Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

  When we get to the jail proper, Leonie and Misty sign our names into a book, and then we’re led into a room with cinder-block walls painted yellow. Misty follows a guard through a door set at the opposite end of the room, where we sit at a table ringed by low benches, like we could be taking a picnic while we wait on Michael, but there is no food, no blanket, and there is white pockmarked ceiling above us: no sky. Leonie rubs her arms, even though it’s warm in here, warmer even than outside. It feels like there’s no air-conditioning. She leans forward and rubs at her eyes, smooths her hair back from her face so for a second I see Pop, his flat forehead, his nose, his cheeks. That hammer in me twists, and then Leonie frowns, and her hair flops back over her forehead, and she’s just Leonie, and Kayla whimpers again, and I want to go home.

  “Juice,” Kayla says. I look at Leonie, asking the question without saying nothing: raised eyebrows, wide eyes, frown. Leonie shakes her head.

  “She got to wait.”

  She reaches out to Kayla, brushes her fingers along the back of her neck, but Kayla says no and burrows in to my chest, her skull hard, her nose smushed into my shirt, trying to get away from Leonie’s hand. I’m looking at Leonie’s frown so hard that I don’t even see Michael when he appears at the door, two guards at his shoulders, who stop at the door and let him pass as it opens and clangs shut, and then all at once, he’s standing in front of us. Michael’s here.

  “Baby,” he says. I know he ain’t talking to me or Kayla, but only Leonie, because it’s her who drops her arm and turns, her who rises and walks stiff-kneed to him, her that he hugs, his arms wrapped around her like a tangled sheet, tighter and tighter, until they seem one thing standing there, one person instead of two. He’s bigger than I remember around the neck and shoulders and arms, wider than he was when the police took him away. They’re both shaking, speaking so low to each other I can’t hear them, whispering and shivering like a tree, juddering in the wind.

  It takes less time than I thought it would to check Michael out. Maybe he done all his paperwork beforehand. Misty is still in another room, talking to Bishop, but Michael says: “I can’t stay in here another minute. Let’s go.” Before I know it, we’re walking back out into the weak spring light. Leonie and Michael have their arms around each other’s waist. When we get back to the parking lot, they stop and begin kissing, wet, openmouthed, their tongues sliding onto faces. He looks so different than he did when he left, but he’s still the same Michael underneath, in the neck, in his hands, kneading Leonie’s back the way Mam used to knead biscuits. Kayla points out to the fields, fields covered in a fog, and says, “Jojo.” I walk across the parking lot, closer to the fields with her.

  “What you see, Kayla?” I ask.

  “All the birds,” she says, and coughs.

  I look out at the fields but I don’t see birds. I squint and for a second I see men bent at the waist, row after row of them, picking at the ground, looking like a great murder of crows landed and chattering and picking for bugs in the ground. One, shorter than the rest, stands and looks straight at me.

  “See the bird?” Kayla asks, and then she lays her head on my shoulder. I blink and the men are gone and it is just fog rolling, wisping over the fields that stretch out endlessly, and then I hear Pop, telling me the last bit of the story he is willing to share about this place.

  After the sergeant beat Richie, I told him: “You got to keep that back clean.” Got clean rags and put them on him, and then changed them with supplies I stole from the dogs’ stash. I bound them around Richie’s chest with long strips. His skin was hot and runny.

  “It’s too much dirt,” Richie said. His teeth was chattering, so his words came out in stutters. “It’s everywhere. In the fields. Not just my back, Riv. It’s in my mouth so I can’t taste nothing and in my ears so I can’t hardly hear and in my nose, all in my nose and throat, so I can’t hardly breathe.”

  He breathed hard then, and ran out the shack where our group of trusty shooters bunked, and threw up in the dirt, and then I remembered again how young he was, how his big teeth was still breaking through his gums in some places.

  “I dream about it. Dream I’m eating it with a big long silver spoon. Dream that when I swallow, it go down the wrong hole, to my lungs. Out there in the fields all day, my head hurt. I can’t stop shaking.”

