by Jesmyn Ward
“Shhh,” I tell Kayla, put my knees to the door, and hunch down over the plate and the charcoal. I hit the charcoal light because I don’t want the gauge to break the plate. Kayla whines and the whine rises. I think she’s going to start screaming candy, candy, but I look back at Kayla and she has her two middle fingers in her mouth, and I know then by the way she’s studying me, her little eyes round as marbles, calm in her seat, rubbing her seat belt clasp with her other hand, that she has it. Like me. That she can understand like I can, but even better, because she know how to do it now. Because she can look at me and know what I’m thinking, know I got it, Kayla, got you a sucker but you got to wait for me to finish doing this and you can get it, I promise, because you been a good girl, and she smiles around her wet fingers, her little teeth perfect and even as uncooked rice, and I know she hears me.
“Mike, you sure about this?” Misty asks.
“It’s what they give you in the hospital,” Michael says.
“I ain’t never heard of nobody using the kind you cook with.”
“Well,” Michael says.
“What if it make her worse?”
“You know what she did?”
“Yes,” Misty says, almost swallows the words, her voice quiet.
“Well, then you know she need something.”
“I know.”
“This what I got,” Michael says, something about his voice set, like concrete firming, like he answered a question: final.
“It’s done,” I say.
“The whole piece?”
I raise the saucer up so he can see it, see the tiny pile of black-gray powder, smelling strong of sulfur. Some kind of bad earth. Like the bayou when the water’s low, when the water runs out after the moon or it ain’t rained and the muddy bottom, where the crawfish burrow, turns black and gummy under the blue sky and stinks. Michael takes the powder. He peels the plastic off the milk top, pops it, and drinks two big gulps. I am so hungry I can smell it on his breath, smell it in the car when he takes the charcoal and dumps it into the milk, puts the top on, and shakes. The milk shades gray. He flicks the top off again, and there is a new smell in the car, the kind of smell that makes the back of my throat get thick, the kind of smell that makes me want to swallow, so I do.
“Jesus Christ, that stinks!” Misty says. She pulls her shirt over the bottom half of her face like a veil.
“It ain’t supposed to smell good, Misty,” Michael says. He hoists Leonie up and her head falls back. I expect her eyes to be closed but they aren’t: they are wide open, and her lashes are fluttering fast as a hummingbird’s wings. A white open shock. “Come on, baby. You got to drink this.”
Leonie twists and turns like she has no bones, her body winding as a worm’s.
“Candy?” Kayla asks.
Michael’s nostrils flare and his lips are spread like he wants to smile, but there is no curve here. His teeth gleam yellow and wet as a dog’s. He won’t know. All his attention is on Leonie, on her winding neck and her hands trying to bat him away.
I unwrap the sucker. It is red and glossy and I hide it in the curve of my hand as I pass it to Kayla. If Michael ask where she got it, I’m going to say I found it on the floor of the car.
“What’s that?” Richie asks.
“Come help me, Misty,” Michael says. The milk drips down his forearm. Leonie is fighting him. “Hold her nose!”
“Shit!” Misty says, and she’s out the backseat and in the front seat and they are both wrestling Leonie back and Michael’s pouring what he can down Leonie’s throat, and she’s swallowing and breathing and choking and there’s gray milk everywhere.
“Hold me!” Kayla says, and she’s climbing into my lap. Her hair is soft on my face, and I can smell the sucker on her breath, sugary and tart, and she turns her head and it’s like having a faceful of cotton candy, rough and sweet.
“It’s a sucker,” I whisper. Richie nods and stretches his hands over his head.
“That’s your mama?” he ask.
“No,” I say, and I don’t explain, even when Michael pull her from the car and they both on they knees in the grass on the side of the station, and she’s vomiting so hard her back curves like an angry cat’s.
* * *
I am singing nursery rhymes with Kayla while Leonie throws up because I want Kayla to pay attention to me. Don’t want her to see Leonie hunched over and sick, don’t want her to see Michael with that pinched look on his face like he’s going to cry, don’t want her to see Misty running from the station to where they are on the grass with cups of water and her voice high-pitched and her face red. But I sing the nursery songs all wrong; Leonie sang them to me so long ago I remember them only in snatches, light shining on a moment here or there when I was on her lap, both of us singing in the kitchen, steamy with onions and bell pepper and garlic and celery, the smell so delicious I wanted to eat the air. Mam would laugh at my pronunciation, the way I called cows tows, the way I called cats tats. I must have been Kayla’s age, but I could smell Leonie, too, smell her breath, the red cinnamon gum she chewed as she sang past my ear. Even when I grew older and she stopped giving me kisses, every time somebody chewed that gum, I thought of Leonie, of her soft, dry lips on my cheek. Kayla doesn’t care, even if the songs are patched together from my memory, pieces of a puzzle that almost fit: Old MacDonald has a llama, and there’s a cow on the bus, mooing as the wheels go around and around, and the itsy bitsy spider is crawling with a pout. I make up pantomimes for all of it, but Kayla’s favorite is a spider crawling upward, because I cross my thumbs and my fingers splay and segment and move, and there is a spider in the car, inches from Kayla’s face, crawling upward against the rain. Foolishly. When the boy begins speaking, I sing in a whisper, and Kayla sings in a whisper because she thinks it’s fun, and I listen. Then Kayla stops singing and she listens, too, but she waves her arms in the air and whines when I stop, so I sing.
