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carrying a hoe and a machete, so I wasn’t about to race him. I saw him reach the last bend before the banana trees began—and then he suddenly stopped, as if he’d run into a wall. He stood quite still for a moment, staring, and then he looked back at me and began to give a long high wail.
    I came up to join him, and looked.
    The farm looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. There was nothing left standing. The banana trees, the papayas, the tomato plants, all the other fruits and vegetables that Grand had tended so carefully, were all lying flat on the ground. Nobody had stolen the fruit—it was lying there on the ground, spoiling. This hadn’t been done by thieves, but by a determined person with a very sharp machete. You could see the marks where the blade had sliced through the thick trunk-like stalks of the banana trees, and the big hollow stems of the papayas.
    We clambered about, through the ruins of the plants and bushes. Lou was making little whimpering sounds now. He patted some of the fallen trees as if they were wounded pets. Looking at it all, I began to feel anger growing like a big lump in my chest, almost like a pain. I wanted to whack at whoever had done all this, to chop at him with his own machete.
    Perhaps there had been more than one person. Perhaps two or three. They had done a very thorough job. Big feet had trampled all the young cabbages into the ground, and kicked holes in pumpkins and squash. The only things they’d left were the onions, which were under the ground and harder to hurt, and the pigeon pea bushes at the edges of the farm plot. But pigeon peas aren’t valuable; everyone grows them.
    I said to Lou, “Let’s pick up all the tomatoes we can. Even the green ones—Grammie will make chutney.” I knew I had to telephone Grammie at the bank as soon as I could, but she wouldn’t have arrived there yet. So we filled our bags with tomatoes, and my lump of anger kept growing, especially when I looked across at the banana trees. There had been two or three big hands of bananas on every tree, but only half-grown yet, still small and green. The whole crop had been lost.
    I called Grammie when we got back to the house. I was spluttering with rage, but she was quiet. “Oh my,” she just said, at first. “Oh my.” Then she told me we should go on rescuing what we could, and by the time wehad gone back and filled our bags with tomatoes and green papayas a second time, a black police jeep came bumping along the trail to the plot, with a policeman inside it, and Grammie.
    She got out, in her good bank dress and her good shoes, and Lou ran to her and clutched her.
    â€œLou and Trey,” she said, “this is Constable Morgan. He a good friend of your mother’s. I knew him when he was your age. He kindly came to inspect our poor farm.”
    She looked at the mess, and I saw her chin quiver.
    Constable Morgan had a perfectly round face, and his eyes grew even rounder as he peered at the splintered bushes and fallen trees. “Oh Lord,” he said. “Somebody sure had it in for you, Mistress Peel.”
    There was nothing he could do, of course. No witnesses, no evidence, just a lot of ruined fruit and vegetables. He helped us pick some more tomatoes, and squash and green peppers, and Grammie sent him back to the police station with a bag of them for his wife.
    Grand said, when he came home from Nassau, “Looks like somebody sent me a message. Stop making noise, James Peel, if you know what’s good for you.”
    â€œWill you stop?” I said.
    Grand smiled a little. “Child,” he said, “I gonna shout my big old head right off.”

SEVEN
    G rand and his friends had managed to reach the right minister in government, armed with their petition, and they had a small success. Because the Sapphire Island Resort people were outsiders, and the petitioners all Bahamian, the minister put a one-month stop on