The Cay (8 page)

Maybe all that had happened was beginning to work on the old man’s mind. Maybe I was stranded on a tiny, forgotten island in the Caribbean with a madman. If he harmed Stew Cat because of some silly jumbi thing, I knew he might also harm me.

I thought about getting back on the raft and letting it drift to sea again. I was certain that there were enough boards still on top to sit and sleep on. If I could get the water keg down the hill, and the last pieces of chocolate out of the box, I’d be all right for a few days.

I got up and went down to the water, feeling my way toward the reef. I knew that if I kept going that way, I’d touch or fall over the length
of life-line rope that tethered the raft. Timothy had driven a heavy piece of driftwood into the sand so that the raft would not go out to sea with the tide.

I walked slowly and carefully, expecting at any moment to feel the rope with my cane, or have it hit against my ankles. I went all the way to the beginning of the reef without finding it. Then I reversed my course, and walked in the other direction. Finally, I stumbled over the heavy piece of wood that Timothy had driven into the sand.

I felt around it, but the rope was no longer tied to it. He’d cut the raft loose! Panic swept over me. But taking my bearing from the stake, I decided to go out into the water, hoping to find the raft.

A few feet offshore, I got another bad scare. I put my foot down and something moved. In fact the whole bottom seemed to move. I lost my balance and fell headfirst into the water. I came up sputtering, and realized I’d stepped on a skate, that diamond-shaped fish with a stinger tail. I’d done that once or twice at Westpunt. The skate is kin to the deadly sea ray, but this one was as shocked as I was and swam off to deep water.

I went out to my waist, feeling with my hands in all directions. But the raft was gone!

I trusted Timothy, and kept telling myself that he wouldn’t harm me, but it was the whole mysterious jumbi thing that was frightening. And he
certainly wasn’t acting like the Timothy I’d been living with.

In midafternoon he returned to the hut. Neither of us spoke.

Then I heard him pounding something. The palm fronds on the hut rattled; whatever it was, he was pounding it into the hut. Having finished, he went away again.

When I heard him moving through the sea grape down the path, I got up and began feeling around the framing of the hut. There was nothing on the sides of it, and I decided that whatever he’d attached had to be on the roof.

I knew there were several lengths of log over near the campfire. So I approached it, found one of the logs, and rolled it over to the entrance to the hut. I stood on it and felt along the cross-frame that held the roof up.

In the very center I found what I was looking for. I cried out when the palm of my hand touched something sharp. Then with my fingers, I slowly felt around the object. It had a head, I discovered, four feet, and a tail.

Timothy had spent all that time carving a cat, a Stew Cat. The nails in it were supposed to kill the evil jumbi.

I felt weak and sat down on the log.

Soon, he came up the path, dropping Stew Cat into my lap.

“Where was he?” I asked.

“On d’raff, o’ course,” Timothy answered. “I got ’im off d’islan’ till I could chase d’jumbi.”

“Where is the raft, Timothy?”

“ ’Twas off d’shore, Phill-eep. ’Tis back now. an’ our luck is change.”

But it didn’t change. It got worse.

O
NE MORNING
in the middle of May, I awakened to hear Timothy taking great breaths. It sounded as though he were fighting for air. I listened a moment and then asked, “Are you all right, Timothy?”

He wheezed back, “Feber! Malar!”

I had to think a moment to understand what he was talking about. Fever! Malaria! I reached over to touch him. His forehead was burning hot.

His breath coming in big, harsh sighs, he said,
“I got malar agin, Phill-eep. ’Twill go away, but fetch some wattah.”

When I had had fever in Virginia, and at Scharloo, my mother had given me aspirin and then put cold cloths on my head. But we had no aspirin on the cay, of course, and the water was always warm. I poured some water from the keg, and gave it to him. He gulped it and then fell back on the mat.

For a while, I listened to his heavy breathing and then ripped a piece of cloth from what was left of my shirt, dampened it with water, and placed it on his forehead. He murmured, “Dat be good,” but suddenly he began to shiver, even though the morning air was already warm. I could hear his teeth clacking.

I had nothing to cover him with, so I just sat beside him holding the cloth, which was already beginning to dry, to his forehead. His breath was like air from a furnace.

It must have been about ten o’clock when Timothy began to mumble and laugh. It sounded almost as if he were talking in his sleep, but the laughter, little bursts of it between the wheezes, was very high and strange. I couldn’t keep the cloth on his head because he was tossing from side to side.

I talked to him constantly, but he didn’t even seem to know I was there.

Once he got up but fell back down to the mat,
and I told him to stay very still. For a long time, he did, because he began to shiver again. When that ended, the mumbling and high laughter started all over.

At about noontime, the mumbling got worse, and I could feel him trying to get to his feet. I clung to his arm, shouting for him to lie down again, but he threw me aside as if I weren’t there. I could hear him crashing down the hill toward the sea, the frightening laughter echoing back.

I followed the trail of laughter. Then I heard splashing and knew he’d gone into the water. I yelled, “Timothy, Timothy, come back.”

Suddenly it became dead quiet. I screamed his name again and again. There was no answer.

I reached the beach and waded out to my knees, then began to move slowly along, trying to keep on a line with the beach. I had gone about thirty steps when I fell over Timothy’s body, plunging down in the water.

