Pack Tight

Chapter 1: The Exercise Book

> **Barrel No. 1.** Posted from 14 Grove Lane, Handsworth, Birmingham. 3 March 1965. To Mrs. Mavis Lewis, Upper Depradine Street, Gouyave, St. John's, Grenada. For Desmond. > 2 pr school socks (grey). 1 pr Bata shoes, size 13 boys, stuff toes with newspaper. 1 tin Ovaltine. 6 tins Carnation. 4 cakes Lux. 1 cardigan, blue, knit by me. 1 box pencils. 1 Beano annual. Tea towels x 3 for Mammy. 1 bottle Limacol. Pack tight. Pack tight. Pack tight.

The steel drum stood in the front room of the house on Rugby Road like a guest who had arrived too early and been told to wait. It was blue, ridged at the waist and at the shoulder, and its lid leaned against the radiator with the clamp ring hooked over it. Somebody had written NOEL in black marker down one side, and under that, smaller, GOUYAVE, and under that, smaller still, in a hand that had begun to shake only in the last few years, *Handle like you have sense.*

Simone Noel stood in the doorway with her rolling bag and looked at it for a long moment before she looked at anything else.

"You see it," her grandmother said from the kitchen. "Good. Then I don't have to explain it."

It was the second Saturday of October, and Flatbush was doing what Flatbush did on a bright cold afternoon: dollar vans honking down Flatbush Avenue two blocks over, a man on Church Avenue selling coconut water out of a cooler, the Haitian bakery on the corner putting out the last of the pâté, and every second stoop on Rugby Road holding at least one auntie in a puffer coat who wanted to know where you were going and why you were dressed like that. Iris Noel's had a rosebush and a tub of thyme and a hand-lettered sign wired to the gate that said NO JUNK MAIL NO CHURCH LEAFLET NO FOOLISHNESS, which the mail carrier had long since learned to treat as a greeting.

Simone had come down from Toronto on the early flight because her father had called on Wednesday sounding like a man reading from a script he had not written. *Your grandmother wants the grandchildren to come by. One at a time. She says she has something to show each of you.* When she pushed him, Dessie had said only, *She bought a barrel,* in a voice that made it sound like a diagnosis.

Grandma Iris bought barrels all the time. That was not news. For as long as Simone could remember there had been a barrel in some corner of this house filling slowly over a season, the way other families had a jar for loose change.

But a new barrel did not usually require the grandchildren one at a time.

Simone left her bag by the stairs and went through to the kitchen. The kitchen was the warmest room in any house Iris had ever lived in. Someone had once measured, and it was true. The window over the sink had been steamed so many winters that the paint on the frame had softened into a kind of skin. A pot of something with pumpkin in it was ticking on the back burner.

Iris was at the table in her good cardigan, the green one, with her reading glasses on a cord and her hair pressed and pinned. She was eighty-five. In front of her, squared to the edge of the table, sat a stack of exercise books.

They were the old kind, the kind with the times tables printed on the back cover, the kind Simone had only ever seen in pictures from her father's childhood. Their covers had once been different colors. Now they were all the soft brown of paper that has been handled by a thumb for sixty years. There were eleven of them, held together with a ribbon that might have been red when it was new.

"Sit," Iris said. "Take off your coat. You look like you came to rob me."

Simone sat. Her grandmother put a hand flat on top of the stack.

"Every barrel I ever packed is in here," she said. "From the first one in Birmingham, when your father was five years old and living with my mother, and I was cold for the first time in my life and could not understand how people chose this. Every one. What went in. What it cost. Who it was for. When it left. When Gem say it reach." She tapped the cover. "Two hundred and three barrels, so far."

"Grandma."

"Two hundred and three. Your grandfather used to say I should have been working for the shipping company instead of paying them." She slid the top book across the table. "Open it."

The first page was ruled in faint blue, and the ink on it had gone brown at the edges. The handwriting was a schoolgirl's handwriting, careful and upright, every capital letter given a little flourish as if it were being introduced at a party. *Barrel No. 1.* The address in Handsworth. The address in Gouyave. *For Desmond.* And then the list: socks, shoes, Ovaltine, Carnation, Lux soap. A blue cardigan, knit by me. At the bottom, three times, as though the first two had not been enough: *Pack tight.*

"Why does it say that three times?"

"Because the first barrel I packed was too loose, and the tins knock about, and by the time it reach Gouyave the Ovaltine had burst and every single thing in it taste like Ovaltine for a year. Your father's shoes. My mother's tea towels. Everything." Iris laughed, a short, private laugh. "He told me later he used to sniff the cardigan. He thought that was what England smell like. Malt."

Simone turned the pages slowly. Barrel No. 2, Christmas 1965: a doll, black, with a yellow dress; a tin of Quality Street; two yards of cotton print for Mavis; a torch and four batteries. Barrel No. 5, 1967: *Sonny's old shirt for Dessie, take in the sides.* Barrel No. 9: *Cod liver oil. He will hate it. Good.* Prices in shillings and pence in a column down the right side, carefully added, and at the bottom of each page a note in a different pen, added later: *Gem say reach 14 April.* *Gem say reach, rain get in.* *Gem say Mammy cry.*

"I didn't know you kept these," Simone said.

"Nobody knew. Your grandfather knew. He thought I was mad." Iris took off her glasses and let them hang. "I am going home, Simone."

Simone looked up.

"Not to visit. Home." Iris said it the way she said the time, or the price of eggs. "Next summer. The house in Gouyave is nearly finish. Kerwin say he can do the upstairs by June if the blocks come. Gem is eighty years old and she is tired of living in that house alone with my furniture under sheets. And I am tired of the cold. Sixty-two winters. I was cold in Birmingham and I was cold in Brooklyn and I have been cold every single winter since I was twenty-three years old, and I would like to be warm now, please, before I dead."

"Does Daddy know?"

"Your father knows. Your father is vexed. Marcia knows, and Marcia is making lists, because Marcia is my child. Clive knows, and Clive wants to put me in a container like a refrigerator." Iris sniffed. "I am not going in no container. I am going the way everything else went. In barrels."

"You can't go in a barrel, Grandma."

"My things are going in barrels. Me, I will take the plane like a lady." She pushed the stack an inch closer to Simone. "But I want the lists done properly. I want the last barrels written in the book, the same as the first one. And I want somebody young to read the whole thing, every page, and tell me if it was worth it. All of it. The packing and the sending and the being here." She looked toward the front room, where the empty blue drum stood waiting. "That is why one at a time. Each of you get a book to read. You get the first one, because your father was the first one it was for."

Simone sat with the exercise book open on her knees while her grandmother turned back to the stove.

Later that night, in the small back bedroom that had been her aunt Marcia's as a teenager and still had a poster of a long-dead cricket captain tacked to the inside of the closet door, Simone photographed the first ten pages of Barrel Book One with her phone, holding each page flat under the lamp. She put them up in the family's private space, the one her cousin Theo had set up three Christmases ago after an argument about whose turn it was to send the group photos. She wrote nothing at first. Then she wrote: *Grandma has kept a list of every barrel since 1965. She is going home next summer. This is the first one.*

Along the top of the family page the hours of five households sat side by side. Toronto, 11:42 at night, where her father would be sitting up in the den pretending to watch the hockey. London, 4:42 in the morning, where her aunt Marcia would be asleep with her lists on the night table. Miami, the same as Toronto, where her uncle Clive was probably still answering emails from a warehouse. And Gouyave, 11:42, an hour that meant the sea would be loud on the stones below Tanty Gem's house and the fishermen would already be asleep.

The first response came from Gouyave. It was a single photograph, taken in bad light, of a child's blue cardigan folded on a shelf. The wool had gone thin at the elbows. One button was missing.

Underneath it, Tanty Gem had written: *He never let we throw it out.*

Chapter 2: Grove Lane

> **Barrel No. 3.** Posted from 14 Grove Lane, Handsworth. 2 November 1965. To Mrs. Mavis Lewis, Gouyave. For Christmas. > 1 Christmas pudding, tinned (Mammy will say it is not a black cake. It is not a black cake.) 2 lb Tate & Lyle. 1 tin Quality Street. 1 pr leather sandals, size 7, Mammy. 1 Sunday hat, navy, with net. Socks, Dessie, 3 pr. 1 toy lorry, red. Vicks x 2. 1 Parker pen for Gem, she is to write to me and not make excuse. Paid shipping £2 10s. Sonny did an extra Sunday.

Marcia Bailey had not been to Handsworth since 1989, and in her mind it had stayed exactly where she left it, which was in a coat that did not fit her and a bus that did not come.

She drove up from London on the Saturday of half term with her daughter Tia asleep against the passenger window and the exercise book on the dashboard in a freezer bag. Her mother had posted it to Catford by recorded delivery with a note in the same upright hand: *Barrel Book Two. For Tia. You drive her there. She should see it.*

The M6 went gray and then grayer. Past Coventry the sky lowered itself onto the motorway like a lid. Tia woke as they came down into Handsworth. The Soho Road ran the way Marcia remembered it, a long, busy spine of shops going downhill toward the city, but the shops had changed their clothes.

Grove Lane ran off at an angle and climbed, lined with brick terraces built for factory families a hundred and thirty years before: two up, two down, bay windows, little front walls the height of a child. Number 14 had a new door, composite, the color of a plum, and a satellite dish, and a wheelie bin with its number painted on in white. Marcia parked across the road and turned off the engine and did not get out.

"Mum."

"Give me a minute."

She had been born upstairs in that house, in the back bedroom, in February 1966, during a week when the pipes froze and her father had to carry water up from a standpipe at the end of the road. That was the story, anyway. Of Handsworth she kept only pieces: the smell of Sunday chicken with too much thyme, because her mother could not get the green seasoning right with English herbs; her father coming home from the buses at night in his conductor's jacket with the ticket machine still on its strap, rubbing his hands and saying, *Lord, Iris, England is a refrigerator with a queen in it.*

And the barrels. She remembered the barrels. They lived in the passage between the front room and the kitchen, so that you had to turn sideways to get by, and her mother would stand over one in her stockinged feet late at night when Marcia was supposed to be asleep, fitting tins into the gaps like a woman doing a jigsaw against a clock.

Tia had the exercise book out of its freezer bag and open on her knees. She read the way her grandmother read, with her finger moving under the line.

"Barrel number three," Tia said. "Christmas pudding. She wrote, *Mammy will say it is not a black cake. It is not a black cake.*" She looked up. "That's so rude."

"That's so true," Marcia said. "You can't get the fruit right here. You can't get it soaked long enough. Black cake you start in January for the next Christmas. Mum used to say English people soak their fruit for an afternoon and call it a tradition."

Across the road, the plum-colored door opened and a young woman came out with a pushchair and a little boy in a dinosaur hat. She was Somali or Eritrean, maybe, in a long dark coat and a scarf the color of marigolds. She glanced across at the car with two Black women sitting in it staring at her house, frowned, then seemed to decide something, and came over. Marcia wound down the window.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm so sorry," Marcia said. "I was born in your house. My mother lived here. A long time ago. We're just looking. We'll go."

The young woman's face changed entirely. "Which room?"

"Back bedroom. Upstairs."

"That's his room now." She pointed at the dinosaur hat. "He was born in hospital, though. City Hospital. We're not so brave." She hesitated, then said, "Do you want to see?"

So they went in.

The passage was still narrow. New floor, pale gray walls, but the passage was the passage, and Marcia had to stand still in it for a moment with her hand on the wall.

"My mother used to keep a drum here," she said. "A big steel drum. For sending things home."

"Ah," the young woman said, as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world, which to her it was. "We send boxes. To my mother's sister in Hargeisa. My husband says one day we will send a whole house, piece by piece."

The back bedroom was full of plastic toys and a cot and a wallpaper border of cartoon tractors, and it was smaller than any room had a right to be. Marcia stood at that window for a long time. She was trying to see what her mother would have seen, in the winter of 1965, at twenty-four years old, with her first son four thousand miles away and her second child not yet born and the sky outside the color of washing-up water.

When they left, the young woman, whose name was Hodan, asked if they would like to write something in the guest book she had started when they moved in, for people who came by. Tia wrote, *Iris and Sonny Noel lived here 1964–1970. They sent barrels home to Grenada from this hallway. Their daughter was born upstairs.* Then she drew a small barrel next to it, badly.

That evening, in a chain hotel by the canal at Brindleyplace, with the lights of the converted warehouses doubled in the black water, Tia sat cross-legged on the bed with her headphones on and listened to her grandmother.

Her cousin Theo had been recording Grandma Iris since the spring. He did it on Sunday afternoons, after church, at the kitchen table on Rugby Road, with a little microphone on a stand that Iris called *the lollipop*. He uploaded each recording to the family's space with a title and a date, and the recordings had begun to pile up into a kind of second book: *Grandma on the boat to Southampton. Grandma on the first snow. Grandma on her mother's hands. Grandma on why she will not eat English bread.* Some were two minutes long. One was an hour and nine.

