Stories

By: N.D. Williams

light of the world

I

What could you say about the sea if you're an islander?

It's always there, around and beyond us: churning and receiving; washing up all the dead stuff of the world: sunken histories, green bottles with messages of lost ambitions, the loves we abort and throw away. On Sunday afternoons our islanders come down to the beach; they show off bathing costumes and muscles; they gleam and splash about like carefree porpoises; then, salty-skinned, with sand in their hair, they turn their backs on it and go home.

What could you say about old ladies if you're an islander? They're always among us, in straw hats and headkerchiefs, beneath and beyond us like ancestral graves. On Sunday mornings our old ladies go to church. They startle you in their starched church clothes many decades behind the times. If you stop to say, "Hello Aunt B.", they lift their bowed heads; trembling fingers of memory reach for your face; they squint at you, then smile, for they'd seen you coming long before you had arrived; and they ask about your mother.

These days, of course, I know better.

Old ladies are somebody's mother and somebody's grandmother. They're not waiting to die. They are dreaming souls, lighthouses to so many ships, ancient and new, adrift in the world.

As for the sea, it's the last resting-place for the useless and the used; for skeletons and bones that rattle only what is real; a place for sunken vessels stripped of vanity riggings. You could step off our island and cross over seas, the way you cross borders from France into Spain, or Canada into the USA.

And you could call me caretaker of the sea.

Before, I used to be a journalist. A journalist, you ask, raising eyebrows. These islands have journalists? These islands have all breeds of men and women, let me tell you.

I was fooled once by the magical possibilities of that word. Plucked from High school out of the stampeding path of scholarship winners and exampassers, I was told I had a knack for storytelling; I could develop into a correspondent, reporting back to the island. This was how Mr. Pinks, my father's friend, explained it to my father:

The boy could write (True. I wasn't much good at math and science). The boy could be my apprentice (Mr. Pinks was editor of the island newspaper). Start there, move up gradually, just like me (Mr. Pinks liked to brag he never went to college). Until-who knows?-maybe people at the American Embassy might spot his talent (and send me up North on a training course).

I was fooled by all that; became an apprentice; wrote articles and stories. Year after year after year.

Now I understand how young men like me feel anywhere in the world: in Ireland or Soweto or Port au Prince: up against walls of no hope, your parents threatening to dash you away because once you were their only hope; tempted to join groups of scowling anarchic youth lounging at street corners in every city; then one day something extends itself: a hand reaching through the sky, pointing at you; you feel uplifted; separated from the rest; spared and chosen and uplifted, as each of us in times of hunger and the wolf, in cities of downcast eyes, wish with all our hearts to be noticed, to be redeemed.

Fooled by all that, as I was saying. I don't mean to sound bitter. For awhile with one foot on the career ladder, it did appear as if I had been saved.

I became a "rookie reporter"; it was exciting to be part of an office team. I sported my press pass and breezed through the door at functions, festivals and sports events. I learned to type and I used to think my writing in some way shaped the policy of a Government Ministry, and that the Prime Minister was secretly indebted to me.

So what happen?

Blame it in part on the delusions of gullible youth, the glow of self-importance, the feeling that success would last forever.

Right now I can point to only one source of my demise: Mr. Massareep Pinks, Editor (Maz to his cronies and friends, Mr. Pinks to his underlings) who often took this rookie's reports and turned them into pontificating editorials; whose style was laced with apologies to Churchill and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Bertrand Russell; whose body in its coffin when he dies should be cushioned by the books of these dead authors.

I see his face, fat and smug, and hatred wells up in me. I see his pinstriped trousers held up with braces, his eyes large and round like those Martian creatures in comic books, his face speckled with warts; and on the nape of his neck those boils, disgusting shaving boils, big as sores. I see all that and a desire to kill consumes me.

Islanders have a foolish respect for men like Mr. Pinks who write and speak like Mr. Barkis in Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby. This man of words sat on my dreams all these years. Suddenly one morning I began to wonder: what will become of my life, pinned and squashed under this old fart?

Call it a romantic hunger for freedom. I became caretaker of the sea. And strange as it may sound I have to tell you: it was Mr. Pinks who pointed the way.

Puzzled? You sense a story behind all this? I'm coming to it. I was waiting for a wave, for a rhythm on which to ride to its beginning. Caretakers are, if nothing else, men of patience.

