Vincent did not know whether Thérèse would come. In the end, waiting on the jetty, he thought she would not at the last minute. He had been wrong to try and persuade her. She would have the good sense to see that.
At first, Vincent did not see her in the approaching pirogue. Then, there she was, in the halo of the kerosene lantern. Under cover of his usual routines, Jonah had fetched Thérèse without any trouble.
She and Vincent stood awkwardly on the jetty.
She wore her cotton dress with the blue forget-me-nots which she had worn at La Tinta. Was that a sign of something? They were formal in front of the others. The men winked at each other. Theo noticed. Over her arm was her nun’s white cloak which she had used for her escape.
Vincent explained that they were going on a fishing expedition to the island of Huevos. The crossing was short but hazardous, particularly at night, and because of the military restrictions.
Jonah navigated the boat in such a way that it did not run the risk of setting off any alarms. Theo was all eyes and ears in the bow. What was he making of the present company? Vincent had to talk to him about Singh and Christiana. He had to talk to him about himself and Thérèse. Maybe he had already sorted these things out in his own way.
The fishermen in another pirogue led the way, keeping a look out for the Coast Guard.
They had to be careful. The stories of more and more torpedoed ships off the coasts of the continent and the island of Sancta Trinidad, alarmed everyone. At times, the fishermen brought back more than fish with them, in their catch, from off the north coast. There were bodies found on the rocks, or tangled in their seines.
On the beach, around a cooking fire, Vincent and Thérèse listened to the fishermen, who had come to fish for cavalli, tell their tales.
There were the natural comparisons with other wonders which had been experienced, like the whale at La Tinta. They shared their stories like food. ‘Who ever see a macajuel with a cow inside it belly?’ Jai Singh asked, jumping up all of a sudden. He was from the plains of Caroni near the mangrove swamps and the oyster beds where he had been with his father searching for conch, throwing seine for cascadu, scraping off the blue lipped oysters from the mangrove branches, when they had come upon the macajuel boa constrictor on the path between the canals. They had interrupted its digestion and disgorged it of the crushed cow. Eyes opened wide and some fellas joined in the chorus of exclamations, ‘I never see thing so, boy. You ever see thing like that?’
Not to be outdone, Sunil Ramchand, in a small voice, just above the crash of the waves, said it was Divali time when he went by cousins down Manzanilla way to keep the celebration, and his uncle took them to a green pool which they got to by taking a boat up the brown Ortoire, and then paddling under the manchineel and the mangrove to where the giant manatee grazed along the edges of the river. Their shadows, just beneath the surface of the water, were like the shapes you see in the clouds. ‘Them is shy animal, only the tip of the head and sometime the back you see, you know. Sometime, the shadow, or the tip of a baby head riding the back of the mother.’ The others nodded with understanding, imagining his wonder. He had clearly seen something, without really seeing anything at all.
There was the dull thunder in the distance. A flare on the horizon prompted speculation. ‘Them U-Boat out there, boy.’
Thérèse was beginning to fall off to sleep. She and Vincent were going to spend the night on the beach while the fishermen sank their seine for cavalli. Vincent suggested a walk.
Theo kept the fire going to ward off the sandflies and mosquitoes, but also to keep the fish broth simmering. The air was perfumed with citronella. He was happy to sit and listen to the stories, looking after the pot. He watched Vincent and Thérèse walk away down the beach.
They were stopped in their tracks. ‘Look. Do you see her?’ Vincent pointed out the turtle.
‘Yes. Extraordinary, how she pulls her great weight through the surf.’ Thérèse knelt in the sand.
As they sat on a high dune and watched, the turtle chose her path without being deterred. She scraped with her fins, heaving her weight up the beach for the safety of the sandy dunes. She was in search of a safe place to lay her eggs. This was an annual ritual, a pilgrimage repeated through instinct over centuries.
‘Should we call the others? Theo would love to see this,’ Vincent enthused.