Tia found the one called *Grandma on Grove Lane* and pressed play.

At first there was only kitchen sound: the fridge, a spoon on a cup, Theo saying, *Okay, it's going, Grandma, just talk normal,* and Iris saying, *I always talk normal, is you who talk like television.* Then her grandmother's voice settled, lower than on the phone, slower, with the island in it more than usual, the way it came out when she was remembering instead of instructing.

*"When I reach Birmingham, it was the eleventh of October 1964, and Sonny meet me at New Street with a coat he borrow from a man at the bus garage. Brown coat. Too big. I put it on in the station and I never take it off till April. That is not a joke. I sleep in it. Sonny say, Iris, you look like a sack of yam walking.*

*"The room on Grove Lane was one room and a half. The half was the scullery. Mrs. Doherty had the downstairs, and she was good to me, she was a good woman, she had come from Ireland in the same way, with nothing, and she knew. Other places, the sign on the window say No Coloureds, No Irish, No Dogs, and she used to laugh and say, well, Iris, at least they put us before the dogs.*

*"What I remember is the quiet. In Gouyave there is no quiet. The sea is talking, the people talking, the radio, the fishermen, the market, the dogs, the church bell, the cocks. Birmingham at night was so quiet I could hear my own blood. And I used to lie down in that brown coat and think, my son is sleeping right now under my mother's roof and he does not know what my face look like any more.*

*"So I start the barrel. A woman at the factory, Mrs. Clarke, she was from Barbados, she tell me where to get the drum, a man in Aston who sell them from the chemical works, you have to scrub them out with Vim and hot water three times. And I start to buy one thing every week. One thing. A tin of milk. A pair of socks. And when I put the thing in the barrel I feel like I put my hand on his head.*

*"That is all it was. You understand? People think is about the things. Is not about the things. Every tin was me putting my hand on his head."*

There was a pause on the recording, and the fridge hummed, and Theo said very quietly, *Grandma,* and Iris said, *Turn it off now. Turn it off, I'm finished,* and the recording ended.

Tia took off her headphones. Her mother was at the window, looking down at the canal, where a narrowboat with geraniums on its roof was tied up under a string of lights.

"Did you know she said that?" Tia asked. "About her hand on his head?"

Marcia did not turn around. "No," she said. "She never said it to me. I don't think she said it to anyone till Theo put that lollipop in front of her."

"Uncle Dessie should hear it."

"Uncle Dessie," Marcia said, "has heard every one of those recordings twice and says he hasn't listened to any of them. That's your uncle." She came and sat on the end of the bed. "Read me the next barrel."

So Tia read her the next barrel, and the one after, by the light of the bedside lamp, while the narrowboat's lights shook in the water and the city went on being quiet outside. A toy lorry, red. Vicks. Socks. A hat with net. Two pounds ten shillings, and the line underneath it: *Sonny did an extra Sunday.*

Chapter 3: The Boy Who Smelled of Malt

> **Barrel No. 22.** Posted from Rugby Road, Flatbush, Brooklyn. 9 June 1972. To Mrs. Mavis Lewis, Gouyave. LAST ONE BEFORE HE COME. > 1 suitcase, brown, empty, for him to pack. 1 winter coat, boys 12, too big, he will grow. 1 pr gloves. 1 woolly hat with bobble (he will refuse it). Underwear x 6. 1 photograph of us, Marcia on Sonny lap, so he know the faces. 1 street map of Brooklyn from the Esso station. Rice 10 lb for Mammy, to say thank you. There is nothing to say thank you. Pack tight.

The first snow came to Scarborough on the third of November, a wet, unconvinced snow that lay on the lawns along Brimley Road for an hour and then gave up. Desmond Noel watched it from the den window with a mug of cocoa tea going cold in his hand and did not say anything when his son came in with the exercise book.

"No," Dessie said.

"I haven't said anything."

"You have the book. That is saying something."

Ravi sat down on the arm of the couch, which his mother had told him for twenty-three years not to do. He was tall the way his mother's family was tall, with her straight black hair and his father's wide mouth and the habit, from both of them, of listening with his whole face. He had come by on his day off because his grandmother had mailed Book Three to his apartment with a note that said, *For Ravi. Read it to your father. He will not read it himself.*

"She says read it to you."

"She says plenty."

From the kitchen came the slap of dough on the counter and the smell of hot oil and geera. Indira was making buss-up-shut for dinner because it was Saturday, because her son was home, and because she had decided, after thirty years of marriage to a Grenadian, that when Dessie went silent the cure was Trinidadian and came on a plate. She had grown up in San Fernando in a house with a mango tree that dropped fruit on the galvanize roof all night in season, and she had met Dessie in 1994 at a fete in a church hall on Eglinton Avenue, where he had stepped on her foot during a soca tune and then stood in front of her apologizing so long that the song ended. Every Labor Day after that, until his knees objected, they had gone down to Brooklyn and played J'ouvert on the Parkway before dawn, two people in old shorts covered head to foot in mud and blue paint and chocolate, following an iron band through the dark while the sky came up gray behind the Grand Army Plaza arch.

"Read it," she called through. "Desmond, let the boy read it. Or I am putting pepper in yours."

Dessie set down the cocoa tea and folded his hands on his stomach, the way he did when he was preparing to lose an argument. He was sixty-six, thirty years a mechanic on the subway trains, with forearms like cable.

Ravi opened the book to the first marked page. Book Three ran from 1969 to 1972, the last years in Birmingham and the first in Brooklyn, and his grandmother had put a strip of paper in at Barrel No. 22.

He read the list out slowly. The suitcase. The coat that was too big. The bobble hat he would refuse. The photograph *so he know the faces*. The street map of Brooklyn from the Esso station. Then the last line: *There is nothing to say thank you.*

Dessie did not move for a while.

"I did refuse it," he said finally. "The hat. I threw it in the sea."

---

He had been born in Gouyave in March 1960, in his grandmother's house on Upper Depradine Street, a narrow two-story board house painted a pink that faded to the color of the inside of a shell, standing on concrete pillars on a slope so steep that the back door opened at ground level and the front door needed six steps. From the gallery you looked straight down over rusted galvanize roofs to the sea. Gouyave was a fishing town, on the west coast of Grenada, the leeward side, where the water was calm and dark blue and the boats went out before dawn for tuna and blue marlin and came back by noon with their catches slung across the gunwales. The whole town smelled of fish and nutmeg.

His mother left when he was four. He did not remember her going. He remembered his grandmother Mavis, who was tall and dark and silent and had a laugh like a door being kicked open; he remembered Tanty Gem, who was eighteen then and loud and in love with a fisherman called Linus; and he remembered the barrels.

"You have to understand," he said to Ravi, and his voice had gone slow and careful, the way it went when he was explaining a fault in a brake assembly. "In Gouyave, everybody's mother was somewhere. England. Trinidad. Aruba, for the oil. Curaçao. Some fathers in the canefields in Florida. So it was not strange. Every second child in my class had a barrel coming. When the barrel reach, you went to St. George's with your grandmother in the bus, the bus with a name painted on the front, *Sweet Sensation* or *Who Jah Bless*, and you sat on the wooden seat holding the paper from the shipping office, and you went down to the Carenage, where the boats tie up in the middle of town and the houses go up the hill behind like steps, red roofs, yellow walls. And you stood in a line at the customs shed for hours. And then you got your barrel, and a man with a handcart pushed it to the bus, and the whole bus knew what you had.

"And then at home, you open it."

He was quiet for a moment.

"When you open a barrel," he said, "the smell come out first. Every barrel had its own smell. Ovaltine. Soap. Wool. Mothballs. That English smell, damp, like a cupboard. I used to put my face in it. Grandma Mavis would slap the back of my head and say, *Boy, take your face out of the people barrel.* But I would put my face in it. And then she would take out every single thing and lay it on the bed, and we would look at it. Everything. My grandmother would hold up each tin and read the label out loud, like it was a letter."

"Grandma Iris says it was her hand on your head," Ravi said. "Every tin."

Dessie looked at him sharply.

"It's on one of Theo's recordings."

"I know what is on Theo's recordings." Dessie unfolded his hands and folded them again. "I don't need to listen to it. I was the one getting the tins."

In the kitchen the dough slapped down, once, twice.

"I knew she loved me," Dessie said. "That was never the question. You can't send two hundred barrels to somebody you don't love. The question was why she was over there loving me and I was over here getting tins. Eight years. Then they send for me in 1972 and I come to Brooklyn, to Rugby Road, to a woman I don't know who cry every time she look at me, and a man I don't know who try to teach me cricket in the street with a garbage can for wicket, and a sister, Marcia, six years old, born in England, talk like the BBC, who tell me I smell funny." He laughed suddenly. "I smelled of fish. Gouyave fish. That's what she meant. Took a month to get it out."

"And then?"

"And then I was American. Or Brooklyn, anyway. Which is close." He shrugged. "And then I meet your mother and come to Canada because she had a cousin with a basement, and then I am a Canadian with a Grenadian passport and an American accent who married a Trini. Your grandmother say I am the most confused man in the Commonwealth."

"She said that?"

"She said it at my wedding. Into the microphone."

Indira came through with two plates and set them down on the coffee table on top of the newspaper. The roti was torn into soft, buttery, flaky rags, the way it was supposed to be, torn while hot by clapping it between the hands until it looked like a shirt that had lost a fight, which was where the name came from.

"Eat," she said. "Then read the rest."

They ate. Dessie ate with his fingers, the old way, tearing roti and pinching it around the curry. Ravi took out his phone. On the family's shared map, a globe that spun under his thumb, somebody, probably Theo, had begun drawing the family's journeys as thin lines across the ocean, each with a date. There was Iris's line, Grenada to Southampton by ship in 1964, then by train to Birmingham. There was a line from Birmingham to New York in 1970. And there was a short, lonely line, dated August 1972, drawn from Pearls Airport to Barbados and on to New York, labeled *Dessie, age 12, alone*.

Ravi turned the phone around and showed it to his father.

Dessie looked at it for a long time with his fingers yellow with curry.

"I was not alone," he said. "They put me on the plane with a tag around my neck. Like a parcel. Like a barrel. NOEL. JFK. And in Barbados, where we change plane, an air hostess from Pan Am take me, and she hold my hand the whole way to New York and give me ginger ale." He wiped his fingers on a paper towel and took the phone and, with one thick careful finger, pressed on the line until the label opened. He deleted the word *alone* and typed, slowly, *with a lady from Pan Am called Doreen*.

Then he gave it back.

"Read the rest," he said. "Go on. Don't make it a whole thing."

Ravi read the rest. Barrel No. 23, the first one sent after he had gone, in the fall of 1972: a radio for Mavis, so she could hear the BBC World Service and the cricket; four pounds of salt fish, the irony of which nobody had apparently noticed; a bottle of bay rum. At the bottom, in the later pen: *Gem say Mammy put the radio by the window and sit there every evening. Gem say the house too quiet without him.*

Outside, the snow had started again, properly this time, falling in big slow flakes past the streetlight on Brimley Road and settling on the hood of Ravi's truck and on the long branches of the old silver maple in the neighbor's yard, which he had pruned himself two summers before and which was holding up, he thought, very well.

Chapter 4: One Block at a Time

> **Barrel No. 58.** Posted from Rugby Road, Brooklyn. 21 February 1979. To Miss Gemma Lewis, Upper Depradine Street, Gouyave. > 1 radio cassette player + 6 blank tapes (Gem, RECORD MAMMY TALKING, don't record the radio). 12 tins sardines. 10 lb rice. 4 lb sugar, brown. Panties x 6 assorted. 1 cricket bat, Gunn & Moore, for Pearl to keep for when she have a boy. Sonny's old work boots, for Linus for the boat. Money order inside the Milo tin: $60 for blocks. That is 60 more blocks. Count them. Write me how many.

The warehouse district west of the Palmetto Expressway did not look like anywhere a person would choose to be sentimental. It was flat as a tabletop and white with sun, block after block of tilt-up concrete buildings with roll-up doors and loading bays, their signs in English and Spanish and sometimes French: AIR & OCEAN CARGO. ENVIOS A TODA CENTROAMERICA. COLIS POUR HAÏTI.

Clive Noel's building was halfway down a dead-end street off NW 25th Street, between a company that shipped tires to Colombia and a company that shipped nobody knew what to Venezuela. His sign was blue and yellow, the yellow a little faded: NOEL ISLAND FREIGHT. BARRELS. BOXES. VEHICLES. GRENADA ST. VINCENT TRINIDAD GUYANA BELIZE. WE HANDLE LIKE WE HAVE SENSE.

That last line had been his mother's idea. She thought it was an excellent slogan.

