The Harvester 

by Rick Book
An article for Today's Senior

  

            I can still see his face, black and cracked like dried mud, pitted by acne, spattered with freckles and a grizzled one-week growth. But it was his eyes that shocked me, that haunt me still. Those sad, watery old blood-shot eyes that couldn't look at us directly, but would glance up furtively, then dart back to the safety of the ground.

            The ground was Salt Island, British Virgin Islands, an hour's sail southeast of Roadtown, the capital. From our chartered sailboat, the island appeared as three wind-worn khaki hills covered with scraggly brush, cactus and a few goats.  Where two of the hills sagged almost to sea level, a fringe of palm trees sheltered a couple of tin-roofed houses, a weather-beaten shack and a few piles of sun-bleached lumber.  There was a small beach and a small dock where pelicans rested on pilings. The entire scene, quiet and still as a photograph, was filtered through the haze of a hot Caribbean day.

            We made that landfall ten years ago. Two pale-skinned rascals from the north playing in paradise. Debbie and I bounding up in our sleek 42-foot sloop, blithely dropping anchor in the peaceful bay. We were refugees from urban angst, just looking for rest, relaxation and a little fun as we went ashore in the dinghy.  "You should look up the old man on Salt Island," Vincent Thomas, a captain with the sailboat rental company, had told us. "He's my father."

            We dragged our dinghy onto the beach and saw three men working on one of the houses. We asked them where we could find Mr. Thomas. One pointed to a pond in the middle of the island. "He's ovah theyeh reapin' some salt," the man said.

            In the distance, a man was crouched at the water's edge. As we came near, he stood stiffly to meet us.

            To say Mr. Thomas was gaunt does not do justice to the word. His faded old jeans and T-shirt hung like wet laundry on the rack of his bones. He stood there, shoulders drooping, pants rolled up to bony knees, brown toes sticking out of plastic sandals. His faded, white baseball cap had a compass rose on the front and the peak was off course by 45 degrees.

            We introduced ourselves. He was very shy and his shyness made us feel like intruders. We told him his son, Vincent, had sent us. At that, his black face split open into a big, white-toothed smile and the sad look evaporated, at least temporarily. With that introduction, he began to speak in a soft, lilting voice. We strained to pick words out of his thick island accent.

            "I live heah all my life," he began. "Seventy-one years I bin harvestin' salt from dis pond." He bent down to show us how. His only tool was a short scrap of aluminum, like a ruler, slightly curved. Slowly, carefully, he gathered in the ripples of salt washing near the shore, pushing the salt into small, conical piles. Behind him, little white mounds dotted the edge of the pond like rosettes on the rim of a cake. "When it's calm like now," he said, "de salt float into shore on top of de water. But if a breeze come an' disturb her, den the salt break up an' go to de bottom."  He continued as if confiding a great natural law.  "Sometime de pond, she give me salt an' sometimes she take her salt back."

            He talked about his life on the island. Twelve children had been raised here, a wife had come and gone. He was the only one living here now but someone was fixing the house and he'd soon have company. There was no electricity, he said. A few years ago, the government put in a diesel generator, but it doesn't always work. 

"Don't you get lonely?" Debbie asked.

"No, de boats, dey come to buy my salt." 

Mr. Thomas began scooping his little piles of salt into plastic tubs which he covered with sheets of plastic. We asked if we could buy some. He led us to a jumble of boards. Wreckage, he said, from the last hurricane. Mr. Thomas reached into a hole in the woodpile and pulled out a bucket of clean, white salt. "Dis salt, it is two years old," he told us. "It takes two years to cure."

Using a rusty enamel plate, he tried to scoop salt out of the pail and pour it into a small brown paper bag. But his hands shook badly and we knelt to help. The salt cost two dollars. "When was the last time you were off the island," I asked.

"Oh, las' week, I went to a pig roast on Cooper Island. Never been to a pig roast before. I didn't have any to eat but, boy, that pig she smelled so good."

It was time to go. It was getting harder to understand Mr. Thomas. We said good-bye, promising to come back tomorrow.

            The next morning, someone came and picked up Mr. Thomas in a boat. It sped right by us with Mr. Thomas sitting bolt upright in the bow. We waved; he didn't. I don't think his eyesight was very good.

            I often think about that old man alone on his old island. There was something in him that stopped us in our tracks, a stillness that touched us deeply. I worried that I was romanticizing Mr. Thomas. Like those parched worn hills, had he simply been worn down by the poverty and hardship of his life?  I envied his stillness. And, if it was grace, I envied that even more.  Could it be that he who had nothing had everything, while we who have everything have nothing? Reluctantly, we weighed anchor that afternoon and sailed away to our next destination. But there are some places and some people you can never sail away from completely.

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