One Song in Every Town

Limón: The Banjo on the Porch

The old man was sitting on his porch with his banjo across his knees when Daniela pulled up in the Hyundai at seven in the morning, and he had his good hat on, and that was how she knew something was wrong.

Mr. Cyril Grant did not wear his good hat. Not on Tuesdays. Not for the nurse. He wore it to funerals and to the bank and, once a year, on the twelfth of October, to the carnival parade in Limón, where they put him on a float with a microphone and he sang one song, the old one, the one everybody knew, and the crowd sang the chorus back to him and wept. The rest of the year the good hat lived on a nail behind his bedroom door: a white Panama with a black band, gone yellow at the brim, that he said he had bought in 1961 from a sailor off a banana boat with the money from his first song.

Today it was on his head. And his shoes were polished. And there was a small suitcase on the porch beside his chair, an old brown one with a strap around it, and a plastic bag from the supermarket with something heavy in it.

Daniela got out of the car with her bag. She was thirty-four. She had been a home-care nurse for nine years and a nurse for Mr. Grant for eleven months, three mornings a week, since his heart started doing things in the night that made his granddaughter call the ambulance. She checked his pressure and his sugar and his pills and his feet and his lungs, and she listened to him tell her she was too thin and too serious and too Spanish, and she made him breakfast, and she left.

She was also married to his grandson. That was how she had got the job. That was how she had got everything on this coast, the first year, when she came from San José and knew no one and could not understand one word in five of what the old people said to her, in their English that was not English, in their Creole, the old language of the coast that had come from Jamaica a hundred and fifty years ago with the men who built the railroad.

She had met Andre in San José, in the emergency room of the Hospital México, at two in the morning, nine years ago. He had come up the mountain on the night bus with a cousin who had put his hand through a window at a party, and he sat in the plastic chair in the waiting room for six hours in a shirt covered in his cousin's blood, making jokes in Spanish to a nurse on her first month of nights, and when the cousin was stitched and sent home he came back to the desk and asked her, very politely, whether people in San José ever went to the beach. She said no. He said that was the saddest thing he had ever heard.

They had lived in San José for seven years, in a small apartment near the hospital, and had two children there. Then the port at Moín had wanted men who could drive the new machines, and the money was double, and his grandparents were getting old. So they had come down the mountain.

The first time she met Mr. Grant, on the porch of the blue house, in that first year, he had looked at her for a long time from his chair, a pale thin serious woman from the capital holding her husband's hand, and said something in Creole, and everybody on the porch had laughed, Andre too.

She had asked Andre, in the car, what he had said.

Andre had hesitated. "He said you look like a woman who reads the instructions."

"Is that bad?"

"On this coast," Andre had said, "nobody reads the instructions."

"Mr. Grant," she said, in Spanish. "Where are you going?"

He looked at her from under the brim of the good hat.

"We," he said, in Creole, slowly, so she would understand. "Where are *we* going."

---

The house was blue. A wooden house on stilts, like all the old houses on that street in Limón, a block back from the sea, with a tin roof gone red with rust and a porch along the front with a railing painted white, and under the house, between the stilts, a hammock and a rusted bicycle and a chicken. From the porch you could see down the street to the seawall, and over it, the Caribbean, gray-green and restless in the morning, with the pelicans going over it in a line and the big container ships waiting offshore to come into the port at Moín, and beyond them, low on the horizon, the smudge of the island, Uvita, where Columbus had landed five hundred years ago and found, he wrote, a beautiful harbor and people with gold.

Mr. Grant had sat on this porch for eighty-one years. He had been born in the bedroom behind it, in 1945, to a mother from Port Antonio, Jamaica, and a father who worked the banana trains, and he had sung on this porch since he was six, with a guitar first, and then, from fourteen, the banjo, which had been his uncle's, and which was the only thing he owned, he said, that was worth anything.

He had written a hundred and forty calypsos. He knew because he had counted them, in a school exercise book, in pencil, every one, with the date. He had sung them on this porch, in the bars of Limón and Cahuita and Puerto Viejo, on the radio in San José in the 1970s, on a record in 1981, at the carnival every October. They were about everything. A woman who left. A woman who came back. A fisherman who caught a fish so big it ate his boat. The banana company. The railroad. A pastor who drank. The day the Spanish-speaking government in San José finally let the Black people of the coast travel freely in their own country, in 1949, after sixty years of not. A goat. A hurricane. His mother's rice and beans.

Nobody sang them anymore. Except at carnival. The one song.

"I want to go up the coast," said Mr. Grant. "And down. Every town I ever sang in. Before I die." He tapped the suitcase with his cane. "One more time. Every town. One song in each." He looked at her. "You will drive me."

"Mr. Grant. Your heart."

"My heart," said Mr. Cyril Grant, "is the reason."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Moín: The Railroad

His wife came out of the house while Daniela was still standing in the yard with her bag.

Mrs. Ena Grant was seventy-five, small and straight-backed, in a housedress the color of limes, with her reading glasses on a cord around her neck and a dish towel over one shoulder. She had been married to Cyril Grant for fifty-four years. She did not hurry. She had never, in the eleven months Daniela had known her, been seen to hurry, not even the night of the ambulance, when she had walked out to the gate in her nightgown and directed the driver to the steps as if he were a delivery van that had come to the wrong house.

She looked at her husband in his good hat. She looked at Daniela.

"Come," she said, in English, and went back inside.

Daniela followed her. The kitchen was at the back of the house, with a window over the sink that looked into a yard full of breadfruit and a lime tree and a clothesline, and on the table, laid out in a row on a clean dish towel, were his pills. Every bottle. Every box. The little white ones for his pressure and the yellow ones for the water and the small brown bottle of the ones that went under the tongue, the ones Daniela had told her, in the first month, never to let him leave the house without. Beside them, a sheet of paper torn from a calendar, with the days written down the back of it in blue ballpoint, and the times, and which pill.

"Five days," said Mrs. Grant. "I counted six, for safety."

"Mrs. Grant," said Daniela. "He can't."

"I know he can't."

"His heart is—"

"I know what his heart is." Mrs. Grant folded the dish towel around the pills, corner over corner, like a parcel, and tied it with a piece of string. "I have been listening to his heart in the night for fifty-four years. Before you came, before the doctors came. I know when it skips. I know when it runs." She put the parcel in Daniela's hands. "And I know what it does when he stops singing. It gets small. All year it gets small. And in October, on the float, for one song, it gets big again. Then November comes and it gets small." She took off her glasses and let them hang on their cord against her chest. "This year, he says, he is not waiting for October."

"Then come with us."

Mrs. Grant laughed. It was the first time Daniela had ever heard her laugh.

"Child," she said, "I have heard every one of those songs a thousand times. Some of them were about me. Some of them were about women who were not me, and I heard those a thousand times too." She put her glasses back on. "This is not my trip. Somebody needs to hear them who never heard them." She looked at Daniela over the top of the glasses. "If you don't take him he'll take the bus. And the bus driver doesn't know which pill."

From the porch, Mr. Grant called something in Creole. Mrs. Grant called something back, sharp, and he was quiet.

"What did he say?"

"He said the tide is going out and so is he." Mrs. Grant picked up a plastic container from the counter and pressed it into Daniela's other hand. Fried dumplings, still warm, wrapped in a paper towel. "For the road. He'll say he isn't hungry. He'll eat four."

---

She called her husband from the car. Andre was at work, at the port, where he drove a straddle carrier, a machine like a giant metal spider that lifted containers off the trucks and stacked them in rows.

"He's what?" said Andre.

"He's sitting in the passenger seat of my car with his banjo and his suitcase and his good hat on. He says we're going to Cahuita. And Puerto Viejo. And Manzanillo. And Siquirres. And Matina. And somewhere called Old Harbour that I can't find on the map." She looked at the old man beside her, who was looking straight ahead through the windshield with his hands folded on the head of his cane. "He says he's not getting out."

There was a silence on the phone.

"What did Grandma say?"

"Your grandmother," said Daniela, "packed his suitcase."

Andre laughed. He laughed for a long time. Then he stopped.

"His heart," he said.

"I know."

"Dani. If something happens—"

"I'm a nurse," said Daniela. "I have my bag. I have his pills. I have the hospital numbers for every town on the coast. And I have a seventy-five-year-old woman who packed her husband's suitcase and told me, and I am quoting, *if you don't take him he'll take the bus.*" She looked at Mr. Grant. "He will take the bus, Andre. You know he will."

Andre was quiet.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Call me from every town."

---

She did not go south first. Mr. Grant said north. To Moín. "Start where it started," he said.

So she drove him north out of Limón along the road by the sea, past the port with its cranes and its stacks of colored containers, red and blue and green and orange, like a city built by a child, and the trucks lined up for a mile with their engines running, to a place beside the old railroad tracks at the edge of the swamp, where the rails ran off into the mangroves and stopped.

There was nothing there. A rusted signal post. A concrete platform cracked through with weeds. Two rails going away into the green and vanishing under the water.

