Timothy of the Cay Read online

  They drew him past Kronprindsen's Gade, the beginning of Main Street; drew him past the old warehouses where pirates once stored their loot; drew him past the singing coal women. He'd sit on a bollard and daydream—listening, watching.

  Truly wondrous things happened on that waterfront. Three times each year the "ice ship," a four-masted bark, would arrive from New England with its cargo of blocked ice cut from far northern lakes. Timothy loved to put his cheek against the sawdust-encased blocks, feel coldness he'd never known existed. The same ship carried barrels of rum north to a place called Boston. Once, a barrel being hoisted aboard dropped and busted. Then even the sea gulls got drunk.

  He knew by now to get permission to board any ship. Once, he'd been kicked in his backside for boarding without asking.

  The husky sailor standing at the rail of the Amager, bare to his belly button, wanted to know what Timothy's business was.

  "Cobbin boy I be oskin' to be."

  The sailor, an island man, grunted a "you'll be sorry" laugh, then said, "See de mate, 'e'll be bock soon."

  Timothy promptly took up station between the two low deck houses and waited, dry mouthed and jittery, already tempted to leap down to the wharf and forget about his wild dreams. He forced himself to stand still.

  Twenty minutes later, a chunky, squat bukra, blond haired and blue eyed, wearing a soiled white cap, returned to the Amager and looked at the boy standing between the mainmast and the mizzen; he listened briefly to the sailor, then walked over.

  "What's your name?" He spoke English with a Danish accent and puffed a short cigar.

  The official island language was English, in schools and otherwise. Light-skinned children were encouraged to go to school. Light-skinned girls needed to be educated, for domestic work in the mansions.

  "Timothy, sirrah." Fright made his mouth flour dry.

  "Last name!"

  "I 'ave but one name, sirrah."

  "How old?"

  "Twelve, sirrah. I tink."

  "You think?"

  Hannah Gumbs had estimated his age. She didn't know for certain. Only his unknown mother knew.

  "Yes, sirrah."

  "You want to go to sea?"

  "Yes, sirrah." Though he stood soldier stiff, his knees felt like sponges.

  "Open your mouth." The mate came closer, blowing out strong smoke.

  Timothy opened wide. He knew that slaves—like Tante Hannah, who'd been emancipated forty-one years before, in the Virgin Islands—had had to do that. Show their gums. Now he had to do it, too. He knew he did not have gum rot or other diseases. No sores.

  "Bend your head, bend it."

  The mate took one blunt fingernail to separate the hairs and examined Timothy's scalp. He was looking for lice.

  "Spread your toes, nigra boy," the mate ordered.

  Timothy bent down and opened his toes, feeling a humiliating surge of anger. But he dearly wanted the job. The mate was looking for chiggers now, he knew.

  Taking a backward step to examine Timothy's whole body, the mate said, "You look strong enough to scrub a deck."

  "Yes, sirrah."

  "Have you ever been to school?"

  "No, sirrah." With skin as black as a sea urchin, he wasn't exactly welcome.

  "Can you read or write?"

  "No, sirrah."

  "Can you count?"

  "Yes, sirrah." Timothy half lied. He could count to ten. Tante Hannah had taught him.

  "All right, Timothy. Four kroner a month and keep. Do you have a shirt and shoes?"

  Four Danish dollars a month, a fortune.

  "I asked you if you had a shirt and shoes!" the mate thundered.

  "I 'ave a shirt, sirrah."

  "Get a pair of shoes. We're going to New York. Your feet'll freeze. I don't need frozen feet on this ship."

  "Yes, sirrah."

  The tobacco-smelling mate walked away and Timothy twirled around, permitting himself a wide smile, then leapt off the Amager. He began to run the second his feet hit stone; threaded and dodged through the light rain west toward "Back o' All," the poorest section of Charlotte Amalie, a squatter village.

  Among the collection of one-room wooden shacks in Back o' All, where the coal carriers lived, was the one belonging to Hannah Gumbs. Feet flying in rhythm with his joy, Timothy hadn't known such excitement in however many years he'd been on earth.

  Shoes? He'd never worn shoes in his life. The soles of his feet were tough as a leopard shark's back. But, yes, he'd find a way to get shoes. Nothing would stop him. Nothing would "harl" cold water on his soaring spirit at this moment.