  I touched his narrow back, pushed one of the cuts to see if pus would come out, trying to see if it was infected, if that’s why he was sick with fever and chills, but it oozed a little clear and that’s it.

  “Something ain’t right,” I said to myself, but the boy was kneeling over his sick in the dirt, listening to the trusty shooters calling to each other on they patrol, shaking his head like I’d asked him a question, right to left, right to left. And then he said:

  “I’m going home.”

  * * *

  “See the birds?” Kayla asks.

  “Yeah, Kayla, I see,” I tell her.

  “All the birds go bye,” Kayla says, and then she leans forward and rubs my face with both hands, and for a second I think she’s going to tell me something amazing, some secret, something come from God Himself. “My tummy,” she says, “Jojo, tummy hurts.”

  I rub her back.

  “I ain’t had a chance to give y’all a good hello,” comes a voice, and I turn around and it’s Michael. He’s looking toward Kayla.

  “Hello,” he says.

  Kayla tenses up, grips me with her little legs, grabs both of my ears, and pulls.

  “No,” she says.

  “I’m your papa, Michaela,” Michael says.

  Kayla puts her face in my neck and starts to shake, and I feel it like little tremors through my gut. Michael lets his hands drop. I shrug, look past Michael’s face, clean-shaved and pale, purple under his eyes, sunburn high on his forehead. He got Kayla’s eyes. Leonie’s behind him, letting go of his hand to grab him around the waist. He reaches behind him to her, and rubs.

  “She got to get used to you,” I say.

  “I know,” he says.

  * * *

  When we get back to the car, Leonie pulls out her little cooler and then hands out sandwiches that the lawyer must have made before me and Kayla woke up, sandwiches on brown bread thick with nuts with slabs of smelly cheese and turkey slices thin as Kleenex layered in between. I eat mine so fast I have trouble breathing, and I start to hiccup around the food, big bites, lodged in my throat. Leonie frowns at me, but it’s Michael who speaks.

  “Take your time, son.”

  He says it so easy. Son. He got his arm on the back of the driver’s seat, his hand wrapped around the back of Leonie’s neck, rubbing it, squeezing it soft. It’s something like the way Mam would hold me by the neck when we went to the grocery store when I was little and both of us could walk, up and down the grocery aisles. If I’d get too excited, like when we got to the checkout and saw all the candy, she’d squeeze. Not too hard. Just enough to remind me that we was in the store, around a whole bunch of White people, and that I needed to mind my manners. And then: she was behind me, with me, loving me. Here.

  If I wasn’t hiccupping, I would cut my eyes at Michael, but the hiccupping is so bad I can’t breathe. I think of Richie and wonder if this is how he felt in them dusty rows, how they must have stretched to the end of the earth before him, how this place must have gone on forever. But even as I’m gulping to swallow past the food, to breathe easier, and another hiccup shakes through me, I know it must have been worse for the boy.

  A rain begins, so light it’s like a gentle spray from a water bottle, and it turns the air white, and everything looks hazy. I want another sandwich, but Michael is sitting where Misty sat, and he’s eating his sandwich slow, tearing off his bites before putting them in his mouth. It’s one of the things I heard Pop say about Michael when he moved in with us: Mike eat like he too good for the food, he told Mam. She shook her head and cracked another pecan, picking out the meat. We were sitting next to each other on the porch swing. I
’m still so hungry I can imagine the taste of those pecans, how the dust around the nut taste bitter, but the pecan is wet and sweet. Mam knew, but she ignored my thieving and let me eat. There’s only one sandwich from the lawyer left in the bag, and Misty still hasn’t eaten hers yet, so I swallow.

  “We got some water?” I ask.

  Leonie passes me a bottle of water the lawyer must have given her. The plastic is thick and has mountains painted on the front. The water is warm, not cold, but I’m so thirsty and my throat is so clogged I don’t even care. The hiccups stop.

