The Dolphin Catcher
Diana McCauley
The Dolphin Catcher tells the story of a boy called Lloyd and his search for his grandfather who is lost at sea. He is a 12-year-old Jamaican boy, descended from many generations of fishermen. His beloved grandfather, Maas Conrad, was last seen near a group of remote islands off the southern coast of Jamaica called the Pedro Cays.
The boy sat in the lee of the crumbling wall and stared out to sea. It was full dark and rain hissed on the water, but he was sheltered from the downpour where he sat. He saw a swirl of phosphorescence in the sea, gone so quickly he might have imagined it, might have merely wished for it, because his grandfather, Maas Conrad, had told him about the tiny creatures that lived in the sea and at night, shone aqua in the wakes of boats and drew the deep ghostly shapes of fish. His grandfather said Kingston Harbour had once been full of them, that no night’s fishing would have passed without seeing the shining mystery. ‘Where dey go, Gramps?’ the boy had asked.
‘Sea too dirty for dem.’
‘Why the sea get dirty?’
...
Lloyd heard his grandfather’s voice in his mind: I come from a line of fishermen.
The boy lived with his mother near to the old Western Sewerage Plant, on the shores of Kingston Harbour. Maas Conrad’s son, the boy’s father, did not live with them, but he visited, and filled the two room house with complaints. Lloyd thought his father talked a lot, but not about what mattered. The house was too hot; a fan was needed. There were cheap ones on Princess Street. He had been fired again, but it had been a stupid job, not enough money. He had plans, ambitious plans, he could be somebody, but the big man* was against him. He knew a man who was fixing up a car for him, nothing fancy, but he could run taxi with it. And there was a big money job coming up, a secret job. Although when times were hard he did go to sea with one of his brethren, he was a sometime fisher, for he said fishing was for old time people.
...
Lloyd went to sea with his grandfather before he was a year old, so his mother said, just for a spin around the Harbour, over the shoals of grey and green, into the flat calm water of the Port Royal mangroves. His grandfather was a deepwater fisherman, a line fisher. He did not use nets or pots, because, he explained when Lloyd was older, those methods were wasteful, catching everything above a certain size, trash fish, juveniles, eels, turtles. Lloyd peppered Maas Conrad with questions.
‘Why you go sea alone, Gramps?’
‘Why sometime you drop a line and sometime you troll?’
‘How you know where to go?’
I come from a line of fishermen, was all his grandfather said in response. And Lloyd would see that line of fishermen slanting taut into the sea; a line that could both feed you and cut you.
The best times were on weekends, when his grandfather left for his anchorage at four in the morning, long before the garbage men started their work in the city and before the dancehalls turned down their music, in the coolest part of the night. Maas Conrad sat in the stern of his canoe, his hand on the engine, a bent shadow in the small warm glow of his tilly lamp. Lloyd stood in the bow, holding the anchor rope to steady himself, staring ahead as the boat cleaved the water. They went together across the sea that contained no directional signs, at least not to Lloyd, and they anchored and fished together, and then when the sun came up, and the ice cooler was full, and the fish had stopped biting, and if the weather was calm, they went to one of the south coast cays.
...
Maas Conrad had been missing for a month. Lloyd watched for him on the wall each Friday evening, and on Saturday mornings, he went as usual with his mother to help her sell fish to uptown people.
...
But Lloyd could still see his grandfather in the stern of his boat, leaving and returning, surely the sea would never kill him, perhaps his boat had failed him finally, but he must have made it to some isolated cay, some beach with no road access, and if any man could survive with just a fishing line and a knife, that man was his grandfather. So at least once a week, the boy went to the wall in the night and stared out to sea and waited for the old man, until the final night, when he gazed out to sea through sheets of rain.
*Big man = God