Father insisted on his head being covered. He wore a hood, like a condemned man, and sweated in it. He did not see the lifting flights of ducks, the tumbling plovers, the flamingos, the seabirds that met us near villages with English names like Living Creek and Doyle. He went silent for long periods. His silences had always been worse than his howls. But now we thought he was dead. He still steamed of death. We knew he was alive by his skin, the way he came out in bites.
The sand flies got him. The tortoiseshell cockroaches in the boat bit him. Fevers shook him. He raved and struggled and opened his wound.
"Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. You're protected on your hands and knees. It's either that or wings."
On this flooded river, his voice cracked through his gallows hood. "Listen to me, people. Grow wings and they'll never get you!"
The river grew wider and lost its current. We had to paddle hard to move forward. With swamp at both banks there was nowhere to moor the boat, and all through the last hot night we kept going. Just before dawn, we saw a beacon — a lighthouse — and heard the slap of waves on the beach by the rivermouth. This was the Cape.
"What's that?"
He knew the sound.
"No!" And raised his arms for the first time.
He pulled down his mask and said, "Charlie, don't lie to me. Tell me where we are."
I bent down. I could not speak. Then I had to turn away, because with bared teeth I heard something violent in me urging me to bite his ear off.
"Vultures," he said, and then the terrible sentence, "Christ is a scarecrow!"
***
Yet it seemed as if everything Father feared was true. He had predicted this. The sky was thick with birds — ugly pelicans and gulls and vultures. They circled and soared, they swung across the great curve of tropical beach. And sometimes they hurried down and fed, for surfing through the breakers were large paddling turtles, with parrot beaks and baggy necks.
The turtles' shells were crusted with periwinkles and weedsuckers and hardened sea glop. More turtles worked their flippers up the shelf of sand, and others were backed into the low dunes. Blinking and brooding, they laid brown eggs. Their beaks were splashed with the soapy saliva of their effort.
They made no sound at all. Only the birds cried out, and when a turtle was tossed ashore on its back by a rogue wave, the vultures went for its unprotected neck and jerked it out of its shell. The gulls had the leavings. Sunlight made this nightmare more horrible — the massing turtle lids flopping along the shore and pooping eggs into the sand, the birds hovering in the sky, the heavy surf. It was the coastal hell Father had promised.
We chose a secluded spot in a palm grove down the beach, overturned our flatboat. and made camp. And Father wept. Each time he tried to speak he burst into tears. It was the sight of the sea, the Mosquito Coast. His tears said we had tricked him, failed him, brought him here to die.
Black Indians came in cayukas to stare at us. Father howled them away. Mother walked into Cabo Gracias, the village, and tried to find a doctor. People said the doctors were upriver, at the missions, or in La Ceiba or Trujillo — not here. She told the people she wanted a boat, to take us up the coast. But the boats were all going south, to Bluefields and Puerto Cabezas and Pearl Lagoon. They laughed when she told them we had no money.
We killed a turtle, and while vultures strutted nearby, swishing their wings and watching us. we roasted the fatty meat over our fire. We believed that the whole of Father's prediction had come true. We were dying on the Mosquito Coast, in the hot sand, among scavengers and scuttling turtles. It was worse than he had said.
America was safe — the Spellgoods' word had been verified by the Moravians — but we were far away, so what did it matter? Hell is what you can't have. The best memory we had was of living in the jungle. It was too late to go back — the river was impossible without a motorboat, and the vast expressionless sea made us feel small and lonely. We had escaped to the coast, but we were more than ever like castaways, clinging to this scrap of shoreline. We were tired and empty, and hardly spoke. Father could move his arms, but his legs were useless. He lay staring at the waves, the turtles, the birds. Every sunrise, he saw sea monsters gasping in the surf.
Yonder were sailboats, shrimpers, and fishermen. But none came near enough for us to see if Mr. Haddy was among them. No boats landed at this beach, and Father had scared the blacks away. The twins were too sick to stand up. They sat under the boat with Father.
Our hope was Mother. She still walked the three miles through the palms every day to Cabo Gracias, demanding medicine, and cloth for Father's bandages. "I'm not a beggar — I don't take no for an answer," she said. The people called her Auntie and said she was loco. Jerry and I collected turtle eggs and firewood. We listened to Father pleading to be taken upriver, we squashed the flies that settled on him.
"Which way is the river?" he said in a small voice.
He spoke in baby talk about living on all fours far away in Mosquitia, and about going to sea in a sieve. Usually he said nothing. He stared. Thoughts folded his brow. Tears gathered in his eyes and, without his making a sound, rolled down his cheeks.
Five days of this weakened us worse than the river had, and now this coast seemed a great mistake. Creatures here, the only life, fed on each other. We went around in our rags. The longer we stayed here, the more fearful we were of the ocean. Because of the turtles, we never swam, and because of the birds, we stayed under cover.
When I slept, I had food dreams. I dreamed of chocolate fudge cake and cold milk. I dreamed of our kitchen in Hatfield, how some nights I had gone down in the dark and opened the refrigerator to cool myself and look upon the lighted shelves, the cheese, the milk, the bacon, ajar of grape jelly, a jug of water, a pie, a pitcher of fresh orange juice. The kitchen was dark, but the inside of the refrigerator was bright and filled with clean food.
I was woken from this very dream one day by Jerry's shouts, and I was to remember that interruption. Jerry had seen a sailboat beating from the south. The wind was offshore. The boat tacked way out, then sailed in on a wave, its gray sail luffing, and plowed the beach.
"It's a boat, Dad!"
Father raised himself up and watched Jerry running toward the sailboat.
I said, "It might be Mr. Haddy."
"Where's Mother?"
I looked around. I had been sleeping. "She must be in the village."
The twins were asleep beside him. They slept holding hands.
"Go see who it is," Father said. He gave me a sneaky glance, his coward's glance, which was weak and wanting comfort and willing to ditch anything in order to get away — his blamer's look, which had a hint of sadness and self-hate in it. I saw his face. I did not size up his expression until later.
"Take your time," he said. 'Til be right here."
I left him with the twins and ran down the beach. Jerry had already reached the sailboat. He was talking to the man on board, who had turtles stacked around his mast and filling his cuddy like manhole covers. It was not Mr. Haddy, but he was willing to talk. He had broken his mainsheet, he needed some rope. He was talking about rope when we heard the yell.
"The twins," Jerry said.
It was a child's shriek, thin and complaining and pathetic.
"Mother! Mother! Mother! Mother!"
"You got trouble for true," the boatman said, speaking at the sound of the voice.
The twins were awake, rubbing their eyes, when we got back to the little camp. Father was missing, but we could see the groove mark of his body across the sand, like a lizard track, with handprints on either side. All fours.