Mr. Grant got out of the car. It took a long time. Daniela held his arm. He walked to the end of the platform with his cane, in his good hat and his polished shoes, and stood looking at the rails going into the mangroves.

"My grandfather came in 1879," he said, in Creole, slowly. "From Jamaica. On a boat. To build this." He pointed his cane at the rails. "The railroad. From the sea to San José. Over the mountains. Through the jungle. Four thousand men died building it. Malaria. Yellow fever. Snakes. Accidents. The Chinese came, the Italians came, they died. Then the Jamaicans came. We didn't die so fast." He was quiet. "My grandfather laid track for nine years. Then the railroad was finished and the company said, now plant bananas. So he planted bananas. And the Spanish people in San José said, the Black people stay on the coast. Don't come up the mountain. This is not your country." He tapped the platform with his cane. "So we stayed. We stayed on the coast. We kept our English, and our church, and our cricket, and our rice and beans, and our calypso. For seventy years, we were Jamaicans in Costa Rica." He looked at her. "And then in 1949 they said, okay, you are Costa Rican now. And our children learned Spanish. And their children forgot the English. And now?" He shrugged. "Now my great-grandchildren cannot understand one word of my songs."

He took the banjo out of the plastic bag.

It was old. Very old. The skin of the head was yellow and spotted. The neck was dark wood worn smooth and pale where his hand had moved on it for sixty-seven years. One of the tuning pegs was a piece of whittled stick.

He sat down on the edge of the cracked platform, with his polished shoes hanging over the rails, and tuned it, slowly, by ear, and then he played.

---

It was not the carnival song. It was a song Daniela had never heard. About a man who came on a boat to build a road and found a wall instead. It was quick and bright and bouncing, the way calypso was, the banjo going like rain on a tin roof, and the words were funny, she could tell, even though she understood only one in three, because he grinned while he sang them, and the grin was the grin of a young man.

But under the funny, there was something else. She heard it. Like the sea under the sand.

When he was done, he sat on the edge of the platform with the banjo in his lap and looked at the rails going into the swamp.

There was no one there to hear it. Only Daniela, and the mangroves, and a heron standing in the water on one leg.

"Who was it for?" said Daniela. "If there's nobody here."

Mr. Grant ran his thumb along the edge of the banjo's head, where the skin was coming loose from the rim.

"My grandfather," he said. "He never heard one of my songs. He died in 1931. Before I was born. In a bed in Limón, with his hands still the shape of the hammer." He looked at the rails. "The carnival is for the people who come. This one is for the man who didn't."

She called Andre from the car, as she had promised, while Mr. Grant rested in the passenger seat with the door open and his feet on the gravel. Behind Andre's voice she could hear the port: the engines, the long scream of the cranes, a horn somewhere, the metal crash of a container set down on another.

"Moín," she said. "One song. At the end of the old tracks."

"Which one?"

She tried to tell him. A man who came on a boat to build a road. She tried to remember the tune, and could not, and said so.

Andre was quiet on the line for so long that she thought the call had gone.

"I know it," he said finally. "I didn't know I knew it. He used to sing it to me in the bath." He laughed, very short. "I'm sitting up here forty feet in the air with a box full of somebody's refrigerators, and I know every word." He was quiet again. "Dani. I don't know what half of them mean."

"Neither do I," she said. "Yet."

"One," said Mr. Grant. "Now Cahuita."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Cahuita: Rice and Beans

Cahuita is forty kilometers south of Limón, on the coast road, through the banana plantations and the cacao and the jungle, and it took them two hours, because Mr. Grant made her stop four times.

Once for a man selling pipas, green coconuts, from the back of a truck, who cut the top off one with a machete in three strokes and stuck a straw in it, and Mr. Grant drank the coconut water and said it was the best medicine on the coast and Daniela should tell her hospital. Once at a bridge over a brown river where he said he had kissed a girl named Hyacinth in 1962 and written a song about it, and her husband had heard the song and chased him with a cutlass. Once for no reason at all, at a bend in the road where the jungle opened and you could see the sea through the trees, blue now, the morning cloud gone, a long white beach going away south in a curve with the palms leaning over it and the waves coming in clean and slow.

And once in front of a small wooden house painted yellow with a sign on the gate in hand-painted letters: MISS PEARL'S · RICE AN BEAN · RONDON · PATI.

"Lunch," said Mr. Grant.

---

Miss Pearl was eighty-three. She was as round as Mr. Grant was thin, in a flowered dress and an apron and a head tie, and when she saw him get out of the car in his good hat, she put down the spoon she was holding and came down the steps of her porch faster than Daniela would have believed possible and put her arms around him in the yard and said something in Creole into his shoulder that made him laugh until he coughed.

"She says," said Mr. Grant, wiping his eyes, "she thought I was dead. She says she was going to be very angry."

Miss Pearl fed them on her porch. Rice and beans, the way the coast made it, which was nothing like the gallo pinto Daniela had eaten every morning of her childhood in San José. Red beans and rice cooked together in coconut milk, fresh, from coconuts Miss Pearl grated herself that morning, with thyme and a whole Scotch bonnet pepper floated on top and lifted out before it could burst, so that the rice was creamy and sweet and faintly fiery, and the whole porch smelled of it. With it, fried chicken, crisp, in a sauce of tomato and onion. Fried plantain, sweet and dark. A pati, a little pastry folded over spiced beef, flaky and hot, the coast's version of the Jamaican patty. And a glass of agua de sapo, ginger and lime and brown sugar water, so sharp it made her eyes sting.

"Rondón tomorrow," said Miss Pearl, in English, to Daniela. "If you stay. Fish, coconut, yam, plantain, breadfruit, everything you can find. *Run down*. Because you run down and find whatever there is and put it in the pot." She looked at Mr. Grant. "He wrote a song about my rondón. In 1968."

"1967," said Mr. Grant.

"1968. I was there."

"You were there," said Mr. Grant, "because you were in the song."

---

After the chicken he fell asleep. In Miss Pearl's hammock, on the porch, with his good hat over his face and his hands folded on his stomach and the banjo on the boards underneath him where he could reach it, and he snored, gently, like a man who had been up since four.

Daniela checked his pulse while he slept. Miss Pearl watched her do it.

"You hold his wrist," said Miss Pearl, in English, "the way I hold a fish to see if it's fresh."

"Is that a compliment?"

"Child, on this coast, that is the best compliment there is." Miss Pearl lowered herself into the chair beside the hammock with a long sigh and fanned herself with the lid of a pot. "Sit. He'll sleep an hour. He always did, after rice and beans. In 1968 he slept through a hurricane warning in that hammock. The whole street was nailing boards on the windows and Cyril Grant was snoring."

Daniela sat on the top step.

"What was he like?" she said. "Young?"

Miss Pearl laughed. Then she thought about it, and the laugh went quiet.

"Thin," she said. "Thinner than now, if you can believe it. A neck like a heron. And trouble. Every song was trouble. He wrote one about the pastor in Limón who drank, and the pastor heard it on the radio, and stood up in church and said Cyril Grant was going to burn. And the whole church sang the chorus at him. The pastor's own church." She fanned. "He wrote one about the banana company, about the foreman who weighed the bunches with his thumb on the scale, and the company told every bar on the coast not to let him play. So he played on the street. On a crate. And more people came than ever came to the bars."

"Andre never told me any of this."

"Andre doesn't know it," said Miss Pearl. "How would he? He grew up in Spanish. You ask the young ones on this coast who Cyril Grant is, they say, the old man with the banjo on the float." She looked at the hammock. "He was on the radio in San José. Every Saturday. In 1975. The man who said his name on the radio couldn't say it right. He said *See-reel Grawnt*." She said it in the voice of a man from the capital, high and careful, and Daniela laughed before she could stop herself. "Every Saturday. *See-reel Grawnt*, from Limón, with a song from the coast. And all over the coast, every house, the radio on, everybody listening." She was quiet. "We thought it meant something. That they would listen. Up the mountain."

"Did they?"

Miss Pearl fanned herself.

"For a year," she said. "Then they got a new man for Saturday, who played music from Mexico."

The hammock creaked. Mr. Grant said something from under his hat, in Creole, without waking up.

"What did he say?"

"He said *1967*," said Miss Pearl. "He's still arguing with me. In his sleep." She leaned over and lifted the hat off his face and looked at him for a while, the old sleeping face, the gray stubble, the mouth a little open, and put the hat back. "Fifty-eight years he's been wrong about that."

---

After lunch, he sang. On Miss Pearl's porch. The rondón song.

And this time there were people. Miss Pearl's grandson, who was twenty and worked at a surf shop and had never heard his great-grandmother's name in a song. Two old men from the house next door who came over the fence when they heard the banjo. A woman with a baby. Three tourists, German, sunburned, in flip-flops, walking past on the road, who stopped at the gate and then, when Miss Pearl waved, came in and sat on the steps with their phones up.

And by the end of it, the two old men from next door were singing the chorus. Badly. In voices like rusty hinges. They had known it for fifty-eight years.

Miss Pearl's grandson recorded it on his phone. When the song was over he looked at it on the screen for a long time.

