Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Claude and Vanise and the baby scrambled about in the hold, struggling to find someplace safe, where they could curl up against one another and not get tossed about, until at last they ended clinging to the ladder below the hatch cover. Vanise held her baby with one arm, the ladder with the other. Claude, wrapping himself around both woman and child, clutched the rails of the ladder and clamped them to it, as the boat tipped and fell, then rose again and tipped and fell again.

They could hear a wind roaring abovedecks and heard waves slam against the boat with furious force and weight. Pray for us! Claude ordered. Pray to les Mystères the way you know how. Pray to Agwé, your mait’-tête, he pleaded, so the boat will not sink and drown us. Pray to the Virgin and to the saints and to Jesus Christ, to Papa Legba and Damballah and all the others. Pray! he shouted into her ear, and Vanise began to murmur incoherently, mixing half-remembered songs and prayers and chants together as best she knew how: Coté ou yé, metté hounsi-yo dey ors, gan malice oh, cé passé’l t’ap passé. Dou quand Bon Dieu réle ou. Je vous prends pour me rendre les services que je veux, au nom de Mait’ Carrefour et de Legba, generation paternelle et maternelle, ancêtre et ancètere, Afrique et Afrique, au nom de Legba, Baltaza, Agwé, Erzulie, Ghede, Ogoun, Damballah … and on and on, as the storm raged against them.

After a long time, Vanise grew weary and confused and too ashamed to go on, for she knew only scraps and bits of the proper prayers and calls to the loas, and she said to her nephew, I can’t! I must not! We must let le Bon Dieu take us over now.

No, he said. Go on, pray for us!

And so she resumed, throughout the storm, until, at last, the roar of the wind lowered somewhat, and the boat ceased to tip and thrash about as wildly as before, and gradually, after many hours, they came to believe that the storm had passed by and that it could not have been a hurricane or even a northwester, but a squall, perhaps, for now they heard rain falling on the deck above their heads, steadily and heavily, without wind, and the sea seemed almost calm.

First Claude loosened his grip on the ladder, and then Vanise let go of it, and they slid slowly to the pallet below, where they lay collapsed around one another, like lovers, their child between them, about to fall peacefully asleep together. Yet even as they lay, they still clung to the base of the ladder, as if manacled to it.

The captain lifted the hatch cover and waved Claude, Vanise and the child up. It was night, and the rain had stopped. In the northwest, a crescent moon floated behind strips of silver-blue cloud, and the sea glittered with phosphorus.

The boat had rounded the western tip of New Providence Island, and when Claude and Vanise had pulled themselves up the ladder to the deck, it was as if they had returned from their own drownings. There was air here, fresh, cool air, and endless space that seemed tangible, and though it was night, the air was filled with light and the smells of what it was not — the sea, land, trees, fruit, human beings. They inhaled and looked at their hands and each other’s faces and rediscovered their own battered bodies. They looked off the starboard side and saw the headlights of automobiles beading the north coast of the island. Off the bow, they saw the first lights of the city, Nassau, casting a dull, whitish glow against the bruise-colored sky. They had come over three hundred miles as if chained in darkness, a middle passage, and the sight of so many of humanity’s lights at once was a sharp, confusing blow to them that left them stunned, for they had come to believe that, except for the six men on the boat, there was no one else left in the world. Now they looked out and saw high, rectangular hotels on Cable Beach a half mile away, glittery casinos, crowded restaurants, strings of streetlights, beacons blinking off North Cay at the entrance to the harbor, a jet plane taking off from the airport inland, banking southwest and disappearing, small boats and yachts passing slowly out of the harbor, and there ahead of them, the city itself, with tall pink buildings, a green and white Holiday Inn and a half-dozen more hotels, with spotlights hidden among hibiscus and casuarina trees playing against the terrace windows while shadows of royal palms fluttered against brightly painted pink, yellow, white and blue walls.

They passed the large wharf and two Scandinavian cruise ships tied up there, sleek, white and huge, with strings of lights running up the masts and stacks like Christmas tree decorations, and slowly moved farther down the harbor, with Paradise Island off the portside, downtown Nassau off the starboard, where taxis cruised through Rawson Square, turned and headed out to the casinos or cross-island to the airport for late-night arrivals from London, New York and Miami.

It was as if Claude and Vanise had been carried to another planet than the one they had known, and they stood silent and awestruck, crowded with the other Haitians into the aft cabin, where the captain had told them to stay. The three Haitian men ignored Claude and Vanise now, treated them as if they had never seen the boy and the woman before and were not in the slightest interested in or even curious about them.

The captain had instructed the Haitian with the pipe to explain to the others that they should all stay low inside the cabin until the boat was tied up, and then, when it was clear that no one was watching, they were simply to walk off the boat one by one, to move down the pier and away. No one would stop them, he said, not at this hour, if they walked quickly and seemed to know where they were going. Every one of them, including Claude and Vanise, had been listed as crew members, he said. The harbormaster wouldn’t check for them until morning, if he checked at all. Dese Bahamians, mon, him don’t care where you go, long’s you not standin’ next to him when him look for you. The captain laughed and walked forward, while the white man steered from the bridge and brought the boat safely around and put her with silent ease into a slip on the dark side of a small pier next to a pair of low turtle boats.

There was a moment of confusion and some heat, while the three Haitian men argued over who would leave the boat first, but the man with the pipe, called Jules by the others, prevailed. The youngest of the three would go first, then the next youngest, and finally Jules himself. They would meet on the street, he said, and he would lead them on the journey across the island to his cousin in Elizabeth Town. He glanced at a hand-drawn map, apparently sent to him by the cousin, and said he was sure Elizabeth Town was on the outskirts of Nassau and they would be able to arrive there before sunrise. He carefully folded the map and put it in his shirt pocket.

We will follow you, Claude announced.

The men turned and looked at him with mild surprise. No, you can’t do that, Jules said evenly. There would be five of us then and a baby, he said, and the police will want to know right away who we are. It’s bad enough we have three to travel together. And until we are outside the city, he instructed the other men, we should walk separately. That way, if one of us is captured, it will be too bad, but it will only be one of us. But you two, Jules said to Claude and Vanise, you and the infant, you’re on your own now. We don’t know you.

Claude said nothing. The boat bumped softly against a pair of old truck tires tied to the pier, and the Inaguan leaped out at the bow and tied the boat to a bollard there, then ran to the stern and tied her to another. The first Haitian stepped from the cabin and in seconds had strolled nonchalantly down the length of the low pier, passed through a chain-link gate at the end and down an alley beyond, until he disappeared behind a squat gray cinder-block storage building. They saw a car splash by on the street where he had disappeared, and a second later, the second Haitian left the boat. When he, too, had disappeared, Jules left.