by Jesmyn Ward
Given ignored Pop. Late that winter, in February, he decided to go hunting with the White boys up in the Kill. He saved up his money and bought a fancy hunting bow and arrow. He had bet Michael’s cousin that he could kill a buck with a bow before the boy could take one down with a rifle. Michael’s cousin was a short boy with a wandering eye who wore cowboy boots and beer T-shirts like it was a uniform; he was the kind of boy who dated and hung out with high schoolers even though he was in his early thirties. Given practiced with Pop. Shot for hours in the backyard when he should have been doing homework. Started walking straight as Pop since he spent so long drawed up tight, every line on him as taut as the bow, until he could sink an arrow into the middle of a canvas tied between two pine trees fifty yards away. He won that bet one cold overcast winter sunrise, in part because he was so good, in part because everybody else, all the boys he played football with, tussled in the locker room with, sweated almost to breaking on the stadium field with, woke up drinking beer like orange juice that morning because they figured Given would lose.
I didn’t know Michael yet; I’d seen him around school a few times, his blond hair thick and curly, always looking like it was on the verge of matting because it wasn’t ever brushed. He had ashy elbows and hands and legs. Michael didn’t go hunting that morning, because he didn’t want to get up that early, but he heard about it once his uncle came to Big Joseph in the middle of the day, the cousin sobering up, a look on his face like he smelled something bad, something like a rat dead on poison driven inside the walls by the winter cold, and the uncle saying: He shot the nigger. This fucking hothead shot the nigger for beating him. And then, because Big Joseph had been sheriff for years: What we going to do? Michael’s mama told them to call the police. Big Joseph ignored her and all of them went back up into the woods, an hour in, and found Given lying long and still in the pine needles, his blood a black puddle beneath him. Beer cans all around him from the boys throwing them and running once the cousin with the bad eye aimed and fired, once the shot rang out. How they scattered like roaches in the light. The uncle had slapped his son across the face, once and twice. You fucking idiot, he’d said. This ain’t the old days. And then his cousin had put his arms up and mumbled: He was supposed to lose, Pa. A hundred yards off, the buck lay on his side, one arrow in his neck, another in his stomach, all of him cold and hard as my brother. Their blood congealing.
Hunting accident, Big Joseph told them once they got back to the house and sat around the table, phone in hand, before the cousin’s daddy, short as his son but with synced eyes, called the police. Hunting accident, the uncle said, speaking on the phone with the light of the cold noon sun slicing through the curtains. Hunting accident, the lazy-eyed cousin said in court, his good eye fixed on Big Joseph, who sat behind the boy’s lawyer, his face still and hard as a dinner plate. But his bad eye roving to Pop and me and Mama, all in a row behind the DA, a DA who agreed to a plea deal that sentenced the cousin to three years in Parchman and two years’ probation. I wonder if Mama heard some humming from the cousin’s bad eye, some feelings of remorse in its wandering, but she looked through him, tears leaking down her face the whole time.
A year after Given died, Mama planted a tree for him. One every anniversary, she said, pain cracking her voice. If I live long enough, going to be a forest here, she said, a whispering forest. Talking about the wind and pollen and beetle rot. She stopped and put the tree in the earth and started beating the soil around the roots. I heard her through her fists. The woman that taught Marie-Therese—she could see. Old woman looked damn near White. Tante Vangie. She could see the dead. Marie-Therese ain’t never had that talent. Me neither. She dug her red fists into the dirt. I dream about it. Dream I can see Given again, walking through the door in his boots. But then I wake up. And I don’t. She started to cry then. And I know it’s there. Right on the other side of that veil. She knelt like that until her tears stopped running, and she sat up and wiped her face and smeared blood and dirt all over it.