  “Your sister finish hers?” Leonie asks.

  Kayla’s fallen asleep in her car seat, which I had to move to the middle. Misty’s back, and she’s sitting with me now that Michael’s here. Kayla has half of a sandwich in her hand, her fingers curled around it tight. Her head tilted back and hot. Her nose is sweating, and her curls are getting stringy. I pull the sandwich from her grip and it comes, so I eat the rest of it, even though it’s a little soggy where she was gumming it.

  “Most of it,” I say.

  “She look much better.” Leonie is lying. She don’t look much better. Maybe a little, but not much. “I knew the blackberry would work.”

  “Something wrong with her? She sick?” Michael asks. His hand done stop moving, and he turns around to look at us. I stop chewing. In the gray foggy light, and in the close car, his eyes look bright green, green as the trees pushing out new spring leaves. Leonie looks disappointed he’s stopped touching her and leans across the seat toward him.

  “Just some kind of stomach virus, I think. Or she was carsick. I gave her one of Mama’s remedies. She better.”

  “You sure, baby?” Michael looks closely at Kayla, and I swallow the last of her sandwich. “She still looks a little yellow to me.”

  Leonie gives a little half laugh and waves at Kayla.

  “Of course she’s yellow. She’s our baby.” And then Leonie laughs, and even though it’s a laugh, it doesn’t sound like one. There’s no happiness in it, just dry air and hard red clay where grass won’t grow. She turns around and ignores all of us and looks out the front windshield, gummy with bug splatter, so she doesn’t even see when Kayla startles, her eyes open wide, and throw-up, brown and yellow and chunky, comes shooting out her mouth and all over the back of the front seat, all over her little legs and her red-and-white Smurfs shirt and me because I’m pulling her up out of her seat and into my lap.

  “It’s going to be all right, Kayla, it’s going to be all right,” I say.

  “I thought you gave her something for that,” Misty says.

  “Baby, I told you she didn’t look good,” Michael says.

  “Goddamnit sonofabitch,” Leonie says, and a dark skinny boy with a patchy afro and a long neck is standing on my side of the car, looking at Kayla and then looking at me. Kayla cries and whines.

  “The bird, the bird,” she says.

  The boy leans into the window and blurs at the edges. He says: “I’m going home.”

  Chapter 6

  Richie

  The boy is River’s. I know it. I smelled him as soon as he entered the fields, as soon as the little red dented car swerved into the parking lot. The grass trilling and moaning all around, when I followed the scent to him, the dark, curly-haired boy in the backseat. Even if he didn’t carry the scent of leaves disintegrating to mud at the bottom of a river, the aroma of the bowl of the bayou, heavy with water and sediment and the skeletons of small dead creatures, crab, fish, snakes, and shrimp, I would still know he is River’s by the look of him. The sharp nose. The eyes dark as swamp bottom. The way his bones run straight and true as River’s: indomitable as cypress. He is River’s child.

  When he returns to the car and I announce myself, I know he is Riv’s again. I know it by the way he holds the little sick golden girl: as if he thinks he could curl around her, make his skeleton and flesh into a building to protect her from the adults, from the great reach of the sky, the vast expanse of the grass-ridden earth, shallow with graves. He protects as River protects. I want to tell him this: Boy, you can’t. But I don’t.

  Instead, I fold myself and sit on the floor of the car.

  * * *

  In the beginning, I woke in a stand of young pine trees on a cloudy, half-lit day. I could not remember how I came to be crouching in the pine needles, soft and sharp as boar’s hair under my legs. There was no warmth or cold there. Walking was like swimming through tepid gray water. I paced in circles. I don’t know why I stayed in that place, why every time I got to the edge of the young stand, to the place where the pines reached taller, rounded and darkened, draped with a web of green thorny vines, I turned and walked back. In that day that never ended, I watched the tops of the trees toss, and I tried to remember how I got there. Who I was before this place, before this quiet haunt. But I couldn’t. So when I saw a white snake, thick and long as my arm, slither out of the shadows beneath the trees, I knelt before It.

