Continental Drift

Tyrone digs into his pocket and comes up with some change, which he passes into the old man’s outstretched paw.

“Merci, monsieur. Jé wè bouche pé,” he warns — see but don’t say. “La famille semblé …” he whispers, and he looks warily over his bent shoulder, like a dog warning off other dogs as he’s about to eat. “Soso na pé tué, soso, jodi-à!” A pig is to be killed today. “Pour Erzulie, ‘Ti Kita, Gé Rouge, Pié Sèche. Pour les loas, les Invisibles, monsieur!”

“Qui, Papa?”

“Qui, monsieur.” Then he warns Tyrone to get himself gone, for this is not his country. This is Africa, he hisses. “Poussé allé. Ça lan Guinée.”

Tyrone shakes his head no and asks where they’ve gone to kill the pig. He has to see some people now, tonight, for he has important business with them.

The old man jerks and turns himself around, wobbling on the pivot of one leg, a twitching, sudden kind of dance, almost a seizure. Then, his back to Tyrone, facing through the cluster of huts toward the sea, he speaks. His words seem jumbled at first, incoherent, uttered as chant, prayer or prophecy, Tyrone can’t tell which, but the old man’s voice and words frighten him.

“Nèg’ nwè, con ça ou yé, y’ap coupé lavie ou débor!” A black man like you, the old man warns, will eat with you, will drink with you, will cut the life out of you. “Santa Marie la Madeleine, sonné une sonne pou’ moin, pour m’allé.” Ring a bell for me, Mary Magdalene, so I may go. “Sonné une sonne pou’ les petites nagé.” Ring a bell for the drowned children.

Reaching forward with both hands, Tyrone grabs the old man’s shoulders, and calling him by name, “François!” as if to break the spell, demands to know where the hounfor is located. Now, he must go there now, or it will be too late in the night to do his business.

François stops his dance, and he laughs, a long, loud, sardonic laugh. “Bien,” he says. “C’est bien bon.” He will take him to the hounfor, he says, giggling. Now. But first there must be more money passed between them.

Tyrone unfolds a dollar bill and gives it to the old man, who limps past, mumbling and grumbling, one minute complaining about having to do this dirty business, the next promising Tyrone that he will love what he will soon see. “Ou malhonnête, compé, compé à moin,” he says. You are dishonest, my friend. And a second later, “Nan Guinée plaisi-à belle! Oh, a n’allé wé yo!” In Africa, pleasure is beautiful, as we shall see.

François heads into the darkness, taking an invisible path off the moonlit lane at the edge of the village. Tyrone hurries to catch up to the old man’s bent form and follows him, a few feet behind, through the brush a ways, until he hears a stream nearby, where they turn right and walk upstream along the rocky bank. The old man walks quickly, more easily, it seems in rock and brush than back in the village, as if, once he stepped into the bush, his broken foot were miraculously healed.

2

For the Jamaican, the next five hours are difficult. He and Dubois had arrived at the Haitian settlement on New Providence later than they planned, which gave them little enough time as it was to anchor, come ashore, round up the Haitians and get out to sea again. Dubois was too cautious coming across from the Keys, afraid, perhaps, of the open sea, though he claimed he’d fished in the North Atlantic off New England in rough waters many times and this, to him, was a pleasure, easy sailing, a two-hundred-mile run due east across the Florida Straits and the Gulf Stream, south of the Biminis and north of Andros, with a mate, the Jamaican, who’s made the trip a hundred times. Even so, he held the Belinda Blue back to half-speed, not much more than fifteen knots, and when they arrived at Coral Harbour, it was already ten o’clock at night, and though they didn’t really need gas, Dubois insisted on filling the tanks. Then, because of the time, they had trouble getting anyone at the marina to sell them gas, which delayed them yet another hour.