As I looked, I realized that everything I saw was quivering. It was that shimmering of the air that we had seen before, a little and a long while ago. I thought at first it was the heat from the flames, but then I heard the sound that had come with it, that first time, the sound like the sighing of the wind through casuarina pines. It rose, and grew shrill, drowning out even the roar of the helicopters’ engines. Perhaps it was the last message from the dying tree.
Lou clutched my hand very hard.
Then the sound dropped away.
There was no haze over the sky now; it was clear blue. A breeze was blowing round our bodies, and we were breathing cooler air. Sunlight shone all around us, bouncing up from white sand and clear water. We were standing on Long Pond Cay, facing the flats, all shining and still with a tiny line of silver-top palms on the horizon. I could feel the seawater oozing into my sneakers. The wind breathed softly in the casuarina trees behind us, and under it was the slow rhythmic whisper of the sea.
The still water of the great inland lagoon before us was dimpled by the upturned tails of bonefish, flashing silver as they dug their noses into the muddy bottom, hunting for food. Small ripples walked across the surface, echoes of the waves out at sea. The tide was coming in.
SIX
When we came home, to Grammie calling us to make ourselves clean and tidy for supper, I realized that we’d been gone only for that one suspended hour between the falling and the rising of the tide. However long our time in the Otherworld had seemed to us, it was barely sixty minutes of real time, the time of our own world. I felt dazed, as if I’d been deep asleep for a long time and hadn’t properly woken up yet.
Lou was completely himself again, a bouncing hungry seven-year-old, flinging his arms round Grammie’s broad waist as she stood at the kitchen counter slicing summer squash. She wiped her hand automatically on her apron and patted his curly black head.
“You had a good day, then?”
“Fine,” I said. “Saw a big eagle ray in the cut, coming back.”
The huge diamond-shaped fish had coasted lazily beneath our boat, flapping its spotted sides like wings.
“Good luck sign,” Grammie said cheerfully. “So long as you don’t step on him.”
“Is Grand back?”
“He still in Nassau. Staying with his brother. They got appointments with Government.” She sighed, and reached for another squash. “Much good that going to do. You see anything happening over to Long Pond Cay?”
“No,” I said. I looked down at Lou, and he gave me a small private smile. I knew that if Grand had been home, I might at that moment have tried to tell him about everything that had happened. But not Grammie. She was far too practical. “Child, you got too much imagination,” she’d say.
And so I have, but that’s not where the Otherworld came from.
I had trouble falling asleep that night. There were too many memories crowding through my head, too many sounds and sights and smells. And there was Lou, my different little brother who was in fact far more different than I could possibly have imagined.
I looked across at his bed, where this small skinny boy lay fast asleep, breathing quietly and evenly. “In our world, he is magical, he is predestined,” Annie had said. “Only he can save this world.”
One thing was for sure. Sooner or later we would find ourselves in the Otherworld again. And then what would happen?
When Grand did come home, next day, he was fit to be tied. The group of French and American developers calling themselves Sapphire Island had been making their plans for months, perhaps years. They had applied for all kinds of official permissions, perfectly legally, while nobody on our island had any idea of what was happening, and they’d been granted most of them. Pretty soon, they would begin making changes on Long Pond Cay.
They would destroy it, Grand said. He took me into town for the weekly shopping expedition at the market, where he bent the ear of anyone who would listen. There’s only one big market, so everyone goes there sooner or later—and they all know Grand. He stood just outside the door, where there’s a convenient patch of shade from the roof, and carried on to a group of his friends.
“It’s criminal!” he said. “They buying our land! This the whole state of the islands, in a nutshell—of the whole Caribbean!”
“Tell it like it is, James!” said Jerry Salt from the liquor store. He’s a tall man with muscles, and dreadlocks. He patted Grand on the back.