Three years ago, I did a line and saw Given for the first time. It wasn’t my first line, but Michael had just gone to jail. I had started doing it often; every other day, I was bending over a table, sifting powder into lines, inhaling. I knew I shouldn’t have: I was pregnant. But I couldn’t help wanting to feel the coke go up my nose, shoot straight to my brain, and burn up all the sorrow and despair I felt at Michael being gone. The first time Given showed up, I was at a party in the Kill, and my brother walked through there with no bullet holes in his chest or in his neck, whole and long-limbed, like always. But not smirking. He was shirtless and red about the neck and face like he’d been running, but his chest was still as stone. Still as he must have been after Michael’s cousin shot him. I thought about Mama’s little forest, the ten trees she’d planted in an ever-widening spiral on every death day. I ground my gums sore staring at Given. I ate him with my eyes. He tried to talk to me but I couldn’t hear him, and he just got more and more frustrated. He sat on the table in front of me, right on the mirror with the coke on it. I couldn’t put my face in it again without putting it in his lap, so we sat there staring at each other, me trying not to react so I wouldn’t look crazy to my friends, who were singing along to country music, kissing sloppily in corners like teenagers, walking in zigzags with their arms linked out into the dark. Given looked at me like he did when we were little and I broke the new fishing pole Pop got him: murderous. When I came down, I almost ran out to my car. I was shaking so hard, I could hardly put my key in the ignition. Given climbed in next to me, sat in the passenger seat, and turned and looked at me with a face of stone. I quit, I said. I swear I won’t do it no more. He rode with me to the house, and I left him sitting in the passenger seat as the sun softened and lit the edges of the sky, rising. I crept into Mama’s bedroom and watched her sleep. Dusted her shrine: her rosary draped over her Virgin Mary statue in the corner, nestled among blue-gray candles, river rocks, three dried cattails, a single yam. When I saw Given-not-Given for the first time, I didn’t tell my mama nothing.
* * *
A phone call to Michael’s parents would tell me everything I need to know. I could just pick up the receiver, dial the number, and pray for Michael’s mama to answer the phone. This would be our fifth conversation, and I’d say: Hello Mrs. Ladner I don’t know if you realize but Michael’s getting out tomorrow and me and the kids and Misty is going to get him so y’all don’t need to all right ma’am bye. But I don’t want Big Joseph to answer, to hang up on me after I sit on the line and breathe into the mouthpiece and don’t say nothing while he says nothing. At least then I’d know if I call back, he’d let Mrs. Ladner pick up the phone to deal with whoever it is: prankster, bill collector, wrong number dialer, his son’s Black babymama. But I don’t want to deal with all that: to talk to Michael’s mother in halting starts and stops, or to suffer Big Joseph’s heavy silence. This is why I am riding upcountry to the Kill, my trunk packed with gallon jugs of water and baby wipes and bags of clothes and sleeping bags, to leave a note in their mailbox way down at the end of their driveway, a breathless note. What I would have said in a rush. No punctuation. The note signed: Leonie.
* * *
Michael had never spoken to me before. During lunch break at school one day, a year after Given died, Michael sat next to me on the grass, touched my arm, and said: I’m sorry my cousin is a fucking idiot. I thought that was it. That after Michael apologized, he’d walk away and never speak to me again. But he didn’t. He asked me if I wanted to go fishing with him a few weeks later. I said yes, and walked out the front door. Wasn’t no need to sneak out anymore, my parents wrapped up in their grief. Spider-bound: web-blind. The first time me and Michael went on a date, we went out to the pier off the beach with our poles, me with Given’s held out in front of me like some sort of offering. We talked about our families, about his father. He said: He old—a old head. And I knew what he meant without him having to say more. He would hate that I’m out here with you, th
at before the night’s through, I’m going to kiss you. Or, in fewer words: He believes in niggers. And I swallowed the fact of his father’s bile and let it pass through me, because the father was not the son, I thought. Because when I looked at Michael in the piecemeal dark underneath the gazebo at the end of the pier, I could see a shadow of Big Joseph in him; I could look at his long neck and arms, his lean, muscled torso, the fine shank of his rib cage, and see the way years would soften him to his daddy. How fat would wreathe him, and he would settle into his big frame the way a house settles into the earth underneath it. I had to remind myself: They are not the same. Michael leaned over our poles and his eyes changed color like the mountainous clouds in the sky before a big storm: darkest blue, water gray, old-summer green. He was just tall enough that when he hugged me, his chin rested on my head, and I was cupped under him. Like I belonged. Because I wanted Michael’s mouth on me, because from the first moment I saw him walking across the grass to where I sat in the shadow of the school sign, he saw me. Saw past skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.
