Timothy of the Cay Read Free Page A

important.
    My mother was a slender lady with pale blue eyes and pale skin. The last time I'd seen her, just a twisting glimpse in a fiery red glow, we both had been spilling out of the lifeboat into the dark water after the torpedo hit the
Hato.
    "He was barefoot and wore a straw hat."
    I wondered what she was wearing this day.
    "That's his knife." I motioned to the bedside table and reached over, groping for it.
    "I don't think I saw him," she said.
    Not far away a ship's horn bleated. A tugboat answered. Merchantmen and warships moved through the canal night and day. Fighting was occurring throughout the world, from Europe to the far Pacific. The once peaceful Caribbean was a war zone.
    "I think I saw him just before you sailed," my father said. "I wondered why a man that old was still going to sea. He looked like he was sixty-five or seventy..."
    I turned toward his voice. Though he wasn't smoking in that antiseptic room, a faint apple-flavored tobacco aroma came from the foot of the bed. There was also a touch of his bay-rum shaving lotion in the air. Reassuring smells.
    The last time I'd seen my father had been the previous April. Tall and lonely, he stood on the seawall of Fort Amsterdam, at Curaçao's harbor entrance. He was waving good-bye as the
Hato
put to sea. I had hated my mother at that moment for taking me away from him. But now he sounded as if no days had passed between us. Gentle of voice, always; slow and measured. He was a Virginian. My mother was from New Jersey.
    "I think he was closer to seventy than sixty-five," I said, "but I'm not sure. " There was a lifetime of things I didn't know about Timothy.
    "Did he ever tell you why he was out there at that age?"
    "The war. There was a shortage of experienced sailors, so he volunteered. You can't believe how much he knew about the Caribbean. "
    He knew the birds, the fish, the storms, the cays.
    "You were lucky," my father said. "Very lucky."
    That's what I'd been telling everyone.
    We became silent for a moment. Had someone else been on the raft instead I might not have made it to that hospital bed.
    My mother, whose dark hair always shone like glass, had sounded different from the moment she walked into the room. Subdued. Not a hint of the past's usual scolding in her voice. By tone she wasn't, for now, the taut, tense woman I'd always known.
    They'd flown to Panama after the navy had told them, two days before, that I was alive and well. But blind. I'd fly back to Curaçao with them tomorrow. I really didn't need to be on that bed, but the nurses had ordered me to park there with Stew Cat and to stay out of the hallway.
    My once long and tangled hair, turned straw blond (I was told) from the tropic sun, had been neatly cut. The nurses said I looked handsome and kidded me about going aboard the destroyer with no clothes on. They said I had a good tan all over and could get all the girls I wanted, including them. They flirted with me even though I was years younger. I'd had a birthday on the cay, without cake or candles. But I felt older than twelve now, much older.
    Stew Cat's leg drummed against the bedspread down by my feet. He was scratching an ear. The navy captain who ran the hospital had said he'd let Stew stay in the room, against all rules: "You two look like you belong together."
    We did belong together. We'd shared a lot.
    I kept looking toward my father. "His name was Timothy," I said. "That's the only name he had. Without him I wouldn't be here. He died and I buried him. He's now my guardian angel. We talk back and forth..."
    They were silent, maybe thinking the sun had fried my brain. I'd buried another human in the sand and now talked to him. Maybe they didn't know what to say to me? Maybe they were still in shock that I was alive? Maybe...
    The first few minutes after the nurse had shown them in, saying, "Here's that heartthrob son of yours" (which embarrassed me), my mother held me tightly. She said, over and over, "I'm so sorry, so