The Hand of God

Last time I sailed on night watch serenity inspired me to draw the moonscape, and I called it The Hand of God. He subsequently taught me a lesson that ‘fear- inspiring’ is what you can’t see multiplied a thousand times by what you can.

A crescent moon is high on a cloudless, starry night. I could look down and sail across the universe. This is how I’d wanted to go to heaven, in a boat sailing across the ocean, but  night fishing along the marshlands south of the island, I encountered devilishly glowing eyes in the reeds close to shore demanding my attention.

I knew well the only thing keeping curiosity at bay was a fire I ignited inside an empty five-gallon metal kerosene tin, the top I sawed off to repurpose it. This fire illuminated the tiny old cedar boat, and itself required careful attention.

I imagined the rumbling of a powerful diesel engine coming through the bellowing throat of a crocodile, and as I gazed across a steady fire into its eyes I thought, ‘There must be a gateway to hell, somewhere.’

He wasn’t a salt water crocodile. Omens of the night were palpable: biting cold in summer air, and ripples in the water spreading out from thrashing at the shoreline, and impatient, orange-glowing eyes.

I recited in a whisper Psalms twenty three until the rumbling of its voice mysteriously stopped. Glowing eyes disappeared below the waterline, perhaps blown away like foul wind or scared away by an invisible, more powerful force.

 I looked up. An enchanting crescent moon had been etched into memory, but I also remember a screaming evil returning to shore the following night, and whenever I close my eyes to sleep, this cold, screaming evil has echoed through the halls ever since.

***

On the morning of July 3^rd, I considered changing the batteries in the radio, changing my mind at the last minute. I believed the ones still inside it were a good, high-quality brand even though the volume kept going down more often and the LED lights faded from a bright neon green to a faint yellow, hardly detectable. It still played and scanned the frequencies, picking up even the Spanish radio stations.

Unbothered, I trusted my experience and judgment. I had corned beef sandwiches tied up in the same bag the hard dough bread I purchased to make them came in. I had saltine crackers, a one gallon bottle of drinking water, two bottles of Pepsi in the cooler, a pack of cigarettes, some matches, home-made marijuana joints which I’d usually mix with the tobacco from the cigarettes before smoking, and a banger phone.

All these I randomly piled on top of the nets towards the bow until I arrived at a suitable spot to cast off the nets.

There were no maps or charts or GPS with coordinates telling me I’d fished there a thousand times before, it’s all about  the spawning cycles of the fish, where to find them and when they bite or begin to shoal.

I had an early voyage at around 3 am. There was talk about yellow fin tuna schooling   ten miles west off the Alligator Pond coast. When everyone else was coming ashore to tie down their vessels ahead of Hurricane Beryl I set out for the challenge, oiled and ready, hoping to get a massive payday with time to spare.

Beryl already became a record breaker for the year 2024 by first becoming the earliest cat 5 on record in the Atlantic, and then the earliest to ever approach the island. I’ve never heard of a hurricane that powerful enter the Caribbean in early July, not even from my elders, but it did, and yet I remained confident I’d make it to shore before even a droplet of water fell on my head.

 Even forecasters warned not to be fooled by the sunrise, and so I sailed due west away from it. The further out I sailed the more the waves increased in size and ferocity, slapping the boat around to the point where I decided the risk out-weighed any reward out there waiting for me.

I turned the boat around, and with the engine on full throttle, used petrol generously to bounce off the waves on route to the Alligator Pond beach. Still, not a single cloud crossed the sky.

 Once ashore, fellow fisher folk assisted me in tethering my vessel to theirs. Fifty meters inland along a forty degree gradient on the dunes, we agreed, was far enough from the beach for securing the vessels. It also seemed a far enough place to be to observe the wrath of Poseidon in daylight.

Our laughter and gimmickry masked peril just ahead. We played dominoes while the wind picked up and laughed as seasoned mariners at this puny storm everyone else ranted and raved about. It would be a regular day out on the Pedro keys for men like us.

All’s well and hours go by. We enjoyed thus far a regular day on the beach for fishermen when seas get rough. At around nine o clock someone under the gazebo shouts, “She’s a cat four!” and then more laughter erupts. Our odds of faring better seemed to be improving; Beryl was a cat five the day before. Now, no one was in a hurry. By the time she comes ashore Beryl will be a cat two, which we all could handle easily.

On the last game of dominoes, Mark stands, emphatically crashing the winning domino, double-five at that, onto the ply board with the palm of his hand and shouted, “Hold dat! Double-five boy! You wretch yuh!” After skillfully forcing Jeremy, the hand before him, to play the five-blank he held so close to his breast. Mark did this from two players away!

