Help! Help us! We are dying!”

The cries startled Papa Bois as he floated on the cool surface of his favorite underground river. He jerked upright.

“Help! We die. We die.”

I come. Papa Bois twisted on his side and struck out, his muscular body cleaving through the river’s clear waters. His dreadlocks streamed behind him in an inky cloud.

He crawled through the mouth of the cave and climbed the surrounding cliff, using the thick lianas to pull himself up. “We die. We die.” The despairing calls came again. They came from the north. The screams filled his head and seemed to pulse through the very air. He vaulted onto the cliff-top and ran.

Underneath his feet, pain shuddered through the earth as the living roots vibrated to the distant terror and tumult. Tiny paws scurried for safety. Powerful wings lifted into the air. Clicks, calls and whistles warned of danger. Nature trembled in shock and sorrow.

Papa Bois raced through the forest. He would not reach in time. He knew it already, but he forced himself to go faster. His lungs burned.

“We die.”

Olódùmarè protect you. Olódùmarè receive you. But he doubted that, in their terror and their pain, they could hear him, much less take comfort from his words.

The screams lasted only an hour or so more before fading away but still Papa Bois ran. He usually avoided areas where tiny stilt houses clung to hillsides but now he didn’t care who saw him. He ran across the narrow paths farmers took to their grounds, threaded his way through yam and banana grounds but, still, it took him several hours to arrive near the place from which the calls had come. Instinctively, he had sought height so, when he burst from the forest cover, he had a bird’s eye view of the devastation.

Hundreds of trees lay on their sides, felled by the yellow and red machines still moving around like mechanical crabs. A long rip through all the layers of the forest revealed red clay soil like a huge gash on the skin of the earth.

Birds wheeled in the sky above the wound.

Pain lanced through him. Papa Bois staggered. His eyes turned inward as guns popped around him. Beside him, Earle fell, half his face blown away. The Americans had ambushed them! Robert spun, firing his SKS before a hole blossomed in his chest. Blood sprayed over Papa Bois. He fell to the ground, his hands reaching for his own guns then, from high above, he heard a piercing whistle. He glanced up. A chicken hawk wheeled above him, its white tail feathers vivid against the blue sky. The bird called again. It looked straight at him. The gunfire faded abruptly.

Papa Bois twisted, examining himself, his chest heaving as he panted for breath. There was no blood on him. Rain fell from the near, cloudless sky, cooling his skin, running in thin rivulets over his naked body. His mind clawed its way back to the present.

The chicken hawk banked and glided away.

“My thanks, comrade,” he whispered in a voice grown raspy with disuse. The episodes had grown less frequent, but they were as powerful as ever. He took a couple minutes to calm himself, closing his eyes and breathing deeply before turning to regard the devastation below.

Why? Why, Olódùmarè? But his father was silent. As if from a distance, however, he felt a sending of sorrowful comfort and love. He looked out to sea, beyond the reef and the two small islands flanking the coast. A shimmer, a flash along the surface of the water. Yemaya. His mother had felt his pain, but she would come no nearer. He rose to his feet and held up his arms to acknowledge her. Another flash, a churning of waves, and her presence departed.

Papa Bois returned to surveying the destruction. It was years since he had been in the north, preferring to stay far from the coast, deep in the interior. Now, his heart broke to see what men had done.

The destruction had to be avenged. He stayed in the area for days, foraging in the hills around him where he found a jackfruit tree and a couple of stinking toes. He drank from a nearby spring but, always, he returned to the rocky outcropping from which he watched as 12-wheeler dump trucks deposited huge amounts of soil and gravel in the clearing. Bulldozers and excavators moved the soil around all morning. Every afternoon, it was the turn of the soil compactors. In no time at all but which may have been weeks or months, the ground level had risen a couple feet, and the soil was smoothed out. Next, flat-bed trucks brought shipping containers. Forklifts extracted loaded pallets and, soon, a row of long, low tents were neatly lined up along the edge of the clearing.

All the activity puzzled him. He couldn’t understand what was being built there, more than a mile away from the beach and near a mangrove.

