by Jesmyn Ward
“That’s what you keep in your pouch?” I asked. I’d noticed his small pouch when I was four or five, and I’d asked him what he kept in it. He never told me.
Pop smiled.
“Not that,” he said. “But close.”
When that next log split, I looked up at Pop and shook, felt that splintering in my baseball knees, my bat spine, my glove of a skull. Wondered what power he had running through him. Where it come from.
I lay my head on the seat in Leonie’s car, rubbing the pouch Pop gave me, and wonder if he ever gave a small sack, full of things to balance, to anyone else. His brother, Stag? Mam? Uncle Given? Or even the boy Richie? And then I hear Pop:
Richie wasn’t built for work. He wasn’t built for nothing, really, on account he was so young. He ain’t know how to work a hoe, didn’t have enough years in his arms for muscle, or to know how to break the earth good, or to pull with just enough power to clean the bolls from a plant instead of leaving little half tufts of white, ripping the cotton in two. He wasn’t like you; you already filling out, getting longer through the shoulders, longer in the leg. You built like me, like my papa—good stock. But whoever his daddy was must have been skinny, weak-muscled. Maybe short. He was a bad worker. I tried to help him. Tried to break his line when he was hoeing, dig a little deeper in his grooves. Reach over and clean his plants better when we was harvesting. Pull his weeds. And mine. And for a while, a few months, it worked. I was able to save him, kept him from getting beat. I worked myself so hard I was sleep before my body even hit my bunk. Sleep on the fall. I kept my eyes on the ground. Ignored the sky, all that open space pushing down that made fear gather in my chest, a bloated and croaking toad. But then one Sunday when we was doing laundry, scrubbing our clothes on the washboards with soap that was so weak everything smelled a little less like wet-stink but still didn’t smell good, Kinnie Wagner rode by with the dogs.
Kinnie was the inmate caretaker for the dogs. He was a legend even then. I knew about Kinnie. All of us did. They sang songs about him in the hill country of Tennessee, down through the Delta, all the way to the coast. He bootlegged and brawled and stole and killed. Had the truest shot I ever saw. Even though he’d already escaped Parchman once, and one of them break-proof prisons in Tennessee, too, they still put him over the dogs. Even though he put more than one lawman in the dirt. Poor White people all through the South loved him for it, loved him for spitting in the eye of the law. For blinding it. For being lawless in the lawless South, which was worse than the frontier, for standing like David in an Old Testament place, where, for a century before Parchman, law had been meted out like this, Jojo: eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. I think even the sergeants respected him. Anyway, Kinnie and some of the men he’d chosen to help him was on their way to drill the dogs, to train to scent. And one of the men that ran with the dogs was dragging. Maybe he was sick. Maybe he had been whipped. I don’t know. But the short man fell, and his dogs broke loose, ran away from his dusted-over face, his receding belly, and ran to me. Hopped around me like big barking rabbits. Let they tongue hang. Kinnie, who was a big White man, six foot three, probably damn near three hundred pounds, laughed. Told the Black man on his knees in the clay: Nigger, you more trouble than you worth. And then pointed one of them big sausage fingers at me and said: You look skinny enough. I hung the pants I was wringing on the line on the way over to him. Took as much time as I could, because he was the type of man who expected me to run. To look at his big, healthy whiteness in awe. When I came, the dogs came with me, ears flopping, big black eyes rolling. Happy as pigs in shit. Can you run, boy? Kinnie said. I looked up at him; his horse was big and dark brown, but with a red tinge. Looked like you could see the blood boiling just under his coat, a river of blood bound by skin, knit together with muscle and bone. I’d always wanted a horse like that. I stood close enough to Kinnie so he know I’d come, but far enough away he couldn’t kick me. Yes, I said. Kinnie laughed again, but there was a knife underneath, because then he turned them blue eyes on me and said, But do you know your place? Shifted his rifle so the muzzle was facing me. A great black Cyclops eye. I let him think what he would about my place, but I said: Yes, sir. And hated myself a little bit for saying it. One of the dogs licked my hand. They like you, Kinnie said, and I need myself another dog trusty. I didn’t say nothing. Animals had always come to me. Mama said one time she left me wrapped in a basket on the chicken stump out in the back when I was a little baby, not more than a month, and stepped inside to get a sharpening stone for her knife; when she came out, one of the goats was licking my face and my hand. Like it knew me. So I just looked at the top of Kinnie’s head, his bushy blond hair. He looked at my neck, and he said: Come on. And turned his horse and kicked, and took off.