By then wind picked up significantly, and the skies greyed out. Everyone concluded it was time to secure the rest of the unused ply boards before they turned into kites. I turned my back to the water, kneeled, bracing my body against the side of the boat so Jeremy could skate one of the boards underneath it. That’s when I shuddered at the familiar sound of a bellowing crocodile, intense vibrations coming from behind and through my body, amplified a thousand times as thunder.

The flash triggering it I missed when I turned to face the sea, that’s when a wall of white air knocked three of us, Jeremy Laird and me, on our backs instantly. It threw ply boards in the air meters high before landing them in the marsh well beyond. All the carefree laughing suddenly stopped for an urgent re-evaluation of circumstances.

 In hindsight, had I chosen to fish along an easy road to hell the night before, God might not have bothered to test my faith in him the next day.

Finding our footing in the sand all four of us, Jeremy, Laird, Mark and I steadied ourselves by holding on to each other. Jeremy leaned over and asked, “Do we still have time?” to which I answered, “Hell yes, let’s get out of this before we can’t!”

Mark, beaming with confidence from his last game of dominoes, shook his head defiantly, “Come on, it’ll be fun. It won’t get much worse than this. Let’s ride this out and post it on Facebook,” he said and giggled. He could hardly open his eyes and yet could open his mouth.

Jeremy ultimately gave in to this renewal of bravery, so did Laird, making me the only coward, and so I stayed, reluctantly.

Confident that we were far enough from the water, we sought shelter under a gazebo built of cinder block, steel and concrete. Lighting a spiff proved futile, the same was true for cigarettes. We resorted to drinking kulu kulu. There’s no manly way to drink it, it burns all the way down.

American tourists describe it as the Jamaican equivalent to moonshine, and the irony added bitterness to it.

We reveled mercilessly with south-easterlies coming at us from the sea and didn’t worry about any missiles or projectiles since we were behind the debris field, at least for the time being. Looking back, if good sense prevailed, it should have occurred to us that if the eye moved inland, winds would change direction and blow us all to smithereens.

Mark kept his radio on and we huddled around it with four ounce plastic cups in hand and bravery in a bottle. These waters we treaded carefully, sipping enough at a time just to keep us warm and brave.

Surprisingly the most tempestuous winds stayed aloft, and by around 6 pm Hurricane Beryl proved to be less of a rain-maker and more of a siren begging for the souls of fishermen through the air.

We drank some more, convinced the worst had past, and cursed at the bitch from behind her. We threw stones at her in drunken madness, laughing like hyenas, and then the rains began.

By late evening were all in a pitiful state. On Mark’s radio we listened to the concerned voice of weather forecaster Michael Thompson. Beryl’s eye had begun to pass just to the south and west of Alligator Pond. When the eye wall passed we thought the worst was over, but then we started enduring the dirtiest side of her on her north-eastern quadrant.

 Cracking whips of white streaked across a contrast of increasing darkness above our heads, and thundering reminded us of the unfathomable powers we mocked to our own detriment. Here is where we forced soberness upon ourselves.

 Attempting to empty my cup on the sand, I watched its contents splash onto Jeremy’s face and into his eyes. He laughed, of course. Unfortunately when he could finally reopen his eyes I witnessed his soul leave his body in terror when he stared blandly out towards the ocean. His candid smile and carefree laughter wiped away, replaced with a blank slate.

I thought in that moment, ‘Anything out there that can scare a drunken fisherman like this has to be the last thing he’ll ever see.’

I flipped around in time for another bright flash across the sky, and it illuminated what darkness tried to hide, only for a moment, a faint wall of froth. Another flash and the wall appeared much taller and nearer. We would either survive it or we wouldn’t.

No time to run, in another flash this white wall of froth came ashore, towering over our heads. Mark and Laird threw themselves onto the concrete buttresses, wrapping their arms around them in a desperate grab for survival.

I contemplated a dash towards the boats but we wouldn’t have made it, and so, I followed the others and clung as tightly as I could to the buttresses of the gazebo, my eyes sealed shut, my ears wide open, and then the train hit, “Boom!”

Upon explosive impact my ribs compressed instantly, forcing air out of my lungs. A stabbing pain followed on my right side, and I must have screamed upon exhalation. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. Had I the strength to fight the churning water I wouldn’t have made it.

 My flailing arms slammed into the port side of the hull of one of the fishing boats ripped away from the beach and adrift. I immediately threw my left arm over the gunwale, attaching myself to this lifeline, trying to keep my head above water. Every breath challenged my will to survive. The pain I needed to endure overwhelmed my will power.

