A Million Tears (69 page)

I had been going through a particularly bad patch for some days. I was bad tempered, morose and churlish to the others. I had thrown down the saw in a fit of temper and walked away, fed up with the raft, the island and despairing of ever leaving. I walked around to the other side of the island alone. I cursed the sea, the weather and God. Jake and Estella had found a peace and contentment together that I could never have without a woman with whom to share it. In spite of the paradise we found ourselves on it was still a prison. I craved to get away more than anything else in the world. I walked all the way around the island and back to the edge of the lagoon. I sat on a rock, out of sight of the camp, alone.

I was there for hours. It was a beautiful day, mid afternoon, with a brilliant sun in a blue sky, a few white cotton ball clouds and a refreshing breeze from the west. An ideal day for sailing, I thought ironically. I don’t remember what I thought about as the afternoon wore on. I sat watching a bright red piece of coral about three inches long, embedded in a white surround, being lapped by the blue sea. It was with a sense of shock I saw the sun dipping down over the horizon. I took one last look at the red coral, now some twelve inches above the lapping water and walked back to camp. It wasn’t until I was in bed trying to get to sleep when the significance of what I had been looking at struck me.

I sat bolt upright with the thought. I could not believe it. Had I imagined it? Quickly I began to dress.

‘What’s the matter?’ Dominic asked sleepily.

‘Come on, there’s something I want to show you,’ my voice was quivering with excitement, some of which I must have imparted to Dominic.

‘What is it? Where are we going?’ he asked, also dressing rapidly.

‘To the end of the lagoon. Come on.’ I led the way. It was a clear, star filled night, a half moon just rising above the horizon. The coral gleamed in the white light, the red piece showing black. I estimated it was five hours since I had left and there it was, close to being lapped by the water again. When I saw it, sure it had not been my imagination, I yelled for joy. I jumped up and down and danced around. Dominic was alarmed, thinking I had gone crazy, or so he said to Estella and Jake when they hurried over.

‘I’m not crazy,’ I said with a laugh. ‘Stupid maybe, but not crazy. How many times have we looked at the sea, sometimes seeing more coral at the reef than others? Okay, I know the difference has not been great and the slope of the beach is so gradual we hardly ever notice a difference in tides. Jake,’ I grabbed his arm, ‘there’s a rise and fall of about a foot, perhaps a little more. Don’t you see? We’ve got the wood for a raft. All we need do is modify the design a little and we can do a – what do you call it? They were doing it in New Orleans when we left, clearing those rocks. Remember you pointed them out to me? They were using large barges.’

‘A tidal lift?’ Jake suggested softly.

‘That’s it. A tidal lift.’

To Dominic’s and Estella’s perplexity Jake and I jumped, danced and laughed together. It was some minutes before we calmed down enough to explain to them.

47

At dawn that day we began to construct the raft, but this time with a difference. We lashed four logs together to establish its boundaries which would be eighteen feet long and ten feet wide. We then placed the bottom layer, running the whole length of the raft but left the two middle logs off. This was to fit around the mast and to allow it to feed through as the yacht neared the surface.

‘How many times will we have to do it, do you think?’

Estella asked.

‘It’s hard to say,’ I replied. ‘At a foot a time . . .probably forty to fifty. If we work during both tides we can have her on the beach in three or four weeks after the first lift.’ I did not add the fear that worried me. Was the lift sufficient? I thought it was, but until we tried I could not be sure.

Slowly the raft fitted together. Each log was lashed down separately, care being taken to use as little rope as possible, since our supply was not inexhaustible. With no water barrels, rudder, nor housing to make we would be ready to launch the raft as much as a month earlier than expected. What we would have though, would be big, heavy and unwieldy. The problem of the launch had occurred to us, and we hoped we had the solution. We were building on the sloping beach. If we dug away the sand down to the water, a mere six feet away, we hoped to be able to get the raft into the lagoon.