Holding onto him with one hand, I got on my feet again. The upper part of his body was floating but I knew his feet were dragging on the bottom. I put my face against his mouth. Yes, he was still breathing.

I worked myself around to put both hands under his shoulders, but he was too heavy that way. Then I clasped my hands under his chin, and began to pull him out. He made strange sounds, but did not try to help me.

It took me what seemed like a long time to get Timothy out of the water and back up on the damp sand. He must have weighed two hundred and twenty or thirty pounds, and I could only move him two or three inches at a time.

I sat beside him for almost an hour in the hot sun while he rested quietly, his breathing not so harsh now. Then I realized he was shivering again. I knew I could not drag him up the slope to the shelter of the hut, so I tore off branches of sea grape and put them over his body. The grape leaves cut the rays of the sun.

I brought water down from the hut, raised his head, and ordered him to drink it. With one hand, I found his lips and then guided the cup to his chin. He seemed to understand and gulped it down.

I stayed by him the rest of the long afternoon while he slept. When he awakened, it was early evening and had turned cool again. He was breathing easily now, and I knew the fever had broken because his forehead was no longer hot.

Sitting up, he said weakly, “How did I get downg ’ere?”

I told him he’d run down the hill.

“Dat debil, d’fever,” Timothy sighed.

I said, “You went into the water. You scared me, Timothy.”

“Dat be true,” he said. “My ’ead burn wid fire, an’ I put it out.”

I helped him to his feet, and we went up the hill together, Timothy leaning on me for support for the first time. He never really regained his strength.

I
T WAS IN LATE MAY
that I believe Timothy decided we might stay there forever. We had not seen a schooner sail or heard an airplane since setting foot on the island.

I know it was late May because each day he dropped a small pebble into an old can that he’d found on the beach. It was our only way to tell how many days we’d been there. Every so often, I’d count them, beginning with April 9. We now had forty-eight pebbles in the can.

On this day, Timothy said thoughtfully, “Phill-eep, ’as it evah come into your own self that I might be poorly again some marnin’?” I knew he was thinking about malar and the fever.

I said it had.

He said, “Well, you mus’ den know how to provite your own self wid feesh.”

For more than a week, I knew he had been laboring over nails to turn them into fish hooks. He always speared the fish or langosta with a sharp stick, but I could not see, of course, to do that. I knew he was making the hooks for me.

He said, with a secret tone in his voice, “I ’ave foun’ an outrageous good ’ole on d’reef in a safe place.”

We went down the hill and started out along the reef shelf. By now, my feet were tough and I hardly felt the jagged edges of the coral. But I knew that lurking in the tide pools were the treacherous sea urchins. Stepping on them invited a sharp spine in your foot, and Timothy had already warned me that, “dey veree poison, dey b’gibbin’ you terrible pain.”

Every two feet, Timothy had driven a piece of driftwood deep into the coral crevices so that I could feel them as I went along. Neither of us knew what to do about the sea urchins but Timothy said he’d think mightily about them. He had taken a large rock to smash them all along the path over the reef top. But in time they would come back.

We went out about fifty feet along the reef, and then he said, “Now, we feesh.”

He described the hole to me. It was about twenty feet in diameter and six to eight feet deep. The bottom was sandy, but mostly free of coral so that my hooks would not snag. He said there was a “mos’ ” natural opening to the sea, so that the fish could swim in and out of this coral-walled pool.

He took my hand to have me feel all around the edges of the hole. The coral had been smoothed over by centuries of sea wash. Timothy said that the sand in the sea water acted like a grindstone on the sharp edges of the coral. It was not completely smooth but there were no jagged edges sticking out.

“Now, reach downg ’ere,” Timothy said, “an’ tug off d’mussel.”

I put my hand into the warm water, kneeling down over the ledge, and felt a mussel. But in ripping it loose, I lost my balance and only Timothy’s hand prevented me from falling in. If you are blind, the sensation of falling can be terrifying. My memory of the fall off the raft was still very clear.

Timothy said, “Easy dere, Phill-eep. Jus’ sit a moment an’ relax.”

His voice was soothing. “If evah you do fall, jus’ stay in d’hole awhile, feel which way d’wattah washes, den follow it to d’ledge, grab hol’, an’ pull your own self out.”

Timothy guided my hands in opening the tough
mussel shell and digging the slippery meat out to bait the hook. “ ’Tis an outrageous sharp knife, so be veree careful o’ your fingers.”

Then he told me to feel the hook and slip the mussel bait over the barb. I’d fished many times with my father and this was easy.

Rusty bolts served as sinkers. Timothy had found several pieces of wood with bolts in them; had burned them, then raked the bolts out of the ashes. He’d unraveled a life line from the raft to make single strands for the fishing line.

I dropped the hook and sinker overboard. In a moment, there was a sharp tug. I jerked, flipping the fish back over my shoulder so it would land on the reef. Timothy cheered and told me to feel along the line to the wriggling fish, then take the hook out.

Squirming and jumping in my hand, it was small but fat. I grinned over toward Timothy. When I had fished before, it was fun. Now, I felt I had done something very special. I was learning to do things all over again, by touch and feel.

I said to Timothy, “Dis is outrageous, hombuggin’ good feesh ’ole.”

He laughed with pleasure.