All right, catch this wave:
On the morning of my twenty fifth birthday I woke up thinking that twenty-five was an ordinary number, like twenty six, twenty seven; not deserving of notice or celebration. I switched on the transistor and heard steelband music and then the calypso chorus: "We go beat them/lick them/destroy them". The cricket test was on, West Indies vs. Australia. For the next six days our island would be the center of the world.

I wasn't a sports fanatic, but this was my birthday; and with a press pass I could be there, in the stands, watching boundaries and sixes and shots like miracles. I put on a special shirt and had my sun hat all ready.

Imagine my shock when I got to the office and found an assignment from Mr. Pinks marked Urgent. He needed a human-interest story for the weekend edition. The deadline was six o'clock that evening. I had to travel miles outside the city to August Town to interview an old lady, reputedly the oldest lady in the island. Possibly the oldest lady in the world, Mr. Pinks added.

"Why me? If this story so important why he didn't go himself and interview this old lady?" I exploded

There were one or two fellows in the office hammering away on typewriters, with their sun hats and their flask of ice cubes, and sunglasses perched on their heads. They were going to the test match; they were determined not to miss the first ball; they sniggered and ignored me and pounded away on their stories.

You know those moments when you're alone with desolation as bright as a stab wound, and you wish you could grab a shiny cutlass and make some people slump to their knees begging for mercy? You know those moments?

I stepped outside feeling like a small boy in the office sent out on an errand by the boss.

I searched the sky for rain clouds that might burst over the island, forcing the umpires to abandon play for the day. I dreamed of reporting the sudden death of Mr. Pinks-from cardiac arrest, his sins catching up with him at last. I went in search of a van to take me to August Town.

You could feel the island's center of gravity shift towards the cricket ground as from every quarter, on bikes and on foot, people streamed to that place where two captains were about to toss a coin. You could sense in the air all the electricity of world communications, as transmitters crackled beaming commentary back to Australia, England, India, all over the globe.

The driver of the minivan was a skinny Indian man with wavy hair, quick darting eyes and overwashed clothes. A fidgety man with little time for sleep or meals. Probably the only man at that moment on our island who couldn't care less who won the toss, or which side batting.

He had to be illegal resident; a runaway from another island, scratching out a new life here.

Normally I might have felt inspired to do a piece on people without work permits on our island. It would have pleased Mr. Pinks and his political masters (we all know he had Scotch and soda cronies in the present Government). But I was in a vexed and vengeful mood.

I understood this driver's indifference to events that had nothing to do with his livelihood. Soon we were moving away from all the cricket frenzy. We were brooding, silent men nursing hatreds or dreams. It is at moments like these that destinies are chosen.
We got to August Town so quickly, it occurred to me I might be able to do the interview and get back to the cricket ground to see most of the day's play. I might not get a good seat, but if the West Indies were batting good seat or bad seat made no difference.

First, I had to find the old lady.

We have these houses on our island, outside the town centers: boxy structures, leftovers from the plantation days. Miniature weather-beaten wood things. You can't imagine a whole family living in them. A giant bird could swoop down, plant its giant claws on a roof and fly away with one of them easy, easy.

It was to these boxy houses that I was directed by people who smiled when I asked for the old lady. "You mean, Ma Memu?" Mr. Pinks had forgotten to give me her name. Just ask for the old lady in August Town, he'd said. "It just down the road there," they said.

I walked for five, ten, fifteen minutes, past bushy vacant lots, the ruins of an old sugar mill-and still couldn't find this place. I began to curse country people with their poor sense of distance.

I almost walked past it, telling myself this couldn't be it: a boxy house, alright, festooned with vines and flowers; no T.V antennae; a gate, a fence a concrete strip from the roadway to the front door; and a flower garden. I looked back down the road; nothing but dry grass and a bony stray cow. This had to be the old lady's place.

The front gate opened easily; I half-expected a yapping dog to rush me. The front door was open. Wary, I shouted, "Hello. Anybody there?"

Silence. No dog. No old lady. "Hello...Ma Memu?"

Someone answered: "At the back. Is that you Waverider?"

I stepped nervously round the side of the house, bowed my head under the low branches of a cherry tree, cleared my throat and prepared to introduce myself in a manner befitting a newspaper reporter from the city.

"Oh... it's you... I thought you was my son Waverider come to wish me happy birthday," the old lady said.

