by Jesmyn Ward
When the warden and sergeant told River he was going to be in charge of the dogs after Kinnie escaped, he took the news easy, like he didn’t care if he did it or if he didn’t. When they named River to keep the dogs, I heard the men talking, especially some of the old-timers: said all the dog keepers were always older and White, long as they been there, long as they remembered. Even though some of those White men had been like Kinnie, had escaped and then been sent back to Parchman after they’d been caught fleeing or had killed or raped or maimed, the sergeant still chose them to train the dogs. If they had any talent for it, they were given the job. Even if they were flight risks, even if they had done terrible things both in and out of Parchman, the leashes were theirs. Even though they were terrible, dangerous White men, the old-timers still took more offense when they knew Riv would be their hunter. They didn’t like Riv taking care of the dogs. It’s different, they said, for the Black man to be a trusty, with a gun. Said: That’s unnatural, too, but that’s Parchman. But it was something about a colored man running the dogs; that was wrong. There had always been bad blood between dogs and Black people: they were bred adversaries—slaves running from the slobbering hounds, and then the convict man dodging them.
But River had a way with animals. The sergeant saw that. It didn’t matter to him that Riv couldn’t make the hounds hunt Kinnie. The sergeant knew there wasn’t another White inmate who could wrangle those dogs, so Riv was his best bet for training them, for keeping them keen. The dogs loved Riv. They turned floppy and silly when he came around. I saw it, because Riv asked them to transfer me out the fields and over to him so I could assist him. He saw how sick I was after I got whipped. He thought if I were left to my despair, my slow-knitting back, I would do something stupid. You smart, he said. Little and fast. He told the sergeant that I was wasted in the fields.
But I didn’t have River’s way with the dogs. I think some part of me hated and feared them. And they knew it. The dogs didn’t soften to silly puppies with me. Their tails stiffened, their backs straightened, and they stilled. When they saw Riv in the dark morning, they bounced and yapped, but when they saw me, they ossified to stone. River held out his hands to the dogs like he was a reverend and they were his church. They were quiet with listening, but he didn’t say anything. Something about the way they froze together in the blue dawn was worshipful. But when I held out my hand to them, like Riv told me, and waited for them to acclimate to my scent, to listen to me, they snapped and gurgled. Riv said: Have patience, Richie; it’s going to happen. I doubted. Even though the dogs hated me, and I still got up when the sun was a dim shine at the edge of the sky and spent all day hauling water and food and running after those mutts, I was still happier than I had been before, still lighter, almost, maybe okay. I know River hasn’t told Jojo that, because I never told River that when I ran, it felt like the air was sweeping me along. I thought the wind might pick me up and hurl me through the air, buoy me up out of the shitty dog pens, the scarred fields, away from the gunmen and the trusty shooters and the sergeant up into the sky. That it would carry me away. When I was lying on my cot at night while River cleaned my wounds, those moments blinked around me like fireflies in the dark. I caught them in my hands and held them to me, a golden handful of light, before swallowing them.
I would tell Jojo this: That was no place for hope.
It only got worse when Hogjaw returned to Parchman. They called him Hogjaw because he was big and pale as a three-hundred-pound pig. His jaw was a hard square. His mouth a long thin line. He had the jaw of a hog that would gore. He was a killer. Everybody knew. He had escaped Parchman once, but then he committed another violent crime, shooting or stabbing someone, and he was sent back. That’s what a White man had to do to return to Parchman, even if he was free because he had escaped: a White man had to murder. Hogjaw did a lot of murdering, but when he came back, the warden put him over the dogs, over Riv. The warden said: “It ain’t natural for a colored man to master dogs. A colored man doesn’t know how to master, because it ain’t in him to master.” He said: “The only thing a nigger knows how to do is slave.”
