His name is Severino, and he had wielded a machete in the mountains of Camagüey during the first war. He was about twenty years old then; now his hands are hard and his skin rough. He walks slowly, but he is still strong. They have brought him here, to this shore where the Miami River opens onto the sea, to move mud, not history. The year is 1898, and the city is just over two years old. Henry Flagler has paid to dredge the river and open it up to larger ships.
The camp is a row of damp tarpaulins; dawn is a knife of light that barely pierces the mist. The mosquitoes are like smoke from a distant fire in the Everglades: always in the air, always in your eyes. The other men (landless whites and Bahamian blacks) don’t know who Severino is, nor do they care. Among them, there is only one form of communication: the universal language of hard work.
The steam dredger snorts like a wounded cow. The iron and steam have a new smell for Severino, but the mud is old: the same mud that sticks to boots in any war. The mud that still mixes with blood on the island’s battlefields. Rumors of an imminent end are circulating, but Severino doesn’t believe them.
With each shovel, the river bleeds its bottom, and the blood is slow, yellow, mixed with shells. It piles up beyond, at the mouth of the river, forming an island that is still nameless.
At the end of the day, Severino stares at that strip of land, an artificial island taking the shape of a triangle. He says to himself, “We have made an island from the bottom of a river.”