One day, he decided to go find out. He waited impatiently for darkness to fall. When the insistent chirps and cries of frogs and crickets rose in a wall around him, he clambered down the hill and made his way to the site. As he neared the area, the loamy, tangled smells of the jungle gave way to the sweetish scent of disturbed earth and gasoline mixed with the sharp stink of the men who worked and sweated there.

Papa Bois stumbled as a wave of dizziness hit him. He paused, squeezed his eyes shut and reached inside himself for calm, forcing the memories down.

At the site, he kept to the shadows, away from the lights that rose in even intervals around the perimeter. The tents were even bigger than he’d thought. There were eight of them, lined up neatly alongside the new dirt road. Off to the side, another building was under construction but that one was different. Not a tent, but a proper wooden house.

The earth under his bare feet was loose and crumbly. He dug his toes into it, thinking that it felt like the soil of the south. He brought a handful to his face and inhaled its clean, green scent. The smell took him back years to days of running barefoot through Mr. Crowe’s backyard after picking the principal’s mango tree clean, of playing in the ravine with Yan and Earle.

Papa Bois tossed the soil away and continued his examination of the site.

Near the entrance to the site stood a tall, well-illuminated sign. One of the guards sat in the small kiosk opposite the sign. Papa Bois actually felt pity as he watched him. The guard was young and thin. Perhaps he came from a nearby village. He was bent over something in his hand that emitted a faint light. Every now and then he moved his thumb or his fingers over it but he didn’t look up, didn’t look around, didn’t notice his silent observer.

Papa Bois’s gaze moved to the sign looming in front of him. “Coming Soon” it said in big, white letters and, below it, a beautiful picture of gleaming rockets. Papa Bois blinked and leaned in closer, his eyes wide in disbelief. Not rockets. Rocket-shaped buildings. Three of them, gleaming like bullets against the blindingly blue sky above them. They rose over a palm-lined, grassy walkway bordering a fountain-lined pool that stretched away into the distance. A handful of people stood or walked below the shining behemoths. The two small islands off the coast were in the backdrop.

“Tower Heights Residences by Modern Works” the lettering at the bottom of the sign read. Papa Bois sounded out the words, rolling them slowly on his tongue. How long since he had read anything written by men? Time had no beginning and no end when you did nothing to mark its passage.

The buildings looked unreal, like alien spaceships, but the miniature people walking below them were ordinary humans. This was a vision of the near future “Coming Soon” and there were no signs of the forest and the mangrove in it. The palms and the grass would be imported from somewhere else. They were not native to the island. The palms would offer a tantalizing hint of the tropical, but they would never grow rampant. They would stay where they were planted.

Papa Bois glanced at the security guard, but he was still bent over the thing in his hand. The people on the billboard didn’t look like either Papa Bois or the security guard. A movement at the corner of his eyes alerted him to the approach of the other guard. His eyes were also fixed on something in his hand. Papa Bois had seen enough. He made his way back to his mountain perch, confusion, bewilderment, and rage simmering in his chest like a heavy, one pot stew.

He spent the next day just staring at the site, trying to imagine the spaceship buildings protruding from the surrounding greenery like foil-wrapped, upside down christophenes. Who had thought it was a good idea to demolish all those trees on the verge of a mangrove? Even now, he could still feel little shivers of fear, not coming from the living trees below him but echoes, whispers of the cries he’d heard in his cave.

*

The night after his visit to the site, Papa Bois couldn’t sleep. He lay on his back, staring, unblinking, at the stars scattered across the sky. His blood thundered in his ears. He wanted to leap up, to run through the night, to return to the cool caves in the center of the island and never leave them again but he couldn’t move. He lay as if paralysed, unable to shift his limbs. For a minute, he wondered if, finally, he was dying.

Something moved close to him, but he couldn’t turn his head to see what it was. Fear and panic beat at his mind. Whatever it was drew closer and then slid up and over his arm and onto his chest. Papa Bois glanced down. A boa. But not just any boa. Its skin was almost wholly white. He could barely make out the faint beige splotches that, on a normal brown boa, would have been dark brown or dark grey. A tear, and then another leaked from his eyes. The pain and the hurt gathered itself and then broke like a storm cloud releasing rain. His body convulsed.

Baba.

Baba.

The snake’s pale skin shone dimly in the night as it reared its head to look at him. Its tongue flicked out, ran over his eyelids, grazed his cheeks, tasted the salt of his tears.

