Green Boy (7 page)

Mr. Ferguson said Long Pond Cay was a heritage that should be preserved and passed on to my generation. He said this would be true for us too when we grew up, that it was true for all generations, and he quoted old Chief Seattle, the American Indian.

“This we know:
The earth does not belong to us
We belong to the earth. . . .”

One of the clergymen, I don't know his name, said that God gave us our islands in trust, and we had to look after them. Our local member of the government got up then, and said yes that was absolutely true, but we must also invest our talents wisely, and not bury them like the man in the Bible story. He was being careful not to offend anyone, I think, so he ended up not saying much on either side, for or against Sapphire Island Resort.

But after him, a friend of Grammie's called Mrs.
Ernestine stood up, a tall portly lady with a church hat and a big voice, and she made a very fiery speech about the islands being for the islanders, and not just a playground for rich white foreigners to gamble and play golf.

“We hear this big talk about investment!” Mrs. Ernestine cried. “Who investing in what? Big foreign companies investing in
us
, in our pretty beaches and our blue sea, that's what, and taking they profits home to they own countries to enjoy! Long Pond Cay belong to us—Sapphire Island would belong to them! Let's sign our petition, people, and show the Government how we truly feel!”

We all cheered, and Mrs. Ernestine sat down, looking pleased, and fanned herself with her hat.

The blond American got up next, which was brave of him considering he was a foreigner. He spoke rather softly, so you had to strain to hear him, but he was worth hearing. He said he thought he was a typical boat person, or “yachtie,” and that there were hundreds like him in our waters every year.

“We're an independent lot, but we all love these islands,” he said. “We come here for several months of the year to escape from noise and bustle. We're trying hard now not to pollute the water of your harbor. We used to be bad about that, but we've listened to people like Mr. Peel—”

—that was Grand, and I nudged Grammie proudly—“—and we've learned.” He looked round him a little
nervously, but his voice rose. He said, “I think your government has to learn too, to limit large-scale development, and allow only small hotels, on islands big enough to support them. Long Pond Cay is beautiful and peaceful, and part of the reason why we all come here. Sapphire Island Resort doesn't belong there.”

People clapped when he sat down, but almost at once another man bounced to his feet and started yelling, a loud angry yell. He was Bahamian, but I didn't recognize him, I thought he must be from one of the outer settlements. He was a big man with a shiny bald head and two chins, and a yellow shirt. He started right in on the boat guy.

“You don't belong here neither!” he bellowed. “What you know about us? You sit out there on your million-dollar boat, you go catching our fish, you don't do nothing for this island—we need jobs, man! Big hotels, not small little hotels! We need investment in our economy! We need money for better roads and better schools!”

Some people began to get caught up in this, and to shout “Yeah!” at intervals.

“We need jobs and Sapphire Island goin' give us them!” the fat man shouted. “Let me tell you, they goin' rebuild the main road!”

“Yeah!” shouted the people around him.

“Let me tell you, they goin' help expand the airport!”

“Yeah!”

“Let me tell you, they goin' hire drivers and construction
workers and hotel staff and all kinds of jobs! How many people here goin' say no to one of those jobs, eh? You show me your hand if you goin' say no to a job—”

And the meeting fell apart, as he bellowed on, and people jumped to their feet to bellow back at him, and Grand tried in vain to shout for order. At the end, the best we could do was to stand at the door of the community center with copies of the petition, and try to get people to sign as they left. Maybe half of them signed.

“We'll collect signatures on Sunday after church,” I said to Grand on the way home, trying to cheer him up. “We'll get a whole lot more!”

We were all squished in the cab of his truck, Grammie sitting silently beside me with Lou asleep on her lap. Grand took a long heavy breath, and let it out again.

“It goin' get harder than we imagine, Trey,” he said. “That man was from off-island, I never saw him before. They brought him in to stir things up, and tell lies. It a lie about rebuilding the road, and extending the airport—Sapphire Island not doing any such thing. They won't hire many workers from this island either, they'll bring skilled labor in from outside. All they
will
do is pave over our land, and ruin our waters, and develop all the life out of Long Pond Cay.”