Once, we tracked a gunman through ten miles of swamp to an abandoned cabin, and I saw Kinnie put a bullet through that running gunman’s head at two hundred yards: the gunman’s skull burst. Kinnie had killed him as the sun was going down, so we camped next to a stream. The clouds rolled in, and the night was twice black and fogged with mosquitoes. We’d smoked the fire; all the inmates working with Kinnie and the dogs leaned in to it. Everyone but me and Kinnie. I mudded myself to help with the bites. The smoke boiled his face, melted it to nothing, but I still felt him watching me in the darkness. Knew it when he stopped his story about how a woman sheriff had caught him in Arkansas, sent him back to Parchman this last time, and then said: I could never hurt a woman; they knew that. And then his gaze is on me. I looked right back. Everybody got a line—something to break them, he said. I thought about Richie scrawling through the dirt with his hoe. Everybody, Kinnie said, and spat chew into the fire.
* * *
When I wake up, it’s midmorning, and Leonie done pulled off the highway. The atlas says we should take Highway 49 all the way up, deeper north, into the heart of Mississippi, and then get off and drive a ways to get to the jail, which Leonie has marked on the state map with a black star, but we’re not following the map anymore. We pass a grocery store, a butcher. A sagging building with a flat roof and a faded sign: Lumber Wholesale. The buildings thin and the trees thicken until we’re at a stop sign and there’s nothing but trees, and when we roll through the intersection, the road turns to dirt and rocks.
“You sure you know where we going?” Leonie asks Misty.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Misty says. It’s stopped raining, and the air is fuzzy with fog. Misty rolls down the window and holds her cell phone out. Aside from the chug and pull of Leonie’s car, it’s quiet; the trees are still and tall. To the left of the car, the trunks are brown and healthy, the undergrowth sparse. To the right of the car, the forest looks recently burned. The trunks are black halfway up, and the undergrowth is thick and bright green. I wonder at the stillness of it all. We are the only animals rooting through.
“Ain’t shit out here,” Leonie says.
“If I could get a signal, I could call him and ease your mind, but we too far out.” Misty wipes her phone on her shirt and slides it into her pocket. “I been here before with Bishop. I know where I’m going.”
“Where we going?” I ask the front of the car. Leonie half turns, so I can see her frown at Misty before she turns to the road.
“Got to stop for a minute. See some friends,” Misty throws over her shoulder. “Then we getting back on the road.”
We round a bend and there is a gap in the trees, and suddenly we are among a little cluster of houses. Some have siding like Mam and Pop’s, some have insulation paper and no siding. One is an RV that looks years off the road, with wisteria draping along the top and crawling down the side. It’s like the thing has green, living hair. Chickens run in bunches as a dog, a pit bull with gray-blue fur and a gaping maw, chases them. The chickens scatter. A boy, probably four, is sitting on the ground in front of the porch steps of a house with no siding, and he is stabbing the mud with a stick. He wears a baby’s onesie that fits him like a shirt, yellow underwea
r, and no shoes. He wipes his hand across his face as Leonie comes to a stop and turns off the engine, and it turns his skin from pale milk to black.
“Told you I knew where we was going,” Misty says. “Blow the horn.”
“What?”
“Blow the horn. Ain’t no way I’m getting out of this car with that dog running loose.” Leonie blows, and the dog, who has stopped chasing the chickens and trotted around to the car to sniff the tires and pee on them, begins to bark. I know what he says. Get out. Inhale. Get out! Inhale. Trespasser, get out! Kayla wakes up and starts to cry.
“Take her out,” Leonie says, so I unbuckle her.
The little White boy waves his stick in the air, and then grabs it with both hands, pointing it like a rifle. His blond hair sticks to his head, curls into his eyes like worms. “Pow pow,” he says. He is shooting at us.
