The Other Direction

Nathaniel went to Panama in 1907 because a man came to the square with a paper and read it out loud, and what the paper said was that they were paying in gold.

They were not paying him in gold. He worked that out in the first week. There were two payrolls on the Isthmus, and the gold roll was for the Americans, and the silver roll was for everybody else, and everybody else meant the Barbadians and the Jamaicans and the Martiniquans and the men from St. Lucia who did the cutting and the blasting and the carrying, and the silver roll paid ten cents an hour and the gold roll paid what it paid.

He stayed nine years. He wrote it down afterward, in the only account of it he ever gave, on the back page of a Bible, in a hand that had been taught well and then not used for a long time:

Culebra. 1907 to 1916. Buried Lucius, Mr. Bramwell son, and two I did not know the name.

That is the whole document. Four lines. Half the men from that district went somewhere in those years and most of them left less than that.

· · ·

He came home in 1916 with a hundred and forty pounds and a hernia and married Irene, who had waited, which she never once let him forget and never once regretted.

The money bought land. That is what the Panama money did, all over the island, and you can still see it if you know how to look: the houses with the concrete foundation and the zinc, standing on a piece of ground that was bought outright by a man who spent nine years in a cut in the earth in another country.

The land was good but it was small. By 1920 the price of everything had gone the wrong way, and there were three children, and Nathaniel sat on his own verandah on his own land and understood that he was going to have to go again.

· · ·

Cuba, this time, for the cane.

They were taking men by the boatload out of Kingston and out of Port Antonio on contracts for the harvest, and the cane season is the cane season, six months of cutting and six months of dead time, and a man who went for one crop could be back for Christmas.

He went for one crop. He stayed eleven years.

Irene came out in the second year with the children, which was not the usual thing, and they lived in Oriente in a two-room barracks with a tin roof at the edge of a company batey, and in 1923 a fourth child was born there.

They named him Edmund. The registrar wrote it Edmundo. Nathaniel did not argue with the registrar, because you did not argue with a registrar in a country where your papers were somebody else’s business, and because it was the same name, and because by then Nathaniel had been in Cuba long enough to have learned which fights were worth the trouble.

That small act of not arguing followed Edmund for the rest of his life.

· · ·

The boy grew up in Spanish.

He spoke it in the batey and at the store and with the Haitian children, who were the ones the Cubans liked least, which meant he learned early that there is always a bottom step and that somebody is standing on it. He spoke his mother’s language at home, and he spoke it the way children speak the home language: fluently, and slightly wrong, with an accent his father found funny for a few years and then stopped finding funny.

When Edmund was ten his father told him about Panama for the first and only time.

“You see all that?” Nathaniel said, meaning the batey, the cane, the whole arrangement. “I do that before, in another country, for another set of people. Same work. Same two book — one for them, one for we.”

“Why you go back out, then?”

“Because the land at home is small,” his father said, “and because them is the only two places that was taking we.”

· · ·

In 1933 Cuba passed a law that said half of every workforce had to be Cuban, and after that the island began sending people home.

It did not happen all at once and it did not happen politely. Contracts were not renewed. Men who had been there twenty years were put on boats with what they could carry. Some families went back to Jamaica with less than they had come with, and some went back with children who had never seen it, and a few, the unlucky ones, went back without the papers to prove the children were theirs.

The family got out in the spring, with everybody, and with the Bible.

Edmund was ten years old and he had never in his life been to Jamaica. He stood at the rail and watched a green coast come up that everybody around him was crying about, and he did not feel one thing except the specific terror of a boy who knows he is about to be new at school.

· · ·

They put him back a year, because his English was behind.

The teacher called him Spanish for the first two terms, and the other boys called him worse, and he learned the way children learn, which is fast and at cost. By fifteen you could not hear it in him at all. He worked at that. He worked at it the way his father had worked at the Culebra Cut, deliberately, every day, until the thing was moved.

And it stayed gone for fifty years, except for the counting.

Money, he counted in Spanish. Under his breath, at the shop counter, at the market, in church with the collection: uno, dos, tres. He did it at the bank and did not know he was doing it. When his wife pointed it out he said she was making it up, and then he heard himself do it the following week and went quiet for the rest of the afternoon.

· · ·

He died at eighty-nine, and at the wake his granddaughter, who was doing a project at school about where the family came from, asked the room where her great-grandfather had gone when he went abroad.

“England,” one of the cousins said. “Everybody went England.”

“Not this family,” her aunt said. “This family went the other direction.”

They got out the Bible and showed her the back page. Culebra, 1907 to 1916, and the four lines, and she copied them into her exercise book in the careful round hand of a girl of eleven.

“And Grandpa was born in Cuba?”

“In Oriente.”

“So what does his birth paper say?”

The room did not have an answer for that. The paper that came home in 1933 said Edmundo, and the paper he was given later in Jamaica said Edmund, and they gave different years, and nobody had ever worked out which of the two was the true one because it had never once made a practical difference and because asking would have cost him something.

His granddaughter wrote down both.

She is the only one who ever did, and it is in an exercise book, in a house in Portland, in a tin with some other papers: the record of a family that made three crossings in two generations and never made the famous one, and whose name is spelled two ways because a man in Oriente in 1923 decided that this was not the fight.

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