  He trotted along the inner edge of the harbor for a quarter mile, then turned sharply inland and began running up a low hill.

  St. Thomas was a series of ridges and hills, some of them steep. Crown Mountain was fifteen hundred feet up. Some streets were no more than stone steps upward. Most of the rich people lived in the high hills, not the lowlands, wary of the hurricanes that visited occasionally. Everyone prayed that the island be spared at the beginning of the "tempis" season and prayed again in thanks at the end if it was bypassed.

  Timothy ran on.

  3. Panama

  From the iron-railed bed in the Canal Zone's naval hospital I asked my mother, "Do you remember the old sailor we saw on deck the second day out, chipping paint?"

  Timothy had been the oldest, biggest, and blackest of the SS Hato crew. Six-feet-two or -three when he stood up on our raft. His shoulders and arms were massive, heavily muscled from years of hard work. He hadn't shrunk very much from old age.

  "No, I don't remember him."

  I looked in my mother's direction. Without thinking, I'd been turning my head toward any sound for months. A bird, an aircraft, footsteps, a voice. Her voice. Sounds had become very important to me.

  A hint of her favorite French perfume drifted over from where she sat by the right edge of my bed. I remembered the delicate odor. Smells had also become very important.

  My mother was a slender lady with pale blue eyes and pale skin. The last time I'd seen her, just a twisting glimpse in a fiery red glow, we both had been spilling out of the lifeboat into the dark water after the torpedo hit the Hato.

  "He was barefoot and wore a straw hat."

  I wondered what she was wearing this day.

  "That's his knife." I motioned to the bedside table and reached over, groping for it.

  "I don't think I saw him," she said.

  Not far away a ship's horn bleated. A tugboat answered. Merchantmen and warships moved through the canal night and day. Fighting was occurring throughout the world, from Europe to the far Pacific. The once peaceful Caribbean was a war zone.

  "I think I saw him just before you sailed," my father said. "I wondered why a man that old was still going to sea. He looked like he was sixty-five or seventy..."

  I turned toward his voice. Though he wasn't smoking in that antiseptic room, a faint apple-flavored tobacco aroma came from the foot of the bed. There was also a touch of his bay-rum shaving lotion in the air. Reassuring smells.

  The last time I'd seen my father had been the previous April. Tall and lonely, he stood on the seawall of Fort Amsterdam, at Curaçao's harbor entrance. He was waving good-bye as the Hato put to sea. I had hated my mother at that moment for taking me away from him. But now he sounded as if no days had passed between us. Gentle of voice, always; slow and measured. He was a Virginian. My mother was from New Jersey.

  "I think he was closer to seventy than sixty-five," I said, "but I'm not sure. " There was a lifetime of things I didn't know about Timothy.

  "Did he ever tell you why he was out there at that age?"

  "The war. There was a shortage of experienced sailors, so he volunteered. You can't believe how much he knew about the Caribbean. "

  He knew the birds, the fish, the storms, the cays.

  "You were lucky," my father said. "Very lucky."

  That's what I'd been telling everyone.

  We became silent for a
moment. Had someone else been on the raft instead I might not have made it to that hospital bed.

  My mother, whose dark hair always shone like glass, had sounded different from the moment she walked into the room. Subdued. Not a hint of the past's usual scolding in her voice. By tone she wasn't, for now, the taut, tense woman I'd always known.

  They'd flown to Panama after the navy had told them, two days before, that I was alive and well. But blind. I'd fly back to Curaçao with them tomorrow. I really didn't need to be on that bed, but the nurses had ordered me to park there with Stew Cat and to stay out of the hallway.

  My once long and tangled hair, turned straw blond (I was told) from the tropic sun, had been neatly cut. The nurses said I looked handsome and kidded me about going aboard the destroyer with no clothes on. They said I had a good tan all over and could get all the girls I wanted, including them. They flirted with me even though I was years younger. I'd had a birthday on the cay, without cake or candles. But I felt older than twelve now, much older.

  Stew Cat's leg drummed against the bedspread down by my feet. He was scratching an ear. The navy captain who ran the hospital had said he'd let Stew stay in the room, against all rules: "You two look like you belong together."