She thought I was her son! Well, as my eyes clapped onto her face, I thought this old lady sitting under the breadfruit tree was my Grandmother! The spitting image of my grandmother! Whom I had seen only once on her sick and dying bed!

I remember they had to lift me up to look down her face. I must have been five or six years old and she was lying on this four-poster bed, large and blanketed and breathing in a frightening nostrilly way. Everyone around the bed her that day whispered and seemed drenched in sadness. It was my first visit to a house of death.

This old lady, this Ma Memu, was the spitting image, I tell you. That was the first shock. The second shock hit me like a ricochet.

I was expecting the oldest woman on the island to be someone shriveled, bony, confined to a rocking chair; wearing a headkerchief; giving off an odor of folk medication; hard of hearing, her jaw working up and down; her voice raspy and complaining.

This old lady was a heavyset presence fanning herself under a breadfruit tree (despite the leafy shade and the breeze sweeping up from the ocean below) with slow thoughtful motion of her wrist. Her face was a shiny black moon; she had hair copious as butterflies, and bosoms that looked large and unused.

I waited to be summoned closer.

Her backyard was swept clean; a few chickens had scooped a bowl of repose for themselves in the ground; there were banana plantings and sugar cane stalks and short papaw trees. Everything seemed lush and friendly with green life, so much so I began to wonder what force of nature kept it flourishing this way.

You see, the island was going through a dry spell; there were water restrictions in the town centers; yet somehow the front garden here seemed in full bloom, as if it had rained just yesterday and every day before that.

My eye fell on seven calabashes laid out on her backsteps, their insides turned up to the sun. I had always marveled at the smooth clean insides of a calabash; they made such perfect dippers of water; I used to keep my collection of seashells in a calabash.

"So he sent you to see me?" the old lady said out of the blue.

"Who?"

"You know who? That man of newspaper words. Couldn't come himself. He must be getting old and lazy these days."

She laughed in a way that startled me. Not an old lady's raspy laugh. A young woman's coquettish laugh, her bosom heaving a little with a young woman's contempt for pretentious young men.

"Last time I saw him was twenty five years ago. Came to interview me, he say. Century-maker, he call me. Said he was going to make me famous. Said it was a miracle how I live so long. I told him he should have been there the day I was born. Every birth is a miracle. And every day after that is a celebration of that miracle. As for making me famous... fame is a cologne for the mean flea-bitten dogs of the world."

"Twenty five years ago? Mr. Pinks came here twenty five years ago?" I could barely contain myself. "You know, today I am twenty five years old." I said.

"Mon Dieu!" she laughed again, shaking her head.

Discombobulated was a word Mr. Pinks was fond of using. It made him sound educated. I considered it ridiculous, a word filled with wind and too many syllables, like a shoe several sizes larger than the foot it was meant to cover. But I have to tell you: discombobulated was the exact fit for the state of my mind.

"He asked me fool questions... like if I born here, if I remember my parents...."

I made a note not to ask her any fool questions, though to tell the truth her accent was strange. And add to that her lapses into French, I was thinking: she must be from Martinique. There was voodoo in her eyes, her ample body, her chicken-cluttered yard. No, not Martinique. She had to be from Haiti.

"Kept asking me what were the secrets to my long life. What foods? what faith? what habits? You know what I told him?"

"What?"

"I said to him: Mr. Pinks, I have no time for fool questions... I am going to tell you a bedtime story."

"A bedtime story?"

"That's what I said: a bedtime story".

I cleared my throat and said, "Well, listen... I didn't come all this way to listen to bedtime stories."

Suddenly she lowered her head and for a moment it seemed she had abruptly fallen asleep. I got the strange feeling, however, that under those heavy eyelids she was watching me, that she was offering me a blind chance to slip away.

What happened instead was my legs became weak, as if tired of holding up my body: body holding up the weight of my spirit: spirit and body manacled like prisoners in Ma Memu's backyard: legs complaining, unwilling to assist me in flight.

So I lowered myself on my haunches and I waited.

My body felt even heavier squatting on my haunches. I thought of moving, sitting on her backsteps, but I was seized by a cramp and locked in that squatting position, muscles tense and aching; I would have been forced to crawl on all fours like a dog if I tried to move.

The sun was sprinkling through the leaves of the breadfruit tree. I became aware of the odor from the soursop tree as if the fruit was ready to be picked. In fact there was the odor of ripeness everywhere unlike what you might expect from an old lady's backyard, given the fowlpen, the chickens and the rooster. Ripeness, not the odor of things rotting; no fruit lay squashed and decaying anywhere.

