The fifth hurricane

Text 1: The Breadfruit Tree, by Celestine Abrahams

An original twentieth-century memoir.

My grandmother had lived through four hurricanes, and she prepared for the fifth the way other women prepared for Sunday lunch: calmly, thoroughly, and without discussion. By noon she had filled the bath and every bucket in the house with water. By two she had nailed the shutters closed, her mouth full of nails. By four, when the radio in the kitchen began to crackle and lose its voice, the sky over the bay had turned the colour of a bruise, and the sea had gone completely, unnaturally still.

I was eight, and I thought it was the most exciting day of my life.

It came after dark. First the wind, a long rising moan in the breadfruit tree, like someone practising a note they could not reach. Then rain, not falling but flying, hurled sideways against the shutters. The electricity went at nine. My grandmother lit the hurricane lamp, which I had always thought was just a name, and set it on the floor of the back bedroom, the only room with no outside wall, and we sat on the mattress she had dragged in there, and listened.

I stopped being excited at about midnight.

That was when the roof began to talk. It creaked and groaned and lifted, I swear, an inch at a time, and dropped back with a crash, as if something enormous were outside trying the lid of a box. The wind was no longer moaning. It was screaming, one continuous, inhuman note that went on and on until it was not a sound any more but a pressure, inside my ears, inside my chest. Something hit the side of the house and shattered. My grandmother did not flinch. She took my hand and began, in a low, steady voice, to recite the names of every fish she knew.

Snapper. Grouper. Parrotfish. Kingfish. Jack.

I said them after her. It was absurd. It was the only thing in the world that made sense.

At some point I must have slept, because the next thing I remember is silence, a silence so huge it rang, and grey light coming through a gap where a shutter had been. My grandmother was already standing at the window.

“Well,” she said, after a while. “The breadfruit tree has gone.”

She said it the way you might announce the death of an old friend, and then she went to make tea.

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