"I didn't know," he said, in Spanish, to Daniela, because he spoke Spanish to everyone his age. "I didn't know there was a song about her."

"Neither did I," said Daniela.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Puerto Viejo: The Language

On the road to Puerto Viejo, in the afternoon, in the heat, with the windows down and the jungle going by thick and green and full of noise, the howler monkeys roaring somewhere in the canopy like distant traffic, Daniela said what she had been thinking for eleven months.

"Mr. Grant. I don't understand your songs."

He was quiet.

"I mean, I understand some," she said. "Some words. The Spanish ones. The ones that sound like English I learned at school. But most of it—" She stopped. "I married your grandson. I come to your house three times a week. I've lived on this coast for two years. And I don't understand one word in three of what you sing." She gripped the wheel. "I'm sorry. I've been embarrassed to say it."

Mr. Grant did not answer for a long time. A truck full of bananas passed them going north, green bunches piled high and covered with blue plastic, and the smell came in through the window, green and sharp.

"Andre doesn't understand either," he said finally.

Daniela looked at him.

"My grandson," said Mr. Grant. "Your husband. He understands maybe half. Less. His father spoke Creole to me and Spanish to him. Everybody did. In the 1980s, the 1990s. Spanish at school, Spanish on the television, Spanish for the job. Creole was for the old people. Creole was for the kitchen." He looked out the window at the jungle. "So now, the old people die. And the kitchen is empty."

"Then why sing?" said Daniela. "If nobody understands?"

He turned and looked at her from under the brim of his good hat.

"Because," said Mr. Cyril Grant, "somebody understands. Somewhere. In every town. One old man over a fence. One woman with a spoon. One child who hears it and asks her grandmother what it means." He tapped the banjo case on his knees. "You only need one. Then she tells somebody else."

---

Puerto Viejo was loud. Surfers and backpackers and reggae from every bar and bicycles everywhere, hundreds of them, ridden by everybody, tourists in bikinis and Rastafarians with dreadlocks to their waists and old women with shopping bags and children three to a bicycle, and the smell of marijuana and fried fish and the sea. Mr. Grant hated it. He said so, loudly, in Creole and in English and in Spanish, to everyone, from the car.

But at the end of the main street, by the sea, there was a bar he had sung in in 1974. It was a different bar now, with a different name, and surfboards on the walls and a menu with smoothie bowls. But the owner was the grandson of the old owner, and when he saw Mr. Grant get out of the car in his good hat, he turned off the reggae, and the whole bar went quiet, and he brought a stool to the end of the bar where the old stage had been, and Mr. Grant sat on it with his banjo.

He sang a song about a woman who left.

Daniela stood at the back by the door. And this time, for the first time, she understood a whole line. Not the words. The line. *She took the last bus up the mountain, and the mountain kept her.* She did not know how she understood it. It was something in the way he sang it. Something in the banjo. She understood it the way you understand a person crying in a language you don't speak.

When he finished, a young woman at the bar, a backpacker from somewhere, Swedish or Dutch, said, in English, "What does it mean?"

Mr. Grant looked at her for a long time.

"Ask the nurse," he said. And pointed his banjo at Daniela.

Daniela opened her mouth. And then, standing at the back of a surf bar in Puerto Viejo with forty people turned around to look at her, she said it. In English. The line. *She took the last bus up the mountain, and the mountain kept her.*

Mr. Grant grinned. The young man's grin.

"Two," he said. "Two who understand."

---

They ate dinner on the way south, at a table on the sand at the edge of Puerto Viejo, in the last of the light, because Mr. Grant said he would not eat in the town, and the woman who ran the place was the niece of a man who had played bass for him in 1979 and would not let them pay. Whole fried snapper, the head on, the skin crackling, with a pile of patacones, green plantain flattened and fried twice, and a bowl of hot pepper sauce the color of a sunset that the niece made herself and that Mr. Grant ate with a teaspoon, like soup, while Daniela watched his pressure go up in her imagination.

He ate four of his wife's dumplings in the car before they got there. He had said he wasn't hungry.

Daniela called Andre from the beach.

"Two towns," she said. "Three. He sang in a surf bar. They turned off the reggae for him."

"They turned off the reggae," said Andre slowly, "in Puerto Viejo."

"The owner brought him a stool."

Andre was quiet. Down the line she could hear the children, the television, Sofía asking for something and Jaylen saying no.

"He used to take me there," said Andre. "When I was small. To the bars in the afternoon. He'd sit me on the counter with a soda and sing, and the men would give me coins." He laughed a little. "I thought he was the most famous man in the world. Then I was twelve and I thought he was embarrassing. Then I was twenty and I didn't think about him at all." He stopped. "How is he?"

Daniela looked back at the table on the sand. Mr. Grant was sitting with his hat pushed back and his cane between his knees, talking to the niece in Creole, and the niece was laughing with her hand over her mouth, and the sea was going dark behind them, and the first stars were coming out over the water.

"He's happy," she said. "Andre, I've never seen him like this."

"Is that good," said Andre, "or is that bad?"

She did not know.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Manzanillo: The Night

They stayed the night in Manzanillo, at the end of the road, where the coast road stops at the edge of the national park and the jungle comes down to the sand.

It was a village of one street. A football field with the grass worn to dirt in front of each goal. A shop that sold rice and soap and fishing line and cold beer. A dozen wooden houses under the almond trees, and a bar on the beach with a sound system bigger than the bar, silent that night, because the owner's mother had died in the spring and he had not had the heart to turn it on since. Beyond the last house the road became a footpath and went into the forest, and beyond the forest, Mr. Grant said, was Panama.

He sang his song there before dark. Not in a bar. On the steps of the shop, sitting on a crate of empty bottles, to the shopkeeper and three boys with a football and a dog. A short song, a fast one, about a man who tried to walk to Panama through the forest to see a girl and came back three days later with no shoes and the girl's brother behind him. The boys laughed at the part about the shoes. They did not know why the shopkeeper, who was sixty and had a gray beard, laughed so much harder than they did, until he told them, wiping his eyes, that the man in the song was his own uncle.

Afterward Mr. Grant walked down to the water by himself. Daniela let him go. She watched from the steps.

He stood at the edge of the sand in his good hat with his polished shoes in his hand, which she had never seen him do, and let the small waves come up over his feet, the long brown feet she checked three times a week for sores, and go back. He stood there for a long time. The sun went down behind the jungle and the sea went from blue to silver to gray, and the pelicans came in low over the water, going home, and still he stood there, an old man in a white hat at the end of the road, with his trousers rolled to the knee.

When he came back up the beach he was carrying his shoes and smiling.

"Same water," he said. "It goes to Jamaica. Did you know? If you put a bottle in at Manzanillo, the current takes it north." He sat down beside her on the step, heavily. "My mother used to say that. She said every Sunday she put a word in the sea for her sister in Port Antonio, and every Sunday her sister put one back."

"Did they ever arrive?"

"Of course," said Mr. Grant. "Where do you think the songs come from?"

Mr. Grant's heart did the thing in the night.

Daniela heard it. She had taken a room next to his in a small guesthouse run by a cousin of Miss Pearl's, and she had left the door open, and at three in the morning she woke to the sound she had been waiting for since Limón: his breathing changing. Fast and shallow. A catch in it.

She was in his room before she was awake. She had her bag. She had the pills. She had the oxygen saturation monitor on his finger and the cuff on his arm and her hand on his wrist, feeling the pulse go fast and slow and skip and fast again, like a man running on uneven ground, and she was talking to him in Spanish, low and steady, the way she had talked to a hundred old people in a hundred bedrooms at three in the morning, and he was looking at her in the dim light from the window with his eyes very wide.

"Breathe," she said. "With me. In. Slowly. Out."

He breathed.

She gave him the pill under his tongue. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hand on his wrist and counted, and watched the numbers on the monitor, and did not call the ambulance yet, because the nearest hospital was in Limón, two hours, and she wanted to see.

Ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty.

The pulse slowed. Steadied. The breathing evened out. The numbers came up.

At four o'clock, she let go of his wrist.

---

He did not go back to sleep. Neither did she. They sat in the dark, in the small room in the guesthouse at the end of the road, with the window open and the sound of the sea coming in, and the frogs, and somewhere in the jungle a bird that called the same two notes over and over, like a question.

"Daniela," he said finally. In Spanish. The first time he had ever spoken Spanish to her.

"Mr. Grant."

"In the morning," he said, "you will want to take me home."

She did not answer.

"You are a good nurse," said Mr. Grant. "The best I've had. Better than the one before, who was a very nice lady and thought I was deaf." He was quiet. "And a good nurse would take me home. To the hospital in Limón. To the doctors. To the machine." He looked at the window, at the dark sea. "I know."

"Your heart," said Daniela.

"My heart," he said again, the way he had said it on the porch in Limón. "Is the reason." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. "I have a hundred and forty songs. In a school exercise book. Nobody sings them. Nobody understands them. When I die, they go in the box with me." He held up two fingers. "Today, two people understood. You. And one old man over a fence in Cahuita, who already knew." He put his hand down on the sheet. "There are five more towns."

Daniela sat in the dark for a long time.