‘No, not just yet.’ Thérèse put her hand on Vincent’s knee. ‘There’ll be another one. Let’s watch this one on our own.’ They had hardly had any time together on their own. Invariably, Theo or Jonah were hovering. ‘I nearly did not come.’
‘You’re here now, Madeleine.’
‘Yes.’
‘I missed you. I’m sorry.’ Vincent felt guilty.
‘I suppose I had to come. How could I not?’ she reassured him.
‘After all this while.’
‘It must mean something,’ Madeleine insisted.
They stared, leaning in on each other, wrapped in their own thoughts and in the spirit of the place, and what they were witnessing.
This had been happening before there were middens, when the only graves were the bones of coral and the sigh of shells.
The turtle was six feet long and four across. They watched and waited for her climb to end. At first, she went one way and then another, then choosing the highest dunes with the softest sand. When she had chosen a suitable spot, Vincent and Madeleine crept closer, knelt by her side, and read the ancient runes on her back. They were inscrutable. She circled the spot. She settled. They waited and watched and were patient with her patience.
Then her rear fins began to scrape and dig and scoop what was an ancient form of excavation. They were both aware they were witnessing something which had been going on for centuries, ever since there had been turtles. ‘She’s scooping out a womb in the sand to catch her eggs.’ Madeleine was animated.
‘Yes,’ Vincent murmured. They hardly wanted to speak aloud.
‘Look.’ They watched the turtle’s rear fins repeat their action again and again, until it instinctually felt the depth was sufficient to hold its horde of eggs.
‘A safe place for incubation,’ Madeleine commented scientifically.
Vincent watched Madeleine stooping, leaning towards the turtle and her excavation. The cotton frock with the blue forget-me-nots now as if in memory of her first rebellion. She had tucked her skirt between her legs to kneel more effectively. He saw the stretch of her back. He crept behind her, massaging her spine, his fingers kneading her back through the soft cotton, stroking her neck. Over her shoulder, he too stared at the turtle. He kissed the nape of Madeleine’s neck.
‘How still she is,’ he whispered, licking the whorl of her ear.
‘She’s waiting to lay.’
Then they began to come, eggs, one, then two, followed by another, and then in quicker succession, the size of ping pong balls, soft and wet. As they continued to watch it seemed so quick, like ten, then hundreds of membranous moons caught in a stream of light from the now high moon, a glutinous milky way. ‘Turtles’ eggs. A miracle,’ whispered Madeleine.
‘Nature’s way,’ Vincent responded.
All the while the turtle stared implacably with the wisdom of time at the incoming tide she had to reach to leave, once she had buried her future. Tears seemed to ooze from her eyes. The stream of eggs stopped. Then, as methodically as she had dug and scooped, she began to fill the hole to cover the eggs. Madeleine and Vincent watched as she raked in the sand and began to pat it down, with one fin then another. When this was complete, she then circled the spot twice. Then she dragged herself across the same spot twice more. This was her last, camouflaging, caring act. Her mothering was now complete. She had done enough for survival.
‘How long have we been here?’ Madeleine asked.
‘An hour, I think.’
‘A solitary hour.’
They could hear the voices of the others down the beach. There were the inescapable cries of Theo’s e
xcitement. ‘They must’ve found a turtle of their own,’ Vincent commented. Before deciding to rejoin the party, they stayed to see their turtle return to the sea.
They watched her scrape her way back down the steep beach, while her tracks were erased, as quickly as she had made them, by the incoming tide. Her epic had been lost.
‘Her legacy is now ours,’ Vincent said philosophically.
‘Yes, we must come back for the hatchlings.’
As they looked about them, dazed after their meditative witnessing of their first turtle, they thought they had been lucky at the end of the laying season to see one. Then they noticed that two others were on the beach performing the same ancient ceremony. ‘Wonderful!’ Madeleine exclaimed at the sight.
They had to pick their way back down the beach between the laying turtles. Theo came running up to them, ‘Come and see!’
Vincent and Madeleine knelt beside him and watched a similar excavation. They stared without talking. Theo was all eyes. He pointed in amazement, as if he could not contain this on his own, had to show it to the others. At intervals, he would look up behind him to either Vincent or Madeleine and smile to confirm their joint experience.
