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I could feel him standing there watching me as I tried to reeve the lengths, but I knew they weren’t fitting together. He said, “Like dis, I tell you,”
You’re stupid, you can’t even spell.” Timothy’s heavy hand struck my face sharply.
I wouldn’t let him see me with tears in my eyes.
Something happened to me that day on the cay. I’m not quite sure what it was even now, but I had begun to change. I said to Timothy, “I want to be your friend.” He said softly, “Young bahss, you ’ave always been my friend.” I said, “Can you call me Phillip instead of young boss?” “Phill-eep,” he said warmly.
DURING OUR SEVENTH NIGHT on the island, it rained.
The rain sounded like bullets hitting on the dried palm frond roof.
It rained for almost two hours, and Timothy was quite angry with himself for not making a second catchment because the keg was soon filled and overflowing.
We got on our mats and opened our mouths to the sweet, fresh water. Stew Cat was huddled in a miserable ball over in a corner,
I liked the rain because it was something I could hear and feel;
I wanted it to rain all night.
his own childhood. It wasn’t at all like mine. He’d never gone to school, and was working on a fishing boat by the time he was ten.
only fun he had was once a year at carnival
I asked him why there were different
colors of skin, white and black, brown and red, and he laughed back, “Why b’feesh different color, or flower b’different color? I true don’ know, Phill-eep, but I true tink beneath d’skin is all d’same.” Herr Jonckheer had said something like that in school but it did not mean quite as much as when Timothy said it. Long after he’d begun to snore in the dripping hut, I thought about it. Suddenly, I wished my father and mother could see us there together on the little island. I moved close to Timothy’s big body before I went to sleep. I remember smiling in the darkness. He felt neither white nor
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we were eating
Fish, langosta, mussels, or the eggs from sea urchins, those small, black round sea animals with sharp spines that attach themselves to the reefs.
sea-grape roots but they made us ill.
When we’d landed, there were a few dried ones on the ground, but the meat in them was not very tasty. In a fresher one, there was still some milk, but it was rancid.
He made a point of saying that if he were only fifty again, he could climb the tree and slice them off with his knife.
I wondered how my eyes looked and asked Timothy about that. “Dey look widout cease,” he said. “Dey stare, Phill-eep.” “Do they bother you?” Timothy laughed. “Not me. Eeevery day I tink what rare good luck I ’ave dat you be ’ere wid my own self on dis outrageous, hombug islan’.”
TIMOTHY HAD FASHIONED A CANE for me, and I was now using it to feel my way around the island.
Timothy was very proud of me.
I was starting to be less dependent on the vine rope, and sometimes it seemed to me that Timothy was trying hard to make me independent of him. I thought I knew why, but I did not talk to him about it. I did not want to think about the possibility of Timothy dying and leaving me alone on the cay.
“D’evil spirit harass an’ meliss us,”
I said, “Timothy, you can’t really believe in that.” My father had told me about “obediah,” or “voodoo,” in the West Indies.
Angrily, I said, “Timothy, Stew Cat is not a jumbi. You let him alone.”
I was suddenly worried for Stew Cat’s safety.
Nothing was missing except the knife, and I knew he’d taken it to north beach with him. As best I could, I searched around the hut area for Stew Cat,
It was no good trying to convince him that jumbi did not exist, nor was there any way to find Stew Cat if Timothy had hidden him.
If he harmed Stew Cat because of some silly jumbi thing, I knew he might also harm me.
He’d cut the raft loose! Panic swept over me.
I went out to my waist, feeling with my hands in all directions. But the raft was gone!
I trusted Timothy, and kept telling myself that he wouldn’t harm me, but it was the whole mysterious jumbi thing that was frightening. And he certainly wasn’t acting like the Timothy I’d been living with.
Timothy had spent all that time carving a cat, a Stew Cat. The nails in it were supposed to kill the evil jumbi.
“Where was he?” I asked. “On d’raff, o’ course,” Timothy answered. “I got ’im off d’islan’ till I could chase d’jumbi.”
our luck is change.” But it didn’t change. It got worse.
ONE MORNING in the middle of May, I awakened to hear Timothy taking great breaths. It sounded as though he were fighting for air. I listened a moment and then asked, “Are you all right, Timothy?”
Fever! Malaria!
For a while, I listened to his heavy breathing and then ripped a piece of cloth from what was left of my shirt, dampened it with water, and placed it on his forehead. He murmured, “Dat be good,” but suddenly he began to shiver, even though the morning air was already warm. I could hear his teeth clacking.
I had gone about thirty steps when I fell over Timothy’s body, plunging down in the water.
It took me what seemed like a long time to get Timothy out of the water and back up on the damp sand.
I sat beside him for almost an hour in the hot sun while he rested quietly, his breathing not so harsh now. Then I realized he was shivering again.
I tore off branches of sea grape and put them over his body.