Grand fixed him with a cold eye. “You know Long Pond,” he said. “You and my boy went there all the time. It’s all one system—beaches, land, sea, creeks, mangroves, sea grass, fish, birds—all one ecosystem. We all part of it. But it’s Nature, it’s got to be free to go its own way. That western shoreline changes shape every month. If these people try to fix it solid, the whole ecosystem going to die.”
“They bringing in a dredge next week,” said Mr. Wells, who worked for the telephone company. “Gonna dredge the creek and the lagoon.”
I thought of that great peaceful stretch of water in the middle of Long Pond Cay, the lagoon where the bonefish drift in to feed on the changing tides, and chills went down my spine.
“Birds nest there,” Grand said. He thumped one hand into the palm of the other. “Young fish shelter there. Conch breed there. All that going to go, if they build a harbor, a hotel, a casino! A place just for people is no place at all.”
“Right on!” said Jerry Salt.
“Yeah!” said a couple of teenagers, but they were grinning and I didn’t think they meant it.
A sunburned American with a blond ponytail said quietly, “Long Pond sure is a beautiful spot.” He wore raggedy shorts and a T-shirt. He was probably one of the boat people.
Grand pulled a piece of paper out of his little canvas briefcase. It was a notice he’d carefully printed out from his computer the night before. “I putting this up in the market—there’s a meeting in the community center this Friday. Seven o’clock. We starting a petition to Government, to save the cay. Come! All of you come!”
They all nodded their heads, and we went into the market. It took a long time to get the groceries, because Grand started all over again, talking to everyone in there too.
Lou and I went to that meeting, partly because I begged Grammie to let us, and partly because Grand needed me to work the slide machine. I knew how to do that, from school, and Grand had all kinds of pictures of Long Pond Cay that he wanted to show. Photography was his hobby, and he’d been taking wonderful nature photographs for years, underwater as well as on land. They were really good slides, of everything and everybody that lived on the cay: terns, nighthawks, plovers, oystercatchers, kingbirds, our pair of ospreys; then under the sea: sharks, barracuda, rays, mullet, snapper, bonefish, crabs, shellfish—even the little round jellyfish that live on the shallow bottom, green-fringed with weed. Lou and I used to throw those jellyfish at each other when we were younger, when Grand wasn’t looking.
The slides went on and on: palmetto, mangrove, buttonwood, bay cedar, sea grape, sea oats, seven-year apples, casuarina pines . . . lizards, hermit crabs . . . everything except people. No people lived on Long Pond Cay. Yet.
There were plenty of people at the meeting, though. Local people, from the high school headmaster and some clergymen, the doctor and the dentist, on down to ordinary folks like us, and a few retired Americans and English people who had houses on the island. There were a bunch of boat people from cruising yachts too, Americans and Canadians mostly, though this was summer and most of the boats come in winter and spring. The man with the blond ponytail was there, in a clean shirt and pants this time. “Just want you to know that anything you want us to do, we’ll do,” he said to Grand. “We come to these islands to get away from development, not to watch it eating up the wild places.”
He was a nice man, I think, and I could tell that Grand liked him, but it was this same blond American who was the cause of the trouble in the end, without intending it. The meeting started, and Grand
gave a very persuasive talk, clicking his fingers at me whenever he wanted a slide changed. I managed to get them all in the right order at the right time, except at the very end, when I found them starting all over again from the beginning.
“No—someone else’s turn now,” said Grand. Everyone laughed, and Mr. Ferguson our headmaster took over.
All the speeches said the same kind of thing, about how Long Pond Cay was a special untouched precious place, where birds and fish and all the other wild things were able to live free, all of them depending on each other. It was okay for people to walk on the beach, they said, and for the bonefishermen to come in their boats, because these people just stayed for a little while and then went away again. But if anything were to be built on Long Pond, even a few houses, the whole ecosystem would be changed. And if a huge development like Sapphire Island came there, digging out the shallow lagoon and creeks and covering the sandy flats with concrete, the whole wilderness would die.
