Will did not think he was dreaming when he was awakened by a sharp nudge in the ribs; he thought he was hallucinating. Three people stood over him, their figures backlit by an afternoon sun. Sitting up, he shielded his eyes with his palm and saw a dark-complected boy of fourteen or fifteen wearing a straw hat and ragged cotton trousers, belted with a rope from which a sheathed machete hung. Beside him, an old Negro woman, her face a riverine map of wrinkles, stood holding a bundle of leaves, and beside her was a tall woman of twenty or so, with fawn-colored skin. A blue kerchief was wound turbanlike around her black hair, and her eyes, as black as her hair, were large and oval and tilted slightly at the corners, like the eyes of a woman on an Egyptian frieze. A gold pendant hung between her breasts—generous breasts that nevertheless seemed disportionately small for her wide hips. That flaw heightened rather than detracted from her beauty; she was the most striking female he had ever seen. Behind the trio, a gaff-rigged skiff, sixteen or eighteen feet long, with a bright blue hull and red gunwales, was drawn up on the beach, its painter tied to a mangrove root.

“Quién es?” the boy asked.

“Yo?”

“Sí. Usted.” The boy grinned, as if to say, Who do you think?

“Me llamo Willard Terhune.”

“Usted no es cubano, verdad? De dónde es Usted?”

“Soy norteamericano.”

The boy, who looked like a tough little character, older than his years, cocked his chin at the Braithwaites, lying propped on their elbows, blinking against the light.

“Ustedes también son yanquis?”

“Mis amigos no hablamos español,” Will informed him. “Somos yanquis. Todos.” Pausing, he noticed the boy’s hand resting on the handle of the machete and the alertness in his dark eyes, which moved quickly across their faces and then rested on the shotgun braced across Eliot’s lap. Realizing that the four of them must look like desperados, Will added, to reassure him, “Somos marineros. La barca de nosotros …” He hesitated, forgetting, if he ever knew, how to say “was wrecked” in Spanish. “La barca de nosotros,” he began again, and made motions to indicate a sinking ship. “Comprende?”

The boy nodded and asked if their boat had sunk in the storm, and Will affirmed that it had. The boy replied that it had been one bad storm, and a very unusual one as well, coming from the north and west instead of from the south and east, the direction from which hurricanes usually came this time of year.

The old woman, speaking in a rapid dialect of the classical Spanish Will had learned in school, said something that he translated as “Olokun does as he wishes.”

“Sí, Madrina,” the boy replied, his tone respectful. “Veramente.”