Leonie cranks the car.
“We don’t need this—”
“Yes, we do. Cut it off. Blow the horn again.”
Leonie compromises. She doesn’t cut the car off, but she does blow the horn again, one long, loud honk that makes Kayla cry harder and burrow in to my chest. I try to shush her, but she can’t hear me over the barking dog, the shooting boy, the silence in that clearing in the pines, a sound as heavy and loud as the others, but not. I want to jump out of the car with Kayla, and I want to outrun that boy and his dog and that fake gun, and I want to walk us all the way home. My insides feel like they want to fight.
A White woman steps out the door of the house with no siding, steps past the dirt-faced child. Their hair is the same blondish-reddish color, with the same curliness. Hers is long, down to her waist, and except for her nose, which seems swollen in her face and burns red, she’s prettier than Misty. She’s also barefoot. Her toes are pink. She coughs, and it sounds like a scraping in her throat, and walks toward the car. The dog runs up to her, but she ignores it. At least it stops barking. Misty opens the car door and sticks the top half of her body out while holding on to the frame.
“Hey, bitch!” Misty says, like it’s a term of endearment. The woman smiles and coughs at the same time. The mist is settling like dew on her hair, turning it white. “Told you we was coming.” The boy is still shooting us with his stick gun while the dog licks his face. I want to run back home. Leonie drags her hand through the hair over her right ear, scratching at her scalp. She does this when she is nervous. You going to make yourself bleed, Mam told her once, but I don’t think Leonie realizes when she does it. She scrapes so hard it sounds like nails pulled over canvas. Misty is hugging the woman, who is staring into the car. When Leonie opens her door and steps out and says hey, I barely hear it over Kayla’s crying. She scratches again. The little boy hops up the concrete steps and disappears into the house. When Leonie walks up to the woman and all three of them begin talking to each other, her hands hang weak-jointed at her sides.
* * *
The floors are uneven. They are highest in the middle of each room in the naked house, and then slope down to the four shadow-sheathed corners. The inside of the house is dim through the porch, which is crowded with boxes so all that’s left is a walkway into the living room, which is also dim and crowded with boxes. There are two sofas here and one recliner, and this is where the shooting boy sits. He is eating a pickle Popsicle. The television sits on top of a box instead of a TV stand, and it’s playing some sort of reality show about people who buy islands to build resorts.
“Through here,” the woman says to Misty and Leonie, who follow behind. Leonie stops me with a raised arm in the living room.
“Y’all stay here,” she says before leaning forward to touch Kayla’s nose with her pointer finger and smile. Kayla’s face is still wet with tears, but she is sniffing and holding on to my neck and staring at the shooting boy as if there is something she wants to say to him, so I let her down. “I’m serious,” Leonie says, and then follows the woman and Misty into the kitchen, which is the brightest room in the house, lit by a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, laden with bulbs. There is a curtain hanging over the doorway, and the woman pulls it halfway shut and coughs and motions at the table for Misty and Leonie to sit. She opens the refrigerator. I sit on the edge of the sofa so I can watch the shooting boy in the armchair and Kayla, who is squatting feet before him with her hands in her lap, and the gap in the curtain where the women sit in the kitchen.
“Hi,” Kayla says, drawing the word out so that it’s two long syllables, her voice rolling up and down a hill. It’s the same thing she says to her baby doll when she picks it up first thing in the morning, the same thing she says to the horse and the pig and the goat, the same thing she says to the chickens, the same thing she says to Leonie when she first sees her. The same thing she says to Pop. She won’t talk much to Mam: when I carry her in the room to see Mam’s still body, Kayla shrinks into my chest and shoulder, puts on her brave face, and after five minutes of cringing away from Mam and saying shhhh with her finger in front of her lips, she says out. She never says hello to me. She just sits up or crawls over to me and puts her arms around my neck and smiles.
The boy looks at Kayla like she’s his dog, and Kayla hops closer.