I knew just what they meant. I thought of walking barefoot with Lou over the soft mud-sand beside the lagoon, with mangrove shoots prickling between our toes, and silence all around us except for a few terns peeping, and the occasional small splash of a fish. And just for a moment, a picture of the endless grey city of the Otherworld flashed into my mind.
Mr. Ferguson said Long Pond Cay was a heritage that should be preserved and passed on to my generation. He said this would be true for us too when we grew up, that it was true for all generations, and he quoted old Chief Seattle, the American Indian.
“This we know:
The earth does not belong to us
We belong to the earth. . . .”
One of the clergymen, I don’t know his name, said that God gave us our islands in trust, and we had to look after them. Our local member of the government got up then, and said yes that was absolutely true, but we must also invest our talents wisely, and not bury them like the man in the Bible story. He was being careful not to offend anyone, I think, so he ended up not saying much on either side, for or against Sapphire Island Resort.
But after him, a friend of Grammie’s called Mrs. Ernestine stood up, a tall portly lady with a church hat and a big voice, and she made a very fiery speech about the islands being for the islanders, and not just a playground for rich white foreigners to gamble and play golf.
“We hear this big talk about investment!” Mrs. Ernestine cried. “Who investing in what? Big foreign companies investing in us, in our pretty beaches and our blue sea, that’s what, and taking they profits home to they own countries to enjoy! Long Pond Cay belong to us—Sapphire Island would belong to them! Let’s sign our petition, people, and show the Government how we truly feel!”
We all cheered, and Mrs. Ernestine sat down, looking pleased, and fanned herself with her hat.
The blond American got up next, which was brave of him considering he was a foreigner. He spoke rather softly, so you had to strain to hear him, but he was worth hearing. He said he thought he was a typical boat person, or “yachtie,” and that there were hundreds like him in our waters every year.
“We’re an independent lot, but we all love these islands,” he said. “We come here for several months of the year to escape from noise and bustle. We’re trying hard now not to pollute the water of your harbor. We used to be bad about that, but we’ve listened to people like Mr. Peel—”
—that was Grand, and I nudged Grammie proudly—“—and we’ve learned.” He looked round him a little nervously, but his voice rose. He said, “I think your government has to learn too, to limit large-scale development, and allow only small hotels, on islands big enough to support them. Long Pond Cay is beautiful and peaceful, and part of the reason why we all come here. Sapphire Island Resort doesn’t belong there.”
People clapped when he sat down, but almost at once another man bounced to his feet and started yelling, a loud angry yell. He was Bahamian, but I didn’t recognize him, I thought he must be from one of the outer settlements. He was a big man with a shiny bald head and two chins, and a yellow shirt. He started right in on the boat guy.
“You don’t belong here neither!” he bellowed. “What you know about us? You sit out there on your million-dollar boat, you go catching our fish, you don’t do nothing for this island—we need jobs, man! Big hotels, not small little hotels! We need investment in our economy! We need money for better roads and better schools!”
Some people began to get caught up in this, and to shout “Yeah!” at intervals.
“We need jobs and Sapphire Island goin’ give us them!” the fat man shouted. “Let me tell you, they goin’ rebuild the main road!”
“Yeah!” shouted the people around him.
“Let me tell you, they goin’ help expand the airport!”
“Yeah!”
“Let me tell you, they goin’ hire drivers and construction workers and hotel staff and all kinds of jobs! How many people here goin’ say no to one of those jobs, eh? You show me your hand if you goin’ say no to a job—”
And the meeting fell apart, as he bellowed on, and people jumped to their feet to bellow back at him, and Grand tried in vain to shout for order. At the end, the best we could do was to stand at the door of the community center with copies of the petition, and try to get people to sign as they left. Maybe half of them signed.
“We’ll collect signatures on Sunday after church,” I said to Grand on the way home, trying to cheer him up. “We’ll get a whole lot more!”
We were all squished in the cab of his truck, Grammie sitting silently beside me with Lou asleep on her lap. Grand took a long heavy breath, and let it out again.