On a Tuesday morning in late October he stood in the open bay with a clipboard and the fourth exercise book from Brooklyn, which had arrived by courier the day before in a box padded with three of his mother's dish towels. Book Four ran from 1976 to 1983. His mother's note, on the back of a church bulletin, said: *For Clive. You were born in Book Four. Also you are in the business, so you will understand the arithmetic.*

Behind him the warehouse went back into cool dimness for two hundred feet. It was full of barrels. Blue plastic drums and fiber drums and, still, a few of the old steel ones, standing in rows with the destination chalked on the lids, LA DIGUE, ROSEAU, GEORGETOWN, DANGRIGA, ARIMA, KINGSTOWN, waiting for the container that would go out to the port on Thursday.

He was forty-eight. He had been born on Rugby Road in the winter of 1978, the only one of Iris's children born in America. He had spent most of his twenties trying not to be in the barrel business.

"You reading your book again?" Lucille called from the office. "You going to be crying on the customers."

"I'm reading the arithmetic."

His wife came out with two coffees. She was tall and dark, with high cheekbones and a long, deliberate way of moving, and she had been born in Dangriga, on the coast of Belize, in 1977, and come to the Bronx at the age of eight with her mother.

She took the exercise book and read the page he had open.

"Sixty more blocks," she said. "Count them. Write me how many." She laughed. "Your mother."

"That's the house," Clive said. "That's the house in Gouyave. That's how she built it."

---

The house in Gouyave had been started in 1978, the year Clive was born, and as of that October morning in Miami it was still not finished, which meant it had been under construction for forty-eight years.

It had begun when Iris and Sonny bought a quarter-acre on the hill above town, off the road that climbed toward Belvidere, from a cousin of Sonny's who needed the money for his own passage to Toronto. They paid for it over three years, in money orders. Then they began to build.

That was how it was done. Nobody in Gouyave whose people were abroad took a loan from a bank. You sent money when you had money, and when the money came, somebody at home bought blocks, the gray concrete building blocks made in a yard by the river in molds and left to cure in the sun, and the blocks were stacked on the land and covered with galvanize to wait. When there were enough blocks, a mason came and laid a course. Then you waited for more money. Then more blocks. One block at a time, people said, and they meant it literally.

Clive turned the pages of Book Four and found the house on every one.

*Barrel No. 47. Money order $40, blocks.* *Barrel No. 51. $25, blocks, Sonny's tax refund.* *Barrel No. 55. $100 for the foundation, Gem say Mr. Antoine will dig.* At the bottom of each page, in the later pen, Gem's reports had changed from *reach* to arithmetic: *Gem say 220 blocks on the land.* *Gem say 380.* *Gem say Mr. Antoine pour the floor and the children from up the road write their names in it.* *Gem say goat get in.*

And between the house, the family. *Barrel No. 60: Clive's christening gown for Gem to see, then send back. DO NOT LET MAMMY KEEP IT.* *Barrel No. 71: Marcia's first period. Gem, I don't know who else to tell. She is twelve. She is so English. She say Mummy please don't make a fuss and I did not make a fuss and then I went in the bathroom and cry.*

"She wrote it to her sister," Lucille said. "Where else she going to write it? She was in Brooklyn by herself with a bus driver and three children. You think she had a girlfriend on Rugby Road she could call? Everybody on Rugby Road was busy being somebody's daughter. My mother had a sister too. In Dangriga. For thirty years everything that happened to my mother in the Bronx went in a box to that sister. You know what happened when Tía Juliana died? My mother stopped packing boxes for a whole year. She didn't know who to tell anything to. That's when she started telling me."

Clive looked at his wife. She was looking at the barrels.

"You should ask her," he said. "Your mother. To do what Mom did. Write it down."

Lucille shook her head. "My mother doesn't write. She sings. And she talks. When she wants to." She drank her coffee. "Theo has been asking her. You know that. Since the spring."

He did know. For six months Theo had been splitting his weekends: Sundays on Rugby Road with the lollipop microphone and Grandma Iris, and Saturday afternoons up on the 2 train to the South Bronx, to the apartment on Prospect Avenue where his other grandmother, Fermina Nuñez, eighty-one, lived with a parakeet and a Garifuna flag, yellow and white and black, pinned over the television, and the sound of the elevated train going past the window every few minutes like weather.

Iris had talked from the first Sunday. You could not stop Iris talking; you could only point her.

Fermina was different. Fermina had looked at the microphone for a long time, the first Saturday, and then at Theo, and then she had said something in Garifuna that he did not understand, and then she had said, in English, "Turn it off. Sit. Eat first. We talk about the machine later."

They had talked about the machine for three Saturdays before she let him switch it on.

"She told him the rules," Lucille said now. "He told me. She said, the stories about Dangriga, yes. The stories about the Bronx, yes. The songs she sings in the kitchen, the ones everybody knows, the punta, she don't care, put them where you like. But the old songs, the ones for the ancestors, no. Not in a machine. Those are not for the family space and not for a phone. Those you learn sitting next to the person, or you don't learn them." She shrugged. "And she said anything she says about her own grandmother, he has to play back to her first, and she decides."

"He agreed?"

"He's your son. He agreed and then he went home and made a little form." Lucille smiled. "Typed. With checkboxes. *Fermina says yes. Fermina says family only. Fermina says no.* She signed it. She was very pleased. She said, now I'm like a lawyer."

In the bay a pickup truck had backed in, and a heavy man in a Windies cricket shirt was lowering a barrel off the tailgate with the help of a teenage boy. The barrel was blue plastic, and on the lid, in black marker, it said JOSEPHINE — BLOCK 3 — BELMONT, ST. VINCENT. Clive went to help, the way he always did, because he could never watch a barrel come off a truck without putting his hands on it.

While the man filled out the forms, the boy wandered over to where Lucille sat in the doorway. He was perhaps fifteen, Vincentian, with an earbud in one ear and a face that wanted to be bored and could not quite manage it.

"What's that flag?" he said, nodding at the sticker on Lucille's lunch bag. It was the same yellow, white and black as the one over Fermina's television.

"Garifuna."

"We learned that in school," the boy said, surprised. "Back home. Before we came. The Garifuna were from St. Vincent first. The British sent them away."

"That's right," Lucille said. "From Yurumein. That's what we call St. Vincent. My people were put on ships in 1797 and taken to an island near Honduras. Then they came along the coast to Belize, to Dangriga, where I'm from. So you and me are neighbors. Just a long way round. My mother would say I'm from St. Vincent, Belize, the Bronx and Miami, and all of them are true and none of them are the whole thing."

The man in the Windies shirt called, and the boy went back to the truck, glancing at her once more over his shoulder.

Clive, his hands dusty from the barrel, came and sat on the step below his wife.

"You never told me that," he said. "About the neighbors."

"You never asked about the map," she said. "You ask about the food."

That night Theo, who had apparently been told everything by his mother within the hour, opened the family's globe and added a new line. It began at a small green island in the Windward chain, St. Vincent, a short hop north of Grenada, close enough that on a clear day you could almost imagine them waving. From there it ran west, the whole length of the Caribbean Sea, to the Bay Islands off Honduras, dated 1797, and from there north along the coast to a town on the shore of Belize, dated 1832, and from there, much later, to the Bronx, and then to Miami. He labeled it *Lucille's people*. Then he looked at it, and deleted that, and wrote instead the word his grandmother Fermina used, *Garinagu*, and under it, in brackets, *ask Nana how she wants this written*.

On the map it sat beside Iris's lines. Grenada to Birmingham. Birmingham to Brooklyn. Brooklyn to Toronto, to London, to Miami. All of them leaving the same small corner of the sea.

Clive, lying awake beside his sleeping wife at four in the morning, opened it on his phone and spun it slowly under his thumb, and thought that he had spent twenty years shipping barrels across that water for other people's families and had somehow never looked at it as a map.

Chapter 5: Gem Say Reach

> **Barrel No. 97.** Posted from Rugby Road, Brooklyn. 3 October 1986. To Miss Gemma Lewis, Gouyave. > 2 bags cement (no, Gem, I know you can buy cement. Mr. Antoine say the Brooklyn one better. Let him have his way). Tiles, bathroom, white, 4 boxes. 1 toilet seat, still in the box, DO NOT USE AS A PLANTER. Curry powder (Chief) x 6 for Mrs. Ramdass next door, she is from Trinidad, she say it is the only one. Tapes back to you, 4, I play them till they nearly melt. Make more. Every Sunday. Make Mammy sing.

Gemma Lewis woke at a quarter to five the way she had woken every morning of her life, not because of an alarm but because the boats were going out.

You could not live on Upper Depradine Street and sleep through it. The engines coughed and caught down on the beach below, one and then three and then a dozen, outboards on long wooden pirogues painted green and yellow and red with names on their bows, *Faith*, *Mr. Fix*, *Mavis Please II*, and the men called to each other in the dark the way they had called for two hundred years, short, rough and cheerful, saying almost nothing.

Gem lay a while and listened to it go. Then she got up, because she was eighty years old and had learned that if she lay too long her knees made decisions for her.

The board house had not changed much in sixty years. Upstairs were three rooms and the gallery, and from the gallery, with her tea, Gem watched the light come.

It came up behind her, over the mountains, so that the sea went from black to iron to a deep, polished, early blue before the sun itself got high enough to touch the town. The roofs below her came out one by one, rust and red and new silver, then the bell tower of the big stone church by the bay, then the long barn of the nutmeg station, then the fish market, then the boats, small now, out on the water near the horizon where the tuna ran.

At seven Kerwin came up the street with his tools in a bucket.

He was her grandson, her daughter Pearl's boy, thirty-four and built like a door, with sawdust in his eyebrows and a laugh that had got him out of most of his troubles. He was a mason, like Mr. Antoine had been. Kerwin had carried mortar for him from the age of eleven. Now the house was his.

"Morning, Granny Gem."

"You eat?"

"I eat."

"What you eat?"

"Bake."

"With what?"

"With bake, Granny." He grinned and set the bucket down on the steps. "I come to tell you the blocks reach. Two hundred. Uncle Clive pay the man direct this time, by the phone. The man say he never see a Noel pay the same week before."

"Uncle Clive is not a Noel," Gem said. "He's a Miami." But she was pleased. She went in and got her own exercise book, the one that matched her sister's, which nobody in the family knew existed either. Gem's books were thinner and messier than Iris's. They did not list what went in the barrels. They listed what came out, and where it went, and what it was for. *Rice, half to Miss Edna next door because her son in Aruba never send nothing.* *Corned beef, the wrong kind, give to the church harvest.* *Money order, $60. Bought 58 blocks and one bottle of rum for Mr. Antoine because you have to.*

She wrote, in her loose hand: *200 blocks. Clive.* And then, because she was honest, *Same week.*

---

Kerwin walked her up to the house on the hill after the heat broke, around four, with her hand on his forearm and his other hand carrying a folding chair.

The road from town climbed in hairpins through the kind of green you could hear. Breadfruit trees with leaves as big as umbrellas. Nutmeg trees, dark and glossy, with the yellow fruit splitting on the branches to show the red mace lacing the brown seed inside, like a secret somebody was halfway through telling.

The house stood on its quarter-acre at the turn of the road with the breadfruit tree behind it. It was big. That was the first thing anyone said, every time. Iris and Sonny had planned for all their children and all their children's children, and the drawings that Sonny had made on squared paper at the kitchen table on Grove Lane in 1968 had grown, over forty-eight years of barrels, into something with four bedrooms downstairs, a long front gallery on concrete columns, an outside kitchen with a wood fire for when the gas ran out, and an upstairs that existed, as of that afternoon, as a concrete floor with walls up to waist height and steel rods sticking up at every corner, blue sky where the roof would be.

Kerwin set up the chair on the gallery and Gem sat down in it, facing the sea.

From here you saw the whole bay. Gouyave folded down below them to the water, and the coast curved north toward Victoria and Sauteurs, and south toward Grand Roy, and behind it all the mountains went up into their own weather, dark green and wet, with cloud caught on the peaks.

"Twelve weeks," Kerwin said. "If the weather hold. Twelve weeks for the walls. Then the roof, if Uncle Dessie send for the steel. Then she can come."

"She coming anyway," Gem said. "If she have to sleep downstairs. If she have to sleep in the shop with the sweetie jars. She coming."

Kerwin asked if she was glad. Gem took her time.

"Sixty-two years," she said. "She went in sixty-four. I was eighteen. She said, Gem, five years. Five years and I'm back. You will see." She laughed. "Every five years, five more years. Then the children. Then the grandchildren. Then Sonny get sick. Then Sonny pass. Then she say she cannot carry him home in a box, it is too soon, so she keep him on the shelf in the front room and stay with him. Then the shelf is fine, the shelf can manage. Then she is just old and stubborn and cold." She looked at the open upstairs. "I am glad. I'm also vexed. Both."

"You talk to her every day."

"Sixty years of letters and thirty years of telephone. That's not the same as she sitting there." Gem pointed at the second chair Kerwin had not brought. "Talking is easy. Talking is what you do when you can't do the other thing."

