the ladder, and made the boat secure.
Daniel Noel, a tall, ebony-skinned Haitian dressed in clean, but well-worn chinos and an open-neck shirt, was waiting for me as usual, leaning against a telephone pole in the shade of a sapodilla tree. He carried his lunch in a blue and white Igloo Playmate.
‘Bonjou, Daniel.’
‘Bonjou, Missus.’ Daniel picked up his Igloo and waited politely for me to proceed down the dock ahead of him.
‘Komon ou ye?’ I asked.
‘N’ap boule.’
I raised a finger. ‘En minit,’ I told the gardener, not completely exhausting my Creole vocabulary, but close. ‘J’ai besoin des oeufs,’ I said, switching into French. ‘Eggs,’ I added in English to cover all bases.
Daniel touched a finger to his ball cap, nodded in acknowledgement, and headed toward Pro Bono with a loose-limbed stroll.
At the end of the dock where it T-bones with the Queen’s Highway, there’s a vacant lot. Well, not completely vacant. Twisted tree stumps languish among waist-high weeds, and the cinder block foundation of a house sits on the corner, with five concrete steps leading up to nowhere. Victims of hurricane Jeanne. I stopped for a moment, puzzled, because the yard looked more vacant than usual.
The signs. That’s what was missing. Protest signs hand-painted on plywood sheets of varying sizes that until recently had been nailed to the tree stumps and propped up against the stairs.SAVE HAWKSBILL CAY REEF!SHOW THE DOOR TO EL MIRADOR!OUR HERITAGE IS NOT FOR SALE TO FOREIGNER DEVELOPERS!RESPECT THE LOCALS!
Ninety-eight percent of Hawksbill Cay residents had petitioned against the development, so sentiments ran high.
Still wondering what had happened to the signs, I turned left and followed the road one hundred yards or so to the Harbour Grocery, a building the size of your average two-car garage and painted Pepto-Bismol pink. Neatly stocked, the Pink Store, as it was known, carried just about anything you’d need, and if they didn’t have it, Winnie Albury would order it for you. I’d already put in a request for disposable diapers (Huggies, size three) for when my daughter, Emily, and her brood came to stay over the Christmas holidays.
I opened the glass door, appreciating the blast of air conditioning that immediately enveloped me, then browsed my way along the neatly stacked shelves. Pasta and spaghetti sauce, soups, olives, jams. I remembered I needed tomatoes, so I picked up a can, then turned the corner, snagging a box of Dorset cereal, before hustling to the end of the aisle where the six-packs of soft drinks were stacked. ‘Boat came in yesterday,’ Winnie called after me.
Oh, joy! I knew what that meant. Half and half. I passed up the sodas and opened the sliding glass door of the fridge, selected a pint of half and half – ultra-pasteurized, but who was complaining? – clutched it lovingly to my bosom, then added a pound of bacon to the pile. On my way past the vegetable cooler, I seized on some fresh strawberries.
Winnie kept the eggs out, British style, unrefrigerated. I plucked a carton off the shelf, added them to my stack, and laid everything on the checkout counter where Winnie rang them up. ‘Ives,’ I reminded her.
‘At Windswept,’ she said with a smile, easing open the drawer where she kept the receipt books. She extracted the book with ‘Ives’ printed in block capitals on the spine, added the total ‘12.35’ to the figures already on the page, then rotated the book on the counter so I could initial the entry. At the end of the month I would visit the store with my checkbook and pay our bill in full. I liked that in a grocery.
‘What happened to the signs?’ I asked Winnie as she tucked the box of cereal into my bag and snuggled it up to the cream.
‘Vandals broke ’em up, set ’em on fire,’ she explained in a lyrical island drawl. A little bit Southern with a touch of Merrie Olde Englande.
‘Kids?’ I was appalled.
Winnie shook her head, raised an eyebrow and fixed me with a look that seemed to say, Our kids? Wouldn’t put up with any of that foolishness, I can tell you. But Winnie was a woman of few words. ‘Wasn’t, was it?’ she said.
‘Who, then?’ I asked. It was hard to imagine any churchgoing, law-abiding grown-up on Hawksbill Cay stooping so low. Nobody even locked their doors in the settlement.
Another customer had come in, so I stood at the end of the counter while Winnie rang him up, punching the keys on her adding machine a bit more energetically than absolutely necessary. She jerked her head in an eastward direction. ‘Someone at that development, I reckon.’
She was referring to El Mirador Land Corporation, the developers of the Tamarind Tree Resort and Marina, the people responsible for the naked slash that spoiled the view of Hawksbill Cay from my living room window. ‘Is anyone going to replace the signs?’
‘Wood’s expensive.’
Too true. Everything was expensive in the islands. From groceries to engine parts to generators and refrigerators, all had to be brought in by boat. And the Bahamian government added insult to injury by tacking a 30 percent duty on to items imported from non-Commonwealth countries. That’s why we suffered without Cheerios and Fritos and bought Irish Gold butter for one-third the price of Land O’ Lakes.
‘That’s the second time it’s happened,’ Winnie said after the other customer had left the store.
I picked up my shopping bag and adjusted the loops over my shoulder. ‘Has anyone complained to El Mirador about it?’
Winnie plopped down on her stool, slumped against the wall, looking small and defeated. ‘What good would it do?’
If it had been up to me, I would have marched out to the Tamarind Tree Resort and Marina, demanded an audience with the manager and insisted on an explanation. There might have been some finger pointing and fist shaking involved in the confrontation, too. I wondered who was in charge over there.
‘I’ll look around Windswept and see if there’s any spare plywood lying about,’ I said as I went out the door. ‘Could you use it?’
Winnie crossed her arms over her bosom and smiled. ‘Could do.’
Daniel was waiting for me in Pro Bono, reading his Creole Bible. He’d had a hard-knock life, too – leaving a wife and two daughters behind him in Haiti when he immigrated to Abaco looking for work. Meanwhile, he was living in a migrant workers’ community on the outskirts of Marsh Harbour, a community with a name that pretty much said it all – The Mud. No tourists of my acquaintance were standing in line to acquire a foothold in paradise by purchasing property in The Mud, or in Pigeon Peas either, the other area of the island where foreign workers were allowed to build their shanty towns.
Yet Daniel always seemed happy. Perhaps his faith kept him going. He certainly carried that Bible with him everywhere. One day at lunchtime I’d come upon him sitting on the porch of the bunkhouse, reading it aloud: Seyè a se gadò mwen, mwen p’ap janm manke anyen. I’d majored in French at Oberlin, so I picked up the gist of it: the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. From Daniel’s lips, the Psalms of David. I had hurried away before he noticed the tears in my eyes.