We came for stories and left with placemats.
“Do you have Jesus? Do you know the lord?”
“Yes!” I answered — a bald-faced lie.
My cousin, his wife and I were ushered into Laura McPhee’s front room and greeted by stacks of her handwoven basketry—mostly placemats, with a few straw bags mixed in. Laura sat on the sofa as we distributed ourselves around the room, careful not to knock anything over.
At ninety-six, Laura McPhee holds the distinction of being the oldest person on Mayaguana. We’d come to her Pirate’s Well home to ask her to share memories of the island’s Eastern Test Range era.
“So, you were born here?”
“Oh no! I was born in Betsy Bay!” Laura claims her birthplace as if it’s halfway to Uranus, bristling at my suggestion of Pirate’s Well. Betsy Bay is barely two miles down the sandy road.
She had one sister and eight brothers.
“Wow.”
We nodded, in that uncomfortable way you do when you’re trying to break the ice and you know something is off and you’re just dumb strangers inviting yourselves into someone’s home and the person who brought you really just wants to get the show on the road.
“Wow.”
“My husband was Hilton McPhee.” Laura said, ” When he died, I became a bride of Christ. I accepted the Lord in a tent in 1954. Do you know the Lord?”
We pieced together fragments: Hilton had cut cane in the U.S.; they’d been married forty years when he died.
In the pauses between the preaching, it was clear Laura had lived a full life—one now carried, in part, by the people who remembered it for her.
Sam, who’d agreed to bring us here, began showing us Laura’s placemats.
“Wow.” we nodded.
Sam quoted us steep prices, which we paid immediately. I couldn’t get my money out fast enough – feeling the need for penance after telling that lie about Jesus. Sam knew exactly what she was doing. She handed the wadded roll of cash to Laura, who protested that it was too much.
“You keep that.” Sam said, shushing her.
Laura thanked Sam, as if Sam had given her her own money.
We didn’t get many stories out of Laura. We gathered our purchases and made our way out the front door. Laura’s sons were sitting on the porch.
“Did you get what you want?” they asked “She got the visit from Paul Simon.”
“Wow.” we nodded.
Driving away, I’m thinking, Wow! Paul Simon’s pretty cool … but he came all the way to Mayaguana to visit their oldest living person? Now, that’s fucking above and beyond. I’m mulling this over in my head when cousin John says, “I like how they say ‘Old Simon’ when they talk about dementia.”
Bahamians talk funny.
Outermost Uncle 
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