‘Doc, you ever see thing, so?’ He tugged at Vincent’s arm.
Theo had become exhausted with his watching and was sleeping by the fire which was a mound of glowing embers among hot stones, keeping the chill off in the damp hours of the very early morning. Jonah was also sleeping. The fishermen were testing the cavalli nets. All hands would be needed to pull seine before dawn.
Madeleine and Vincent had gone back to the end of the beach where they had seen their first turtle. They were stealing time. Jonah would have to get Madeleine back to the Saint Damian’s before six o’clock, before the first stroke of the Angelus.
They had found a fisherman’s shelter of coconut branches. As they lay against each other, they felt as if they were hammocked in the sway of the tide. It thundered beneath them. They heard the rhythmic flip flip of the sand being scooped and pitched by a nearby turtle. The sand fell onto their naked feet. Their own shifting against the sand joined them to this instinctual ceremony. Vincent’s strivings and Madeleine’s cries and sighs were their own belief against the odds.
They listened to the rattle of the shells and the dead corals. The heave and thud of the sea, which passed beneath the ground on which they lay, were voices sighing from within a sea midden. At times it sounded like sobbing, other times, like wailing.
In the far distance was the sound of thunder, the war they heard about, which delivered its dead sailors onto their shores, out of the very sea from which the turtles came to lay their future.
‘I won’t make a baby now,’ Madeleine whispered.
‘Madeleine?’
He wanted to contradict her irrational feeling. His fresh sperm was inside of her. She curled herself into a foetus on the ground which had become a vast womb to incubate the thousands of eggs which had been laid that season. If ever there was a place of fertility this would be it. He curled himself around her. He raked in their discarded clothes, pulling them about their nakedness. Then, he heard her sobbing. He gathered her up into his arms. ‘Madeleine.’
A baby had been their fear after the time in the boathouse. She could not then leave the convent. He was the new doctor. But now he had brought her here. How much longer could they go on with their separation? Could they have another moment? Madeleine’s declaration was the dread that they had missed their chance.
‘Not all the eggs hatch. Not all the baby turtles reach the sea.’ Vincent tried to find the right balancing words to whisper in her ear.
She got up suddenly, pushing him off, and walked out from the fisherman’s ajoupa. Vincent watched her, naked in the mist and spray, go towards the sea, tripping over a birthing turtle, falling in the deep soft sand dunes where the eggs were buried, disappearing down the sheer sand cliff to the hard shale where the sea pounded the shore.
He followed, naked too, to the edge of the sand cliff. He watched her enter the sea. He fell down as he followed her to the hard shore. ‘Madeleine, take care! Don’t go in too far! Don’t lose your foothold!’ She continued into the sea. He picked himself up and ran and stumbled into the breaking waves. ‘Madeleine!’
They lay on the beach watching a returning turtle. After washing off the sand, they got back to the fisherman’s ajoupa and gathered up their clothes, trying to dry off in the soft breeze which stirred in the palms above.
The moon was a still mask behind the mist and spray.
Back at the fire, Jonah had roasted bake. Everyone was quiet and exhausted after the night of turtle watching. Theo lay on his belly blowing the embers of the fire into a new flame. Bake and black coffee soon gave them the energy they needed to go down to the shore to help Bolo, Elroy and Jai pull in the seine.
Vincent watched with satisfaction the result of his surgery and their care, on the hands of these men, so that they could clutch and pull effectively.
There was a strong wind blowing, the sea was getting rough. The pirogues rose and fell in the swell. The fishermen were in the water with the net. The others, with the excited Theo, waiting to take hold of it on the shore. Soon, everyone was heaving in the net which was jumping with cavalli. ‘A good catch boy!’ Jonah shouted over the crash of the sea onto the steep beach.
That light which is before the dawn, came through the mist and spray, as they all encouraged each other with the heaving of the seine out of the sea onto the beach. Corbeaux were landing to guzzle the dead pickings.