She thought about a woman in San José. Doña Teresa, in a third-floor apartment near the cathedral, in her second year of home care. Eighty-eight, with lungs that were filling slowly, as everyone knew, the doctors, the daughter, Teresa herself. Every morning for six months Daniela had listened to her chest and written down the numbers. And every morning, Teresa had asked her the same thing, half joking, in her dry little voice: *When are you going to take me to see the sea?* She had grown up in Puntarenas, on the Pacific. She had not seen it in forty years. It was two hours down the mountain.

Daniela had laughed, every morning, and said, *when your numbers are better.*

The numbers had never been better. Teresa had died in March, in the apartment near the cathedral, in a bed by a window that looked at a parking garage, with the oxygen on and the television going and her daughter in the kitchen on the phone. Daniela had done everything right. Everything in the book. Her supervisor had said so, at the end of the month, and written it on a form.

She had not thought about Teresa for years.

She thought about her now, in the small room at the end of the road, with the sea coming in through the window, and the frogs, and the bird with its two notes, and the old man on the bed watching her with his hands flat on the sheet, waiting.

Then she took out her phone and called her husband, at four thirty in the morning, at home in Limón, and woke him up.

"Andre," she said. "Bring the kids. Saturday. To Old Harbour." She looked at the old man on the bed. "Bring everybody."

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Sixaola: The Bridge

In the morning she still meant to take him home.

She told him so at six o'clock, on the guesthouse porch, over a cup of coffee so strong it was nearly solid, with her bag at her feet and the car keys in her hand. She told him in Spanish and then, so there could be no mistake, in her school English. She said his pulse had skipped forty times in twenty minutes. She said the nearest hospital was two hours away. She said she had made a promise to his wife.

Mr. Grant listened to all of it with his hands folded on his cane.

"My wife," he said, when she had finished, "packed six days of pills for five days. Did she show you?"

Daniela said nothing.

"So she counted on a bad night," said Mr. Grant. "She counted on one. She knows me." He drank his coffee. "Call her. If she says go home, we go home."

So Daniela walked out to the road, where there was a signal, and called Mrs. Grant in Limón, and told her everything, the breathing, the skipping, the pill under the tongue, the numbers on the monitor. Mrs. Grant listened without a word.

"And now?" she said, when Daniela was done.

"Now he's eating bread and arguing with the cook about cricket."

There was a long pause on the line. Daniela could hear a radio in the kitchen in Limón, and a kettle.

"In 1998," said Mrs. Grant, "he had a night like that in Cahuita, at his cousin's wedding. The doctors in Limón said, Cyril Grant, you are finished, no more singing. He sang at the wedding the next day. He sang at the christening a year later. He sang at the doctor's retirement party." The kettle began to whistle. "You are the nurse. You decide. But if you bring him home this morning, he will sit on that porch until October and he will not say one word to either of us."

"And if something happens?"

"Then it happens with a banjo in his hands," said Mrs. Grant, "and not with the television on." She was quiet. "Daniela. Give him his yellow pill at lunch. Not with coffee. He'll try to take it with coffee."

---

Sixaola was not on the way to anywhere except Panama.

It was an hour west of Manzanillo, at the end of the plantations, where the Sixaola River came down brown and wide out of the mountains and made the border, and the road ran into the town and stopped at the river as if it had been surprised to find it. On the near bank, Costa Rica: a long street of shops selling shoes and mattresses and phone cards and plastic buckets, and trucks waiting in a line for the customs post, and money changers sitting on stools under umbrellas with fat rolls of colored bills. On the far bank, the same street again, the same shops, the same buckets, in Panama.

Between them, over the river, two bridges. A new one of concrete, wide and white, with lanes for trucks. And beside it, the old one. The railroad bridge. Iron, rusted to the color of cinnamon, with wooden planks laid across the rails and gaps between the planks where you could see the brown water going under, a long way down.

"I walked across that," said Mr. Grant, "in 1963. With the banjo on my back. To play a dance in Guabito on the other side. Two dollars and all the rum I wanted." He looked at the old bridge. "I didn't want much rum. I wanted the two dollars."

The old bridge was closed. A chain across the end of it, and a sign in Spanish. He looked at the chain for a long time, and Daniela thought, with something close to panic, that he was going to step over it.

He did not. He sat down instead on a bench in front of a bakery at the foot of the bridge, in the shade of a mango tree, and asked the woman in the bakery for a coconut bun and a glass of water and the use of her bench for an hour, and she gave him all three, because she was from Bocas del Toro on the Panama side and recognized his English before he had finished his sentence.

"Where you from, Mister?" she said.

"Limón," said Mr. Grant. "And before that, Port Antonio. And before that, God knows."

"And before that, Africa," said the woman, and laughed, and brought him two buns.

---

He did not sing right away. He sat on the bench with the banjo in its plastic bag on his knees and watched the people going over the new bridge. Trucks full of bananas. Women with shopping bags. Men on bicycles with sacks of rice across the handlebars. And at a quarter past eleven, a line of schoolchildren, twenty of them, in the Panamanian uniform, white shirts and navy skirts and navy trousers, walking across from the Panama side two by two behind a teacher with a whistle, to visit, the teacher said, the museum of the banana company in the town.

They stopped in front of the bakery to buy buns. All twenty. The woman from Bocas del Toro served them one by one and called them each by name.

And the children were speaking English.

Daniela heard it before she understood it. It was not school English. It was not the English of the German tourists on Miss Pearl's steps. It was quick and rolling and full of laughter, and it went up at the ends of the sentences, and half the words she could not follow at all. But some of them she could. And the tune of it, the music of it, she knew. She had been hearing it for two days in an old man's songs.

Mr. Grant took the banjo out of the bag.

He did not tune it. He just began. A song about a train. A short one. The train that went from the banana farms to the sea, and the man who rode on the roof of it every Saturday to see his girl in town, and the conductor who knew he was there and never once looked up.

The children stopped talking.

They turned around with their buns in their hands. A little boy at the front, eight or nine, with his shirt untucked, was the first to laugh, at the part where the conductor didn't look up. Then a girl beside him. Then all of them. They understood it. Not all of it. But the jokes. They got every joke. They stood in a half circle in front of the bakery in the shade of the mango tree and laughed in the right places, and at the end of the second verse, the little boy with the untucked shirt started clapping on the off note, the way the calypso wanted, and the others followed him, and the teacher with the whistle stood behind them with her arms folded and did not blow it once.

When it was over, the little boy said, "My grandfather sing that one."

"Your grandfather," said Mr. Grant, "is a man of taste. What's his name?"

The boy told him. Mr. Grant thought about it.

"Tall," he said. "Gap in his teeth. Played the bass with a broom handle and a washtub." He grinned. "He owes me two dollars. From 1963."

The children shrieked. The teacher laughed out loud. Then she blew her whistle, at last, and they went off two by two up the street toward the museum, with their buns, looking back over their shoulders at the old man on the bench, and the little boy with the untucked shirt walked the whole way backward, waving.

---

"Twenty-two," said Daniela, in the car. "Twenty-three, with the teacher. All of them understood."

"No," said Mr. Grant.

"They laughed at every joke."

"They're Panama's," said Mr. Grant. "Over there they still talk the old way. In Bocas. In Colón. The government over there never told them to stop." He settled back in the seat and closed his eyes under the brim of his hat. "Panama can count its own. I'm counting Costa Rica."

She drove north. Back up the long road through the plantations, past the turn for Manzanillo, past Puerto Viejo, past Cahuita and Miss Pearl's yellow gate, toward Limón. She gave him the yellow pill at lunch, at a roadside stand, with a glass of water and not with coffee, and he looked at her over the glass and said, "She told you," and she said, "She told me," and he laughed until he had to put the glass down.

At the edge of Limón, at the turn where the road went right toward the blue house on stilts and the porch and the hat's nail behind the bedroom door, he opened his eyes.

He did not say anything. He did not need to.

Daniela kept going straight.

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Siquirres: The Exercise Book

She did not take him home. She took him to Siquirres, inland, up the road from the coast toward the mountains, where the banana plantations went on for kilometers in every direction, green and endless, with the bunches tied in blue plastic bags on every stalk and the cable lines running through them that carried the bananas to the packing plants like laundry on a line, swinging. Mr. Grant had sung in a union hall there in 1976, during a strike, standing on a table.

On the way up he told her about his father.

He did it without being asked, looking out the window at the plantations, at the cable lines and the blue bags and the men in rubber boots walking between the rows with machetes on their shoulders. His father had worked the banana trains for thirty-one years. Not driving them. Loading them. At the sidings in the plantations, at four in the morning, in the dark, lifting the green bunches up into the cars, a hundred pounds a bunch, a thousand bunches a night.

"He had shoulders like a door," said Mr. Grant. "And he could not read. Not English, not Spanish. He signed his name with a mark." He was quiet. "In 1949, when they said we were Costa Rican now, they gave him a paper. A cédula. With his photograph and his name on it, spelled wrong. He could not read the name. He knew it was wrong because my mother told him." He laughed, softly. "He carried it in his shirt pocket every day for the rest of his life. With the name spelled wrong. He said, *it's the first thing this country ever gave me, and they couldn't even get that right, and I'm keeping it.*"

"Is there a song?"