“It goin’ get harder than we imagine, Trey,” he said. “That man was from off-island, I never saw him before. They brought him in to stir things up, and tell lies. It a lie about rebuilding the road, and extending the airport—Sapphire Island not doing any such thing. They won’t hire many workers from this island either, they’ll bring skilled labor in from outside. All they will do is pave over our land, and ruin our waters, and develop all the life out of Long Pond Cay.”
“But we’ll fight them!” I said.
Grand lifted his chin as he drove through the darkness, and his beard jutted again. “Oh yes,” he said. “We’ll fight.”
The petition took over our lives for a few days after that. Everyone who was against the Sapphire Island development took to the roads, or hovered outside shops and restaurants, collecting signatures and arguing. The list of signatures grew longer and longer. The blond American put together a separate petition for the boat people, because they weren’t Bahamian citizens. He specially wanted to find boat owners who were scientists or experts in pollution, so that they would be offering the government advice worth taking seriously. You could see him buzzing round the harbor every day from boat to boat in his grey inflatable dinghy, with his equally blond wife.
The news of the petition even reached Nassau, and a reporter from one of the newspapers came out for the day to interview Grand and Mr. Ferguson and the rest. She had a camera, and she came to the house and took pictures of Grand and Grammie in among the banana trees on the farm. It was a good year for bananas; we were going to have a handsome crop. She wanted to have Lou and me in the pictures too, but Lou got very upset and was on the edge of having a seizure, so I took him away.
Lots of people didn’t agree with Grand and his friends, and some just didn’t seem to care. “Don’t ask me, man,” said one young man coming out of the liquor store. He was a dude, with a big gold chain round his neck. “I ain’t signing no petition. What I care about Long Pond Cay? I never go near that end of the island.”
Grand couldn’t resist arguing with people like that, trying to make them face responsibility, and sometimes he succeeded in shaming one of them into adding his name to the list. But he never got far with Mr. Smith, the father of my friends Kermit and Lyddie, who was firmly in favor of Sapphire Island and any other kind of development. Whenever they passed in the street, Mr
. Smith would lean out of the window of his cab and call, “Opportunity, Mr. Peel! Got to face the future! Can’t let opportunity pass our children by!”
Grand would mutter crossly to himself, “Opportunity for who?”
When they had almost as many signatures as they felt they could get, Grand and the other organizers managed to persuade someone in government to see them, and they flew to Nassau again. Grammie drove him to the airport in the truck, and Lou and I went too. “Good luck, Grand,” I said in his ear as I kissed him good-bye. “Please save Long Pond.”
Grand smiled at me. “You save those bananas from the birds, and I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
But I couldn’t save the bananas, though it wasn’t the birds I had to worry about.
The morning after Grand left, Lou and I went up early to the farm, to scare birds and do some weeding. We took sandwiches and water, so we wouldn’t have to come back for a while. The farm’s a big piece of cleared land about fifteen minutes’ walk from our house, with a fence round it to keep the goats out. It’s in a kind of broad hollow, where the soil is good, though there’s scrubland all round it. Nobody lives nearby, so it has to be checked every day to make sure we get the things that are ready to be picked, before the birds do. We had two sacks with us for the tomatoes, because they were doing really well; Grammie got a great price for them at the market.
The path to the farm winds about a bit, through scrubby bushes and big trees, and Lou was running ahead of me. I was carrying a hoe and a machete, so I wasn’t about to race him. I saw him reach the last bend before the banana trees began—and then he suddenly stopped, as if he’d run into a wall. He stood quite still for a moment, staring, and then he looked back at me and began to give a long high wail.
I came up to join him, and looked.
The farm looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. There was nothing left standing. The banana trees, the papayas, the tomato plants, all the other fruits and vegetables that Grand had tended so carefully, were all lying flat on the ground. Nobody had stolen the fruit—it was lying there on the ground, spoiling. This hadn’t been done by thieves, but by a determined person with a very sharp machete. You could see the marks where the blade had sliced through the thick trunk-like stalks of the banana trees, and the big hollow stems of the papayas.