---

When Kerwin had gone home, Gem sat in the kitchen of the board house with her phone leaning on the bread bin and did the thing she had only recently learned to do.

Her grand-niece Simone had shown her over a video call in the summer, patiently, three times, with Gem's sister shouting instructions from Brooklyn in the corner of the screen. The cassettes. That was the point. For fourteen years Gem had recorded their mother on cassette tapes and sent them up in the barrels, and Iris had played them in Birmingham and Brooklyn until the tape stretched, and sent them back for more. Then their mother had died, in 1993, and the tapes had sat in a shoebox under Gem's bed, forty-one of them, swelling slowly in the damp.

In the summer, Kerwin's girlfriend's brother, who repaired electronics in a shop in Grenville and was much too young to have ever seen a cassette tape, had found an old deck and a cable and done something clever with a laptop, and now the tapes were in the phone. And from the phone, with Simone's three lessons, they went into the family's space, where anybody who belonged could hear them.

Tonight's was labeled, in Gem's own handwriting on the faded cassette insert: *Mammy, Easter 1981. Bread.*

She pressed play.

There was the sound of a kitchen. This kitchen. The same window, she thought, with a strange feeling that she was standing in a recording of the room she was sitting in. The same rain on the galvanize, because it had rained that Easter, she remembered now, rained so hard the drains on Upper Depradine Street ran like rivers. And then her mother's voice, old already, low and dry and slow, close to the microphone because Gem had told her to talk into it.

*"Iris. You ask me how to make the coconut bread so you can make it in Brooklyn. I will tell you but you will not make it right. You never make it right. You knead too soft. You have soft hands, like your father.*

*"You grate the coconut. The dry one, not the jelly. Your hand will get tired. Let it get tired. Then the flour, and sugar, brown, and the butter, and the spice. Nutmeg. You know where to get nutmeg, you come from here. Grate it fresh, don't buy it in the little bottle like the Americans.*

*"And when you put it in the oven, Iris, you must think about who you are making it for. If you make it angry it will come out hard. That is true. I don't care what nobody say. I make bread angry the day your father went to Trinidad and it come out like a stone and the dog wouldn't eat it.*

*"Make it for the children. Make it for Dessie. Tell him his granny say he must eat it all and send me a picture.*

*"That's all. Gem, turn it off. Gem. How you turn this thing off? Gem — "*

And then a click.

Gem sat in the kitchen with the rain not falling on the galvanize and listened to the silence after the click for a while. Then she typed, with one finger, very slowly: *Mammy. Easter 1981. Coconut bread. She say Iris kneads too soft. She say make it for the children.*

She attached the recording. She sent it.

Then she went out to the yard in the dark with a torch and found a dry nut under the tree, and husked it on the old iron spike by the back step the way her mother had, and cracked it, and sat at the table grating until her hand got tired. She let it get tired. She grated the nutmeg fresh. When the loaf came out it was a little soft in the middle, because her hands were soft too, and she laughed out loud in the empty kitchen.

The reply from Toronto came while she was still sitting there. It was from Dessie, who never wrote anything in the family space, who said it was a waste of time, who had not posted a single word in three years.

It was a photograph of an exercise-book page. Barrel No. 23. *Radio for Mavis.*

And underneath it, three words: *I remember the bread.*

Chapter 6: Prospect Avenue

> **Barrel No. 131.** Posted from Rugby Road, Brooklyn. 6 August 1993. To Miss Gemma Lewis, Gouyave. > Nothing for Mammy. First one with nothing for Mammy. Black dress for you, Gem, size 12, I know you have black but have a new one. 2 lb Chock Full o' Nuts for the people who come by. Paper plates. Plastic forks. 1 tablecloth, white, lace edge, to keep. Mammy's tapes back to you, all of them. I can't play them right now. Keep them safe for me.

The 2 train came up out of the ground after Third Avenue and ran on its iron trestle above Westchester Avenue like something stitched to the sky. Below, the avenue ran in deep shadow under the tracks, striped with light where the sun came between the ties, full of bodegas and beauty supplies and a botánica and a shop that fixed sewing machines, and the trains went over it every four minutes, so that everyone who lived along it had learned to pause mid-sentence, wait, and go on.

He got off at Prospect Avenue with a bag of groceries in each hand and the sixth exercise book in his backpack. Book Six ran from 1990 to 1995. His grandmother had given it to him in person, at the kitchen table on Rugby Road the Sunday before, and had said, "You get this one because you have the other grandmother. Read it to her. Fermina will know what to do with it."

"With what, Grandma?"

"With Barrel One Thirty-One. You will see."

Fermina Nuñez lived on the fourth floor of a brick building on Kelly Street, a short walk from the station, in an apartment she had moved into in 1986 and intended to leave, she said, feet first or not at all.

She was waiting with the door open.

"You're late."

"I'm eleven minutes early, Nana."

"Then you're late for being early." She took one of the bags from him and peered into it. Green bananas, two hands of plantain, a bag of grated coconut, a red snapper wrapped in paper from the fish market on Southern Boulevard. "Good. The fish looks at me nice. Come."

The apartment was small and very bright. Fermina had painted the living room a yellow she described as *like the inside of a mango that knows it is a mango*, and the windows on the street side looked out across the tracks to the roofs on the other side of the avenue. Over the television hung the flag, three horizontal bands, yellow on top, then white, then black.

In the kitchen she already had the coconut grating. Lucille had grown up eating hudut on Saturdays and so, through her, had Theo, but he had only learned this year how much work it was. The coconut milk had to be squeezed out by hand, the grated flesh soaked in warm water and wrung through a cloth, again and again, until the milk was thick and sweet. And the green plantains and bananas were boiled and then beaten in a mortar, a big wooden one Fermina had brought from Dangriga in 1985 in her only suitcase, until they turned into a stiff, elastic, sticky mass the color of putty, which was the hudut itself. You pinched off a piece, dipped it in the soup, ate it with the fish.

"Beat," she said, handing him the pestle. It was as long as his arm and worn pale at the grip.

He beat. She watched him.

"Like you're angry," she said. "But not with the plantain."

---

The recordings had started in April, when Theo's thesis adviser at the university had asked the seminar to choose a single family archive and spend a year building it, and he had looked at his two grandmothers and thought, foolishly, *that's two*.

Fermina had not talked at all, at first. Fermina had asked questions. Who would hear it? Where would it be kept? Could someone outside the family get it? Could it be sold? What if she said something about her grandmother that her grandmother would not like? What happened to it when Theo died?

"In Dangriga," she said, the second Saturday, "when I was a girl, a man came from a university in America with a tape machine. Very nice man. Tall. He gave my uncle money and my uncle sang for him. The old songs. The ones for the dead. And the man went away, and twenty years later my cousin is in a library in Chicago and she finds my uncle in a box. With a number on him. You understand? She had to ask permission to hear her own uncle." She put her hand on the table. "Never again. We decide. The family decides. Not the machine."

So Theo had made his form, with its three checkboxes, and his grandmother had signed each recording one by one, and the archive had grown more slowly on the Bronx side than on the Brooklyn side, but it had grown. Some of what she recorded went to the whole family. Some she marked for herself and Lucille only. And some she would not record at all, and those she taught him instead, slowly, at this kitchen table, on Saturdays, saying a word and making him say it back until his tongue stopped tripping.

He had started a list. It lived in the family space beside the list Simone had started from Iris's sayings, the family words, the phrases nobody outside the family would understand without a story. Iris's side said things like *pack tight* and *handle like you have sense* and *he's a Miami* and *Gem say reach*, and *Ovaltine barrel*, which meant any disaster that ruined everything near it. Fermina's side was shorter and in a different language entirely, and for each word Theo had written what she told him it meant and then, beside it, *Nana checked*.

*Buiti binafi*: good morning. *Seremein*: thank you. *Hudut*: the beaten plantain, and the meal. *Yurumein*: St. Vincent, the island before. *Garinagu*: the people. *Garifuna*, the language, and also, people say, the people. *Au bun*: I'm with you. Fermina's own addition, which she had made him write down twice, with a line under it.

---

When the fish was done and they had eaten at the little table by the window, with a train going over every four minutes so that each conversation came in short paragraphs, Theo took out Book Six and opened it to the page Iris had marked.

He read Barrel No. 131 out loud. *Nothing for Mammy. First one with nothing for Mammy.* A black dress for Gem. Coffee for the people who came by. A tablecloth to keep. The tapes, all of them, sent back. *I can't play them right now.*

Fermina listened with her eyes closed.

"Her mother died," she said.

"Great-great-grandmother Mavis. July 1993. Grandma Iris couldn't go down for it. Grandpa Sonny had just had the first heart attack. She stayed with him."

Fermina opened her eyes. "So she packed a barrel."

"She packed a barrel."

His grandmother nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something.

"My sister Juliana," she said. "Tía Juliana. Your mother's tía. When I came to New York in 1985 Juliana stayed in Dangriga. In our mother's house by the river, by the Stann Creek, with the boats. Every month for thirty years I sent her a box. Not a barrel. A box. Clothes, soap, coffee, shoes for the children. Letters inside the shoes so the customs man didn't read them. And every month she sent me back something. Cassava bread, the *ereba*, wrapped in banana leaf, so dry it could last for years. Coconut candy. A letter. Once, a song on a cassette. Our mother singing in the kitchen. Not the old songs. Just the kitchen ones, the ones you sing grating cassava."

The train went over. They waited.

"When Juliana died, nine years ago," Fermina said, "I packed one more box. Out of habit. I had it ready on that table. Coffee and a dress and stockings. Then your mother came in and saw it, and she didn't say anything, and I didn't say anything, and then she sat down and helped me unpack it." She looked at the exercise book in Theo's hands. "Your Grandma Iris knows. That's why she gave it to you to read to me. She wanted to say it to me and she didn't know how to say it so she sent the book. Like a barrel." She laughed suddenly. "That woman. She can't say nothing straight."

Theo did not know what to say to that, so he said, "Do you want to record something about Tía Juliana?"

Fermina was quiet for a long time.

"Yes," she said. "Family only. Not your school. Just the family." She pointed at him. "And then I will tell you one thing about my grandmother that you can put for everybody, because people should know it. But first the family."

He set up the microphone on the kitchen table between the empty bowls. She looked at it and did not call it anything. Then she began to speak, mostly in English, sometimes slipping into Garifuna in the middle of a sentence and back out again like someone stepping off a curb and back on, about a wooden house by a river in Dangriga, about two girls sleeping in one bed under a mosquito net and telling each other stories in the dark, about a sister who had stayed while she had gone. When she finished she checked the box on Theo's form herself, the middle one, *family only*, and signed her name.

"Now the other," she said. "For everybody."

He started a new recording.

"My grandmother's name was Simeona Arzú. She was born in Dangriga in 1890. Her grandmother was born in Honduras, in Trujillo. And that woman's grandmother was born on Yurumein. St. Vincent. Before the British sent us away. My grandmother used to say the names, every night, going back, like counting stairs, all the women, all the way to Yurumein. She made me say them back. Every night. Simeona. Before her, Damiana. Before her …" Fermina stopped, and looked at Theo.

"The names I'll tell you," she said, "not the machine. Write them. In the tree. You know the one."

He knew the one. The family tree in the family's space had begun with Iris and Sonny and gone down, but on Lucille's side it had stopped at Fermina, with an empty box above her and a question mark. He opened it on his phone, and his grandmother sat beside him with her reading glasses on and dictated, slowly, spelling each name, a line of women going back up the screen like a ladder, until the ladder reached a woman for whom she had only a first name and the word *Yurumein*.

"That's as far as I have," she said. "My grandmother had more. She knew the men too. But she died when I was nine, and I only learned the women."

"That's eight generations, Nana."

"Seven," she corrected. "I'm not on it. I'm still in the kitchen." She took off her glasses. "Write that we kept it. Not the government, not the library. The family kept it. In the mouth. Two hundred years. Write that."

Theo wrote it, in the note beside the top name, exactly as she said it.

Outside, the light went gold along Westchester Avenue, and the next train went over, and his grandmother got up to put the kettle on, and began, without thinking about it, to sing.

It was one of the kitchen songs. He knew it now. His phone stayed in his bag. He sat at the table and listened, and when she got to the part that repeated, he sang it back to her, badly, and she laughed and corrected him and they did it again.

At the bottom of the page in Book Six, under Barrel No. 131, in the later pen, Iris had written: *Gem say she put the tablecloth on Mammy's table and it look nice. Gem say she will keep the tapes till I'm ready.*

Under that, in a pen that was newer still, blue ballpoint, last week's, his grandmother had added one more line before she gave him the book:

*Thirty-three years. I'm ready now. Tell Fermina.*

Chapter 7: The Landing

> **Barrel No. 188.** Sent through Clive's place, Miami. 30 October 2012. To Miss Juliana Arzú, Dangriga, Belize. From Iris Noel, Clive's mother. > Do not tell Fermina. 1 good pot, heavy bottom, for the hudut soup. 1 pressure cooker. Coffee 2 lb. Sheets, double, white x 2. Reading glasses +2.00 x 3 (Lucille say she lose them). 1 tin Quality Street because I always send one first time. A note inside. She is family now. Pack tight.