"Of course there's a song," said Mr. Grant. "Number thirty-eight. *My Father's Paper.*" He tapped the window with one finger as a sign went past for the turn to Siquirres. "You'll find it. It's funny. He thought so. He made me sing it at his birthday every year until he died."

The union hall was a church now. The pastor let them in. Mr. Grant sang one song, sitting in a plastic chair in the empty church in the afternoon heat, about the strike, and the men who would not pick, and the company men who came on horses. The pastor, who was young and from Guanacaste and spoke only Spanish, listened with his hands folded and said nothing, and at the end shook Mr. Grant's hand for a long time and asked for the words.

"Three," said Mr. Grant, in the car. "Four, if the pastor learns them."

Daniela had brought the pastor the words that evening, in the end. Not all of them. The strike song. She had written it out on the back of a pharmacy receipt in the hotel lobby while Mr. Grant dictated from his chair, line by line, in Creole, and then again in English, slowly, and she had walked it back across the town in the dark to the church and knocked on the side door.

The pastor had read it under the light over the door. He had read it twice.

"I don't understand this word," he said, in Spanish, pointing. "Or this."

"Neither do I," said Daniela. "He says it means the men sat down on the tracks and the trains could not go. He says the company men laughed at first. Then they stopped laughing."

The pastor looked at the paper for a long time.

"My grandfather picked bananas here," he said. "He came from Guanacaste in 1950. He told me there was a strike when he was young. He told me the Black men who had been here longer showed the new men from Guanacaste how to sit on the tracks." He folded the receipt carefully and put it in the pocket of his shirt. "I always thought it was one of his stories."

"Maybe it was," said Daniela. "Maybe it was both."

The pastor smiled. "Tell Mr. Grant," he said, "that on Sunday I will read it in church. In his words. Badly." He tapped the pocket. "Tell him if I get it wrong he can come and correct me."

---

That night, in a hotel in Siquirres with a fan that rattled, Mr. Grant gave her the exercise book.

It was a school notebook. Green cover, gone soft and brown, from a stationer in Limón that had closed in 1990. Inside, in pencil, a hundred and forty songs. Every one dated. Every one with a title. The words written out in his careful schoolboy hand, in Creole, the way he heard them, with the chords above the lines in tiny letters, and in the margins, notes. *For Hyacinth. Don't sing near her husband.* *Miss Pearl's rondón. She says 1968. It was 1967.* *For my mother, the day she died.* *For the strike.* *For a goat named Josephine.*

"Take it," he said.

"Mr. Grant. I can't."

"You can't sing," he agreed. "You can't understand. But you can read. And you can type." He tapped the book. "Andre says you put everything on your phone. The family's pictures. The birthdays. The page, the family page, that Andre's cousin in New York started, where everybody puts everything." He shook his head. "I never looked at it. Andre showed me once. All the cousins. In New York, in Panama, in Toronto, in Limón. The pictures. The babies." He was quiet. "Nobody on it knows a single song."

He put the exercise book in her hands.

"Put the songs there," he said. "All hundred and forty. The words. In Creole. And under every line, what it means, in Spanish. And in English, for the cousins in New York." He looked at her. "You'll get it wrong. You'll get half of it wrong. That's fine. Somebody will fix it. Some old woman in Brooklyn will read it and say, *that's not what that means, you foolish Spanish girl*, and she'll write the right thing underneath." He almost smiled. "That's how it works. That's how it always worked."

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Matina: Recording

She typed until two in the morning.

She sat on the floor of the hotel room in Siquirres with her back against the bed and the exercise book open on her knees and her phone on top of it, under the rattling fan, in the yellow light of the one lamp, and she typed. Mr. Grant slept in the other bed, on his back, with his hands folded on his chest and his good hat on the chair beside him, and every half hour she got up on her knees and listened to his breathing, and it was slow and even and full, and she sat down again.

It was harder than she had imagined. His handwriting was neat, but the words were the words of the coast, written the way he heard them, and half of them were not in any dictionary she had. She typed the Creole exactly, letter by letter, the way it was in the pencil. Then under each line she wrote what she thought it meant in Spanish. Then she tried the English. Sometimes the English was easy, because the Creole was nearly English already, only bent, the way a song bends a word to fit the tune. Sometimes it was impossible. Sometimes she sat for ten minutes over one line, saying it under her breath, and then gave up and wrote a question mark and went on.

At one o'clock she came to the song with the note in the margin. *For my mother, the day she died.* It was dated the fourth of June, 1977. It was short, only three verses, and the pencil was harder there than anywhere else in the book, pressed into the paper so deep she could feel the letters from the back of the page with her fingertip.

She read it three times. She could not understand the second verse at all.

"It's about her hands," said Mr. Grant, from the bed.

She had not known he was awake. He was lying on his back in the dark, as he had been all night, with his eyes open, looking at the fan going round.

"I'm sorry," said Daniela. "Did I wake you?"

"You type like a woodpecker." He did not turn his head. "Second verse. It says, she washed the clothes of the company men for forty years, and her hands were the color of the river, and on Sunday she put lime on them so they would be soft for church, and they never were." He was quiet. "That's what it says. More or less. It's better in the old way."

Daniela typed it. She typed it slowly, in Spanish and then in English, and read it back to him in English, and he listened, and corrected one word, and she changed it.

"She sang to me," said Mr. Grant. "In the kitchen. Jamaican songs. From Port Antonio. Songs her mother sang. I learned them all. Every one." He looked at the fan. "I never wrote them down. I thought, everybody knows them. Everybody's mother sings them." He turned his head on the pillow, then, and looked at her. "Now nobody knows them. Only me."

"Sing me one," said Daniela. "Tomorrow. I'll put it with the others."

Mr. Grant thought about it for a long time.

"Tomorrow," he said, and closed his eyes, and this time he slept.

By two o'clock she had eleven songs. She put them up on the family page, the one Andre's cousin in New York had started, under a new heading, *Grandpa Cyril's Songs*, with a photograph she had taken at Moín of the old man sitting on the cracked platform with his shoes over the rails.

Then she lay down on the floor, because it was cooler than the bed, and slept for three hours.

In the morning, when she checked, there were nine comments. One was from Andre's cousin in New York. It said only, *Is this real? Is he OK?* One was from Andre, typed at five in the morning before his shift: *Line 2 of the goat song is wrong. Ask him. I think. I don't know.* And one, the last, was from a woman in Panama City Daniela had never heard of, who had written *the hurricane song!!!* and nothing else, and then, an hour later, a long paragraph in Spanish about a roof and a grandmother and a night in 1988, which Daniela read standing at the window of the hotel in Siquirres with her coffee going cold in her hand.

---

In Matina, on the third day, in a cacao farm at the end of a dirt road where an old friend of Mr. Grant's named Brother Lenny dried cacao beans on long wooden racks in the sun and made chocolate by hand, bitter and dark, in a stone grinder his grandfather had brought from Jamaica, Daniela recorded the songs.

Not all of them. Mr. Grant could not sing a hundred and forty songs. His heart. But he could sing some. And he could speak the rest, slowly, line by line, while she held her phone, and then tell her what they meant.

They sat on the porch of Brother Lenny's house among the drying racks, with the cacao beans spread out in the sun brown and purple and smelling like wine and earth and something sweet underneath, and the jungle all around, and the chickens, and Brother Lenny's granddaughter, who was nine, sitting on the steps with her chin in her hands, listening.

Mr. Grant said a line. In Creole. Then he said it in English. Then Daniela said it in Spanish. And the nine-year-old on the steps, every time, said it back. All three. Under her breath.

By the twentieth song, she was saying the Creole first.

By the thirtieth, she was correcting Daniela's Spanish.

By the fortieth, she had moved from the steps to the porch floor, right beside Mr. Grant's chair, with her chin on his knee, watching his fingers on the banjo.

---

At noon Brother Lenny made them chocolate.

He did it the old way, the way he had done it every day for seventy years, at a table under the eaves of the house where the stone grinder sat, a heavy gray slab with a stone roller on top of it, worn into a shallow hollow in the middle by four generations of hands. He took a bowl of the dried beans from the rack and roasted them in an iron pot over a wood fire until the whole porch smelled like a bakery that had caught fire, and then he cracked them in his fingers, one by one, and blew away the papery shells, and put the dark broken centers on the stone. And then he rolled. Back and forth, back and forth, leaning his whole bent body into it, slowly, the stone grinding on stone with a low rough sound like the sea on gravel. The broken beans became a crumble. The crumble became a paste. The paste, after half an hour, became something dark and glossy and smooth, warm from the grinding, that he scraped up with a knife and rolled between his palms into small round balls and set on a banana leaf to cool.

The girl on the steps did the shells. She had done them since she was four, Brother Lenny said. She blew on them so hard her cheeks went round, and the shells flew off the porch rail like brown moths.