  We did belong together. We'd shared a lot.

  I kept looking toward my father. "His name was Timothy," I said. "That's the only name he had. Without him I wouldn't be here. He died and I buried him. He's now my guardian angel. We talk back and forth..."

  They were silent, maybe thinking the sun had fried my brain. I'd buried another human in the sand and now talked to him. Maybe they didn't know what to say to me? Maybe they were still in shock that I was alive? Maybe...

  The first few minutes after the nurse had shown them in, saying, "Here's that heartthrob son of yours" (which embarrassed me), my mother held me tightly. She said, over and over, "I'm so sorry, so sorry..." My face was wet with her tears.

  Yet I felt uncomfortable in her arms. I didn't want her to be sorry for me. Timothy had never taken pity on me, and there were times when I'd thought I deserved it. But I learned from him that pity is often a deadly enemy.

  It had been my mother's decision that we leave Curaçao to go back to our regular home in Virginia and what she thought was safety. But I'd long ago stopped blaming her for what happened.

  As Timothy once said, "She started dis turrible wahr, eh, young bahss?" No, she hadn't started World War II, I knew. She was just frightened of it and wanted to flee once the U-boat attacks began.

  "How did they find you?" my father wanted to know.

  "Smoke from my fire pile was spotted by an aircraft working with the destroyer." It would take days to tell them everything that had happened on the raft and the cay.

  First, I wanted to hear what happened to my mother after the torpedo hit, without warning, at three A.M., the darkest part of the night.

  I remember that when I came up on deck with her the whole after part of the ship was on fire. Everything was red against the moonless night. There was a lot of fright and yelling. Then we were told to climb into the lifeboat so that it could be launched. As it was being lowered, the bow tilted sharply down, and we were thrown into the water.

  My mother said, "I swam around trying to find you but you'd floated away. Then a sailor grabbed me and towed me back toward the lifeboat."

  They'd gotten it into the water, after all.

  "I fought him, Phillip. I didn't want to get into that boat without you. Then he slapped me and someone lifted me up—" Her voice broke again. "I thought you'd drowned and it was my fault, my fault..."

  She said they had to hold her in the lifeboat to keep her from jumping overboard.

  It was hard for me to imagine my mother jumping overboard and swimming off alone to find me. Yet I knew she was being truthful. She loved me, I also knew, though she seldom said so. People change in emergencies, Timothy taught me.

  "We tacked back and forth all that day and the next one, going toward land. There wasn't much breeze. I thought of nothing but you and didn't care whether I lived or died..."

  Then a tanker bound for Aruba, another of the Dutch islands, came along, and soon all the survivors of the Hato—except three—were safe.

  "I told the tanker captain that you were in the water and had disappeared. I knew you had a life jacket and might still be alive. There were sharks..."

  She stopped, voice fading.

  "The captain then sent a message to the navy telling them the ship was sunk and that he'd picked up survivors," my father said evenly. He added, "I had no idea the Hato had gone down until that message was relayed."

  He had a copy of it at home. He read it to me later:

  PLS ADVISE PHILLIP ENRIGHT CARE CURACAOSCHE PETROLEUM MAATSCHAPPIJ SS HATO SUNK APPROXIMATELY 76 WEST 12 NORTH 6 APRIL X MRS. ENRIGHT SURVIVED IN GOOD CONDITION X IS EN ROUTE ARUBA X SON PHILLIP ENRIGHT BELIEVED MISSING X

  He said he learned that the Dutch Navy had sent out a search plane from Curaçao and the American Navy sent three out of Coco Solo, here in Panama. Not even an oil slick was sighted. He had a pilot friend and they took off in a light plane and looked for me, too. They almost ran out of gas and had to land in Barranquilla, Colombia.

  By that time, Timothy, Stew Cat, and I had drifted slowly northwest on our eight square feet of wood and barrels, toward the cays off Nicaragua.

  "Tell us what happened on the raft, Phillip," my father said.

  4. Back o'All

  OCTOBER 1884—Hannah Gumbs was out behind the thatch-roofed shanty, using a long-handled wooden paddle to lift up steaming, dripping clothes. Charcoal from nearby Porto Rico glowed beneath the large cast-iron tub. Lye water boiled. Fumes rose from it and lodged in the light, warm rain, clearing nostrils in one whiff. Back o' All smelled of poverty, rain or shine.