The bus from Belize City came down the Hummingbird Highway in the last of the dark, and Lucille woke somewhere past the turnoff for the Blue Hole with her mother's head on her shoulder and the smell of wet green coming in through the open window.

You could not see much yet. Black hills, close on both sides, standing up out of the jungle like the backs of sleeping animals. Then the road began its long fall toward the coast and the hills opened, and the sky went gray at the bottom edge, and suddenly there were orange groves, row after row of short dark trees running off across the valley floor with the first light on their leaves, and the air through the window changed from forest to fruit.

Across the aisle, Clive was asleep with his mouth open. He had flown in from Miami the evening before, after a week of telling Lucille he couldn't leave the warehouse in November, the busiest month of the year, with the Christmas barrels piling up to the ceiling. But he had been on the 4:15 into Philip Goldson and he had not complained once.

"Wake him," Fermina said, without opening her eyes. "He should see the sea come."

The sea came at the end of the valley, flat and pale and enormous under a sky that had gone from gray to pearl, and then the bus was among houses: wooden houses on stilts painted turquoise and lime and salmon pink, with laundry already out on the lines underneath and dogs asleep in the shade between the posts, and concrete houses with iron grilles, and the long low line of the town strung out along the shore. Dangriga. The sign at the edge of it had been repainted for the day, and someone had tied yellow, white and black ribbons around the post.

It was the eighteenth of November.

---

Fermina's mother's house stood on the south bank of the creek near its mouth, where the Stann Creek met the sea and the fishing boats tied up along the bank under the almond trees. It was a wooden house raised on posts, two rooms and a gallery, painted a blue that had faded to the color of a pale sky in March. Juliana had lived in it until she died. Now it belonged to Juliana's son Rufino, a schoolteacher with a gray goatee and a slow way of talking and who embraced Fermina at the bottom of the steps for so long that Clive had to look away at the river.

Rufino let go of Fermina and turned to him.

"Mabuiga," he said. "Welcome. You're the one with the machine."

"I'm Theo."

"I know who you are. Tía Fermina told us. You have a form." Rufino smiled. "With boxes. She's very proud of it. She says she's a lawyer now." He took one of the bags out of Theo's hands. "Come. Eat. Then I'll show you where the boats will come in tomorrow."

They ate on the gallery with the river going past below: fried fry-jacks, puffed and hollow and golden, a pot of coffee strong enough to stand a spoon up in. Aurelia, Rufino's wife, brought out ereba, the cassava bread, in pale dry rounds wider than the plate, and Fermina held a piece in her palm before she ate it, as if weighing it. Miss Pancha up the road still made it the old way, Aurelia said, with the grater and the snake.

The snake was the *ruguma*, Theo learned later: a long woven tube of palm fiber, taller than a man, that you packed with grated cassava and hung from a beam and stretched, by putting your weight on a pole through a loop at the bottom, so that it squeezed the bitter juice out of the root. That afternoon, Rufino walked him up the road to a yard where an old woman in a head tie sat on a low stool under a zinc shed with three younger women grating cassava on boards studded with tiny stones, and the snake hung from the rafter. Miss Pancha looked at Theo's phone in his hand, then at his face.

He slid the phone into his back pocket and left it there.

She nodded, and handed him a grating board, and let him try.

---

That night the drums began.

They began, as far as Theo could tell, everywhere at once. The big drum, the *segunda*, deep and steady, keeping the floor of it, and over it the smaller *primero*, quick and talking, cutting and answering, and the rattle of the *sísira* shakers, and the voices, a woman leading, the others coming in under her. People danced in the street, in the dark, in the light of the shop fronts: punta, hips going fast and small and the feet hardly moving, the shoulders still, so that the dancers seemed to be floating a few inches over the dirt. Lucille, who had not been home for Settlement Day in eleven years, danced in the middle of the road with a cousin she had not seen since they were eight, and laughed with her head back, and Clive stood on the edge of the crowd with a Belikin in his hand and watched his wife and looked, Theo thought, like a man seeing a house he had been living in for twenty-six years from a window he had never opened.

Fermina did not dance. She sat on a folding chair on the bridge, with Rufino on one side and Theo on the other, and listened.

"That one," she said once, tilting her head toward a yard where the drums had changed. "That one is old." And later: "That woman singing, I know her mother. She has her mother's voice. Listen how she holds it."

Theo listened. He did not record anything. His grandmother had not asked. She had only looked at his pocket on the bridge, and then at his face, the way Miss Pancha had, and then gone back to the music.

---

Before dawn on the nineteenth they walked down to the beach at the mouth of the river.

The whole town was there, or felt like it. People in white and in yellow and black, holding candles, holding children, holding coffee in paper cups. The sky over the sea was going from black to the deep blue of a mussel shell, and the water was flat and quiet, and a long way out, just visible as darker shapes on the dark, were the boats.

They came in slowly, paddled, low in the water, dugout canoes and wooden dories with people standing in them: men and women dressed in the old way, carrying cassava, carrying plantain, carrying the drums, carrying flags, carrying small children. The drums in the boats started up as they neared the shore, and the drums on the shore answered, and the crowd began to sing. It was the landing. It was 1832, when the people had come up the coast from Honduras to this shore, and it was 1797, when they had been taken off Yurumein, and it was this morning. Theo understood that all at once, standing on the sand with his grandmother's hand gripping his forearm hard enough to hurt. It was all of those mornings at the same time, being kept.

The first boat touched the sand. People waded out to meet it. A girl of about twelve in a white dress jumped down into the shallows with a bundle of cassava held over her head and walked up the beach with the whole town singing at her.

Fermina was crying. She did it without moving her face, the tears just going down. She did not wipe them.

"My grandmother did that," she said. "Simeona. When she was a girl. She was the one in the boat."

---

Late that afternoon, with the town gone slow and full and happy and the drums still going somewhere toward the market, they sat on the gallery of the blue house again, and Rufino went inside and came back with a pot.

It was a heavy pot, aluminum, the kind with a thick bottom that held heat, blackened on the outside from years on a fire. Rufino set it on the floor of the gallery in front of Fermina and then went back in and came out with a folded piece of paper in a sandwich bag, soft with handling.

"My mother kept this," he said. "In the pot. She said it was from the lady in Brooklyn. Clive's mother."

Clive sat up.

Fermina took the paper out of the bag and unfolded it and read it, and then she handed it, without a word, to Theo.

It was a sheet torn from an exercise book. He would have known that paper anywhere now, faint blue lines, times tables printed on the back. The handwriting was upright and careful. It said:

*Dear Miss Juliana,*

*You do not know me. I am Iris Noel, the mother of Clive, who married your niece Lucille. I am sending you this pot because Lucille say your old one burn through and you are too proud to say. I know about too proud. I am from Grenada.*

*Lucille say your sister in the Bronx send you a box every month for 27 years. I send my sister a barrel since 1965. So I know what that is. I know what it is to be the one who stay and the one who go. I am the one who go. I think about my sister every day.*

*Now our children are married, so we are family. I don't know your language and you don't know my island, but I know a pot. Please use it. Please don't tell Fermina I send it. She will think I am being forward. I am being forward.*

*Respectfully,* *Iris Noel* *Rugby Road, Brooklyn*

Theo read it twice. Then he handed it to his father, who read it and put his hand over his mouth.

"She never told me," Clive said. "It went through my warehouse. I must have loaded it. I never looked."

"You never look," Lucille said. But she said it gently, and she put her hand on the back of his neck.

Fermina was looking at the pot.

"Five years," she said. "She made the soup in it for five years and she never told me where it came from. Juliana. That woman." She laughed, wet. "Two of them. That's two women who can't say nothing straight."

"Tía used it every Saturday," Rufino said. "For hudut. She said it was the best pot she ever had. She said the Brooklyn lady knew pots."

Fermina put her hand on the rim of it, the way you might put your hand on someone's head.

Then she turned to Theo. "Take a picture," she said. "Of the pot and the letter. And put it for the family. Everybody. Both sides. Write that Juliana used it every Saturday. And write that Iris was being forward." She sniffed. "And then call that woman on the video and give me the phone. I want to tell her myself."

They called Brooklyn from the gallery as the sun went down behind the Maya Mountains and the river went copper and the drums started up again in the town.

"Who is this? Theo? Where are you? It's dark."

"It's me," said Fermina, taking the phone. "Fermina. I'm in Dangriga. I'm sitting with your pot."

There was a long silence on the line from Brooklyn.

"Well," Iris said at last. "I hope she used it."

"Every Saturday," Fermina said. "Five years, till she passed."

"Good," said Iris. "Good. Then it was a good pot." Another pause. "You vexed?"

"Yes," said Fermina. "Come and see me in the Bronx and I'll tell you how much."

On the screen, in Brooklyn, Iris Noel laughed, and then, unexpectedly, so did Fermina, and the two old women sat laughing at each other across two thousand miles of sea while the drums went on in the town and the boats lay drawn up on the sand at the river mouth, where they had landed that morning, as they did every year.

Chapter 8: Double Six on Albany Avenue

> **Barrel No. 162.** Sent through Clive's place, Miami. 14 September 2004. To Miss Gemma Lewis, Gouyave. IVAN. > Tarpaulin, blue, 20 x 30, x 3. Galvanize nails 10 lb. Water purification tablets x 200. Flashlights x 6 + batteries. Candles. Matches in a jar with a lid. Canned milk, canned fish, crackers, peanut butter. Insulin for Miss Edna (Clive will explain the cold box). Rope. Machete, new, for Kerwin, he is only 12 but he will need it. Sonny say tell Linus the boat can be fixed. Sonny say a boat can always be fixed. Gem please call. Please call. Please call.

The domino table at the Caribbean social club on Albany Avenue had been made in 1971 and in fifty-five years it had been slammed on so hard and so often that its surface had gone wavy, like the sea on a breezy day, with a shallow dip worn at each of the four places where a man brought his hand down.

Lennox Noel brought his hand down in the dip at the north end.

"Six-four," he said. "And I pose."

"You can't pose, you just play."

"I can pose when I want. Is my club."

"Is not your club, is everybody club. You're the treasurer."

"Same thing."

It was the first Sunday in December, three o'clock, and the social club was doing what it had done every Sunday afternoon since 1971. Four tables of dominoes going. A cricket match from Australia on the television over the bar with the sound off and the radio commentary on instead. A pot of cow-heel soup on a hot plate. Albany Avenue ran northwest through the heart of Hartford's North End, past the roti shop and the Jamaican bakery, under a sky that had been threatening snow since lunch and had not yet got around to it.

Ravi had driven down from Toronto on Saturday with Book Eight on the passenger seat. His grandmother had sent it to him with instructions: *Book Eight is Ivan and your grandfather. Take it to Lennox. Lennox will tell you about your grandfather better than me. I am too vexed with him for dying.*

Lennox was Sonny's nephew, the son of Sonny's younger brother Cuthbert, who had gone not to England but to the apple orchards and tobacco fields of the Connecticut River valley on a farm-worker contract in 1956 and stayed, the way a lot of men from the islands had stayed, in Hartford, which had been, for a while in the sixties, the most West Indian city in America that nobody had heard of. Lennox was sixty-eight. He had a round, smooth face and a pencil moustache he had kept since 1975.

He shuffled. The bones clattered on the oak, white and black, and four men's hands went into them and drew seven each.

"Your grandfather," Lennox said, setting his tiles up on edge in front of him in a neat little wall, "was the worst domino player in the history of the Windward Islands."

"Grandma said he was good."

"Your grandmother was being kind. That is unusual for her, so remember it." Lennox played. Double five. "Sonny could not count. That's the whole game. You have to count. You have to know what's out and what's left and who is holding what. Sonny played with his heart. He would see a nice tile and play it because it was nice. He would see a man was losing and give him a chance. Ridiculous." He looked at his tiles. "Everybody wanted him for a partner."

"Why, if he was bad?"

"Because when you lose with Sonny you still have a nice time." Lennox played again and the man to his left groaned. "Some men, you lose with them, you go home vexed. You lose with Sonny, you go home and you tell your wife a story. That's a skill. Write that down in your book."

---

Ravi had two books open, in a sense. The exercise book in his jacket pocket, and on his phone the memorial page that Marcia had made for his grandfather, years ago, after the funeral in 2008, which had been mostly forgotten and then, since the barrels began coming out, slowly filled again.

