"It's creepy," Mother said.
"Don't be unhelpful." Father looked at me. "She's bitter."
Mr. Haddy crowed when he saw Brewer's Village. His mother lived there. The huts were piled against the shore. They were shaped like belfries and stained the same color as the lagoon. Zambus paddled dugouts toward the jetty sticks. It was a steamy afternoon, the sun a purple hoop in the gray sea haze.
Father said, "This is where we part company."
"Ain't you coming with me, Fadder?"
"No. I mean, you're not coming with me."
Mr. Haddy gulped, as if trying to guzzle his fear. But it seemed jammed in his throat and fluttering like a chunk of Adam's apple. He said he wasn't ready to go ashore just now.
"Figgy's dragging his feet."
"They gung say, 'Haddy, where you lanch?'"
"You can tell them about your experience. I've got a wife and four kids and nothing else. You don't hear me complaining."
Mr. Haddy opened his mouth and took a big bite of air and wailed, "1 ain't got nothing left!"
Rocking down the pipanto from stern to bow, Father slipped his watch off his wrist. It was an old expensive watch — gold with a gold strap. Father was proud of it. It had survived our flights and failures. Strong, waterproof, and accurate, it was the one valuable item on this boat. Father had often said that it was now worth twice what he had paid for it and each year its value increased. But more likely it had been a lucky find at the Northampton dump.
"It's money in the bank, Fig."
Mr. Haddy shook his hands into his trousers. "I ain't take you watch."
"I've got no use for it anymore — have I, Mother?"
He dragged Mr. Haddy's skinny hand out of the pocket and pushed the watch over his struggling fingers. And he laughed.
"Son, observe the time and fly from evil."
Mr. Haddy looked at Mother. He said, "Speerience."
"Keep it," Mother said. "You've been a good friend to us."
Smiling mournfully at the watch, and wetting his teeth, Mr. Haddy said, "But where you gung, Fadder?"
Father said, "We're going to paddle up the blackest creek in this lagoon. And we're going to find the smallest cranny of that creek, where there's no people or plagiarism. Trees, water, soil — the basics are all we require. We'll hole up there. They'll never find me."
"You ain't like Brewer's?"
"Too exposed," Father said. "I don't want to be visited by scavengers."
The pipanto had drifted toward Brewer's Village. It was belfry shacks and cooking fires and mud banks and wet Zambus and a dog.
"I want a real backwater. Solitary. Uninhabited. An empty corner. That's why we're here! If it's on a map, I can't use it."
"Laguna Miskita ain't on no chart."
"How small is it?"
"Fadder, it so small," Mr. Haddy said, "when you gets there you ain't believe you there."
While Father sculled the pipanto to the jetty, Mr. Haddy gave us directions: two miles along Brewer's shore to the cutoff, and then inland for three miles. "Go till you ain't go no more." Gratefulness made him prolong his directions, but when we dropped him and he slogged through the mud to his mother's hut, he did not look back. He was admiring his new watch, lifting his wrist, and soon he was surrounded by children, Creoles and Zambus, singing at him.
It was painful for me to see him go. He was not ours anymore. We were alone again — the first family, as Father kept repeating. But without our old friends — Mr. Haddy, and the Maywits, and our Zambus, and Ma Kennywick and the rest — it felt like the last family.
***
We had found the creek draining into Brewer's and made our exit. Father sculled to where it opened into a string of lagoons. The last was Laguna Miskita. It had to be — we could go no further. Except for another creek, which led sideways into it and was too small for even a cayuka, there was no more open water. It was nowhere, it was a dead end, there was not a hut to be seen. We turned over our pi-panto on the shore and propped it up with poles. This was our house. There were herons and kingfishers here, and overhead some pelicans. In the low gray trees at the edge there stumbled some wild cows with cloudy eyes. The lagoon bubbled and streamed with stripes of decay. It was the color of cooked liver. Flies buzzed around us. Even the mud bubbled, and the pressure of rotten gas underground made holes on the banks, like the dimples on clam flats.
"We're alone here," Father said. "Look, no footprints!"
He said that from now on our life would be simple — gardening, fishing, and beachcombing. No poisonous contraptions, none of the Jeronimo mistakes, nothing fancier than a flush toilet. A vegetable plot here, a chicken run over there, a good solid hut that could take the rain.
"Chickens?" Mother said. "Where are you planning to get chickens?"
"Curassows." Father said. "Chickens is just a generic term. We'll raise curassows — we'll tame them."
"What else?"
"Nothing. That's the beauty of it. Survival means total activity. There isn't time for anything else!"
"It'll be an ordeal," Mother said.
"An ordeal is a square deal."
That night and for many nights afterward, we slept under the propped-up pipanto. It was cool at night and we made smudge pots to keep the mosquitoes away. Each day we worked at making the place comfortable. We had done it before, at Jeronimo, but until we started beachcombing we had no tools here, except the burned machete. We built a latrine and a cooking area and Father paced out a garden — the soil was so black and soft on the shore it would hardly need tilling, he said.
"It might be a couple of weeks before the rains start. In the meantime, we'll build a real house, a watertight one, and get those seeds ready for planting."
As soon as the new hut was underway, April got sick, then Clover, then Jerry, then Mother. It was the squitters, but they also turned pale and ran a high fever. They lay under the pipanto and groaned and made dashes to the latrine. Mother said it was all the travel and banging around and our diet, which was wild manioc and fish, and the carkles and whelks that we dug out of the mud.
"If it's the food, how come Charlie's not sick?" Father said. "Or if it's the hard work, why aren't I flat on my back?"
"How dare you accuse us of faking!" Mother said.
"Just asking."
"Don't bully us, Allie!"
Father went silent. It was scary, hearing them argue in the stillness of this gray lagoon, but their silence was worse. For two days they did not speak to each other, and, because of it, all we kids did was whisper.
Mother recovered, yet she was still weak. Father said, "The invalids can deal with the seeds," and they stripped the Miskito's vegetables and corn and dried the seeds while Father and I gathered material for the hut.
We had found an abandoned dugout. We patched it and caulked its cracks. "Some fool threw this away — it's a perfectly good boat!" We made daily trips down the creek and to Brewer's to gather driftwood — beams and planks that had floated through the coastal inlet and washed ashore. We found them stuck against the mud banks. Most of this wood had nails and screws in it. We removed these and once they were straightened used them for fastening the foundation of the hut. And beachcombing, harvesting what the tides deposited, gave us other treasures.
On the coast, all huts were belfries on stilts. Not Father's. His was like a small barge, the tublike foundation resting against the bank. He took great care to make it waterproof, tarring its cracks and then hammering strips of tin on it to seal it from rats and moisture. This barge-hut was bigger than a pipanto, but it was pipanto-shaped at its base.