  Timothy shouted happily, "I be goin' to sea, Tante Hannah!..."

  Hannah was not Timothy's aunt. She was no kin at all to him. She'd found him asleep on her doorstep at cockcrow time just before he was of crawling age. The note attached to the box, painfully written, said, "Timothy." Nothing else. But real aunt or not, she'd raised him like a son.

  A faded blue bandanna on her head, she was wearing a worn cotton blouse and a long skirt, no shoes. She turned and gazed at him. "Yuh goin' to 'prentice."

  She'd been talking to a woodworker on Frenchman Bay Road, where she delivered wash, about Timothy becoming an apprentice. Learn to make furniture from Brazilian mahogany. A craftsman he would be. That was her hope.

  "I be a cobbin boy, Tante Hannah," Timothy said stubbornly, hurt that she wasn't pleased he was going to make his way in the world. Grasp his own goal, at last.

  A large, handsome woman with a face nearly as round as a pie, she narrowed her wise, deepset brown eyes. "Who said?" She was not one for yaba-yaba talk, senseless chatter.

  After she was freed, she had refused to work for Estate Alborg, the sugar plantation where she was born and had lived most of her early life. She was proud and independent, though sometimes hungry. Her husband had died the year before she'd been blessed with Timothy. She never had a child of her own.

  Until six years ago she had been a coal carrier, ninety-pound baskets of it pressing down on her padded head as she went up the steep gangways. Sweat had run down her body in thin rivers, even in winter. An øre, penny a basket, was what the singing coal girls got. They sang about hard life, keeping a rhythm with their steps.

  Then her legs and neck gave out and she took up washing and ironing. Hannah Gumbs knew how cruel life could be. Timothy didn't, as yet—that was what her eyes were saying to him.

  "De bukra mate o' dat schooner said. Four masts dat schooner, goin' to New Yawk. Dey be gibbin' me four kroner a mont' an' feed." His own eyes glittered with victory.

  Hannah sighed, picked up an armful of dirty laundry, and dropped it into the pot. "Bes' yuh stay wit' me."

  "I be goin', Tante Hannah," Timothy said again, picking up the paddle to stir the gray water for h
er.

  "'Tis a hard life yuh oskin' foh," she said.

  "No harder dan wark in de feels."

  A slight nod said she might agree. And there wasn't that much field work on St. Thomas anymore. The early plantations were mostly in ruins.

  "Yuh bes' wait to mek de chair an' table" was her final pronouncement.

  Not wanting to look at her, knowing he'd miss her night and day, he looked at the huge pot. "De sea is whar I mus' go, Tante Hannah."

  Her silence told him she would not interfere.

  He added, "Someday I'll be a coptin. Den yuh can cease hard wark foh de bukra..."

  Hannah laughed softly. "Don' tie de rope till you cotch de goat," she advised, pushing more charcoal under the pot.

  Timothy knew what she meant: Don't get your hopes too high. He laughed back, "Coptin Timothy o' de schooner Hannah Gumbs, I be..."

  She moved a few feet to take the boy into her arms. Neither paid any attention to the downpour or the fact that they were both getting soaked, head to foot. The sun would likely shine in a while and they'd dry off soon. It was nearing the end of the rainy hurricane season.

  Then she stepped back, as the mate had done, to take another look at Timothy, but hers was a loving one. She'd raised him well. Despite his lack of schooling, he was a smart boy. Wisdom seldom came out of books, anyway. He was strong and healthy, she knew.

  A weedwoman, she'd used her knowledge of herbs and plants to keep him that way. Callaloo, the green leaves of the dasheen plant, always worked wonders at the supper table. Tea from gritchee-gritchee bush leaves kept his body tuned. A sliver of bitter sempervivum, the aloe plant, had fought off colds.

  There were two dozen other bush wonders she knew about. The soapberry bush helped burns and scalds. So did fresh banana leaves. The toothache tree relieved jaw pain and "better-mahn-better" knocked down fever. Everyone in Back o' All came to Hannah Gumbs with physical complaints, leaving a few øre if they could afford it.