Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"Everything gone!"

That was the last I heard. He splashed the blades and turned the boat aside and rowed into the rain, groaning indistinctly. The shore fell away. He took the lagoon with him, and all the trees, and left me standing in the sting of straight-down rain. The night's black was above and below me. The rain closed over Mr. Haddy and the kick of his oars. He was like a man rowing into a mountain.

It was all rain and monkey howls in this pit of unseparated darkness. Googn! Googn! Googn! Googn!

***

In the morning, steam rose from the cold boilings of the lagoon, and from the root knuckles and beaten-down grass and broken trees. The land was covered with pink worms. It looked shocked by the twelve hours of heavy rain. It lay thrashed and still.

Most of the sprouts in our garden were pasted against the mud as flat as stamps, or else floated in the troughs we had dug. Our whole shelf of furrows had slipped sideways down the bank and lay bunched at the shore. The garden was waterlogged: the smaller sprouts were drowned, the bigger ones tipped over and showing the pale hairs on their roots. Twigs, ripped leaves, and branches littered the lagoon.

Father said, "I'll be willing to bet that we're the only dry folks in the country, if not the world."

"It rains in our yard and he thinks the whole world is wet," Jerry whispered. "Why can't we leave?"

I took Jerry aside and showed him the barrel of gasoline and the spark plugs.

"We can bomb out of here with that outboard," Jerry said. He was happier than I had seen him for weeks. "We can find Mr. Haddy. He'll take us home!"

"We can't go home," I said. "It's gone. Dad was right—"

"No!"

"Mr. Haddy told me. He wouldn't he. Please don't cry."

But he had started. He put his arm against his face to hide it.

"We'll go somewhere else," I said. "We'll go to Brewer's Village, or somewhere on the coast better than this." I kept talking to him this way to stop him crying, and then I swore him to secrecy about the gasoline and the spark plugs.

Clover was at the shore with Father and saying, "Our nice garden's ruined."

"It'll perk up in this sun," Father said, and he made us dig ditches to drain it.

Overnight the trees around the lagoon had turned bright green, their leaves washed by the rain. They glistened with a shine like fresh paint. The gray was gone from the whole place, and under the clear sky the lagoon was deep blue. The land was black. Bird honks skimmed across the water.

Driftwood had been scattered from the junkpile, but after Jerry and I picked it up and stacked it, the barrel of gasoline was hidden. I pushed the pouch of spark plugs under my hammock pad. What good were they to us if Father was determined to stay? But his outboard motor, which was the first thing I checked that morning, had not been shifted by the storm. It was still clamped to its stump, and was wrapped tight in plastic like a leg of meat.

Father said you had to admire this foolish waste of energy — nature running mad and drenching everything. It was a huge demented squandering of water, like an attempted murder that a quick-witted man could overcome by crawling into his leakproof hut: all that trouble for nothing, because we were still alive.

"But we weren't meant to die!"

The storm had terrified everyone except Father. He was impressed by the way it had destroyed trees, and he marveled at all the uprootings. He calculated that six inches of rain had fallen in the night. You had to admire that. And look at the beaten bushes. And think of the velocity. You could build a machine that operated on falling rain — the collected rain would spin a flywheel, the same principle as a water wheel but more efficient — no drag. Only the rain was undependable, because the world was imperfect. Nature tried to burn you, then starve you, then drown you, and it made you dig a garden like a savage with a stick It surprised you and made you fearful that something was going to go wrong That fear made people religious nuts instead of innovators.

"But it will be weeks before anyone plants a garden, and by then ours will be in blossom."

Mother said the damage scared her. We would have to fight to save the garden.

Father said, "I like a good fight."

In the course of that hot day, most of the plants perked up just as he said they would. Even the little shoots followed Father's orders, and what in the early morning had looked like the ruin of a drowned garden had begun again to grow.

The important thing now, Father said, was to protect the plants. It was not the amount of rain that was so bad, but its ferocity: the wind, the waterspouts, the erosion. "If we don't take care, the plants will be punched out of their holes," he said. "But we will take care."

We sawed lengths of bamboo and fitted some of the plants with collars, and others we banked with dirt to prop them up. Father said, Wasn't that ingenious?

"I'll believe it when we have vegetables," Mother said.

"Patience!"

Toward evening, the clouds sailed in and the first drops hit us like slugs. Father ordered Jerry and me to work naked at repairing the garden, and so we did, up to our ankles in mud, with the rain whipping our backs.

"He treats us like slaves," Jerry said. "I'd like to get that outboard working and escape from here."

"We've already escaped," I said.

"Even if America's burned — even if it's destroyed — it's better than this. This is a stinking dump. I want to go home."

"But the garden's all right now," I said. "When it grows, things will be different."

"Why are you always on Dad's side?"

"He was right about the rain — he was right about the garden!"

"It's still raining," Jerry said. Thunder compressed his face and gave him a frightened smile. The fat raindrops riddled on our little hut.

The next day, half the garden was gone. Some of the plants floated in the lagoon, where they had been washed with the storm's debris, and others lay broken in the furrows. The bamboo collars had done no good. They served only to bruise the plants under the strength of the falling rain.

"It's no use," Mother said.

"You make me laugh," Father said. "You talk as if we have an alternative! What we're doing is all we can do. There's nothing else. A garden is our only hope, Mother. Have you got a better idea?"

Mother said, "Why don't we just pack up and go?"

"Nothing to pack," Father said. "Nowhere to go."

"There's Brewer's Village. Mr. Haddy said—"

"Figgy is busy dying. They all are, except us." He had taken a shovel and was mucking out the furrows and replanting the stringy shoots. He saw us watching him and said, "Stick with me, people, or you'll die, too."

Jerry knelt down and said, "I hate him."

Clover heard. She said, "I'm going to tell Dad what you said."

"I want you to tell him, Crappo. I want to see him go buggy."

This made Clover cry. She ran to Mother and said, "Jerry just swore at me!"

"No one gives a hoot," Father was saying. He threw down his shovel and unwrapped the outboard. He spun it and throttled it with his rope, making it choke. Seeing him, I almost told him about the spark plugs and the gas. But he had said, Nothing to pack — nowhere to go. It would make him madder. He would ask me where I had got them, and why, and how. He would scream if I mentioned Mr. Haddy. I wished Mr. Haddy had never come and stuck me with that secret.

"That's to keep him sane," Jerry said.

I looked at Father tearing at the outboard's rope.

"It's not working," Jerry said, and he laughed.

We concentrated on what was left of the garden. But down here at the shore I could see that it was not the rain that had done the worst damage. The level of the lagoon had risen, as Mr. Haddy had predicted, and submerged the plants that had been near the water's edge. Jerry wanted to tell Father, to show him he had been mistaken, but before he could, it began to rain again. We stripped our clothes off and began bailing. It rained five times that day. At noon it was so dark we had to use candles in the hut to see our crabs.