* * *
Big Joseph and Michael’s mother live at the top of a hill in a low country house, the siding white, the shutters green. It looks big. There are two trucks parked in the driveway, new pickup trucks that catch the sun and throw it back into the air, shooting sparks off the angles. One red truck, one white. Three horses roam around the segmented fields that abut the house, and a gaggle of hens scamper across the yard, under the trucks, to disappear around the back. I pull over to the side of the road, stop feet from their mailbox; the grassy shoulder is not so wide here, bordered by a ditch at least hip-deep, so I have to get out of the car and walk, can’t just pull up next to it and slide the note inside. It’s been some days since we had rain. When I walk around to the box, the grass sounds with a dry crunch. There are no other cars on this road. They live way up in the Kill, nothing but houses and trailers in great spreading fields, off a dead-end road.
Just as I’m pulling the mailbox door down, I hear a buzz, which loudens to a humming, which loudens to a growl, and then a man is riding around the side of the house on a great lawn mower with a steel bolted deck, the kind that’s so expensive it’s as big as a tractor. It costs as much as my car. I slide the note into the mailbox. The man angles toward the north end of the pasture, turns left, and begins making his way toward the road. He must mean to cut the yard from top to bottom, riding in long, clean lines.
I reach for the handle, pull it open, and it shrieks, metal grinding against metal.
“Shit.”
He looks up. I get into the car.
The lawn mower speeds up. I turn the key. The car stutters and stalls. I turn it back, look down at the dashboard like I could make it start if I just stared long enough. Maybe if I prayed.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
I turn the key again. The engine groans and catches. The man, who I can see now is Big Joseph, has decided to abandon his plan of cutting the top of the yard first and is cutting diagonally across the yard, trying to reach me and the mailbox. And then he is pointing, and I see the sign nailed to a tree feet away from the mailbox. No Trespassing.
He accelerates.
“Goddamnit!”
I shift the car to drive, look back to check the street, and see a car advancing, a gray SUV. Fear rises to my shoulders, up my neck, a bubbling choke. I don’t know what I’m afraid of. What can he do but curse me? What can he do? I’m not in his driveway. Doesn’t the county own the sides of the road? But something about how fast he’s gunning that lawn mower, the way he points to that tree, the way that tree, a Spanish oak, reaches up and out and over the road, a multitude of dark green leaves and almost black branches, the way he’s coming at me, makes me see violence. I press the gas and swerve out into the street, the car behind me skids and its horn sounds, but I don’t care. My transmission switches gears with a high whine. I sling the car around and go faster. The gray SUV has pulled into a driveway, but the driver is waving his arm out the window, and Big Joseph is passing under the tree, stopping at the mailbox I just abandoned, lumbering off his lawn mower, striding toward the box. He is taking something off the seat of the mower, a rifle that was strapped there, something he keeps for wild pigs that root in the forest, but not for them now. For me.
When I pass him, I stick my left arm out the window. Make a fist. Raise my middle finger. I see my brother in his last photo: one taken on his eighteenth birthday, leaning back on the kitchen counter while I hold his favorite sweet potato pecan cake up to his face so he can blow his candles out; his arms are crossed on his chest, his smile white in his dark face. We are all laughing. I accelerate so quickly my tires spin and burn rubber, throwing up clouds of smoke. I hope Big Joseph has an asthma attack. I hope he chokes on it.