I looked up at the old lady-still fanning herself, head still lowered, chest moving in a faint breathing rhythm. I stared at her-God help me, the spitting image of my grandmother!-and I wondered: she's supposed to be 125 years old! where are the years? They were nowhere on her face, unless the wrinkles and creases of age lay on her insides. What I saw outside was an unblemished surface, like the insides of the calabash.

And this way she had of speaking, in sliding tones like notes on a musical scale - now a child, now a girl, adolescent, woman ! You could hear the passage of a hundred and twenty five years in her voice, in the silences that punctuated her words during which you smelled odours of the world around you.

"Who is your son?" I asked.

"You are my son," she said, smiling.

"No... I mean, Waverider... the fellow you were expecting?"

"Oh, he will come. He brings me a birthday present every year."

"Where does he live?"

"By the sea."

At this point, tired of stooping like a tribesman in a forest, and puzzled by her answers, I tried to heave myself up on my feet. Suddenly it was easy. Whatever was holding my thighs in a vise had released them. I jumped up in surprise; I told myself it was time to make a retreat; not too hasty, not too obvious.

"Listen, I have to go soon," I said.

"No... stay and wait for Waverider... he should be here any minute... he could tell you many stories."

Since I still had an article to write I began to take note of the yard, a few more details about her person. I would have to invent more back in the office. Still, I was puzzled: considering the importance of this assignment why hadn't Mr. Pinks sent a photographer with me?

"I told Mr. Pinks a story about Waverider and he didn't believe me," she said.

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him that once, long long ago, back in the colonial days, when pirate ships use to sail these Caribbean waters, islanders used to hang lanterns in coconut trees. Waverider's father would do that. He'd hang the lanterns in the trees and lure the pirate ships onto reefs. The ships would sink to the bottom of the sea with chests of gold in their bellies...."

She caught me staring at her and once again she laughed. This time I laughed too; I had never before heard so preposterous a tale.

"That is where Waverider gets his gifts. Sometimes they float up from the bottom of the sea and wash ashore. All kinds of precious ornaments... I told Mr. Pinks I could make him a wealthy man if he listened to me. He wouldn't believe a word I said."

The lime tree was giving off a scent that swirled around my head and drifted away with the wind. My mind was in turmoil. My legs were light and springy and ready to rush away, but now I couldn't tear myself away.

I had heard stories from time to time about discoveries on our beach of old coins and medallions. I remember our history teacher, Mr. Gravesande, had jokingly given the class an assignment: we were to walk the beaches at the eastern tip of the island and search for lost treasure: for doubloons and guineas. Someone did find a few gold coins and took them to the bank. An article in the newspapers about the rare value of the coins and the possibility of sunken treasure off our shores threw our island into a frenzy.

For weeks after people actually combed the beaches with flashlights during the night; tourists, too, all hoping to become instant millionaires.

A part of me views such stories as fodder for stupid, gullible folk from rundown neglected villages-Choiseul, Bathgate, Pompey. The behavior it encourages is often shameful. Another part of me, hearing this tale again as if from its source, was hanging in limbo: wanting to dismiss it as a joke by a crazy old lady; at the same time, I half-expected her to reach into her bosom and offer proof, a shiny necklace, for instance; or pull from the folds of her dress a tarnished gold coin, large and round, with strange inscriptions.

Instead, a soft voice, croaky, like my grandmother's on her sick bed, said, "Come over here. Come and give the old lady a birthday kiss?"

Now, I'm not the kissing kind; I didn't come all this way to kiss an old lady. But when someone summons you in your grandmother's voice, you tremble and pout; you lower your head like a schoolboy; you shuffle forward, praying for release from the next few seconds of agony.

I moved toward her, prepared to peck her on the cheek; I had to look into her face, that shiny black moon. I leaned forward awkwardly. There were a few pimples where crinkled eyebags should have been.

Then a voice that was distinctly that of a young woman said, "You so shy. Come closer." Broad arms reached out and pulled me into the waiting folds of her lap. "So shy. Close your eyes and kiss me."

I could feel the warmth of that massive flesh (there was nothing, no bodices, no old-fashioned slips under her clothes). I could hear inside her body the sound of her enormous breathing, like a furnace burning up the air she inhaled. I let myself be wrapped and enfolded, then squeezed gently and long in those fleshy arms.

