Church Cay, part 3

Part 3

My parents shortly learned, while they mulled over their unusual situation from the relative civility of Baraterre, that the church, on its grand bluff, had been visible from half a dozen islands grouped in a curl away from the main archipelago. A hundred years ago, the Christianized inhabitants of those outer cays came to the church for their weddings, their baptisms, to bury their dead in its well-tended cemetery. But when the last missionary died, no one was sent to replace him. So for the ensuing generations, the outer islanders returned to the practice of burying their dead at sea. No one set foot in the church from that time on, but the sight of it across the water gave the disparate islanders a kinship, a common knowledge of something beyond their immediate existence.

My father was not a stupid man, but he was such an innocent one. He could not have failed to see from the geography of the islands and the gaping mouth of the trench just below where he stood that the cay was slowly pulling out from under him as it had pulled out from under the church. But my father would not be deterred from his mission. He did not know what the first church had looked like, nor could he tell much from the wreckage that lay at the bottom of the cliff. It had been down there so long that most of it had floated out to sea as driftwood, and what would not float had become a part of the bottom of the trench. There was no trace left of even a foundation, if one had ever existed.

So my father brought long boards and white paint on an armada of small boats from Baraterre to the island he christened Church Cay. The locals, some loving an eccentric, some fearing a zealot, helped him carry the rough goods and the hand tools to the top of the cliff, but none volunteered nor were they asked to stay and help him. He and my mother cleared out one of the homes to be their base camp, and it was my mother’s responsibility to catch and clean something each day to supplement the canned goods they had brought with them, but she returned to Baraterre when the advanced stage of her pregnancy made it impossible for her to climb out onto the rocks to fish at the shallow end of the island.

All alone, then, my father built a perfect scale replica of a white clapboard New England style church, steeple and all, achieving a height of twenty-three feet. Its exterior was flawless in proportion, but lacked a lot of detail, and the interior was, well, non-existent. The front door was a fake, nailed onto the outside, and the church was hollow, like a cardboard Christmas model for the mantel to be surrounded by angel hair snow.