He had never known Sonny well. He had been five when his grandfather died, and what he remembered was a big man in a cardigan on Rugby Road who smelled of bay rum. On the memorial page there were photographs he had never seen until this year: Sonny in his Birmingham Corporation conductor's jacket on the platform of a double-decker in 1962, grinning, with the ticket machine on its strap; Sonny in a white shirt bowling in a park in Brooklyn, arm high, all his weight on the front foot. And there were the messages, which kept coming. From people Ravi did not know. Lennox, who had written a single line: *He could not count and he did not care.*

And under them, last month, a new one, from Lucille, in Miami: *Mom Iris sent a pot to my aunt in Dangriga in 2012, four years after he was gone. She told my mother on the phone last week that she packed it with him in her head, the way they always packed together. So I'm putting it here.*

Lennox, watching him over the wall of tiles, nodded at the phone.

"Ivan," he said. "That's what you came about. Turn to Ivan."

Ravi took out Book Eight and opened it at the strip of paper.

---

Hurricane Ivan reached Grenada on the seventh of September 2004 as a Category Three, with winds over a hundred and twenty miles an hour, and stayed over the island for most of an afternoon. Grenada had not been struck by a major storm since Janet in 1955, and people had begun to say, the way they say it on every island until it isn't true, that Grenada was below the hurricane belt. It broke the nutmeg trees, which took fifteen years to grow and bear, and tore up the cocoa, and pulled the bananas out of the ground. And for three days, for the family in Brooklyn and Birmingham and Toronto and Miami and Hartford, Grenada was simply gone. A silence where an island had been.

"Sonny was in the hospital," Lennox said. He had stopped playing. The other three men had stopped too, and were looking at him, and he did not seem to mind. "Kings County. The second heart attack. He was in the bed with the wires on him, and the television on the wall showing the island with no roof on it, from a helicopter. And he could not get up. You understand? Every other trouble in his life, Sonny got up. And he had to lie there.

"Your grandmother was in the kitchen on Rugby Road packing a barrel. That's what she did. She didn't know if Gem was living. She didn't know if the house in Gouyave was standing, the old board house or the new one on the hill. She didn't know about Linus, about the boat, about Pearl and the children. She just packed. Tarpaulin and nails and water tablets. Clive drove up from Miami overnight with the cold box for the insulin because there was a lady next door to Gem who needed it.

"And me." Lennox looked at his hands. "Me, I went to the hospital. Every evening for a week. Sit with Sonny. He made me read him the barrel list. Every evening. Read it out, Lennox. What she put in. Read it again. Like a man saying his prayers."

He played a tile, gently, without the slap. Six-three.

"On the third day the phone ring at Rugby Road," he said. "Gem. From a satellite phone at the police station in Gouyave. Thirty seconds. She say: *We living. All of we living. The roof gone. The board house standing. The house on the hill standing, the blocks hold, but the rods bend. Linus boat gone. Send nails.* That's all. Thirty seconds. Your grandmother call me at the hospital and I tell Sonny, and Sonny…"

He stopped. One of the men behind him put a hand on his shoulder.

"Sonny said the blocks hold," Lennox said. "That's what he said. Lying there. He said, *Lennox, the blocks hold.* Forty years of money orders and every one was a block, and the blocks hold. I never saw a man so happy in my life."

Ravi turned the page in the exercise book. At the bottom of Barrel No. 162, in the later pen, it said: *Gem say reach 9 October. Gem say the tarpaulin went on the board house roof and Kerwin and Linus put it, Kerwin is only 12 and he work like a man. Gem say tell Sonny the blocks hold. Sonny know. I tell him.*

And then, on the next page, Barrel No. 163, a month later, the shortest list in the whole book:

*Boat engine, Yamaha 40, second-hand, from a man in Sheepshead Bay. For Linus. From Sonny. A boat can always be fixed.*

---

They played on into the dark. The snow came at last around five, big soft flakes going slant through the light of the streetlamps on Albany Avenue and settling on the roofs of the parked cars and on the shoulders of people coming out of the roti shop across the street.

"You see," Lennox said to the table, delighted. "He's a Noel. He can't count either."

Before Ravi left, Lennox took him to the back wall of the club, where among the framed photographs of cricket teams and dances and a visit from a famous calypsonian in 1979 there hung a photograph Ravi had never seen. It showed a cricket field in a park, wide and green, ringed by big old oaks, and two teams in whites lined up in front of a wooden pavilion. Keney Park, Lennox said, in the North End, where the West Indian clubs had played every Saturday all summer since the fifties, and still did. The date said 1974. In the back row stood Sonny, up for the weekend from Brooklyn to play for his brother's club because they were a man short, grinning, with his arm around a very young Lennox.

"He took five wickets that day," Lennox said. "Five. Never again in his life. He talked about it for thirty-four years." He took the photograph off its nail, wiped the glass with his sleeve, and held it out. "Put it in your phone. For the page. For Dessie. Your father has never seen it. Sonny was always going to show him, and then there was never a Saturday."

Ravi photographed it under the light by the coat rack, and then, standing in the doorway with the snow coming down on Albany Avenue, he put it on the memorial page with the date and the place and a short line: *Keney Park, Hartford, 1974. Five wickets. Lennox says he never shut up about it.*

He was half an hour north of Hartford on I-91 in the dark when the phone, in its mount on the dashboard, lit up with a reply. It was from Scarborough. It said:

*He told me about the five wickets. I thought he made it up.*

And a minute later, as the road crossed into Massachusetts and the tobacco barns along the river went by, long and dark, in the snow:

*Ask Lennox if he will teach me to count.*

Chapter 9: Fruit Soaking in Catford

> **Barrel No. 139.** Sent from Rugby Road, Brooklyn. 2 January 1996. To Mrs. Marcia Bailey, Bromley Road, Catford, London. FIRST ONE THE WRONG WAY. > 1 glass jar, big, with lid. Raisins 3 lb, currants 3 lb, prunes 2 lb, cherries 1 lb. Mixed peel. Wray & Nephew x 1, cherry brandy x 1. Burnt sugar, Grenada, 2 bottles (you cannot get it there, don't argue). Instructions inside. Start NOW. Not December. NOW. You are a married woman. Make your own black cake.

The jar stood on top of Marcia's fridge in Catford, where it had stood every year since 1996, and in the second week of December Tia climbed on a kitchen chair to get it down.

It was the same jar. That was the point. It was a big squat glass jar with a red screw lid that had been replaced twice, and every January since Marcia had been married it had been filled with dried fruit and poured full of rum and cherry brandy and set on top of the fridge to think about itself for eleven months. In that time the fruit went from fruit to something else, soft and black and drunk, and the whole kitchen, when you opened the lid, smelled like a Christmas that had been going on in secret all year.

"Mind the — "

"I'm minding."

Tia set the jar on the counter. Through the kitchen window the back garden was gray and wet, the bare apple tree dripping, the shed roof shining, and beyond the fence the backs of the next row of Victorian terraces stepped down toward the railway cutting, where a train to Hayes went by with its windows lit at three in the afternoon. Catford in December: the giant fiberglass cat on the shopping center roof, the high street smelling of rain and hot oil and roasting chestnuts from a cart outside the station.

Marcia had the burnt sugar ready. Burnt sugar was the secret, and the secret was not a secret, it was just that you could not buy it right in London and you had to have it sent. It was sugar cooked past caramel, past brown, into black, until it was almost smoke, and it gave the cake its color and its bitterness. Grandma Iris's instructions, folded into Barrel No. 139 thirty years before, were taped inside the cupboard door, yellowed now and splashed. *Do not be frightened of the burnt sugar. If you are frightened of it the cake will be pale and everybody will know.*

They worked together. Marcia creamed the butter and sugar in the old mixer. Tia blitzed the soaked fruit, in batches, into a dark thick paste that clung to the blade. Eggs, one at a time. Flour. Spice: nutmeg grated fresh from the jar of whole nutmegs that came from Gem every year, cinnamon, a little allspice. The burnt sugar last, poured in a thin stream so the batter went from brown to the color of a wet road at night.

On the counter, propped against the bread bin, the phone showed Brooklyn on a video call. Grandma Iris was at her own table on Rugby Road with her own bowl, five hours behind and two hours into her own black cake, and they had been doing this together, in two kitchens, for three Decembers now. Around the edge of the screen, other faces came and went in small boxes: Indira in Toronto, also baking, with flour on her cheek; Simone in her apartment on Ossington, not baking, giving advice.

"Too pale," Iris said, peering at Marcia's bowl through the screen. "Put more."

"It's not pale, Mum, it's your screen."

"My screen is fine. My screen is new. Clive buy it." A pause. "Put a little more."

Marcia put a little more.

---

The cakes went in at five and the kitchen began to fill with that smell, and Tia's father came home from work and stood in the doorway in his coat breathing it in with his eyes shut.

Winston Bailey was Bajan, from St. Philip, the rocky east side of Barbados where the Atlantic came in white against the cliffs. He had been born in Barbados in 1964 and brought to London at the age of three to join his parents, and had grown up in Brixton, and worked for thirty years for the council, in housing, and played cricket for a club in Streatham until his knees told him to stop.

Tia knew about 2018. Everybody in the family did. It was not something anybody argued about. It was just something that had happened, like Ivan.

Winston's father, Elroy, had come to England from Barbados in 1959 at the age of twenty-one, recruited for London Transport, and had worked the London buses for twenty-six years, conductor first and then driver, most of it on the 36 between Queen's Park and Peckham. He had paid his tax and his national insurance and his rent for sixty years. He had brought his wife and son over in 1967. And in the spring of 2017, at seventy-nine, applying for a hospital appointment, he had been asked for papers proving he had the right to be in the country, and he had not had them. He had never needed them. He had come as a British subject from a British colony, before there were such papers to need.

The letters began after that. Winston spent a year in offices. He took leave from work and sat with his father in waiting rooms in Croydon with a plastic folder of payslips and rent books and a 1962 photograph of Elroy in his conductor's uniform outside Peckham bus garage. He wrote to the MP. He phoned. He waited. His father, a man who had never in his life been in trouble with anybody, stopped going to his Sunday dominoes because he was ashamed to say what was happening. In the end, it was sorted. Papers arrived. Apologies, of a kind. But Elroy died eighteen months later, in 2019, and Winston said, the one time Tia ever heard him speak about it, that his father had spent his last good year proving he existed.

That was all. That was 2018.

"Smells right," Winston said now, from the doorway.

"You haven't tasted it."

"Don't need to."

He hung up his coat and came to the counter and looked at the exercise book, which lay open beside the mixing bowls. Book Seven had come to Tia from Brooklyn in November, and she had saved it for this afternoon on purpose. It ran from 1995 to 2003, and in the middle of it was Barrel No. 139, the first barrel that had ever gone *the wrong way*, not home to Grenada but outward, to London, to a daughter newly married.

"Your grandmother sent your mother a barrel to make her a wife," Winston said. "I remember the day it came. Eleven in the morning. Two men from Peckham with a sack trolley. The whole street watched them bring it in."

"She sent a barrel for a cake?"

"She sent a barrel for a life." He smiled faintly. "The cake was the excuse."

Tia turned the page. On the other side of Barrel No. 139, in Iris's careful hand, there was a second list she had never seen before, squeezed into the margin in smaller writing:

*Also in this barrel, for Winston: 1 tin Bajan pepper sauce (from the shop on Flatbush, the lady say it is the right one, I don't know). 1 cricket ball. 1 photograph of Sonny on the buses in Birmingham. Tell him Sonny was on the buses too. Tell him he is welcome.*

Winston read it over her shoulder. He didn't say anything for a while.

"I never knew she sent the photograph for me," he said. "I thought it was for your mother. It's in the box upstairs."

"Can I have it?"

He went upstairs and came back with a shoebox and found it at once, as if he had always known where it was: a small black-and-white print, Sonny on the platform of a double-decker bus, cap pushed back, ticket machine on its strap, grinning.

Then he went upstairs again and came back with a second photograph, from a different box. It was nearly the same picture. A different man, thinner, younger, also in a conductor's jacket, also grinning, on the platform of a red London bus with a 36 on the front.

"My dad," he said. "1962."

Tia put them side by side on the counter between the mixing bowls. Two young men, a hundred miles apart, in the same jacket and the same cold, grinning as though nothing in the world had ever been difficult.

She photographed them together. Then she opened the family tree and went to Elroy Bailey, who had a name and two dates and nothing else, because nobody had ever gone back and filled him in, and she put the photograph there, and under it she wrote: *Barbados to London 1959. Drove the 36 for twenty-six years. Sonny Noel was on the buses too.* She hesitated. Then she added nothing about 2018. It was not what she wanted the tree to remember him for.

When she showed her father, he looked at it for a long time. Then he took the phone out of her hand and, with one finger, slowly, added a line under hers.

*He was a very good driver. Never had an accident. Not one.*

---

The cakes came out at half past seven, black and heavy and fragrant, and Marcia painted them with more rum while they were still hot, so that they hissed, and wrapped them in greaseproof paper and foil and put them in tins. One for the house. One for Hodan on Grove Lane in Birmingham, which Tia had insisted on, to say thank you for the passage. And one in a tin with a lid taped shut, labeled in Tia's writing for Clive's warehouse, which would go into a barrel, which would go on a container from Miami to St. George's, which would be carried up the hill to the house in Gouyave to wait for Iris.