I wasn’t light anymore. When I ran to fetch, I didn’t feel like I was racing the wind. There were no more firefly moments to blink at me in the dark. Hogjaw smelled bad. Sour like slop. The way he looked at me—there was something wrong about it. I didn’t know he was doing it until one day we were out running drills with the dogs, and Hogjaw said, Come with me, boy. He wanted me to follow him to the woods so we could run the dogs up trees. Hogjaw told River to run a message to the sergeant and leave us to the drills. Hogjaw put his hand on my back, gently. He grabbed my shoulders all the time, hands hard as trotters; he usually squeezed so tight I felt my back curving to bend, to kneel. River gave Hogjaw a hard look, and stood in front of me that day, and said, Sergeant need him. He looked at me, tilted his head toward the compound, and said, Go, boy. Now. I turned and ran as fast as I could. My feet running to darkness. The next morning Riv woke me up and told me I wasn’t his dog runner anymore, and I was going back out in the field.
* * *
I want to tell the boy in the car this. Want to tell him how his pop tried to save me again and again, but he couldn’t. Jojo cuddles the golden girl to his chest and whispers to her as she plays with his ear, and as he murmurs, his voice like the waves of a calm bay lapping against a boat, I realize there is another scent in his blood. This is where he differs from River. This scent blooms stronger than the dark rich mud of the bottom; it is the salt of the sea, burning with brine. It pulses in the current of his veins. This is part of the reason he can see me while the others, excepting the little girl, can’t. I am subject to that pulse, helpless as a fisherman in a boat with no engine, no oars, while the tide bears him onward.
But I don’t tell the boy any of that. I settle in the crumpled bits of paper and plastic that litter the bottom of the car. I crouch like the scaly bird. I hold the burning scale in my closed hand, and I wait.
Chapter 7
Leonie
We got to leave the windows down because of the smell. I done used all the napkins I had shoved in the glove compartment to clean up the mess, but Michaela still look like she been smeared with paint, and she done rubbed it all over Jojo, and he won’t let her go so he can clean the throw-up off him, too. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m all right.” But I can tell by the way he keep saying it that it ain’t all true. The part of me that can think around Michael knows what Jojo is saying ain’t true. That he ain’t all right, because he’s so worried about Michaela. Jojo keeps looking over at Misty, who is half leaning out the window, complaining about the smell (“You ain’t never going to be able to get that out,” she said), and I expect him to look mad in the rearview like he did earlier when Misty complained. Instead, there’s something else there, something else in his wide-open eyes and his lips that done shrunk to nothing.
* * *
Michael knocks on the door. All of us are huddled on the porch, smelling like vomit and salt and musk, when Al opens it.
“Hello. I’m surprised they processed you so quickly!” Al says.
He has another cooking spoon in his hand, a hand towel tossed over his shoulder like a scarf. I feel sorry for his housekeeper, if he has one, because I’m pretty sure he never washes any of his pots, just stacks one on the other on his counter. Whenever he’s not at his office, he must be cooking.
“Michaela’s still sick.” Misty shoulders her way past all of us and through the front door.
“Well, that just won’t do,” Al says, and he steps back so the rest of us can file past him. Jojo is last; Michaela won’t let him go, and he won’t put her down.
“Clean towels are in the hall closet,” Al says. “Y’all should wash up. I’ll borrow Misty and we’ll go to the store for medicine.” Misty nods, looks relieved at being able to ride in a vehicle not splashed with vomit. “Bread and ginger ale are in the pantry,” Al says. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that yes
terday.” Al studies the carpet, then looks up and passes the towel over his face. “Oh yes, I remember.” He smiles at me and Michael. “I was dazzled by my company and their gifts, no?”
Michael holds out his hand. It is callused from the farm work he did in Parchman: looking after dairy cows and chickens, tending to some vegetable patches. He told me the warden thought it would be a good idea to get the inmates to working the land again, that he thought it was a shame all that good Delta soil was going to waste with all them able-bodied men there, with all them idle hands. But it had put a bug in Michael. He liked it, he told me in his letters. When he finally got home, he wanted us to put in a garden, wherever we ended up at. Even if it was a cluster of pots on a concrete slab. Can’t nothing bother me when I got my hands in the dirt, he said. Like I’m talking to God with my fingers. Al’s hand looks soft, big, and when he shakes Michael’s hand, his flesh is an envelope, swallowing.
“Thank you,” Michael says. “For everything you done for my family and me.”
Al shrugs, looks down at their hands, turns redder than he already is.
“It’s my job,” Al says, “for which I am well compensated. Thank you.”