It shifted its body to drape itself over him, lowering its head to Papa Bois’ chest. Calm radiated from its comforting weight.

Papa Bois’s heartrate quieted. The paralysis faded. He closed his eyes and slept.

When he woke the next morning, the snake was gone.

Ese o, Baba. In his sleep, an answer had come to him. He knew what he must do.

*

Over the next two weeks, people in the nearby villages noticed things going missing. Little things, things that didn’t make any sense like an alarm clock here and electrical wires there. The glass bowl Miss Stella had inherited from her mother disappeared from her kitchen table and so did her pressure cooker. Her friend, the priest’s wife, told her someone had taken her cooker as well. The two women wondered if someone was stealing them to sell in town but didn’t give the matter much thought. They didn’t know that other pressure cookers had also gone missing or that bags of galvanize nails were taken from under Mr. Baptiste’s house.

The Emmerdales were a British expatriate couple who kept themselves to themselves and didn’t really speak to the local people, so nobody knew that someone had broken into their garden shed, the one where they kept their pool and garden supplies. Mr. Emmerdale wanted to call the police, but his wife pointed out that they weren’t even sure exactly what was missing.

It was only after the investigation started in earnest and the newspapers explained how the bombs had been made that all of these people put two and two together.

When he had everything he needed, Papa Bois busied himself putting it all together. Intermittent rain made him build a low crude shelter in which he could keep the supplies dry as he worked. Every now and then, he’d stop to look at the building site, noting the comings and goings. He took particular interest in the men in the buttoned-up shirts who arrived on-site a couple hours after the laborers and disappeared into the comfort of their air-conditioned site office. They rarely re-emerged until it was time to leave but sometimes, they’d walk around, pointing at things and consulting clipboards.

He worked quickly, his strong hands sure at his task, his mind calm, the years dropping away from him. Sometimes, he would make his way to the site at night, just to observe the progress being made but he never looked at the sign with its impossible buildings again.

Finally, it was time.

Papa Bois waited with impatience for the sun to set. He watched as the trucks ferried away the construction workers and the shirt-men got into their Land Rovers and their Escalades and drove off.  Papa Bois willed himself to wait until the stars were bright above him before moving off from his perch.

Despite the four full cookers he carried, he strode swiftly through the forest towards the haze of light ahead. As the buildings had progressed, more light towers had been raised so that the area glowed like a small city, banishing the darkness of the surrounding forest. The recent rains meant that his feet were caked in mud by the time he got to the building site but Papa Bois didn’t mind. Afterwards, he planned to head to a nearby river for a quick swim and to clear his head before striking out for the cave he called home.

At the site, Papa Bois placed each cooker in position before heading back to his hideaway to retrieve four more.

The next morning, Papa Bois crouched on his rocky perch, his chest tight with impatience as the sky slowly lightened. The workers began arriving, fanning out through the site after collecting their tools from the container. He would have warned them if he could but, sometimes, the innocent had to die along with the guilty, Comrade Leader had said that once. In any case, they weren’t completely innocent. They were the ones who had manned the bulldozers and the backhoes and had cared nothing for any of it. He hardened his heart and waited. He’d done the best he could for them.

When the sun was already high in the sky and he felt the heat on his shoulders, the Land Rovers and the Escalades drove up and the shirt-men got out and went into their office. Papa Bois noticed that there was one more than usual but that was unimportant. He waited.

An hour after the shirt-men’s arrival, eight explosions rocked the site, booming like thunder. Fireballs and debris rose in the air. Clouds of black smoke obscured the site. Papa Bois could smell it, acrid and bitter, even from where he crouched. He coughed, his eyes tearing as he tried to see through the smoke. The construction site office was gone. Pieces of the containers lay on the ground on fire. The wooden building was on fire. It toppled forward even as he watched. Flames rose from the tents. A bulldozer lay on its side. Papa Bois couldn’t see the man who had been driving it just a minute before. Confusion reigned as men ran here and there. Papa Bois watched it all.

Minutes later, he heard sirens in the distance. He turned to go.

