“Don Vicente.” The respectful salutation commanded his attention. It had been so long since he’d been so addressed, and only out of courtesy by his father’s peones. He hadn’t enough money or land or age to merit the title. The speaker was the plantation agent Albert E. Minvielle, who had astounded them by speaking Spanish as well as English. It was rumored that his mother was a Puerto Rican.
“I’m very sorry for your loss.” Minvielle pointed to the sailors: sunburnt, rough-looking men. “They’re here for the boy.”
His son. His boy.
Minvielle took his handkerchief out of his breast pocket. The stench of hundreds of unwashed emigrants and their normal bodily functions was so vile that the ship’s doctor held a handkerchief to his nose whenever he was obliged to descend to steerage and tend to the sick.
It wasn’t as if the Puerto Ricans couldn’t smell the terrible odor, but what could they do about it? Stick pieces of cloth in their nostrils for the duration of the voyage? They had to breathe, didn’t they? What choice did they have when nobody listened to their petitions? When they were met with silence whenever they asked for water to wash or to empty their chamber pots? The very unlucky had cots near makeshift water closets.
Strangers and acquaintances alike moved out of Vicente’s way as if Javier had died of some contagious disease. Bare feet shuffled on the wood planks as they parted for their fellow compañero and his dead son. Hushed murmurs ceased. Valentina and their daughter huddled together on their cot. Lourdes, now Vicente and his wife’s only living child, cried at her mother’s side. Valentina gathered the boy to her breast as she had when he was her newborn baby. She whispered a mother’s nonsensical murmurings as Vicente watched helpless in his grief and guilt. Minvielle reminded him that the sailors were waiting. Vicente bent to take their son.
“¡No! ¡Vicente, no!” Valentina slapped at her husband’s hands.
“Querida—” Vicente knelt down and wrapped his arms around his wife and their daughter. The plantation agent tapped his shoulder. Time to go.
Vicente followed the sailors up some steps. A gust of wind from the ocean chilled him and he braced his legs against the ship’s oscillations. He thought he might fall, but he righted himself, the boy heavy in his arms as only a sleeping child can be.
The small room was bare except for a table and a few chairs. A kerosene lamp, a cloth, a bowl of water, a swathe of heavy canvas, and a sewing box were on the table. Minvielle relayed instructions from the sailors and they left him alone to prepare the body. Vicente washed and dried his son’s face, his hands, his feet, noting, without realizing it, the crooked toe on Javier’s right foot, the same as his father’s. His fingers trembled as he moved the needle with coarse thread in and out; he sewed his son’s nostrils closed. He remembered their departure from the port of Ponce, when Javier played monster, chasing his little sister up and down the pier. Vicente had thought the boy too old to be so childish, especially in front of strangers, and had been about to reprimand him when Valentina placed her hand on his arm.
Minvielle returned with the sailors, who carried a plank and a piece of heavy chain. They wound the chain around Javier’s ankles and placed him in the sack. Vicente asked that they give him time to sew the sailcloth closed, but when Minvielle conferred with the sailors, he was told it would take too long. The sailors balanced the sack with the boy’s body on the plank. Vicente heard the sharp clack of their shoes on the wood deck; he wondered what had happened to Javiercito’s shoes, perhaps Valentina had them. He saw his brother Raulito with his arm around Valentina, his wife’s face hidden behind a black lace mantilla. A crowd of spectators, both steerage and cabin passengers, had gathered on deck for the burial at sea. The murmuring swell of excitement rushed against Vicente’s temples.
Behind the captain and a minister in clerical collar, the sun sank into the ocean like an aureole. The Puerto Ricans bowed their heads at amen. The sailors balanced one end of the plank on the railing. The sack with his son slid down into the black water and disappeared into the mouth of the sea monster.
Minvielle told him that it was a terrible thing what had happened, but soon they would be in Hawaii. It was a good place, this Hawaii, a country of aloha. Vicente would have work in the sugarcane fields. Good hard work. Steady work. What every man needed. Minvielle advised Vicente to bid adiós to the past and aloha to the future, that’s what the Hawaiians say. A strange word, aloha, it meant both hello and goodbye. He could never figure out why that was. But Vicente didn’t have to worry about that. Talking Hawaiian, he meant. Even if he ever did meet any Hawaiians, he would be too busy on the sugarcane plantation to talk to them. Hard work would do him good. Hard, steady work in the Hawaiian sugarcane fields. Hawaii would do more good for him and his compatriots than the whole island of Puerto Rico had done since before the great Hurricane San Ciriaco, since the Americans, and even all the way back to the old days of los españoles. That’s what they all needed, the Puerto Ricans. Hard, steady work in the Hawaiian sugarcane fields.
Vicente held onto the rail, unaware that he was alone on deck and had been for hours. His fellow Puerto Ricans in their steel cages dreamt of the island breeze that once swung their hammocks, and the chant of the coquís that used to lull them to sleep. Vicente didn’t hear the hum of the ship’s mechanical workings or the sailors as they went about their duties.
Well-dressed cabin passengers paused in their evening stroll for a closer look at the man whose child was now at the bottom of the ocean. The men had supposed that he’d be more of a brute; the women hadn’t expected a tragic hero. He didn’t look like a savage native. Of course they’d had very little contact with the natives, especially the negros. There were the servants, of course, but one didn’t notice servants. Porto Ricans played in the native orchestras, but one didn’t actually look at the musicians. The cabin passengers all agreed that the island of Porto Rico was very beautiful, and the parties in the Spanish-style homes of the island elites quite acceptable as far as provincial island entertainment went. So exotic to see palm trees while dancing, wouldn’t you say? Quite fascinating how travel broadens one, they all agreed as they returned to their spacious staterooms and comfortable beds with the bedclothes turned down by the stewards.
The sailor assigned to make sure Vicente didn’t jump into the ocean brought him a flask of whiskey, compliments of the captain. Raulito snuck on deck, and they stood vigil through the night. The stars illuminated the waves that moved the ship further away from all they had known and all they had lost.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
RON CAÑA HELPS
No sky for days—five days. No sky for a people born into sun. Streaks of light, too dim to give courage or hope, came in through portholes that they couldn’t open to dispel the stench. In the cavernous hold of the ship, the men were separated from the women and children, they slept on pallets of straw in iron cages set in double banks, row after row, tier upon tier. The women hung their mantillas or whatever they had for privacy.
They shivered in their thin cotton clothing when the steamship Arkadia docked at Port Eads Harbor in the chill of a New Orleans winter. They complained that they had never felt so cold, not even after Hurricane San Ciriaco, when some of them had been naked and without shelter, no señor, not even then. They were allowed on deck when they reached port and watched in amazement as stevedores carried crates filled with bananas off the ship. Bananas were mother’s milk! They shouted, “Minvielle, Minvielle, why didn’t you give us bananas?” When they saw mangos carried off by the hundreds, they thought it was but a dream. Why weren’t they given mangos? The cabin passengers disembarked, men and women brilliant like peacocks in their fur-cloaked plumage. A Puerto Rican child called out to one of these lovely ladies, who waved a fur muff in condescension.