Chapter 3
Jojo
Breakfast today was cold goat with gravy and rice: even though it’s been two days since my birthday, the pot was still halfway full. When I woke up, it was to Leonie stepping over me. She had a bag over her shoulder and was grabbing Kayla. “Wake up,” Leonie said, not looking at me, but frowning as Kayla whimpered to waking. I got up, brushed my teeth, threw on my basketball shorts and a T-shirt, and brought my bag out to the car. Leonie had a real bag, something made of cotton and canvas, although it was a little beat up, pulling loose at the edges. Mine was a plastic grocery bag. I never needed an overnight bag, so Leonie never got me one. This is our first trip north to the jail with her. I wanted to eat the goat hot, to heat it up in the small brown microwave, the one Pop say is leaking cancer in our food because the enamel on the inside is peeling off like paint. Pop won’t heat anything in it, and Leonie won’t give him half to replace it. When I started to put it in the microwave, Leonie walked by and said: “We ain’t got time.” So I put my birthday leftovers in a Styrofoam bowl; crept in the room to kiss sleeping Mam, who muttered babies and twitched in her sleep; and then went out to the car.
Pop was waiting for us. Looked like he had slept in his clothes, his starched khaki pants, his short-sleeved button-up shirt, all gray and brown, like him. He matched the sky, which hung low, a silver colander full to leak. It was drizzling. Leonie threw her bag in the backseat and marched back into the house. Misty was playing with the radio controls and the car was already running. Pop frowned at me, so I stopped and shuffled in front of him. Looked down at my feet. My basketball shoes were Michael’s; an old pair an inch too big for me I found abandoned under Leonie’s bed. I didn’t care. They were Jordans, so I wore them anyway.
“Might rain bad up the road.”
I nodded.
“You remember how to change a tire? Check the oil and coolant?”
I nodded again. Pop taught me all of that when I was ten.
“Good.”
I wanted to tell Pop I didn’t want to go, that I wanted me and Kayla to stay home, and I might have if he didn’t look so mad, if his frown didn’t seem carved into his mouth and brow, if Leonie hadn’t walked out then with Kayla, who was rubbing her eyes and crying at being woken up in the gray light. It was 7 a.m. So I said what I could.
“It’s okay, Pop.”
His frown eased then, for a moment, long enough for him to say:
“Watch after them.”
“I will.”
Leonie rose from buckling Kayla into her seat in the back.
“Come on. We got to go.”
I stepped in to Pop and hugged him. I couldn’t remember the last time I had, but it seemed important to do it then, to fold my arms around him and touch my chest to his. To pat him once, twice, on his back with my fingertips and let him go. He’s my pop, I thought. He’s my pop.
He put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed, and then looked at my nose, my ears, my hair, and finally my eyes when I stepped back.
“You a man, you hear?” he said. I nodded. He squeezed again, his eyes on the forgotten shoes I wore, rubbe
ry and silly next to his work boots, the ground worn sandy and grassy thin in the driveway from the beating it took from Leonie’s car, the sky bearing down on us all, so all the animals I thought I could understand were quiet, subdued under the gathering spring rain. The only animal I saw in front of me was Pop, Pop with his straight shoulders and his tall back, his pleading eyes the only thing that spoke to me in that moment and told me what he said without words: I love you, boy. I love you.
* * *
It’s raining now, the water coming down in sheets, beating against the car. Kayla sleeps, a deflated Capri Sun in one hand, a stub of a Cheeto in another, her face muddy orange. Her brown-blond afro matted to her head. Misty is humming to the song on the radio, her hair piled in a nest. Some of it escapes, a loose twig, to hang against her neck. Her hair turning dark with sweat. It’s hot in the car, and I watch the skin all around her nape dampen and bead, and the beads run like the rainwater down the column of her neck to disappear in her shirt. The longer we ride, the hotter it gets, and Misty’s shirt, which is cut wide and loose around the neckline, stretches out even more so that the top of her bra peeks through, and tall as I am, I realize I can see it from the backseat if I look diagonally across the car. It’s electric blue. The windows begin to fog.
“Ain’t it hot in here?” Misty’s fanning herself with a piece of paper she’s pulled out of Leonie’s glove box. Looks like Leonie’s forged car insurance papers. People pay Misty twenty dollars to make copies of cards and insert their names into the copies so if they get stopped by the county police, it looks like they have insurance.
“A little,” Leonie says.
“You know I can’t stand heat. It makes my allergies act up.”
“This coming from somebody born and raised in Mississippi.”