The news flew around the island. Twenty people had been killed by bomb blasts at one of the Citizenship by Investment sites. No, it was fifty! A hundred injured! It was the talk of the island, of the entire Caribbean. FLOW’s servers came close to crashing. Then reporters and journalists filed their stories and the facts emerged. Six people had died in a series of explosions at the Tower Heights Residences construction site in the north of Carenada. Dozens more were injured. Police were not releasing further information until relatives were notified.

That afternoon, the names of the dead were posted to the Carenada Police Department’s Facebook page. People’s eyes widened when they realized that all but one were non-Carenadians. In fact, one, Lee Wan-Yong, was the owner of the parent company that owned Modern Works, the firm building the Tower Heights Residences. He had flown to Carenada the day before after a series of meetings on another island where he owned properties. Also killed were the CEO and the Construction Supervisor. The lone Carenadian, Gustavus Francis, was a backhoe operator. But the most startling revelation was still to come.

By that evening, the police department had released a grainy photo of a dark-skinned, naked black man, his hair matted into thick locks that snaked down his body, his compact body, wiry and powerful. The image flew around the island via WhatsApp and on social media. It was broadcast on the television and on Facebook Lives. Soon, almost everyone had seen it. It wasn’t long before the older people in Providence, a small village, began whispering to each other.

“But how that man look like-”

“Isn’t that-”

“Not Miss Clara’s son that?”

But they weren’t sure so they went to see Tantie May who, at 93, was the oldest person in the village and would surely know.

“It look like….” The old woman peered at the cellphone screen held out to her. “It look like Miss Clara’s son, Michael. Michael Blaize.” She grabbed the phone and squinted at it….  “But how….” she said with a sense of wonder and doubt. “I don’t understand. I know him well. He was Yan’s good, good friend.” Her visitors knew Yan was her older brother who had migrated to the States before the Revo and died there in a traffic accident just ten years after.

“I don’t understand,” she repeated. “He looks so young.”

The villagers didn’t either, but they called the District Station. The police would sort it out.

Miles away, Papa Bois shivered as Miss Clara called his name. A vague unease enveloped him. From far away, he felt a sense of grief, and his brow wrinkled.

He had no way of knowing that the next morning’s headline in The Carenada Beacon read “Michael Blaize, ex-PRA Lieutenant, Wanted in Connection With Tower Heights Bombings.” A picture of him in army fatigues, his hair in short dreads, his dark skin smooth, stared out from the front page. The Carenada Voice used the same picture. It had been taken decades ago by a British photojournalist at a Heroes Day rally. But The Voice’s headline struck a more cautious, disbelieving note – “Could Long-Lost PRA Soldier Be Responsible for Bombing?” it asked.

Papa Bois was near his cave when he heard the rotors. He tried to run but he was exhausted. He staggered and collapsed to the ground. What was it? What was wrong with him? Consternation and fright seized his mind as he looked at his body. His chest and belly were no longer those of a strong man in the prime of his life. Instead, dull, flaccid skin mottled with tiny whorls of grey hair sagged over his ribs. His legs seemed to shrivel in front his eyes.

He heard shouts in the distance. The men in the helicopter had seen him. They were coming. It didn’t matter now. Tiredness overtook him.

Papa Bois lay back, staring up at the light blue dome of the sky. A swishing sound made him glance to his right.

The white snake regarded him.

“Baba.”

“Rest now, my son.”

Papa Bois closed his eyes. A heaviness seeped into his very bones. Somewhere far away, an Àyàn began beating his drum and a woman’s voice rose in a melody as deep and beautiful as the ocean.

*

Thirty years later, a young German hiking in the north of the island put his foot on something which gave way, pitching him forward. He tore at the vines beneath him, clearing them away to reveal broken pieces of what looked like some sort of sign. It was green with lichen but he could make out the word, “Works”. He scrabbled around in the undergrowth for other pieces but they were all illegible. Giving up, he struggled to his feet and continued on his way. High above him, two chicken hawks noted his passing as they glided on thermal currents.

 

∝

 

Eugenia O’Neal is a writer and scholar originally from Tortola, British Virgin Islands, who now lives in Grenada. She is the author of several novels, most recently Jessamine, and the book-length critical study Obeah, Race and Racism, published in 2020 by the University of the West Indies Press. Her fiction will be featured in Virgin Islands Noir, due in August 2026 from Akashic Books.