“But we'll fight them!” I said.

Grand lifted his chin as he drove through the darkness, and his beard jutted again. “Oh yes,” he said. “We'll fight.”

 

The petition took over our lives for a few days after that. Everyone who was against the Sapphire Island development took to the roads, or hovered outside shops and restaurants, collecting signatures and arguing. The list of signatures grew longer and longer. The blond American put together a separate petition for the boat people, because they weren't Bahamian citizens. He specially wanted to find boat owners who were scientists or experts in pollution, so that they would be offering the government advice worth taking seriously. You could see him buzzing round the harbor every day from boat to boat in his grey inflatable dinghy, with his equally blond wife.

The news of the petition even reached Nassau, and a reporter from one of the newspapers came out for the day to interview Grand and Mr. Ferguson and the rest. She had a camera, and she came to the house and took pictures of Grand and Grammie in among the banana trees on the farm. It was a good year for bananas; we were going to have a handsome crop. She wanted to have Lou and me in the pictures too, but Lou got very upset and was on the edge of having a seizure, so I took him away.

Lots of people didn't agree with Grand and his friends, and some just didn't seem to care. “Don't ask me, man,” said one young man coming out of the liquor store. He was a dude, with a big gold chain round his
neck. “I ain't signing no petition. What I care about Long Pond Cay? I never go
near
that end of the island.”

Grand couldn't resist arguing with people like that, trying to make them face responsibility, and sometimes he succeeded in shaming one of them into adding his name to the list. But he never got far with Mr. Smith, the father of my friends Kermit and Lyddie, who was firmly in favor of Sapphire Island and any other kind of development. Whenever they passed in the street, Mr. Smith would lean out of the window of his cab and call, “Opportunity, Mr. Peel! Got to face the future! Can't let opportunity pass our children by!”

Grand would mutter crossly to himself, “Opportunity for who?”

When they had almost as many signatures as they felt they could get, Grand and the other organizers managed to persuade someone in government to see them, and they flew to Nassau again. Grammie drove him to the airport in the truck, and Lou and I went too. “Good luck, Grand,” I said in his ear as I kissed him good-bye. “Please save Long Pond.”

Grand smiled at me. “You save those bananas from the birds, and I'll see what I can do,” he said.

But I couldn't save the bananas, though it wasn't the birds I had to worry about.

The morning after Grand left, Lou and I went up early to the farm, to scare birds and do some weeding. We took sandwiches and water, so we wouldn't have to
come back for a while. The farm's a big piece of cleared land about fifteen minutes' walk from our house, with a fence round it to keep the goats out. It's in a kind of broad hollow, where the soil is good, though there's scrubland all round it. Nobody lives nearby, so it has to be checked every day to make sure we get the things that are ready to be picked, before the birds do. We had two sacks with us for the tomatoes, because they were doing really well; Grammie got a great price for them at the market.

The path to the farm winds about a bit, through scrubby bushes and big trees, and Lou was running ahead of me. I was carrying a hoe and a machete, so I wasn't about to race him. I saw him reach the last bend before the banana trees began—and then he suddenly stopped, as if he'd run into a wall. He stood quite still for a moment, staring, and then he looked back at me and began to give a long high wail.

I came up to join him, and looked.

The farm looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. There was nothing left standing. The banana trees, the papayas, the tomato plants, all the other fruits and vegetables that Grand had tended so carefully, were all lying flat on the ground. Nobody had stolen the fruit—it was lying there on the ground, spoiling. This hadn't been done by thieves, but by a determined person with a very sharp machete. You could see the marks where the blade had sliced through the thick trunk-like stalks of the banana trees, and the big hollow stems of the papayas.

