Claude hurried forward, the baby clinging to his hip with its legs, and once behind the wall of bags of sea salt, in darkness again, heard the fat man lift the hatch from below, heave his bulk up the ladder, then close it with a bang. The boy reached out until he felt one of Vanise’s ankles. He could hear her heavy, rasping breath, as if she had been chased by a huge, fierce animal and had barely escaped to this cavelike hiding place.
You’ll be all right again soon, he told her.
She asked for her baby, and he passed the child over. Then she asked him to find her headcloth, which she had lost.
He groped between the sacks and finally came to it and handed it to her. A few seconds later, she passed the crumpled cloth back and told him to soak it in the bilge water for her, which he did. In a few moments, he could hear the baby sucking, and Vanise’s breath had slowed and disappeared beneath the sound of the water against the hull and the engine aft, and the boy leaned back again, stretched out his legs and rested.
Sometime later, as in a dream, though it was not a dream, the slender, brown-skinned man and the white man with the long brown hair appeared in the hold together, the white man sending Claude and the baby aft with a gesture, then holding the flashlight on Vanise while the other man silently raped her. When it was the white man’s turn, he gave over the light, pulled down his trousers, said a few words in English that Claude overheard,
Back in Cockburn Harbour, when Vanise and Charles and Claude had first descended into the hold, day had gone clean away, and night now went away too, for there was only blackness, broken unpredictably, swiftly and absolutely by the men from above with their flashlight and few words and quick, violent moves that seemed to relax the men for a while, as if they were injecting themselves with a drug — the fat man, who, after the first time, came with a flask of clear rum in one hand and drank from it and gave it to Vanise to sip from when he was done with her, and the slender brown man, who came to the hold alone now and tried talking to Vanise and then got angry because she would not respond, so he slapped her, and the young white man, not much older than a boy, but hairy across his chest and shoulders, his stringy long arms and legs casting wild shadows when he took the woman, as if he were beating her. When the men were down in the hold, their flashlight shattering the darkness, the place seemed tiny, cramped, closed in upon the human beings, as if they were under a huge house; but when the men had gone and had taken their light away with them, the place seemed to open up and grow enormous, like a black tent. And with both day and night gone, all of time was gone, too, except for the scratchy, mechanical time that passed through whenever the men appeared, abrasive interruptions that Claude had begun to accept like a shift in dreams, his mind returning gratefully, as soon as the men were gone, to the sweet-flowing timeless dream of perpetual darkness — when suddenly the throb of the motor ceased, and the sound of the sea smacking the planks near his head diminished, and the steady lift and drop of the boat changed to a gentle, rocking motion.
He heard a thud against the side of the boat, and voices, the captain’s and the Englishman’s, and then, astonished, Claude heard a Haitian voice, a man shouting in Creole.
Claude sat upright, and hearing now a mumbling mix of English and Creole as several people came aboard, understanding more of the English words than the Haitians seemed to and more of the Creole than did the captain and his crewmen, he decided that this was a prearranged stop, that the
Haitian people, Claude said to Vanise.
How many?
I don’t know. More than two. Listen.
Police.