Suddenly, on the wind, was a squall blowing off the gulf, swirling into the bay, causing the sea to swell and crash. The pirogues were heaved up and then let down. The pullers of the seine were slipping in the sand and falling back onto the beach. They managed in time to haul in the seine and transfer the cavalli to the other pirogue which would take the fish back to El Caracol.
Madeleine was worried about the time. Would she get back to the convent before the Angelus?
The men were eager to save the boats from being dashed against the shore. They were heaving them up the steep beach, running them along on logs, winching them up.
Then the rain came in, lashing the coast. Rain and spray. With the dark and pulsing light before the dawn, they were completely cut off.
Bolo, Elroy and Jonah, with Theo in fast attendance, built a shelter of coconut palms raised by bamboo poles they found on the beach. Madeleine and Vincent retreated to the fisherman’s ajoupa, their earlier haven.
Time ceased here, under the coconut palms and the drip of the rain in the bush. They sat huddled together, staring at nothing. They were all ears.
‘Can you hear them growing?’ Madeleine mused.
‘Growing?’ Vincent was astonished.
‘The baby turtles. They grow with the waves pounding onto the beach. This is what they will know most of all, this beach and the sound of the sea. To get to the sea will be their strongest instinct. To return here, to lay their own eggs, will be their strongest instinct too, a generational cycle going on and on. A repeated journey,’ Madeleine spoke amazedly.
Then, words ceased. And time also, as they knew it, stopped.
Madeleine was kneeling in the sand. Vincent came up behind her and cradled her. She leant back into him. Over her shoulder, he could see the task that she was engaged in. She had discovered some hatching turtles burrowing out of the sand in one of the earlier sites. She had decided to help them. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘they’ll never make it.’
Circling overhead, were the corbeaux and the gulls.
‘It’s a cruel outcome,’ she lamented.
‘Nature’s way?’ Vincent said philosophically.
‘You always say that.’
‘What else is there to say.’
‘We could enable them to survive.’
‘We could, but we couldn’t save them all. And would that be the right thing?’ Vincent looked back at the beach. ‘If they were all saved!’
&
nbsp; The beach was strewn with debris of birthing.
‘It’s the survival of the fittest,’ Vincent concluded.
‘It’s a matter of luck,’ Madeleine replied.
‘Chance, maybe,’ Vincent qualified.
‘The fittest may die.’
‘Yes, the fittest may die,’ Vincent concluded.
He watched her kneeling in the sand digging, and then with her skirt full of baby turtles, hurrying to where the dunes slid to the hard shore. There she released them to make their own journey, the rest of the way into the water, shooing off the predatory corbeaux, the pecking gulls and inquisitive sandpipers.
‘They know only the sea. Look, at how strong their small fins are.’ He watched her freeing them from her skirts.
It seemed as if at one moment the gulf was empty, and in the next, it was filled with destroyers and mine sweepers. They were transported from a desert island to a theatre of war. A Barracuda reminded them of waking at night to the boom of thunder in the distance.
Thérèse slipped through the palms in her nun’s cloak, up the steps from the jetty at the first toll of the Angelus. She did not turn to wave. She and Vincent had not decided what they would do next. She did not know if any of her sisters had been watching, and seen her naked ankles, as she gathered her nun’s cloak over her cotton frock with the blue forget-me-nots.
The Thunder Again
Lieutenant Jesse Morrison walked out of the darkness at the back of the Doctor’s House. He had come down the path where the sorrel bushes had grown at Christmas time, but which was now a dry bank of yellowing, scorched grass.
He entered by the back door. ‘Hello, hello,’ he called, carrying his saxophone. Its brass gleam glinted where it picked up the stuttering flame from the kerosene lantern.
The generators had just been turned off. This was part of the new curfew.
Madeleine was sitting at the dining-room table, bent over a microscope in the glow of the humming lantern. ‘Oh, hello, we met on the beach, last August,’ Jesse reminded her.
Night Calypso Page 31