I raised my head, placed my cheeks against hers, and was surprised at how soft they felt, how tender and yielding like baby fat. In the next instant with my eyes firmly closed, her lips had found mine.

It was this kiss that woke me up. Her lips were those of a young girl in the first flutter of passion, giving herself nervously, heart racing. Her hands found my hands and directed them under her arm sleeves to her breasts. There the flesh was smooth and firm; there the nipples were hard, wanting to be pinched; there I thought this had gone far enough.

I opened my eyes; I found her eyes wide open; they'd been open all along. I felt awkward and frightened and I pulled away. It snapped the spell. Her chin fell down on her chest and for a moment I was afraid she would topple over to the ground. Instead she started rocking gently back and forth, humming and chanting strange words.

I backed away. She made no effort to stop me. My hair got entangled in the branches of the cherry tree. I thought I saw a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, but by then I was in full flight, determined to let nothing get in my way.
Only once before had I fled from someone's grasp and ambivalent intentions. A police officer, a friend of my father, promoted to Sergeant and a desk job, had playfully arrested me. He'd surprised a group of schoolboys raiding the mango tree in the yard at the back of the police station. It was a daring raid. The tree because of its location was considered off limits, its fruit left to rot in the yard. We thought all the police were out on duty. The Sergeant surprised us.

In the scramble to get away, each man for himself, I tripped and fell and was paralyzed by the Sergeant's voice ordering me to stop. He dragged me inside by the neck and showed me a cell. He threatened to lock me up forever, and pretended to push me in the cell. Crying and pleading to be spared, I was eventually released with a warning.

That warning and that incident, I think, have scarred me for life. I have a foolish fear of our island policemen in helmet and khaki. Each time I am approached for any reason by one of them fear rises inside me like acid.

Fleeing that old lady's arms, her yard with its poultry and abundant trees, I felt an older fear: of badly lit villages, shabby dwellings, crumbling bridges and mud-cratered roads; of people trapped there with their children and goats and bony stray cattle; an older fear of spending the rest of my life in so desolate a place.

I hurried toward the main road. I twisted my ankle but didn't stop to inspect it. I wanted to get back to the town, to my office, familiar streets, my house.

To my surprise and relief the same skinny Indian driver who had brought me here was parked off the main road, his engine idling. He was waiting for travelers.

I jumped in and told him to drive. He scanned the road for more passengers. My ankle began to pain and I became irritable. I told him I was a newspaperman. I told him the Government was about to announce a crackdown on illegal residents working on the island. I told him to drive if he knew what was good for him. He flashed me a look of fear and contempt, then slowly, still looking around for fares, he put the minivan in motion.

Back in the office I wrote a story about the old lady; I told our readers about lanterns hung in trees and Spanish galleons blown off course by hurricane winds and gold bullion lying at the bottom of the sea in moss covered hulls just off our shores. I told them there were fortunes to be made by anyone with patience roaming the beaches. I wrote all this and hobbled home.

People who go to Test matches expecting miracles would believe you if you tell them that fortunes like chocolate cookies were made in heaven then dropped from the sky through a chute. People who watch and wait for one glorious shot, that stroke of wondrous magic, to last a lifetime, could be led by the nose through portholes into the paradise. They'll find nothing, but never mind, the shot of a lifetime always beckons. And the paradise, we know, is always elsewhere.

In the following days I never felt such pain and discomfort. My foot was bandaged; my movements were excruciatingly slow. Imagine my horror at what I had become: a young man hobbling around town; people staring, people asking, what happened? then looking disappointed when they find out it was only a sprained ankle.

I decided to ask for sick leave.

Sick leave? Mr. Pinks was incensed.

One of his favorite complaints about islanders was their failure to adapt. A little rain falls, what do islanders do? They walk through the rain getting soaked, or stand for hours under shop awnings as if they'd never heard of raincoats and umbrellas and galoshes.

Sick leave? For a sprained ankle? Get a walking stick, he railed at me.

Let me tell you: at that moment I felt like bashing his breadfruit of a baldhead with a cricket stump.

The old lady's story set fire to the island. It was the talk, in between cheering and barracking the players, all around the cricket ground for the rest of the series. I stayed in the office nursing my ankle and waiting for telephone calls.

A professor from our island university called asking for more information; he said he was doing research in "African retentions". Another professor, an anthropologist visiting from California, wanted names and addresses and was willing to cover all expenses if I led him to the source of "this fabulous tale". People started scouring the beaches; even well-off islanders drove up in their cars, usually at night, carrying flashlights.