We clambered about, through the ruins of the plants and bushes. Lou was making little whimpering sounds now. He patted some of the fallen trees as if they were wounded pets. Looking at it all, I began to feel anger growing like a big lump in my chest, almost like a pain. I wanted to whack at whoever had done all this, to chop at him with his own machete.

Perhaps there had been more than one person. Perhaps two or three. They had done a very thorough job. Big feet had trampled all the young cabbages into the ground, and kicked holes in pumpkins and squash. The only things they'd left were the onions, which were under the ground and harder to hurt, and the pigeon pea bushes at the edges of the farm plot. But pigeon peas aren't valuable; everyone grows them.

I said to Lou, “Let's pick up all the tomatoes we can. Even the green ones—Grammie will make chutney.” I knew I had to telephone Grammie at the bank as soon as I could, but she wouldn't have arrived there yet. So we filled our bags with tomatoes, and my lump of anger kept growing, especially when I looked across at the banana trees. There had been two or three big hands of bananas on every tree, but only half-grown yet, still small and green. The whole crop had been lost.

I called Grammie when we got back to the house. I was spluttering with rage, but she was quiet. “Oh my,” she just said, at first. “Oh my.” Then she told me we should go on rescuing what we could, and by the time we
had gone back and filled our bags with tomatoes and green papayas a second time, a black police jeep came bumping along the trail to the plot, with a policeman inside it, and Grammie.

She got out, in her good bank dress and her good shoes, and Lou ran to her and clutched her.

“Lou and Trey,” she said, “this is Constable Morgan. He a good friend of your mother's. I knew him when he was your age. He kindly came to inspect our poor farm.”

She looked at the mess, and I saw her chin quiver.

Constable Morgan had a perfectly round face, and his eyes grew even rounder as he peered at the splintered bushes and fallen trees. “Oh Lord,” he said. “Somebody sure had it in for you, Mistress Peel.”

There was nothing he could do, of course. No witnesses, no evidence, just a lot of ruined fruit and vegetables. He helped us pick some more tomatoes, and squash and green peppers, and Grammie sent him back to the police station with a bag of them for his wife.

Grand said, when he came home from Nassau, “Looks like somebody sent me a message. Stop making noise, James Peel, if you know what's good for you.”

“Will you stop?” I said.

Grand smiled a little. “Child,” he said, “I gonna shout my big old head right off.”

G
rand and his friends had managed to reach the right minister in government, armed with their petition, and they had a small success. Because the Sapphire Island Resort people were outsiders, and the petitioners all Bahamian, the minister put a one-month stop on development until she could look more closely at the whole case.

“But these people got good lawyers, and powerful arguments,” Grand said. “Now we have to work even harder.”

So the collecting of signatures went on, and there were more meetings, and posters began appearing all over the island, on walls and doors and tree trunks, saying,
SAVE LONG POND CAY!
Grand was spending all day and every day in town, or at his computer, organizing the protest. He did arrange for a couple of men to come in and clear up the damage at the farm, and Lou and I hung out with them to help, and watch them burn the trash, making a great plume of grey-white smoke.

Grand was leaving the running of his bonefishing business to other people too, for the time being, but all his bonefish guides were good men, and his chief guide, Will Torris, was one of his oldest friends. Besides, this was summer, and most of the visitors came to fish later in the year.

We liked Will; he was a tall, stooped man with a big quick smile and enormous hands and feet. But those big hands could tie the smallest fly onto a bonefish line, and he and Grand had been teaching us all we knew about fish and the sea and the islands, ever since we were babies. Lou and I kept our little dinghy down at an old jetty alongside the bonefish hut, with its smart little marina for the nine boats, and Grand and Will's office under the neatly painted sign,
JAMES PEEL: BONEFISHING.

Lou was restless; I knew he wanted to go out in the dinghy. We both missed the water if we hadn't been out there for more than a few days, or gone over on Long Pond Cay. But on the day I intended to go, Will Torris turned up at the door early in the morning, just as we were having breakfast.