“Hi,” she says again. There is a worm of snot running down the boy’s face. He jumps up to stand in the recliner, and seems to make a decision because he smiles, and his teeth are all capped with silver, the metal stopping them from rotting out of his mouth. He begins jumping in the chair like it’s a trampoline, and a few of the boxes stacked to the side of the chair wobble.
“Don’t get up there, Kayla.” They’ll both fall out. I know it. Kayla ignores me and swings one leg up and pulls herself into the chair, where the two begin talking to each other and jumping, having a conversation. I catch words: chair, TV, candy, all gone, move. I cup my hand around my ear, look at the women in the kitchen, watch the way their mouths move, and try to hear.
“I was sleep. That’s why I didn’t hear y’all at first. We all been sick back here.”
“It’s the weather,” Misty says. “One day it’s freezing, the next it’s in the eighties. Damn Mississippi spring.”
The woman nods, drinks a plastic cup of something, clears her throat.
“Where Fred?” Misty asks.
“Out back, working.”
“Business still good?”
“It’s booming, baby,” the woman says, then coughs.
Leonie is worrying the table with her hands.
“The warmer it gets, the better it gets.”
“You still got me?” Misty says.
The woman nods.
“Y’all want something to drink?” she asks.
“You got a cold drink?” Misty asks. The woman hands her a Sprite. I remember how thirsty I am, but I won’t say anything. Leonie would kill me.
“No thanks,” Leonie says, and the only reason I know it’s what she’s said is because I read her lips and the shake of her head. She speaks so low.
“You sure?” Misty asks her.
Leonie shakes her head.
“We need to get back on the road soon.”
There are cases of cold drinks stacked up against the wall: Coke and Dr Pepper and Barq’s and Fanta. When we drove up, I never would have imagined this much plenty in one house: it is stuffed with it, so much food and so many things, so much bulk—cases of soup, cases of crackers, cases of toilet paper and paper towels, three microwaves still in the box, rice cookers, waffle makers, pots. So much food the boxes of it reach to the ceiling in the living room, so many appliances, they are as tall as the lights in the kitchen. I am hungry and thirsty: my throat a closing hand, my stomach a burning fist. And Leonie at the table, Leonie who doesn’t usually care whether we accept food when it’s offered, Leonie who normally will take everything given to her with an open hand—now she says no. Now, when the goat and rice I ate is silt in my gut.
The woman crosses her arm over her chest and frowns. She’s trying to keep the coughs inside, but they come out in sp
utters. She shakes her head, and I know what she’s thinking because I can see it in the way she’s standing and staring at Leonie. Rude.
* * *
If Pop was here, he wouldn’t call this boy no rascal. Wouldn’t call him a scalawag, neither. And he definitely wouldn’t call him boy. He’d call him badass. Because he is. He’s tired of playing Kayla’s game of chase, so he’s stopped running. He crouches in front of the television, turns on one of his four game systems, and begins playing a game. It’s Grand Theft Auto, and he doesn’t know how to play it. He drives the car over medians, into stores, gets out of the car at stoplights, and runs. Kayla is bored. She walks back over to me and climbs into my lap, grabbing a bunch of my shirt, and begins talking to me seriously about wanting juice and graham crackers, so I can’t see the women, can’t see the glass of water that Leonie drinks now that she’s been bullied into accepting something, can’t see Misty and the woman leaning toward each other over the table, whispering to each other. Drawing pictures on the table with their fingers.
The boy is screaming at the television. His video game has frozen.
“No! No!” he yells in a voice that sounds like his nose is stuffed with snot.
The boy’s car has sailed off a road that winds around a cliff. The car has jumped the railing but is frozen in the air. The car is red with a white stripe down the middle of it, splitting it in two. The boy punches the buttons on the controls, but the game does nothing.
“Take it out,” the woman yells from the table.
“No!”
“Start it over,” the woman says, and then bends toward Misty again.
The boy throws the controller at the television. It hits and clatters to the floor. He bends and begins fiddling with the game station, pressing buttons, but nothing changes.
“Don’t want to lose my spot!” he yells.
The women ignore him.
Kayla jumps up from my lap and bends to pick up a blue plastic ball from the floor, about the size of two of her fists, and starts playing with it.