Then Brother Lenny grated one of the cooled balls into a pot of boiling water with a little milk and a stick of cinnamon and a grating of nutmeg and a spoon of brown sugar, and whisked it with a wooden stick he spun between his hands, and poured it out into four tin cups.

It was bitter. It was thick. It tasted of smoke and earth and the inside of the forest. Daniela, who had drunk chocolate every afternoon of her childhood in San José out of a packet, held the tin cup in both hands and did not want to give it back.

"Cocoa tea," said Brother Lenny. "Cyril's mother drank this. She used to come up the river in a canoe to buy it from my grandfather." He looked at Mr. Grant. "You wrote a song about it."

"I wrote a song about everything," said Mr. Grant.

"Sing it."

Mr. Grant drank his cocoa tea. Then he put the tin cup down on the porch floor beside his chair and picked up the banjo, and the girl, with her chin back on his knee, held up Daniela's phone in both hands, very steady, and recorded it herself.

---

In the middle of the afternoon, when the rain came over the hills and drummed on the tin roof of the porch and the racks of cacao had been pulled in under the eaves, he kept his promise from the night before.

He did not play the banjo. He put it on the floor. He sat in Brother Lenny's chair with his hands on his knees and his eyes closed and sang, very quietly, almost under the sound of the rain, a song his mother had sung in the kitchen of the blue house in Limón when he was small. It was not a calypso. It was older than calypso. It was slow and plain, with a tune that went up and came back down like a woman walking to the river and home again, and it was about a girl in Port Antonio who waited on the hill for a boat that was taking a long time.

Brother Lenny, on his stool, began to sing it with him on the second verse. His voice was deeper and rougher and a little behind. The two old men sang it together to the end, under the rain, with their eyes closed, and the girl on the floor between them did not move, and Daniela held the phone and did not breathe.

"Where did you learn it?" said Mr. Grant, when it was over, opening his eyes.

"From your mother," said Brother Lenny. "When she came up the river for the cacao. She sang it in the canoe. Every time." He looked at the rain. "I was eight years old. I thought she was the most beautiful woman on the coast."

"She was," said Mr. Grant.

The rain eased, and stopped, and the forest dripped, and Brother Lenny got up and pushed the racks of cacao back out into the sun, one by one, slowly, as he had done every afternoon of his life.

"What's your name?" said Mr. Grant, in Creole, when they stopped for water.

"Keisha," said the girl, in Creole. Clearly. Perfectly.

Mr. Grant looked at Brother Lenny. Brother Lenny, eighty, very black and very bent, with cacao stains on his hands that would never come off, grinned.

"I talk to her in the old way," said Brother Lenny. "Every day. Since she was born. Her mother says she'll be confused at school." He shrugged. "She is not confused. She is the best in her class. In Spanish. And she can talk to me." He looked at his granddaughter. "Somebody has to talk to the old people."

Mr. Grant looked at the girl for a long time.

"Five," he said.

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Penshurst: The Dance Hall

On Friday they went south again, past Limón for the second time, and this time he did not even open his eyes at the turn.

He was tired. Daniela could see it. He had sung and spoken forty songs on Brother Lenny's porch, and then, in the evening, while she typed, he had sat up with Brother Lenny under the eaves until after midnight, two old men in the dark with a bottle of something Brother Lenny made from cane and would not name, talking in Creole so fast and low she could not follow one word. In the morning his ankles were swollen. She made him put his feet up on the dashboard on a folded towel, polished shoes and all, and he grumbled, and let her.

"Where today?" she said.

"Penshurst."

She had driven past the sign a hundred times. A turn off the coast road south of Limón, toward the hills, where the Estrella River came down out of the mountains through the banana farms. She had never turned.

"There was a dance hall," said Mr. Grant. "On the river. Wooden, on posts, so the floods went under it. Every Saturday night from 1958 until they closed it. The men came down from the farms in their good shirts and the women came from every town on the coast, on the train, in their good dresses, and we played until the sun came up." He was quiet. "I met my wife there. In 1971. She came with her sister. She didn't like me."

"She married you."

"She married me in 1972," said Mr. Grant. "She still didn't like me. She liked the songs."

---

The dance hall was still there. Daniela had not expected that. It stood at the end of a gravel track at the edge of a banana farm, on its posts, above a bend of the brown river, with its tin roof patched in four colors and its long wooden sides gone silver with age, and a sign on the door that said, in Spanish, COOPERATIVE · AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Inside it was full of cardboard boxes. Thousands of them, flat, stacked to the rafters, waiting to be folded and filled with bananas and loaded on the trucks for the port. A forklift. A desk with a computer and a fan. A calendar from a fertilizer company. And a young man at the desk with his feet up, eating rice out of a plastic container, who took his feet down very fast when he saw an old man in a white Panama hat in the doorway with a banjo.

"I'm sorry," he said, in Spanish. "This is private. The cooperative—"

"I played here," said Mr. Grant, in Creole. "In 1958. That floor." He pointed his cane at the boards under the stacks of boxes. "You could see the river through the cracks. We used to let—" He stopped, and frowned, and started again. "We used to lose coins through the cracks into the river. Every Saturday. The children would dive for them on Sunday morning."

The young man stared at him.

Then he said, in Creole, "Still do."

---

His name was Elroy. He was thirty-two. He was the night foreman of the cooperative's packing shed, and he was from Bluefields, in Nicaragua, on the other side of the border to the north, on the same Caribbean coast, where the same people had come in the same boats from the same islands two hundred years ago, and where, Elroy said, his grandmother still spoke to the chickens in the old way, and so did he.

"I understood everything you said," he told Mr. Grant. "Every word. Nobody here talks like that. The old men on the farm, maybe. A few. I talk Spanish all day." He looked at the banjo. "Are you going to play?"

"That," said Mr. Grant, "is what I came for."

Elroy cleared a space. He moved boxes for twenty minutes with the forklift and then by hand, while the other men on the shift came to the door to see what was happening and stayed, and by the time he was done there was a square of bare floor in the middle of the old hall, gray boards worn smooth by sixty years of dancing feet, with cracks between them where, sure enough, if you bent down, you could see the brown river going by underneath.

Mr. Grant sat on a chair in the middle of it. He looked up at the rafters, where somebody, long ago, had painted stars on the underside of the roof, faded now to the color of old teeth.

"We painted those," he said. "In 1960. Me and two boys from Cahuita. On ladders. Drunk." He laughed. "One of them fell. He married the nurse who set his arm."

Then he played. Not a song about the hall. A dance tune. A fast one, with no words at all for the first two verses, only the banjo, running and jumping and doubling back on itself, and Elroy, who had been standing at the edge of the square of floor with his arms folded, began, without seeming to decide to, to move his feet. A little. Then more. Then one of the men from the door came in and took the hand of one of the women who packed the boxes, who was laughing and shaking her head, and pulled her out onto the boards, and then there were four of them, then six, dancing on the floor of the old hall in their work boots between the stacks of cardboard in the middle of a Friday afternoon, with the river going by underneath.

And then, on the third verse, the words came in, and Elroy sang them. Under his breath first. Then out loud. Every word. Not because he had ever heard the song before. Because he knew where the words were going before they got there, the way you know the next step of a dance.

Mr. Grant stopped playing. He looked at Elroy.

"Six," he said.

"Six what?"

"Six who understand." Mr. Grant held out the banjo, neck first, to the young man from Bluefields. "Can you play?"

"A little. Guitar."

"Same thing with fewer strings and less sense," said Mr. Grant. "Take it home with you. In your head. To Bluefields. The next time you go." He tapped his own temple. "Six, and Bluefields."

Elroy did not take the banjo. He stood looking at it, held out to him neck first across the square of old floor, and shook his head, slowly, and put his hands in his pockets as if to keep them safe from it.

"My grandmother would kill me," he said. "Taking a man's banjo." He grinned. "I'll take the song. She'll want to hear it. She says nobody in Bluefields writes the new ones anymore, only the old ones, over and over, like a radio stuck on one station."

"Then tell her one thing from me," said Mr. Grant.

"What?"

"Tell her the new ones are only old ones that somebody got wrong," said Mr. Grant, "and kept."

Elroy laughed. Then he wrote his telephone number on a piece of cardboard torn from one of the flat boxes and gave it to Daniela, and asked her to send him every song she put up, all of them, in the old way, without the Spanish, because his grandmother could not read Spanish and would want to read them herself, with her finger, slowly, on his phone, on the porch in Bluefields in the evenings.

---

In the car, afterward, on the way back to the coast road, Daniela said, "Mr. Grant. Can I tell you something?"

He was quiet, which meant yes.

"My grandmother sang," she said. "In Cartago. My mother's mother. She sang boleros while she ironed. Every afternoon. Old ones, from the radio, from when she was a girl. She had a terrible voice. Worse than mine." She kept her eyes on the road. "When she died, I was nineteen. I was in nursing school. And at the funeral my mother said, *what was the one she always sang, the one about the window*, and nobody knew. Nobody could remember the words. My mother. My aunts. Me. We'd heard it every day of our lives." She stopped. "It's gone. I can hum it. I can't sing it. Nobody can."