  You are here, It said.

  The needles dug into my knees.

  Do you want to leave? It asked.

  I shrugged.

  I can take you away, It said. But you have to want it.

  Where? I asked. The sound of my voice surprised me.

  Up and away, It said. And around.

  Why?

  There are things you need to see, It said.

  It raised its white head in the air and swayed, and slowly, like paint dissolving in water, its scales turned black, row by row, until it was the color of the space between the stars. Little fingers sprouted from its sides to grow to wings, two perfect black scaly wings. Two clawed feet pierced its bottom to dig into the earth, and its tail shrunk to a fan. It was a bird, but not a bird. No feathers. All black scales. A scaly bird. A horned vulture.

  It bounced up to alight on the top of the youngest pine tree, where it bristled and cawed, the sound raw in that silent place.

  Come, It said. Rise.

  I stood. One of its scales dislodged and floated to the earth, wispy as a feather.

  Pick it up. Hold it, It said. And you can fly.

  I clenched the scale. It was the size of a penny. It burned my palm, and I rose up on my tiptoes and suddenly I wasn’t on the ground anymore. I flew. I followed the scaly bird. Up and up and out. Into the whitewater torrent of the sky.

  Flying was floating on that tumbling river. The bird at my shoulder now, a raucous smudge on the horizon then, sometimes atop my head like a crown. I spread my arms and legs and felt a laugh bubbling up in me, but it died in my throat. Because I remembered. I remembered before. I remembered being spread-eagle in the dirt, surrounded by hunched, milling men, and a teenage boy at my shoulder who stood tall under the long shadows. River. River, who stood as the men flayed my back, as I sobbed and vomited and turned the earth to mud. I could feel him there, knew that he would carry me after they let me loose from the earth. My bones felt pin-thin, my lungs useless. The way he carried me to my cot, the way he bent over me, made something soft and fluttery as a jellyfish pulse in my chest. That was my heart. Him my big brother. Him, my father.

  I dropped from my flight, the memory pulling me to earth. The bird screamed, upset. I landed in a field of endless rows of cotton, saw men bent and scuttling along like hermit crabs, bending and picking. Saw other men walking in circles around them with guns. Saw buildings clustered at the edges of that field, other fields, unto the ends of the earth. The bird swooped down on the men’s heads. They disappeared. This is where I was worked. This is where I was whipped. This is where River protected me. The bird dropped to the ground, dug its beak into the black earth, and I remembered my name: Richie. I remembered the place: Parchman prison. And I remembered the man’s name: River Red. And then I fell, dove into the dirt, and it parted like a wave. I burrowed in tight. Needing to be held by the dark hand of the earth. To be blind to the men above. To memory. It came anyway. I was no more and then I was again. The scale hot in my hand. I slept and woke and rose and picked my way
through the prison fields, lurked in the barracks, hovered over the men’s faces. Tried to find River. He wasn’t there. Men left, men returned and left again. New men came. I burrowed and slept and woke in the milky light, my time measured by the passing of all those Black faces and the turning of the earth, until the scaly bird returned and led me to the car, to the boy the same age as me sitting in the back of the car. Jojo.

  * * *

  I want to tell the boy that I know the man who sired him. That I knew him before this boy. That I knew him when he was called River Red. The gunmen called him River because that was the name his mama and daddy give him, and the men say he rolled with everything like a river, over the fell trees and stumps, through storms and sun. But the men added the Red because that was his color: him the color of red clay on the riverbank.

  There’s so much Jojo doesn’t know. There are so many stories I could tell him. The story of me and Parchman, as River told it, is a moth-eaten shirt, nibbled to threads: the shape is right, but the details have been erased. I could patch those holes. Make that shirt hang new, except for the tails. The end. But I could tell the boy what I know about River and the dogs.