* * *
After Misty and Al leave, I strip Michaela and make Jojo take off his shirt, and then I throw it all in Al’s washing machine, a fancy upright that takes me five minutes of jabbing buttons and turning dials to figure out how to work. Michaela shrieks the entire time she’s in the bathtub, her eyes rolling to Jojo, and I’m rougher than I should be with her, soaping her little lean belly, her legs, her back. Picking chunks out of her hair. Pushing that rag against her face to wipe the slime and crust and tears from it, pushing harder than I should, because I’m so pissed. Mama carried an orange bracelet always, woven orange yarn with little orange beads on it, and she knotted it and put it in the pocket of her skirt every day, and when me or Given done something stupid, something like Given getting drunk for the first time and showing up with a sick mouth throwing up all over her herbs on the porch, or like when I pulled up some plant she was growing in the garden, mistaking it for a weed, she’d grab that little piece of orange and start praying: Saint Teresa, I’d hear. Our Lady of Candelaria, she’d mutter. And then: Oya. And I don’t know the French, just words here and there, but sometimes she’d say it in English, and I was there often enough to understand: For Oya of the winds, of lightning, of storms. Overturn our minds. Clean the world with your storms, destroy it and make it new with the winds of your skirts. And when I asked her what she meant, she said: Ain’t no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that’s going to flush out the truth.
“Saint Teresa,” I mutter. “Oya,” I say, and rinse Michaela, dumping a cup of water over her head. She wails. I wrap a towel around her that soaks at the bottom, turns heavy with water, before picking her up and lifting her out of the tub. She kicks. I want to hit her. Don’t make me feel this for nothing, I think. Give me some truth. But ain’t no truth coming when I dry her off, ignore the lotion for her flailing, and shoulder past Jojo, who been cleaning off his chest at the sink and mirror and, I know, watching, like a blue jay mother, ready to dart in and peck if I do her wrong. Ready to take the hits for himself if I do lose my temper and start swatting at her bottom, still clammy with water and fever. He’s at that age where skinny boys either stretch and get skinnier and leaner and harder, or where skinny boys get fat and spend their early teen years trying to learn how to move bodies made bulky by hormones. Jojo is a mix of both: fat collects all along his belly, but avoids his chest and arms and face. With a shirt on, he still looks as lean as he did when he was younger. I can tell by the way he washes himself he’s ashamed of it, that he don’t know like I do that in a few years that stomach’s going to melt away, layer by layer, as he gets taller and more muscular, and he’ll emerge, his body an even-limbed machine like Michael’s. Tall like Pop.
“Make sure you get in them rolls,” I say. Jojo flinches like I’ve hit him. Shies closer to the mirror. It feels good to be mean, to speak past the baby I can’t hit and let that anger touch another. The one I’m never good enough for. Never Mama for. Just Leonie, a name wrapped around the same disappointed syllables I’ve heard from Mama, from Pop, even from Given, my whole fucking life. I dump Michaela, the wailing bundle, on the bed and begin toweling her off and she’s still kicking and screaming and moaning and now saying “Jojo,” and I just want to give her one slap, or maybe two, enough to sting her good, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop, Saint Teresa, I won’t be able to stop, help me. I leave her trembling and walk to the door and yell at the bathroom, at Jojo, who stands with his hands tucked in his armpits, his arms like football pads across his chest, and watches us.
“Get her dressed. Put her to sleep for a nap. Don’t leave this room.”
I slam the door.
* * *
When I run out of the hallway and see Michael standing in the milky light, my anger turns so quickly to love I stop, silenced. All I can do is watch him walk the four corners of the room, and then shrug.
“He ain’t got no TV,” Michael says. “He got this big old nice house, but no TV.”
I laugh and it’s like the badass little boy who ruined the TV down the road is in the room with us: the delighted trembling he must have felt at his wickedness rushes like water through me.
“He got something better than that,” I say.