For awhile nothing much happened; the excitement began to die down; then somebody made a discovery of six gold coins-"I turn around, I see these shiny things lying there, under a rock, just like that!"-and the whole gold-hunting madness started again.

Tourist people who you would expect to know better were now shamelessly walking the beaches with toy spades, towels around their waist, ignoring the surf, eyes cast down. The Tourist Board called to ask if the paper was going to do a follow-up on the old lady article. They spoke to Mr. Pinks. Mr. Pinks decided a follow-up would be good for tourism.

This is where we came to the crossroads, the parting of the ways.

Because of his prior involvement in this story (and some undisclosed anxiety over its subject) Mr. Pinks insisted I see the old lady one more time, sprained ankle or no sprained ankle.

I refused.

He reminded me that the people at the U.S. Embassy were still following my development with keen interest. I sucked my teeth and pouted.

He accused me of laziness, lack of ambition.

I told him he was acting like "a pussy".

For long steaming seconds we stood in the office, glowering at each other like gladiators in a Roman arena. He said he was "appalled" at my language; he told me I was about to walk alone into my future.

Islanders reach a point in their cramped lives where the longing to take wing, to stretch their limbs, overpowers good sense. In fact, good sense is what keeps some of us trudging along, always yielding and dreaming, year upon year. In calling Mr. Pinks "a pussy" (I'd borrowed the word from a disgruntled character in an American movie) I was revving up engines. I was looking at empty blue sky and I was saying: enough is enough. Time to take off.
I remember how I felt walking out of the office that day: loose-limbed, untouchable, not seeing anyone, brushing past desks, not caring, heading for the last doorway to freedom.
Everyone on our island remembers the trial of Dannyboy D'Henrieux. He was the gardener accused of murdering the wife of a Bank manager. Everyone was shocked when the news broke, and to this day many people believe he didn't do it, suspecting that the Bank official had set him up or had strangled the woman himself.

I was assigned to cover the early trial proceedings for awhile. Those were dull days, sitting there listening to testimony, to the wrangling of nasal-toned lawyers. But during the time I was there I was often lost in contemplation of D'Henrieux's face; I had no qualms staring at him; I searched for telltale signs, muscle twitches or something that would give him away.

What I saw instead was a man passively listening to every word, sometimes lowering his head, aware all the time of every movement around him; a gentle man, you thought, who stood up and walked calmly, obediently, back to his cell at the end of the day; who understood that his fate was no longer in his hands and was resigned to that fact.

They found him guilty; they gave a life sentence with hard labor; soon after the case was forgotten.

I mention the D'Henrieux case now because in the ensuing weeks after I walked out of Mr. Pinks' office, (for which I received my severance pay) in those first weeks at home, feeling severed and bitter, I kept bringing back his face, his manacled presence in the court room; and I wondered if in his mind those trial days might not have seemed the most extraordinary moments of his life.

Like me D'Henrieux had passed through our island school system. He must have had dreams of becoming somebody; he must have worked hard at his gardener job, secure, barely noticing the passing of years; until that moment.

They never established a motive for the killing.

D'Henrieux remained passive and non-committal to the end. I was thinking: at some point in his life he must have felt betrayed. Waking up one morning, say, on his birthday, he might have started brooding about his life: where was it taking him? what might be its hidden purpose? And then the act of murder-assuming he did it-and the courtroom drama, the focus and attention of the whole island, emotions split between sympathy and outrage. Could it be his entire life was leading up to this: the leap from obscure gardener to a murderer on trial?

The parallel between our lives intrigued me. I spent those weeks and two more weeks after that sitting at my window, watching islanders go back and forth, ants in Ant City, and feeling abandoned.

I began to see my life as a gleaming machete; all I had to do was step outside and wield it in the canefields of my dreams; chop a few people; get thrown in jail; chew on the meaning of what I had done.

On average we don't have too many murderers on our island. This doesn't mean that no one contemplates murder. I suspect the thought springs to mind at least once in every islander's life. Most of us escape the thought. Some of us enter politics believing they know what's best for everyone and get away with blue murder.

Looking back I can say this: in those weeks when I wrestled with impulses like so many scorpions scuttling across the floor of my mind, Mr. Pinks could hardly imagine how close he came to spending his last fat days on this earth.