Mr. Grant was quiet for a kilometer or more.

"Hum it," he said.

"Mr. Grant."

"Hum it."

So she did. Badly. Driving along the coast road south of Limón with the windows down and the banana farms going by on one side and the sea on the other, she hummed her grandmother's song, the one about the window, with her face going red.

Mr. Grant listened with his eyes closed. Then he took the banjo out of the bag on his knees and found it. Not quickly. It took him three tries. But he found it, the slow tune, the sad sweet turn in the middle of it, and he played it under her humming, softly, and then, because she had stopped humming, he played it alone.

"It's a bolero," he said, when he had finished. "Not my country. But a good one." He put the banjo away. "There. Now two people have it. You and me."

"You don't know the words."

"Nobody knows the words," said Mr. Grant. "So we'll make some. Your grandmother won't mind. She's heard worse."

---

They stayed that night in Cahuita, at Miss Pearl's, because Miss Pearl had said rondón tomorrow and three days late was still tomorrow on that coast.

Miss Pearl cooked it in the yard, over a fire of coconut husks, in a pot so big Daniela could have sat in it. She cooked it the way she had said: with whatever there was. There was a snapper and two jacks that a neighbor's son brought up from the beach still flapping. There was yam and cassava and green bananas and a breadfruit from the tree by the gate. There were dumplings, flour and water rolled long between her palms like little fingers. And over all of it, coconut milk, a great deal of it, from coconuts Miss Pearl made Daniela grate herself on a tin grater nailed to a board, until her knuckles were raw, and then squeeze through a cloth, handful by handful, while Miss Pearl watched and said, "More. Harder. You squeeze like a San José girl."

It cooked for an hour. The yard filled with the smell of it, thyme and black pepper and fish and coconut and the sweet smoke of the husks. The two old men from next door came over the fence without being asked. So did the grandson from the surf shop, with his girlfriend. Mr. Grant sat in a chair on the porch with his feet up on a crate, as Daniela had ordered, and his banjo on the floor beside him, untouched.

He did not sing that night. He had sung in Cahuita already. One town, one song. He was strict about it.

But Miss Pearl sang. At the pot. Stirring with a paddle of wood, in the firelight, with her back to all of them, she sang the rondón song, the one he had written about her in 1967 or 1968, under her breath, the whole thing, every verse, in a voice that was cracked and low and perfectly in tune. And on the porch, in his chair, with his eyes closed, Mr. Cyril Grant mouthed the words along with her and did not make a sound.

"She is a woman with a spoon," he said to Daniela later, quietly, when Miss Pearl had gone in. "I told you. In every town."

Daniela sat on the steps with her phone and typed until midnight. Thirty songs, then. Thirty-four. When she looked at the page before she slept, there were sixty comments under them, and the first song had been shared by somebody in Toronto, and somebody in Colón, and a schoolteacher in Old Harbour whose name, the little picture said, was Ivy.

She did not think about it. She was too tired to think about anything. She lay down on Miss Pearl's spare bed with her bag open on the floor beside it and her phone on her chest and listened through the thin wall to the old man breathing in the next room, slow and even and full, and slept.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Old Harbour: The Children

Old Harbour is not on the map. Daniela had been right about that. It was the old name, Mr. Grant said, the Creole name, for a cove south of Puerto Viejo where the first Jamaican families had settled in the 1820s, fishermen and turtle hunters who had come before the railroad, before the bananas, before anybody, in canoes from the islands, and built houses on the sand. The town on the map had a Spanish name now. But the old people still called it Old Harbour.

He had been born in Limón. But his mother's people were from Old Harbour. His grandmother had been buried there. It was where he had sung his first song, at six, on the sand, at a wedding, standing on an upturned fish crate.

It was the last town.

---

They left Miss Pearl's at eleven on Saturday morning, because he would not leave earlier.

He shaved first. He sat on a stool in Miss Pearl's yard in his undershirt with a basin of hot water on a chair in front of him and a small round mirror propped against the basin, and shaved, slowly, with a razor his wife had packed, while Miss Pearl's chickens walked around his feet. Then he asked Daniela to polish his shoes. He had polished them himself on Tuesday morning, he said, but they had been in the sea at Manzanillo and the mud at Penshurst and they were not fit to be seen.

"Seen by who?" said Daniela. "It's Old Harbour. You said it's a dozen houses."

"Seen by my grandmother," said Mr. Grant.

So she polished his shoes. She sat on Miss Pearl's steps with a tin of black polish and a rag and an old toothbrush for the seams, and polished them until she could see her face in the toes, while he watched from the stool and told her she was doing it wrong, and Miss Pearl, in the kitchen window, laughed at both of them.

Andre called at ten. He sounded strange.

"Where are you?"

"Cahuita. We're leaving soon."

"Leave at eleven," said Andre. "Not before. Drive slowly. Don't take the beach road. Take the inland road and come in from the top." He paused. "Is he okay? Is he okay to stand?"

"Andre, what's going on?"

"Nothing," said Andre. "I'll see you there. Eleven. Slowly." And he hung up.

She looked at the phone. Then she looked at Mr. Grant on his stool in the yard, in his undershirt, with shaving soap on one ear.

"Andre says to leave at eleven," she said.

"Then we leave at eleven," said Mr. Grant. "Andre is a good boy. He reads the instructions." And he would not look at her, and she thought, though she could not be sure, that he was trying not to smile.

---

They got there on the afternoon of the fifth day, a Saturday, with Mr. Grant very tired and very gray in the passenger seat with his good hat in his lap and the exercise book in a plastic bag on the floor and the banjo on the back seat, and Daniela driving slowly on the sand road through the palms, with one eye on the road and one eye on the old man, and her bag open beside her.

The cove was small. A curve of gray sand between two rocky points, with the jungle coming down behind it to the beach and a dozen wooden houses on stilts under the palms, painted blue and pink and yellow and green, and fishing canoes drawn up on the sand, and nets drying on poles.

And people.

Daniela did not understand at first. She thought it was a party. A wedding. A funeral. There were cars parked all along the sand road under the palms, forty, fifty, and pickup trucks, and a bus. There were people on the beach. Two hundred, maybe more. Old people in chairs. Young people standing. Children everywhere, running on the sand.

And at the front, by the water, on a stage made of fish crates and a sheet of plywood, a group of children in school uniforms, white shirts and blue skirts and blue trousers, maybe thirty of them, standing in two rows. Waiting.

Andre was at the end of the sand road, by the first house. Waiting for the car. With their two children, Jaylen, who was eight, and Sofía, who was five, holding his hands.

Daniela stopped the car.

"What is this?" she said, through the window.

Andre bent down and looked in at his grandfather.

"Keisha," he said.

---

Keisha. Brother Lenny's granddaughter. Nine years old. From the cacao farm at the end of the dirt road in Matina.

She had listened to forty songs on a porch on Thursday with her chin on an old man's knee. And on Thursday night, Brother Lenny said later, she had gone home and taken her mother's phone and gone onto the page, the family page, the one that Andre's cousin in New York had started years ago and that half the Black families of the coast were on now in one way or another, cousins and cousins of cousins, from Limón to Brooklyn to Panama to Toronto, and she had found the songs Daniela had started putting up, from the exercise book, the first twenty, with the Creole and the Spanish and the English under every line.

And she had sent them to her teacher.

Her teacher was a woman named Miss Ivy, sixty-one, who taught at the primary school in Old Harbour, the one school on that stretch of coast, and who had grown up speaking Creole and had been told at the same school, in 1972, by a teacher from San José, never to speak it in the classroom again. Miss Ivy read the twenty songs on her phone on Thursday night. On Friday morning, she taught them to her class.

All day Friday. Every class. The whole school. Thirty-one children from six to twelve, who spoke Spanish at home and Spanish at school and Spanish on their phones, and who had never sung a word of Creole in their lives.

On Saturday morning, Miss Ivy had called everyone she knew.

She called the parents first, and then the grandparents, and then the old people whose names she found written in the margins of the songs, and then the man with the shop on the point, who had a loudspeaker on the roof of his truck and drove it up and down the sand road twice. One of the grandparents was a cousin of Miss Pearl's. One of the old people had a nephew in Limón who drove a straddle carrier at the port, and the nephew had gone straight across the yard at the start of the shift on Saturday morning to the machine where Andre Grant was climbing up into the cab, and shouted up at him over the engines, *Your grandfather. Old Harbour. Today. The whole school.*

Andre had asked for the day already, on Wednesday, after Daniela's call in the night. He had only come in that morning to cover two hours for a man whose wife was having a baby. He climbed back down out of the cab. He found the man in the canteen and gave him back his two hours, and the man, who had been at the carnival every October of his life, said he would cover the whole day if Andre would bring him the words.

He had gone home and put the children in the car. On the way down the coast, in the back seat, Jaylen had learned the goat song from Daniela's page on his father's phone, and taught it to Sofía, who was five and could not read, and who sang it from Limón to Old Harbour so many times, over and over, all four verses, that Andre had to stop the car at Hone Creek and buy them both ice cream to make her stop.

She did not stop. She sang it with ice cream on her face.

