Vanise looks over her shoulder at the yellow dog, who lifts his pointed head and stares at them a second, then resumes working at the hambone. Don’t worry, Vanise says to the boy.
A moment later, George kicks open the screened door and comes out carrying a small, stained mattress. He motions with his burly head for them to follow and hurries across the yard past the dog to the shed. Hefting the mattress onto one shoulder, he unlocks a rusty padlock on the low door and yanks it open. Then he tosses the mattress inside. He stands away and points into the darkness and says, Dere,
Vanise leans forward and peers into the darkness and heat of the hut. She smells chickens of long ago, the remnants of dried, powdered droppings ground into the dirt floor, old feathers and tufts, bits of grass and seeds, yellow hulls of ancient corn in corners, dust motes floating in the air.
The last time he used this shed, George explains, he stored some marijuana for his brother-in-law, who made heaps of money off it and went to America and never paid him a shilling for his troubles. Ever since then, he’s kept the shed locked and empty, because every time he went near it, he got mad all over again. He figures if he lets the Haitians use it awhile, he’ll forget about his brother-in-law’s betrayal.
George points to their baskets, then inside the shed. Vanise understands, swings her baby onto her left arm and drags her basket into the darkness. Claude follows her example, and when they emerge they find George seated back on the stoop, his bottle in his lap, waving them over. Like obedient children, they go and stand before him.
He explains loudly and slowly what the arrangement will be, and though they do not understand a word of what he says, they know a bargain has been struck. In a few days, it will become clear to them that George will provide shelter and food for them, yams and corn meal, rice, chicken backs, sometimes pork and maybe fish, when he can get it cheap, and they will work for him, in the fields, house and yard, and when George drives home from town in his taxi, drunk, loud and angry at the world, he’ll stumble through the kitchen, grab his bottle and cross the backyard in the silvery moonlight to the henhouse, where he’ll swing open the door and enter. Pushing the boy off the mattress, moving the sleeping infant aside, he’ll yank down his trousers and make Vanise open up to him. The first time this happens, the boy will sit shivering all night on the stoop. After that, he will crawl into the man’s car and sleep on the back seat until daylight wakes him.
Vanise and Claude and the baby, whom they soon start to call Charles, will stay on the island of North Caicos hidden away like this for many months, before they have learned enough of George McKissick’s words to speak to the young man they replaced, Robbie, a thin, lazy brown man who comes around every week or so (more often after the morning he accidentally discovers Vanise in the yard) to make vain attempts to collect his pay.
Robbie is a kindly but stupid man, and it does not occur to him that this silent woman and boy are Haitians, until finally the boy speaks to him, asks in a halting, garbled way how to find a man with a boat to take them to America. To hurt McKissick, who now believes he will never have to pay Robbie for the work he did, and also to get his old job back, he will help them escape, he says, not to America, which is probably impossible to arrange without money, but straight to the Bahamas, where boats go all the time. There are plenty of small wooden cargo boats shipping salt for food, with captains not at all averse to carrying a pretty young Haitian woman belowdecks in a corner of the hold. If she must bring along her child and nephew, no matter. They can be shoved aside when necessary.
Columbus stayed on the island for only a few days, when, no longer afraid of being lost, certain of where he had landed, he departed for Cipangu, Japan, which “the Indians here call Cuba.” North Caicos itself became lost. The admiral’s landing and brief stay here went recorded as having occurred way to the north in the Bahamas, at Watling’s Island.
Ponce de León, after fourteen days ashore, set sail and headed north from Whitby, where a small stream parted the beach and entered the sea. Glad to be rid of the place, his head once again filled with visions of a new youth, a new life, a new old age, he quickly forgot the island. He would not even have marked it on his chart, had it not been for the reef on which his ship had foundered and were it not, therefore, a place to avoid.