I threw the last of it at the wind, moaning in agony. I had enough but suddenly, on the verge of letting go, an arm stretched towards me from inside the boat, grabbed onto mine and hauled me into it. It was Mark, the best swimmer out of the lot. I coughed water out of my lungs in misery and excruciating pain, almost drowning again in another deluge from the sky pushing us down inside the hull.

Mark, himself badly injured with a bleeding gash across his abdomen, lay on his side, covering the wound with his hands and assured me, “I’ll fight until my last breath to make it, even if we get dragged out to sea. Don’t give up Jax,” he said, and then grabbing hold of my hand he repeated, “Don’t give up.”

We were taking on water at an unsustainable rate from mostly the rainfall. Neither of us had the strength to bail it out, so lying on the bottom of the boat we did our best to keep our chins above ever rising and vigorous splashes of water, bouncing around in a washing machine on the waves.

There were days on the island when I prayed for rain, this night I prayed for it to stop.

In time I accepted my fate. I knew Mark and I were dead men, adrift in a category four hurricane on the Caribbean Sea. Capsizing was just a matter of time. I spoke to God in secret, telling him it would be a quicker end for which I’d be grateful.

He chose to inspire me instead. On my back, with my chin up and Mark bumping into me, I witnessed the mighty hand of God in a flash across the sky. Veins of lightening shrouded in a palm of mist, and then again. This time coiled into a fist as if grabbing hold of something and pulling it away.

Mark removed all doubts about what I thought I saw, “Did you see that, Jaxen, were going to make it,” is the last thing I heard him say.

***

I opened my eyes to white light, and told the man standing at the foot of the bed to forgive me for my sins. Hoarseness from salt water intake lingered. Every inhalation seemed like double the effort to breathe. Speaking at all was hard work.  He walked over to the right side of the bed and touched me on the right side of my chest.

 The man seemed satisfied that I grunted in pain before he spoke to me, “Jaxen,” he said, and I grunted again in reply.

“You were truly dead,” he said, injecting a fresh dose of morphine into my tubes, “Try not to move or talk. There is a catheter inside your chest cavity, and you have several broken ribs along with a collapsed lung, rest.”

I spent seven weeks in ICU, sometimes unable to tell the difference between dreams and reality. As time moved on, my condition improved. The tubes came out and I celebrated being shuttled out of the ICU into the general ward where Mark and Laird came to visit. Mark spent three weeks in the same hospital at Kingston Public. Laird had been treated as an outpatient at the Black River hospital the night of the storm and had to travel to Kingston to see us.

Mark would peel back his bandages to show me his stitches. They canvased the breadth of his abdomen as if he was sawed in half and sewn back together, resembling a zipper. Now he is a man of faith. Whenever Laird visited he brought lunch from the outside— a welcomed change from weeks of mush.

I savored everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken to fried fish and beef patties to street side pan chicken and soups to corned beef sandwiches.

 Laird recounted details of his harrowing experience, saying how frightening momentum of the surge knocked him unconscious the moment of impact. He had to be told how he miraculously survived, being strapped to a palm tree by drifting nets, and how other fishermen rescued him there.

I always wondered why Jeremy wouldn’t visit. Did he get badly injured like me, or worse than me? Mark and Laird didn’t talk about or mention him either. One day I asked them, “Are you going to wait for me to ask you about Jeremy?”

They looked at each other despondently as if they knew the day had come. Mark said, “They couldn’t find him, Jeremy is lost Jax, I’m sorry. We wanted you to be the one to ask.”

Learning of Jeremy’s loss wasn’t as hard for me as they thought it would be. In a sense I already knew. The last time I saw him he stared ghastly into the beyond, soulless, fearful and helpless. He didn’t see a killer wave like the rest of us. He saw, felt and heard what I did the night before Beryl: glaring, glowing eyes, thrashing on the shoreline, a bellowing diesel engine begging for his soul and the cold air of death.

When I asked God for relief that night he must have also heard of a suffering greater than mine and relieved him. That’s when I saw the hand of God reach over the boat to exert a claim against forces of darkness in the wicked wind.

 I later learned Jeremy’s family refused to have a service for him without all of us being there, and I gifted his mother the moonscape I drew in pencil the night of July 2nd. The stars, the shadow of our watery earth we wouldn’t see if not for a crescent moon, the sea, the wind,  to all of which God said ‘No’ for a single soul.

I understand know. Our plight is not for forgiveness. There will come a time in our lives when we will seek a higher power, when forces powerful beyond our capacity to overcome try to claim our souls, like walls of frothy water and screaming sirens of Poseidon.

It’s why I made my request for salvation that night an ode to life, for Jeremy. I etched it on the back of the drawing because God taught me a lesson.

 ‘The hand of God has many fingers. They pulled Beryl back out to sea. They sailed Jeremy away in a boat across the universe, and set him free.’

THE END