---

Mr. Grant got out of the car.

It took a long time. Daniela held one arm. Andre held the other. Jaylen and Sofía walked in front of him, very solemnly, carrying the banjo between them. He walked down the sand road under the palms in his polished shoes, slowly, with his cane, toward the beach, toward two hundred people and a stage made of fish crates and thirty-one children in school uniforms, and the people on the beach went quiet as he came, and stood up from their chairs, the old ones, and took off their hats.

He stopped at the edge of the sand, in front of the stage.

Daniela looked along the rows of chairs, and saw them.

Miss Pearl, in the front row, in a flowered dress and a church hat, with her grandson from the surf shop beside her. The two old men from the house next door, side by side, in matching white shirts that they had clearly bought that morning, because the creases from the packets were still in them. Brother Lenny, very bent, on a folding stool, with his cacao-stained hands on his knees. The young pastor from Siquirres, standing at the back under a palm in his black trousers, with a folded receipt sticking out of his shirt pocket. And at the end of the second row, in his work boots, looking as if he had driven all night, Elroy from Bluefields, who saw her looking and lifted one hand.

Every town had come. Every town but Sixaola, and Sixaola, Daniela thought, would have its own count.

He looked at the children. They looked at him.

Then Miss Ivy, at the side of the stage, lifted her hand.

And the children sang.

---

They sang the rondón song. Miss Pearl's. From 1967, or 1968. In Creole. Badly. Wonderfully. With the wrong stress on half the words and the right one on the other half, in their high clear children's voices, bouncing, the way calypso bounced, while a boy of eleven at the end of the front row played the banjo part on a cheap guitar he had borrowed from his uncle and learned the night before from a video Keisha had found.

Then they sang the one about the goat named Josephine. And everybody on the beach laughed, the old people until they cried, because they remembered the goat.

Then they sang the one about the railroad. The one he had sung alone on a cracked platform at the edge of the swamp at Moín on the first morning, to the mangroves and a heron. About a man who came on a boat to build a road and found a wall instead. The children sang it straight through, every verse, and at the last line, Keisha, at the front, in the middle, sang it alone, in Creole, clearly, perfectly, to the old man standing on the sand in his good hat.

Mr. Grant did not move.

Daniela stood beside him with her hand on his arm, feeling his pulse through his sleeve, the way she had felt it at three in the morning in Manzanillo. It was fast. It was strong. It was not skipping at all.

---

When the children had finished, a woman came along the front of the stage toward them. She was tall and gray-haired, in a blue dress, with her reading glasses pushed up on her head and a sheaf of papers in her hand, printed, the twenty songs, with pencil marks all over them. She stopped in front of Mr. Grant.

"Mr. Grant," she said, in Creole. "I am Ivy Matthews. I teach the school here."

Mr. Grant looked at her for a long time.

"Matthews," he said. "From the shop by the point."

"My father had the shop by the point."

"He sold me a fishing line in 1958 that broke the first time I used it."

Miss Ivy laughed. Then she stopped laughing.

"When I was seven," she said, "a teacher came here from San José. A good woman. She meant well. She told us that if we spoke the old way in her classroom we would never get jobs, never go to university, never be anything. She made us write *I will speak Spanish* in our notebooks, a hundred times, every time she heard it." She held up the papers. "I have been teaching in that same classroom for thirty-five years. I never once taught them a word of it. I was afraid." She looked at him. "On Friday I taught them twenty of your songs."

Mr. Grant did not answer. He took her hand, the one that was not holding the papers, and held it.

Then he let go, and turned to Daniela, and said, "Help me up on that crate."

"Grandpa," said Andre. "Sit down. You've done it. Look. You've done it."

"I haven't sung," said Mr. Grant. "This is Old Harbour. One song."

Andre looked at Daniela. They all looked at Daniela. The children on the stage, and Miss Ivy, and Miss Pearl in the front row, and Brother Lenny on his stool. She stood on the gray sand with her fingers on the old man's wrist, counting, and the pulse went on under her fingertips, fast and strong and regular as the waves.

"One song," said Daniela.

---

He sang the last song himself. He would not let anyone stop him.

He sat on a fish crate at the front of the stage, with the banjo across his knees, with the thirty-one children sitting on the sand in front of him in their school uniforms and two hundred people behind them and the sea behind him, gray-green and restless in the late afternoon, and the pelicans going over in a line, and he played the carnival song. The one everybody knew. The one he sang once a year on a float in Limón.

And when he got to the chorus, the children sang it back to him.

All thirty-one. In Creole. And behind them, the old people, in their rusty-hinge voices, who had known it for fifty years. And behind them, the young people, who had not known it this morning and had learned it from their children in the last hour. And Andre, who understood maybe half, singing it anyway, with his arm around his wife. And Jaylen and Sofía, eight and five, on the sand at their great-grandfather's feet, singing every word, because Keisha had taught them in the car park in ten minutes.

And Daniela.

Thirty-four, from San José, a nurse, Spanish to the bone, who had not understood one word in three when she came to this coast, standing on the gray sand of Old Harbour with her bag on her shoulder and her husband's arm around her, singing the chorus of Cyril Grant's carnival song in the old language of the coast.

She did not get all the words right. Nobody cared.

---

When it was over, and the people on the beach had come one by one to shake his hand, and Miss Pearl had kissed him on both cheeks and told him he was still wrong about the year, and the children had been taken home for dinner, singing, up the sand road under the palms, he asked Andre and Daniela to walk him to the point.

It was not far. A path through the sea grape at the north end of the cove, up onto the rocks, to a small square of ground under three old almond trees with a low white wall around it, where the old families of Old Harbour had been buried since the 1820s. The stones were small and plain, worn smooth by the salt wind, some of them with no names left on them at all. Some had names. Some had only initials, scratched by hand. A few had been painted, recently, white, with the names in black.

His grandmother's had been painted. Somebody had done it for him. He did not ask who.

He stood in front of it in his polished shoes, between his grandson and his grandson's wife, with the sea going gold behind him in the last of the sun, and took off his good hat. He held it against his chest. He said something to the stone in Creole, quietly, not very long. Daniela did not try to understand it. She did not think it was for her.

Then he put the hat back on.

"She told me," he said, in English, to Andre, "when I was six, standing on that fish crate down there with the guitar, that I sang like a frog with a cold." He looked down the rocks at the cove, at the stage of fish crates and plywood still standing on the sand, empty now, with the tide coming in around its legs. "Then she gave me a shilling. Jamaican. She had kept it forty years." He touched the pocket of his jacket. "I have it still."

Andre did not say anything. He put his arm around his grandfather's shoulders, carefully, the way you hold something old, and the three of them stood there until the sun was gone.

---

That night, in Limón, on the porch of the blue house on stilts a block back from the sea, with the good hat back on its nail behind the bedroom door and the banjo across his knees and his wife beside him in her chair, Mr. Grant sat in the dark and looked at the sea.

Daniela checked his pressure. His sugar. His pills. His feet. His lungs. Everything was fine. Better than fine. His heart, she said, was the strongest she had heard it in eleven months.

"Of course," said Mr. Grant. "It got what it wanted."

In her chair beside him, Mrs. Ena Grant said nothing. She had said almost nothing since the car pulled up at the gate, only looked at him, standing on the porch steps in his good hat with the dust of five towns on him, and taken the banjo from him, and taken the hat from his head with her own hands and hung it on its nail. Now she reached across the space between the two chairs in the dark and put her hand on his arm and left it there.

"Six days of pills," she said to Daniela, in English. "How many left?"

"One day's."

Mrs. Grant nodded, as if a sum had come out right.

She sat down on the top step of the porch with her phone. On the family page, under the songs she had put up, there were four hundred and sixteen comments. From Limón. From Cahuita and Puerto Viejo and Siquirres and Matina and Old Harbour. From Brooklyn, from Panama City, from Colón, from Toronto, from Bluefields in Nicaragua, from a man in London who said his grandmother had sung the goat song to him in 1959 and he had never known who wrote it.

And under the first song, the railroad song, from a woman in Brooklyn, eighty-seven, in a long comment typed one finger at a time:

*Line 4, that's not what that means, you foolish Spanish girl. It means: they gave us a hammer and called it a gift. Fix it. And tell Cyril Grant he still owes me a dance from 1963.*

Daniela laughed so hard she had to put the phone down.

"Who is it?" said Mr. Grant, in the dark.

She read it to him.

He was quiet for a long time. Then he laughed, too. The young man's laugh. Then he picked up the banjo.

"Hyacinth," he said. "She went to Brooklyn. In 1964. Her husband never found her." He tuned the banjo, by ear, slowly. "Write this down. Number one hundred and forty-one."

And on the porch of the blue house in Limón, at ten o'clock at night, with the sea going in and out beyond the seawall and the container ships lit up offshore like a floating city, Mr. Cyril Grant, eighty-one, began to sing a new song, and his nurse, his grandson's wife, who could not sing a note, sat on the top step with her phone and wrote it down. In Creole. In Spanish. In English. Getting half of it wrong.

Somebody would fix it.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.