"She'll be there to eat it," Tia said.

"She'll say it's too pale," Marcia said.

On the phone, in Brooklyn, Iris had taken her own cakes out of the oven and was holding one up to the camera like a trophy.

"Show me yours," she said.

Marcia held hers up.

There was a long pause from Rugby Road.

"Well," Iris said finally. "It's black."

From Marcia, that was the closest thing to a medal anyone in the family had ever seen her get.

Chapter 10: Two Grandmothers and a Jug of Sorrel

> **Barrel No. 204.** Packed at Rugby Road, Brooklyn. 23 December 2026. To Miss Gemma Lewis, The House on the Hill, Gouyave. MY OWN THINGS NOW. > Sonny's cardigan, brown, the one with the elbow. 1 domino set, bone, in the wooden box (Lennox say I must take it). My good pot. The wooden spoon from over the table. The photograph of the boat. The Birmingham coat, brown, too big, I keep it 62 years, it is going home now too.

Fermina came to Brooklyn on the twenty-third of December, which was the day Iris had said, and at the hour Iris had said, and with exactly what Iris had told her not to bring, which was food.

Theo brought her in a car service from the Bronx, down the Major Deegan and over the Triborough and along the long elevated sweep of the expressway into Brooklyn, with the skyline of Manhattan going by on the right, all lit up in the early dark, and a covered pot on Fermina's knees the whole way. She held it level through every pothole on the BQE.

Iris was on the porch, in her coat, waiting. She had been on the porch for twenty minutes. The two women had spoken by video every few days since the evening in Dangriga, and before that had met at Clive and Lucille's wedding in 2000 and at Theo's high school graduation, and at a christening in Miami, and on each occasion had been scrupulously polite to each other in the manner of two heads of state whose countries had fought a war over a fishing boundary in the eighteenth century.

What happened was that Fermina reached the top step, held out the pot, and said, "Hudut. Fish soup. For your pot." And Iris looked at it, and then at her, and said, "You brought food. I told you don't bring food," and took the pot, and lifted the lid an inch, and smelled it, and closed her eyes.

"Come inside," she said. "It's cold. You'll catch your death."

---

The house on Rugby Road was half packed. That was the first thing you noticed, coming in. The front room, which had held the blue barrel in October, now held four, standing in a row along the wall under the window like children waiting for a bus, three full and sealed, one open. Pictures had come off the walls and left clean pale rectangles behind.

But the kitchen was the kitchen. Nothing had been packed in the kitchen. The pumpkin soup was ticking on the back burner, and beside it a pot of oxtail, brown and glossy, with butter beans, the meat falling off the bone. The black cakes, three of them, stood in their tins on the counter. And on the table, in a big glass jug with a plate over the top, was the sorrel: deep red, almost purple, the color of stained glass with light behind it, made from the dried red sepals of the sorrel flower steeped with ginger and cloves and cinnamon and orange peel and sugar, and a good splash of rum, and left to stand two days.

Iris poured two glasses and put one in front of Fermina.

Fermina drank and held it in her mouth.

"We have this," she said. "In Belize. We call it something else."

"Everybody has it," said Iris. "Every island. Every island think it invent it."

They sat. Theo sat at the end of the table and did not take out the microphone. He had been told, by both of them, separately, on the phone, that if he took out the microphone at any time this evening he would be put out on the porch with the inflatable snowman.

They talked first about the cold, and about Brooklyn compared to the Bronx, which Fermina said was quieter, and Iris said was more respectable, and Fermina said was the same thing. They talked about Lucille as a girl, and Fermina told a story about Lucille at nine, in the Bronx, refusing to speak anything but Garifuna for an entire week because a teacher had told her it was not a real language, until the teacher came to the apartment to apologize, which had made Iris put down her glass and laugh for nearly a minute.

And then, because it was a kitchen and there was food in it and they were both in their eighties and had both been cooking since they were seven, they began, without anyone deciding to, to cook together.

Theo watched it happen. Fermina said the hudut needed to be heated slowly. Iris said of course it needed to be heated slowly, did she think Iris was a fool. Fermina got up to do it. Iris got up to show her where the pots were. Then Iris was cutting up a christophene for something and Fermina said, "Not like that," and took the knife, and Iris said, "In my own kitchen," and took it back, and then Fermina was grating coconut and Iris was making dumplings and there was flour on the floor and the window over the sink was steaming up and the radio was on, an old calypso.

At some point Iris said, "You know what my mother used to say about the coconut bread?"

"No."

"She said if you make it angry it come out hard." Iris shook her head. "I make it angry every year for sixty years. Every year in the cold. Every year it come out hard. This year I am going to make it in Gouyave. In the sun. Not angry."

Fermina looked at her for a moment.

"My grandmother used to say the same about cassava," she said. "If you're thinking bad things when you squeeze it, the bread is bitter." She grated. "She said, the bread knows. You can't lie to the bread."

"That's true," said Iris. "That's true. You can't lie to the bread."

They looked at each other across the counter, and something seemed to be agreed.

---

Later, when they had eaten, Theo's grandmothers sat on in the warm kitchen with the dishes not washed and a fresh glass of sorrel each, and Iris brought out Book Ten.

It was the second-to-last. It ran from 2012 to 2024. In it was Barrel No. 188, the barrel with the pot, the barrel that went to Dangriga, and Iris opened it to that page and put it in front of Fermina without saying anything.

Fermina read the list. *A good pot, heavy bottom. Pressure cooker. Coffee. Sheets. Reading glasses +2.00 x 3. Quality Street because I always send one first time. A note inside. She is family now. Pack tight.*

And at the bottom, in the later pen, which Theo saw now had a different look to it, as though it had been added much later than the others, an entry from 2017:

*Lucille say Juliana pass. Lucille say she used the pot to the end. I never meet her. I miss her. That is foolish. I write it anyway.*

Fermina read that twice. Then she took a pen from the cup on the windowsill, a cheap blue ballpoint, and, without asking, she wrote under it, slowly, in a hand that was much less tidy than Iris's:

*She was my sister. She said you knew pots. Seremein. — F.N.*

Iris looked at it upside down.

"What's that word?"

"Thank you," said Fermina.

Iris nodded. She took the pen out of Fermina's hand, turned the book back toward herself, and wrote the word again, carefully, underneath, copying the letters one at a time. Then she said it out loud, getting it wrong.

Fermina said it properly. Iris said it again. It was closer.

"Theo," Iris said, without looking up. "Put that word in the list. The family list. On my side."

"It's already on Nana's side, Grandma."

"I know. Put it on mine too."

He opened the family words on his phone. Iris's side: *pack tight. Handle like you have sense. He's a Miami. Gem say reach. Ovaltine barrel.* He added *seremein*, and in the note beside it typed: *Grandma Iris learned this from Nana Fermina, Rugby Road, 23 December 2026, over sorrel.*

He showed it to them. Iris read it with her glasses on the end of her nose. Fermina read it over her shoulder.

"Good," said Fermina. "Now she has to use it."

---

When the car service came to take Fermina home, near midnight, the two women stood at the front door under the porch light with their coats on. Snow had begun, very light, falling into the bare branches of the street trees and onto the inflatable snowman next door, which had partly deflated and was leaning over the railing as though it had had too much sorrel.

"You're really going," Fermina said. "To the island."

"In June."

"To stay."

"To stay." Iris pulled her coat closer. "I am eighty-five and I have been cold since 1964. I would like to be warm now."

Fermina nodded. She looked down the street at the lights, at the big old houses, at the snow.

"I went home for Settlement Day," she said. "In November. First time in nine years. I sat on the bridge and listened to the drums and I thought, maybe I stay. Maybe I don't get on the plane. I have the house by the river. Rufino is there. Maybe I stay." She shrugged. "Then I got on the plane."

"Why?"

"Because Theo is here. Because Lucille is in Miami. Because the Bronx is home too. That's the problem with us. We have too many homes." She buttoned her coat to the top. "You only have two. You're lucky. You can choose."

Iris thought about that. Then she said, "Come in June. To Gouyave. To see the house. Bring Theo. From Grenada, you know, on a clear evening, you can see St. Vincent from my gallery."

Fermina stood very still on the porch.

"Yurumein," she said.

"If that's what you call it."

"That's what we call it." Fermina was quiet for a moment. Then she held out her hand, and Iris, after a second, took it, and they stood there, two small old women in heavy coats on a porch in Brooklyn in the snow, holding hands like girls.

"I'll come," Fermina said.

When the car had gone, Iris went back inside and closed the door and stood in the hall among the boxes for a while. Then she went into the front room and knelt, slowly, with one hand on the radiator, beside the open barrel. Into it, on top of the brown cardigan with the elbow worn through, she placed the domino set in its wooden box, and the photograph of the *Mavis Please*, and, folded small, the brown Birmingham coat. Then she picked up the exercise book, Book Eleven, the last one, the one with only a few pages left, and wrote the list. At the bottom, before she closed it, she added one line:

*Fermina coming in June. Need one more chair on the gallery.*

Chapter 11: Twelve Barrels Up the Hill

> **Barrel No. 211.** Packed at Rugby Road, Brooklyn. 2 May 2027. To Mrs. Iris Noel, The House on the Hill, Gouyave. LAST ONE. TO MYSELF. > The exercise books, 1 to 11, in the biscuit tin with the lid taped. The lollipop (Theo say I can keep it). Sonny's ashes are NOT in here, Clive, I am carrying him myself on my lap. Nothing else. The rest of me is already there.

The port at St. George's lay at the foot of the town like a boat that had been pulled up into a lap of hills, and on the morning the container came in, the whole harbor seemed to have dressed for it.

That was Kerwin's opinion, anyway. He stood on the dock in the early heat with his hands on his hips and his shirt already dark down the back, looking out at the water. The Carenage curved around the inner harbor in a horseshoe of warehouses and old stone buildings with red fish-scale roofs, yellow and ochre and pale green walls, wooden balconies, and above them the town climbed straight up the hillside in steps, house above house, roof above roof, to the walls of the old fort on its promontory, where the flag was snapping in the trade wind. Out past the lighthouse a cruise ship sat at anchor like a white apartment block someone had floated out to sea and forgotten.

And on the commercial dock, among the cranes and the stacked containers, painted on the side of a forty-foot box in blue and yellow: NOEL ISLAND FREIGHT. WE HANDLE LIKE WE HAVE SENSE.

Clive had come down with it.

It took three hours in the customs shed. It always took three hours in the customs shed. A woman in a crisp uniform with reading glasses on a chain went through the manifest line by line, and Clive, who did this for a living, who had stood in a hundred customs sheds, stood in front of her desk with his hands clasped and answered every question as if he were sixteen and being asked about his homework. At the end of it she looked at the last page, where it said *Barrel 211: personal effects, books*, and looked at him over her glasses.

"Your mother," she said. "Miss Iris. From Upper Depradine Street."

"Yes, ma'am."

"My grandmother used to buy sweeties from her mother. In the shop." She stamped the page. "Tell her welcome home."

---

Twelve barrels went up the hill to the house in Gouyave on the back of a flatbed truck driven by Kerwin's friend Shaka, with Kerwin and Clive riding on the back with the barrels, holding them steady on the hairpins, the way men had ridden barrels up these hills for sixty years.

The road north from St. George's ran along the coast, the leeward coast, the calm side, and every turn of it opened a new bay below them, each one smaller and bluer than the last: the fishing village at Grand Roy with its pirogues drawn up under the sea grapes; Concord, where a waterfall came down out of the green mountains in three steps and children were swimming in the pool at the bottom. The rainforest climbed away on the right, heavy and dark, bamboo and tree fern and immortelle. On the left, the sea. In the villages people looked up as the truck went by with its blue barrels, and some of them waved, because a truck full of barrels meant somebody was coming home, and that was always worth a wave.

When they came over the last hill and Gouyave appeared below them, with its rusted roofs and its church tower and its boats, Clive stood up on the back of the truck holding onto a barrel and looked at it for a long time.

He had been there perhaps eight times in his life. Weddings. Christenings. Two funerals.

"It's smaller," he said.

"Everything smaller from the back of a truck," said Kerwin.

The house on the hill was finished.

Not finished the way a house in Miami was finished, with an inspector and a certificate. Finished the way a house in Gouyave was finished, which was to say, enough. The upstairs had walls and a roof now, galvanize painted green, and windows with louvered glass, and a staircase on the outside up to a second gallery that ran the whole length of the front. The steel rods were gone from the corners. Kerwin had sawn them off level in April and, without telling anyone, kept one, a short length of rusted iron eighteen inches long, which he had cleaned and oiled and laid on the mantel shelf in the front room like a trophy.