Jake and I dived to the
Lucky Lady
using our homemade bell. We positioned it near one of the starboard portholes so we could reach out and remove the glass. We used it to fashion a second diving mask. We then spent the best part of a day examining the
Lucky Lady
and discussing where and how we would pass the lifting ropes. The fact that she was sitting upright on a pile of coral had helped when stripping her and now was going to prove a Godsend when it came to the lift. She was angled slightly to port, lying with her side against a large piece of coral that stretched over three quarters the length of the hull. On her starboard side there were a number of broken segments of coral, some as much as eight feet high, though none were touching the hull.

Now I was doing something definite to get away I no longer suffered the depressions I had previously. Every day we were working by sunrise and did not finish until sunset, stopping only for a light lunch and frequent drinks of water or coconut milk. Even through the heat of the early afternoon we continued, wearing large, floppy sun hats which Estella had made out of palm leaves.

We finished the construction in the third week of May.The days had flown by unnoticed, except for the fact that Estella was fast approaching her time. She accepted it far more stoically than we men. She mentioned the fact, hitherto ignored by us, that one of us would have to deliver the child. We all blanched but Dominic and I agreed entirely on one thing. Jake was responsible for putting it there, he could deliver it. He went into a paroxysm of panic at the thought and kept insisting Dominic or I were much better at that sort of thing than he was. What sort of thing he meant he did not expand on. At first it was funny, but as the day got nearer the problem took on gigantic proportions.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘this has been going on for years. Millions of men have helped deliver babies. It must be as easy as falling off a log.’ Estella cast a reproachful glance at me. ‘Well, you know what I mean. Surely you know what must be done.’

‘Of course I do,’ she replied tartly. ‘Unfortunately, apart from lying on my back with my legs open there is little I can do to help you. I’ve told you all a dozen times what you must do, I can’t do more than that. And I want to add, you three are a great help to a girl, I must say. You instil me with such confidence, I wish I had never become pregnant,’ and she promptly burst into tears.

We looked helplessly at each other and then Dominic and I sneaked quietly away leaving Jake to comfort her. When it came to some matters I was amongst the fifty percent of the cowardly population in the world, all of us male.

The day came to launch the raft. We scraped away the sand from around it, and dug down in front until the sea was lapping at the logs. Behind the raft we built a sturdy tripod, which acted as the fulcrum for a lever made of a fifteen feet long, ten inch diameter tree trunk. With the lever at the centre of the raft, and with two thirds of it behind the fulcrum, we attached a triple sheaved block and rope. When the three of us pulled on the rope the lever came slowly down, the raft tilted and slipped all of six inches over the sand. We repeated this again and again . . . and again . . . until finally the front third was floating, then a half, then two thirds, and then we were standing behind pushing it slowly into the water. That night we men celebrated by getting drunk.

Which was a great shame really, because around midmorning next day, just as we were surfacing, Jake yelled for help. Dominic and I rushed to their hut to find Estella lying on their bed, her hands over her waist, pain on her face.

‘He’s early,’ she whispered. ‘It is time. Don’t forget what I told you. Plenty of hot water and use the whitesheets I’ve got ready from that top drawer,’ she pointed to the rough chest of drawers Jake had made.

‘Oh, Christ,’ one of us said.

Dominic and I collided in the doorway as we rushed to light a fire and put water on to boil. Our haste to get out of there before anything happened was unseemly. We hung around outside, listening to Jake and Estella talking in quiet voices; he seemed to be reassuring her. The morning dragged. We had a half hearted lunch of cold meat and mangoes and sat in the shade waiting for the big event. It was late in the afternoon when Jake yelled to us:

‘Come here quick. Bring the water. Heck, it’s coming.’

Dominic and I leapt to our feet like frightened rabbits at the first yell from Jake. We bumped into each other going for the water, now simmering on the stones by the side of the fire. We scrambled up the steps and into the hut as the miracle began. Jake was incredible in the calm, proficient way he delivered the boy. It came out head first, covered in blood and a slimy substance. He handed it to me, and without thinking I took him.

‘What do I do?’ I asked plaintively.

‘Hold him by his feet and smack his bottom,’ Dominic said, ‘like Estella told us.’

