after arriving. The leathery scent of bougainvillea hangs over the road. The boy’s mother has lit a lantern in the window of their house, the only structure in town that survived the last hurricane. Maybe tonight she’ll tell the story again of how, when she was walking pregnant with him, a snake appeared in the road. Brother had a hoe slung over his shoulder, and he swung it on the snake. Whack. It lay there with its head cocked over. Just then you kicked inside me, and I touched my belly. That’s why your left toe bends inward like it does. A birthmark.
He looks down at his odd track in the sand and stops to lean against the palm where he moors his boat. The fronds shift, though he feels no wind against his skin. He kneels and checks the rope. The smallest waves slurp at the hulls like clear tongues, recalling his thirst. Nearby the water’s nervous with a small shoreward push: likely a school of the bony fish his neighbor sometimes nets. Save this tiny wake, the sea as far as he can see is planed and gray: an endless whetstone on which he hones his eyes.
Who knows what causes the opening and closing of the door?
—WANG WEI
As all good anglers know, one must from time to time shirk a bit of responsibility in pursuit of one’s quarry. After several months away, I was back in McLean’s Town doing just that; on assignment to write a where-to article for a glossy magazine, a chalk fishing piece that would almost cover my plane ticket, I found myself more drawn to the dangling thread of David’s story than to finding a catchy lead, and had wandered over to his house in hopes of reconnecting.
David stood in his yard whittling a long pine branch into a push-pole, peeling the bark from the wrist-thick wood with brisk flicks of his forearm. Shavings sprayed with each machete stroke, the blade bronzed by a matinal sun. I wasn’t sure if he would remember me, so I stood at the end of the driveway and yelled, “Miller sends his greetings!” He looked up, cocked his head back and forth like a bird, then lifted the brim of his ball cap from his forehead, and pulled it back down with a nod, his long arms hanging beside his lanky-strong frame like wind socks at dead calm.
“Oh, yessir,” he said, and set the knife and would-be poling instrument atop an old skiff that rested upturned on two sawhorses, waiting for repair.
I walked toward him and offered my hand.
IT TOOK A WHILE TO CARVE IN PAST THE SMALL TALK, BUT eventually David sorted through my scattershot questions and pointed north toward where he had grown up in a two-room house, bunking on the floor with his brothers, his sisters sharing a mattress in the next room, twelve kids all told and the slumber—what with all the arms and legs scratching bedbug bites—far from sound.
“Nights when I couldn’t sleep,” David said, his deep voice harmonizing momentarily with the guttural groan of the passing ferry’s engine, “I would ask my father how we got here, so far from where he was born, on Eleuthera.”
David breathed deep and looked up at the trees around the yard, the palms’ fronds high-noon still. A good fishing morning, he offered, an aside not lost on my nerves.
Like many Bahamians of West African descent, David’s father Samuel had been born a free man and roved the archipelago via sponging boat before landing at East End.
“Not much for stories, but he would tell it: ‘You stop somewhere sponging and squat. Fall in love with a woman, squat.’ He’d roust us in the dark with chores. ‘Take the small boat up to Big Sound and walk the mud flats for shinies. A man coming to town soon will buy them.’ Five dollars for a quart. Seven thousand to fill a jar. If we got home before he did we should dye and trim sponges, press the cured ones into bales. Tough work, but it beat sailing all day to Red Shank, oaring if the wind’s not right.”
One otherwise uneventful Thursday morning, Samuel Pinder, pastor of the McLean’s Town church, would suffer a sudden stroke and die three days later on the Sabbath.
Not long after his father’s funeral, David found himself teaching at the McLean’s Town school—yet another visiting instructor had come, surveyed, taught for a few weeks, and, scrimshanking, left for parts unknown. Thus the school’s finest student was tasked with giving rudimentary lessons until the next import arrived. One of his peers reminded him fondly of his mother. Her name was Nicey (knee-sea) and for a whole week in October she stayed home sick. Each day he fretted, and on Friday, instead of sending Nicey’s homework with her sister, David sent a letter. A few months later sixteen-year-olds Nicey and David were married, the minister listing their ages in the official registry as eighteen, in adherence with Crown law.
“It was,” he said, looking across the water at a horizon line obscured by humidity, “the year I got in love.
“I probably would have stayed a sponger’s son. Who knows where I would have ended up? The wind would blow you one way one day, another way the next. We would hop from island to island on those sponging boats, but you couldn’t make much money if you were black,” he said, explaining that eight hundred sponges gathered by a black family would garner the same pay as five hundred sponges gathered by whites. “After a time all the sponge died. I think the Lord killed it off because it was being abused. Because we were being treated unfairly.”
About the time the sponge rebounded, David, nineteen, was working on a hard-labor crew at a US missile-tracking site near Freetown. One mid-April evening a wealthy man from Palm Beach arrived in search of a hand.
An avid saltwater angler, Gil Drake had recently leased from the Crown a square-mile island across the channel from McLean’s Town. Since purchasing land in the Bahamas in the late 1950s required royal connections, Drake’s wife, who was of extremely high-test Philadelphia money to bankroll the purchase, called upon family friends Sir Henry and Lady Oaks, who shortly thereafter enlisted the queen. Since the island’s moniker Crow Carrion wouldn’t likely attract visitors and since Drake was ultimately hoping to build a fishing lodge on the north shore of the cay, he dubbed it Deep Water, and shortly thereafter, on the fourteenth day of April 1956, regarded a trio of young rock-lugging Bahamians, and approached the one who appeared the fittest of the three.
Did young David Pinder know it was the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the sinking of the Titanic? Did he sense something ominous in the air?
“I still count it as the luckiest day of my life,” he said. We had made our way down his driveway to the water, where the tide was out. In the glaring distance a gull-chased fishing boat could be seen scribing a wide glare-cutting arc across the bay. “To have been chosen by Mr. Drake that day was a great privilege. I was barely earning four pounds a week at the missile site, small money. I was so happy he chose me over the other two.
“That was on Sunday. On Monday we were clearing mangroves so they could bring in a generator—he had hired two of my nephews as well—then later we put up a shed. This point, the Drakes lived on their boat, got their hands dirty just like us. We brought rocks in the dinghy across from McLean’s Town, big chunks of rock and shoreline. Cracked them, mixed them into cement. Eventually Mr. Drake would hire a contractor from Palm Beach by the name of Charlie Counch who built the first cottage and lodge building. He shipped the materials down on a commercial fishing boat, but for now it was oaring over to camp loaded down with rock. The water almost over the gunwales.”
Having foraged on the newly named Deep Water Cay for as long as he could remember, David was intimate with the terrain around the island Gil Drake had procured. As a youth he had harvested lobster from traps in nearby