The fireplace is big, the molding blackened at the edges and the paint long since sloughed off like a snake’s skin. There are three ceramic bowls capped with tops on the mantel, vases at least five shades of blue. Like the ocean, Al said the night before. Not like your ocean—I mean seriously, they shouldn’t even call that a gulf since it’s the color of ditch water. I mean real water. I mean Jamaica and Saint Lucia and Indonesia and Cyprus. He smiled away the insult and pointed at the two larger urns at the corners of the mantel. Mater and Pater, he said. And then he slid the small center urn across the sooty wooden plane and cradled it in his arms. And my Baby: my Beloved. When Al pulled out the pack, and said She’s here to party, Misty yelped, excited. I pull out the pack and Michael looks as if he wants to turn and run—and then like I am holding his favorite food, macaroni and cheese, and he wants to eat. Instead, he grabs my hand and pulls me toward him, surrounds me, breathes heavy into the hair at my temple, making it flutter. Five minutes later, we are high.
* * *
It’s the drug but then it’s not the drug. He is all eyes and hands and teeth and tongue. His forehead against mine: his head down. He is praying, too low for me to hear, and then I feel it. “Leonie, Loni, Oni, Oh,” he says, his voice there and then nothing, his fingers there and then nothing and then there again, and my skin itches and tingles and burns and sears. So long since I had this. My chest is hollow and then full; now a ditch dusty dry, now rushing with water after a sudden, heavy spring rain. A flood. There are no words. All around me, then through me, a man praying, and silent, praying and silent, a man who is more than man, a man with a shining shock of hair and clear eyes, a man who is all fire, fire in his mouth, flames his hands, smoldering coals the V of his hips. Fire and water. Drowned clean. Born up. Blessed. Like that, yes. Like that. Yes.
* * *
I pee in Al’s cold white half bathroom, listen for the kids, hear nothing. Walk back into the living room, the windows sparking dust to gold in the air. There is something wrong. Michael smiles at me, rubs his neck where I sucked on him, says, “I think you left a mark.” And Given-not-Given, black-shirted, sits slumped at the other end of the sofa. He waves his arm for me to come sit between them. The buzz loops through me and drops. I sit, and Michael takes my face in his warm, real hands, and his lips meet mine, and I am opening all over again. Losing language, losing words. Losing myself in that feeling, that feeling of being wanted and needed and touched and cradled, all the while marveling that the one doing it is the one that wants, that needs, that touches, that sees. This is a miracle, I think,
so I close my eyes and ignore Given-not-Given, who is sitting there with a sad look on his face, mouth in a soft frown, and think of Michael, real Michael, and wonder if we had another baby, if it would look more like him than Michaela. If we had another baby, we could get it right.
I expect him to be gone when I pull my mouth from Michael’s, but Given-not-Given’s not on the sofa anymore, he’s standing by the mantel, looking just as solid as the Michael I’m straddling, but still as those urns. Michael groans and wipes a hand over his face, his neck and chest red, the freckles on him welted as ant bites.
“Sugar baby, what you do to me?” he says.
I don’t know what to say because Given-not-Given is watching me closely, waiting for my reply, so I say nothing and shake my head and root into Michael’s neck with my face, inhaling the smell of him. So alive: so here. Hoping that when I sit up, Given-not-Given will be gone back to wherever he stays when he’s not haunting me, back to whatever weird corner of my brain calls him up when I’m high: the hollow figment. But Given’s still there, and he’s standing outside of the hallway to the kids’ room, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. He rubs his face with his hands.
“I love you,” I tell Michael, and he cups me to him and kisses me again. Given-not-Given frowns and shakes his head. As if I have given the wrong answer. I look at Michael beneath me, and I ignore the phantom, don’t even look toward the kids’ room, so that for the rest of the hour and a half that Misty and Al are gone, Given-not-Given is a light smudge at the corner of my eye, sitting outside the kids’ room, guarding them. But Michael is rubbing my back and scalp, and that is all that matters.
* * *
They sleep as one: Michaela wraps herself around Jojo, her head on his armpit, her arm over his chest, her leg over his stomach. Jojo pulls her in to him: his forearm curled under her head and around her neck, his other arm a bar across them both to lay flat against her back. His hand hard in protection, stiff as siding. But their faces make me feel two ways at once: their faces turned toward each other, sleep-smoothed to an infant’s fatness, so soft and open that I want to leave them asleep so they can feel what they will. I think Given must have held me like that once, that once we breathed mouth to mouth and inhaled the same air. But another part of me wants to shake Jojo and Michaela awake, to lean down and yell so they startle and sit up so I don’t have to see the way they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other’s light.