The Cay

Then an army officer climbed out of a truck and told us all to leave the Queen Emma bridge. He was very stern. He growled, “Don’t you all know they could shoot a torpedo up here and kill you all?”

I looked out toward the sea again. It was blue and peaceful, and a good breeze churned it up, making lines of whitecaps. White clouds drifted slowly over it. But I couldn’t see the usual parade of ships coming toward the harbor; the stubby ones or the massive ones with the flags of many nations that steamed slowly up the bay to Schottegat to load gas and oil.

The sea was empty; there was not even a sail on it. We suddenly became frightened and ran home to the Scharloo section where I lived.

Finally she said, “You’ll be safe if you do what we tell you to do. Don’t leave the yard again today.”

She seemed very nervous. But then she was often nervous. My mother was always afraid I’d fall off the sea wall, or tumble out of a tree, or cut myself with a pocketknife. Henrik’s mother wasn’t that way. She laughed a lot and said, “Boys, boys, boys.”

It was very different in Virginia, where my father had been in charge of building a new refinery on the banks of the Elizabeth River. We’d lived in a small white house on an acre of land with many trees. My mother often talked about the house and the trees; about the change of season and the friends she had there. She said it was nice and safe in Virginia.

My father would answer quietly, “There’s no place nice and safe right now.”

I remembered the summers with lightning bugs and honeysuckle smells; the cold winters when the field would be all brown and would crackle under my feet. I didn’t remember too much else. I was only nine when we’d moved to the Caribbean.

Timothy, standing below to catch me if I fell, called up softly, “Phill-eep, ’Tis no shame to ease your own self back downg to d’san.”

Slowly I began to back down along the trunk. The bark was rough against my hands and feet, but what I felt most was Timothy’s disappointment. I couldn’t have been more than a few feet off the ground when I took a deep breath and said to myself, If you fall, you’ll fall in sand.

Then I started climbing again.

Timothy called up to be, “You ’ave forgot d’knife.”

I knew that if I stopped now, I’d never climb it. I didn’t answer him but kept my hands and feet moving steadily. Then I heard him shout, “You b’getting to d’top.” Palm fronds brushed my head. I grasped the base of one to pull myself up. Timothy let out a roar of joy.

It was almost as if Id’ graduated from the survival course that Timothy had been putting me through since we had landed on the cay.

It rained that night, a very soft rain. Not even enough to drip through the palm frond roof. Timothy breathed softly beside me. I had now been with him every moment of the day and night for two months, but I had not seen him. I remembered that ugly welted face. But now, in my memory, it did not seem ugly at all. It seemed only kind and strong.

I asked, “Timothy, are you still black?”

His laughter filled the hut.

There was so much to do that I hardly knew where to start. Get a campfire going, pile new wood for a signal fire, make another rain catchment for the water keg, weave a mat of palm fibers to sleep on. Then make a shelter of some kind, fish the hold on the reef, inspect the palm trees to see if any coconuts were left—I didn’t think any could be up there—and search the whole island to discover what the storm had deposited. […]

I accomplished a lot in three days, even putting a new edge on Timothy’s knife by honing it on coral. I jabbed it into the palm nearest my new shelter, so that I would always know where it was if I needed it. Without Timothy’s eyes, I was finding that in my world, everything had to be very precise: an exact place for everything.

In early April, I returned to Willemstad with my mother and we took up life where it had been left off the pervious April. After I’d been officially reported lost at sea, she’d gone back to Curaçao to be with my father. She had changed in many ways. She had no thoughts of leaving the islands now.

I saw Henrik van Boven occasionally, but it wasn’t the same as when we’d played the Dutch or the British. He seemed very young.