The breadfruit tree stood behind the house. The view was the same as it had been in 1978, when there had been nothing on the land but a breadfruit tree and the view: the whole of Gouyave tumbling to the sea, the bay, the coast curving away, and the wide blue water going out to a horizon smudged faintly, on the right, with the shapes of other islands.

Gem was sitting on the gallery in the folding chair.

"You bring them?" she said.

"Twelve," said Clive.

"Two hundred and eleven," she said, "and you only bring twelve." But she was standing up, holding onto the rail, and her face was doing something it rarely did, and when Clive came up the steps she held onto him for a long time, smelling of nutmeg and Limacol, the way she always had.

---

They unpacked for three days.

That was Gem's instruction. You did not just unload a barrel. You opened it properly. You took out every single thing and laid it on the bed and looked at it, the way their mother had done. It was not fast. Clive, who unpacked barrels for a living, nearly lost his mind on the first afternoon, and then, somewhere around the fourth barrel, he stopped minding. He sat on the bed in the big downstairs bedroom while Gem held up each thing, the brown cardigan, the domino set in its wooden box, the photograph of the *Mavis Please*, the wooden spoon, and said what it was, out loud, and where it had come from, and then put it down where it would live now.

Neighbors came. People always came. Miss Edna's daughter, who brought a pot of oil down, the breadfruit and salt meat and dumplings stewed down in coconut milk and turmeric until the liquid was gone, the national dish, which nobody was ever allowed to say they could make better than their own mother. The children from up the road, who had, in 1980, written their names in the wet concrete of the floor, now grown men and women with gray in their hair, who came to see if their names were still there. They were, under a rug in the front room. Kerwin rolled the rug back. A woman of fifty-four knelt and put her finger in the letters of her own name and laughed until she cried.

In the evening, on the second gallery, when the sun went down into the sea like a coin into a slot, Clive opened the family space on his phone and put up a photograph of the twelve barrels standing open and empty in a row in the yard under the breadfruit tree. He did not write anything. He did not need to. The replies came in from every clock on the screen. From Toronto: *Look at that.* From Catford: *Is that the house? Is that the real house?* From the Bronx: *Ask Gem if there's a chair for me.* From Rugby Road, where Iris was spending her last month in a house with three boxes left in it and a mattress on the floor: *Did the books reach?*

He went and got the biscuit tin from the last barrel, Barrel 211, and unwound the tape, and opened the lid. Eleven exercise books, soft and brown, the ribbon around them, smelling faintly, after five days in a container, of Ovaltine. He did not know why. There had not been Ovaltine in a barrel for forty years.

He photographed them. He wrote: *Reach.*

---

On the third evening, when everything was put away and Gem had gone to bed early, worn out by sixty years arriving in three days, Clive and Kerwin sat on the upper gallery in the dark with two Carib beers and listened to the town.

You could not hear yourself think in Gouyave on a Friday night. Fish Friday, they called it: every Friday the whole town turned out into the streets by the bay, and the stalls went up with their lights strung on wires, and the fishermen's wives and daughters fried and grilled and stewed every kind of fish that came out of the sea that week, tuna and marlin and mahi-mahi and lobster and lambie, conch, stewed in butter, and oil down in big black pots, and fish cakes, and fish broth, and people came from all over the island, and there was music from three different directions at once, soca and old calypso and somebody playing steel pan near the church, and the smell of smoke and lime and pepper came all the way up the hill.

Kerwin pointed out to sea, where the last pale light lay along the horizon.

"You see it?"

Clive looked. Far out to the north, beyond the Grenadines, very faint, a long low shape, darker than the sky, with something like a peak at one end.

"St. Vincent," Kerwin said. "Only on clear nights. Granny Iris always say she used to see it from here when she was a girl. When she was young she thought it was England."

Clive laughed. Then he stopped.

"My wife's people," he said. "That's where they come from. Before."

"I know. Theo told me. He tell everybody." Kerwin drank. "He say his Nana Fermina is coming in June with Granny Iris."

"She's coming."

"To look at St. Vincent?"

Clive watched the faint dark shape on the edge of the sea until the light went out of the sky and it was gone, and there was only the music from the bay, and the smell of the fish fires, and the stars.

"To look at where it was," he said. "From somewhere it can be seen."

Chapter 12: Pack Loose

> *No barrel. Written in Book Eleven, last page, Gouyave, June 2027, in pencil because the pen dry.* > Me. Fermina. Theo. Simone. Gem. Kerwin and Pearl and Pearl children. Dessie and Indira and Ravi, Thursday. Marcia and Winston and Tia, Friday. Clive and Lucille, already here eating everything. Lennox, Saturday, with dominoes. Hodan from Grove Lane, card in the post. Nothing to pack. Nothing to send. Everybody reach.

Iris Noel came home on a Tuesday afternoon in the second week of June, sixty-two years and eight months after she had left, on a flight from New York that landed at Maurice Bishop International Airport at twenty past three, with her husband's ashes in a wooden box on her lap and her Garifuna co-grandmother in the seat beside her holding her hand through the descent.

Simone had come with them. She had taken two weeks off from her job in Toronto, where she worked for an architecture firm drawing other people's houses, and she sat across the aisle and watched the two old women through the whole flight: watched Fermina fall asleep with her head against the window and Iris put a cardigan over her, watched Iris, when the plane banked over the south coast of Grenada and the island came up out of the sea, green and steep and folded, ringed with white sand and white surf and the pale turquoise of the reefs, put both hands over her face.

She did not cry. She just sat with her hands over her face until the wheels touched.

---

Simone had read all eleven books by then. That had been the bargain. *Each of you get a book,* her grandmother had said, at the kitchen table in October, *and somebody young read the whole thing and tell me if it was worth it.* Simone had read them all in order in March, in four evenings, on the floor of her apartment with a notebook, adding up columns.

She had done the arithmetic. She was an architect; she could not help it.

Two hundred and eleven barrels. Sixty-two years. She had counted the money orders for blocks: one hundred and forty-three of them, and Gem's notes beside them, and the blocks they had bought, according to Gem's arithmetic, came to six thousand one hundred and twelve.

And she had made a list of her own, in the notebook, of what the barrels could not hold, because her grandmother had asked the question and it seemed only fair to answer it properly. A son's face at the age of eight. Sixty-two summers. A mother's funeral. A sister's ordinary Tuesdays. A husband's last year at home.

---

They laid Sonny's ashes on the Thursday, in the cemetery on the hill above the bay where his own mother lay, in a small plot that Gem had paid for in 2008 and kept clean every Sunday for nineteen years, waiting for him to be brought. It was not a funeral. Iris had been clear on that. *I said goodbye to him once in Brooklyn already. This is just bringing him home. Nobody is to wear black and nobody is to make a speech.* So nobody did. Dessie, who had come in that morning with Indira and Ravi, dug the small square of earth himself with Kerwin's shovel. Then they went down to the house on the hill and ate.

On the Friday, the London contingent landed. Marcia came off the plane with her lists.

On the Saturday, the family welcomed Iris home.

She had been told it was a small lunch. It had been planned for months by everyone except her. Theo, who had sworn himself to secrecy and kept it, astonishingly, for three months, had built the page in March, the way the family had built them before for birthdays and graduations: a place where anyone could leave a video wish. He sent the link quietly to everyone in every book. To Hodan on Grove Lane. To Miss Pancha, who had agreed, after some thought, to be recorded holding a round of cassava bread and saying one word to the camera. To a retired Pan Am flight attendant called Doreen, eighty, in Fort Lauderdale, whom Ravi had found in February after four weeks of looking.

They showed it at lunch, on the long gallery of the house on the hill, on a television Clive had carried up the hill himself, with the whole family at a table made of two tables and a door, under the shade of the breadfruit tree, with the town below and the sea beyond.

There was oil down. There was fish broth. There was hudut, which Fermina had made in the kitchen with Gem watching her suspiciously, in a heavy pot, the very heavy pot, which Rufino had sent up in a box from Dangriga by way of Clive's warehouse because Fermina had asked for it. There was black cake from London, which Iris looked at and said was black, and sorrel in the same glass jug, which had come in the last barrel but one.

And on the television, one by one, the wishes.

Hodan, in the narrow passage on Grove Lane, holding the guest book open to the page with the badly drawn barrel: *Welcome home, Mrs. Noel. Your hallway is still exactly the right width.* Lennox's whole domino club, nineteen elderly men in the club on Albany Avenue, with the snow-dark of a Hartford March in the window behind them, slamming one tile each in sequence on the wavy oak table and then shouting, raggedly, *WELCOME HOME IRIS, SONNY STILL CAN'T COUNT*. Miss Pancha, unsmiling, holding up the cassava bread, saying one word in Garifuna, which Fermina, at the table, translated quietly for Iris as *strength*.

And Doreen.

She was very small and very old, in a pink cardigan, in a bright apartment with a view of a canal and palm trees. She held up to the camera a photograph of herself at twenty-five in a blue Pan Am uniform, impossibly elegant, with a little hat.

*"Mrs. Noel. Your grandson found me. I've flown a lot of children. I don't remember all of them. I remember yours. August 1972, Barbados to New York, a little boy from Grenada with a tag around his neck. He didn't say a word for four hours. Then over Puerto Rico he asked me if America would smell like Ovaltine. I said I didn't know. I said it smelled like a lot of things. He said, okay, and he went to sleep holding my hand. I hope he's well. I hope he grew up good. Welcome home, Mrs. Noel."*

At the table, Dessie put down his fork and walked to the end of the gallery and stood with his back to everyone, looking at the sea, and Indira went and stood next to him, and nobody said anything, and after a while the next video began.

---

Late in the afternoon, when the heat had broken and the light had gone long and gold across the hills and the children of Gouyave had come out to play cricket in the road below with a coconut-branch bat and a wicket made from the lid of a barrel, Iris asked Simone for her answer.

They were sitting on the upper gallery, the two of them, with Fermina asleep in a chair at the other end and Gem pretending to be.

"You read the books," Iris said.

"All eleven."

"So. Was it worth it."

Simone had thought about this for four months. She had thought about the arithmetic, and the list of what the barrels could not hold, and about Dessie's back at the end of the gallery, and Fermina's ladder of women going up the screen in the Bronx, and Miss Pancha's single word, and her grandfather lying in a hospital bed saying the blocks hold.

"You asked the wrong question," she said.

Iris raised her eyebrows. Nobody had told her she had asked the wrong question since approximately 1979.

"It's not *was it worth it*. That's for the money. You don't add it up like that. You told me yourself. It wasn't the things." Simone took the last exercise book, Book Eleven, out of her bag, and opened it to the final page, where her grandmother had written the list in pencil that week: *Me. Fermina. Theo. Simone.* All of them. *Everybody reach.* "The question is whether it held. Like the blocks. And it held. Look. It held. Everybody's here."

Iris looked at the page for a long time.

Then she took the pencil out of the spine of the book, where it had been tucked since Tuesday, and wrote, slowly, under the list, a final line, and closed the book, and tied the ribbon around all eleven of them, and put them in Simone's lap.

"Keep them," she said. "You and Theo. All of you. Put them in the place on the phone, the family place, every page, so nobody lose them in a hurricane." She looked down at the town, at the boys playing cricket with the barrel lid, at the boats drawn up below. "And when one of you is far, and you are cold, and you want to send somebody something, you read the first page. Then you go and buy one thing. One tin. One pair of socks. One something."

"And put your hand on their head," said Simone.

Her grandmother looked at her.

"You listen to the tapes," she said. "Good."

Across the gallery, Fermina had woken and was looking out to sea. The light had gone clear and hard and golden, the way it did just before the sun went down, the air washed and still, and on the horizon, far to the north, a long dark shape was standing up out of the water with a peak at one end.

"Iris," said Fermina, very quietly. "Look."

They looked. All of them. Gem, who had seen it all her life. Simone, who never had. Theo, coming up the outside stairs with a jug of sorrel. Iris, who had thought as a girl that it was England.

Fermina stood up, holding the gallery rail, and looked at Yurumein for the first time in her life, and the first time in seven generations that a woman of her line had seen it, and said something in Garifuna, low, not to any of them.

Theo set down the jug. He left his phone where it was. He went and stood beside his grandmother, and she took his hand without looking at him and held it, and after a while she began to say the names, quietly, going back up the ladder, one at a time, like counting stairs. Simeona. Damiana. And the others. And when she reached the top, the woman with only a first name and the word for the island, she stopped, and said it again, and then she said, "Au bun," which Theo knew meant *I'm with you*, and it was not clear to anyone whom she was saying it to.

The sun went into the sea. The island went dark against the sky and then was gone. Below them in the road a boy hit the coconut-branch bat clean and the ball went high over the barrel-lid wicket and over the hedge and someone's mother shouted, and all the boys laughed.

Simone opened the book in her lap in the last of the light and read her grandmother's last line.

*Pack loose now. Room for everybody.*