The baby was crying gustily, his eyes screwed tight, his tiny fists clenched. Jake had cut the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors and Dominic was putting some sheets into my hands, to cover the baby with. Luckily the placenta had come out with the cord and Jake took the mess and threw it on the fire.

‘But he’s breathing all right,’ I said in awe. ‘And Estella said . . .’

‘So she did,’ said Jake. ‘So just hold him you big ape, until Estella can take him.’ He was busy cleaning Estella and covering her with a sheet.

‘I shall take him now,’ she said sweetly. ‘Let me see my baby.’

Tentatively I held him out to her. She took the bundle, still crying, from me, opened her night-dress and began to feed him. The noise stopped like a tap being turned off. As she fed him, she reached into the sheet and counted his fingers, toes and looked him over. Finally she was satisfied and lay back with a beaming smile. ‘We shall call him David Dominic Rodriquez Mendoza Kirkpatrick.’

‘That’s a bit of a mouthful for such a little fellow, isn’t it?’ asked Jake. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of Jake Junior.’ ‘Never,’ Estella said with finality.

I was honoured. Dominic thought Dominic David had a better ring to it than David Dominic and Rodriquez had been chosen as it had been their father’s name.

We did no work for the next couple of days. Jake wanted to stay close to Estella and the three of us would be needed for the next part of the operation. Estella was soon on her feet, preparing meals for us or fussing over the baby.

Estella assured us he was beautiful, but I confess all I saw was a red, wrinkle faced, sleeping, or crying bundle about eighteen inches long. I could not see any trace of the beauty she talked about. But then I was not alone; neither his father nor uncle could either.

Four days after the birth we were ready to pull the raft into position. We used the rope from the top of the mizzen mast of the
Lucky Lady
to pull ourselves slowly and sedately along. The raft was a heavy structure and tended to tilt if we walked from one side to the other. But she floated with the whole of the second layer out of the water. We pulled the bell down over the cockpit and Jake and I dived down. We had two strops to pass round the hull, one near the bows and the other near the stern. We held the strops in place by hammering nails into the hull and bending them around the rope. It was a simple task but having to hold your breath, swim out and back to the bell, and every ten minutes take the bell to the surface to freshen the air, made it a long and tedious process. Each time we took the bell up to the surface wasted about forty minutes, provided all went smoothly and the ropes and tackle did not become tangled, or the blocks tumble.

On each side of the raft we made two sets of reels, each with long handles. We had the tackle roved to advantage, able to haul from the running block fixed to the eyes of the strops around the keel of the
Lucky Lady
. On the raft we had the standing block tied on a pendant around the reel. We turned up the reels until the ropes were bar taut. Jake and I dived down to see how the boat was laying, and agreed it was as good as we could have hoped for.

While we had been working Estella had been keeping a note of the times of high and low tides and this allowed us to know accurately when they would next occur. A high tide followed a low tide every six hours and twenty minutes, as near as we could tell. Also at one part of the month, the range – the difference between high and low water – was only five or six inches, while two weeks later it was as much as fifteen to eighteen inches.

Low water on that first day was at eight o’clock in the evening. With the last of the rope, we ran a block and tackle from the front of the raft to a tree near the huts.

Nervously we ate a cold meal, sitting on the raft on the lagoon, watching the last of the sun’s rays disappearing from sight, and waiting for low water, which would be in another hour and thirty minutes. We kept the lifting tackle tight by means of a ratchet wheel and peg Dominic had made on the reel. When the peg was pushed into place, after the wheel was turned, there was no chance of it unwinding. It was a calm night, with only the gentlest of breezes, little cloud, the sky full of stars, the moon not yet risen. We could see Estella sitting by the fire outside the huts, peering anxiously our way, her face an undistinguished white blob in the poor light.

‘I’m sure we moved slightly then,’ I whispered, ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s possible. What the hell are we whispering for?’ Jake suddenly said in a normal tone. ‘We ought to start lifting soon after low water, not before.’

We heaved until the ropes were taut and the sea was lapping over the edge of the raft. Would it lift?