“Is Riv old?” Richie asks.
I nod and warble.
“He was skinnier than you. Taller. Always had a way about him. He stood out. Not just because he was young. But because he was Riv.”
The sun is creeping across the sky. The sun beams past the boy’s face to land on Kayla, to make her eyes shine.
“Got a lot of men in there ain’t so friendly. Then and now. It’s full of wrong men. The kind of men that feel better if they do something bad to you. Like it eases something in them.”
Where the sun should hit the boy’s face and make it glow, it only seems to make it turn a deeper brown.
“They beat you in there. Some people look at boys our age and see somebody they can violate. See somebody who got soft pink insides. Riv tried to keep that from me. But he couldn’t keep it all, and I was too small. I couldn’t bear it. Kept thinking about my brothers and sisters, wondering if they was eating. Wanted to know what it would feel like to wake up and not feel like a thicket of thorns was up inside of me.”
This is a brown that skims black.
“I couldn’t live with it. So I decided to run. Did Riv tell you that?”
I nod.
“I guess I didn’t make it.” Richie laughs, and it’s a dragging, limping chuckle. Then he turns serious, his face night in the bright sunlight. “But I don’t know how. I need to know how.” He looks up at the roof of the car. “Riv will know.”
I don’t want to hear no more of the story. I shake my head. I don’t want him talking to Pop, asking him about that time. Pop has never told me the story of what happened to Richie when he ran. Every time I ask about it, he changes the subject or asks me to help him with something in the yard. And I understand the sentiment when he looks away or walks off, expecting me to follow. I know what Pop’s saying: I don’t want to talk about this. It wounds me.
“What’s wrong?” Richie asks. He looks confused.
“Shut up,” I say softly. And then I nod at Kayla, who wiggles her fingers in the air and says, “Spider, spider.”
“I got to se
e him again,” he says. “I got to know.”
Michael done picked Leonie up like a baby, one arm under the crook of her knees, the other under her shoulders. Her head flops back. He’s talking into her throat, carrying her to the car. She’s shaking her head. Misty’s wiping her forehead with paper towels. Richie raises up a little, like he has a body, has skin and bones and muscle, needs to stretch before he settles back down into his too-small spot on the floor.
“It’s how I get home.”
It’s afternoon. The clouds are gone, the sky a great wash of blue, soft white light everywhere, turning Kayla gold, turning me red. Everything else eating light while Richie shrugs it off. The trees clatter.
“You ain’t even from Bois.” I say it like it’s a fact, when I know it’s a question.
Richie leans forward, leans so close that if he had breath, it would be hitting me in the face, stinking up my nose. I done seen pictures of toothbrushes from the ’40s. Big as hair brushes, bristles look metal. I wonder if they even had them up there, in Parchman, or if they gnawed a twig to a brushy softness and rubbed their teeth with that, the way Pop said he had to do when he was growing up.
“There’s things you think you know that you don’t.”
“Like what?” I spit it out fast because Misty’s opening the front door, and Michael’s laying Leonie in the front seat, and I know the rest of my words have to be quiet.
“Home ain’t always about a place. The house I grew up in is gone. Ain’t nothing but a field and some woods, but even if the house was still there, it ain’t about that.” Richie rubs his knuckles together. “I don’t know.”
I raise my right eyebrow at him. Mam can do it, and I can do it. Pop and Leonie can’t.
“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where my family lived . . . it’s a wall. It’s a hard floor, wood. Then concrete. No opening. No heartbeat. No air.”
“So what?” I whisper.
Michael starts the car and pulls out of the narrow gravel parking lot beside the gas station. Wind kneads my scalp.
“This my way to find that.”
“Find what?”
“A song. The place is the song and I’m going to be part of the song.”
“That don’t make no sense.”
Misty glances over at me. I look out the window.
“It will,” Richie says. “It’s why you can hear animals, see things that ain’t there. It’s a piece of you. It’s everything inside of you and outside of you.”
“What else?” I lower my hand and mouth.
“What?”
“What else I don’t know?”
Richie laughs. It’s an old man’s laugh: a wheeze and a croak.
“Too much.”
“The biggest ones,” my lips form.
“Home.”
I roll my eyes.
“Love.”
I point at Kayla. Richie shrugs.
“There’s more,” he says. He wiggles like the floor is too hard, like he doesn’t like talking about love. The way he looks at me then, like the secretary at the school did when I was seven and I had an accident and peed myself and Leonie never showed up with clean clothes, so I sat on a hard orange plastic chair in the office and shivered for an hour until they got in touch with Mam, and she came and walked me out of the AC into the hot day. Like he’s sorry for me, for what I got to learn.
“And time,” he says. “You don’t know shit about time.”
Chapter 9
Richie
I know Jojo is innocent because I can read it in the unmarked swell of him: his smooth face, ripe with baby fat; his round, full stomach; his hands and feet soft as his younger sister’s. He looks even younger when he falls asleep. His baby sister has flung herself across him, and both of them slumber like young feral cats: open mouths, splayed arms and legs, exposed throats. When I was thirteen, I knew much more than him. I knew that metal shackles could grow into the skin. I knew that leather could split flesh like butter. I knew that hunger could hurt, could scoop me hollow as a gourd, and that seeing my siblings starving could hollow out a different part of me, too. Could make my heart ricochet through my chest desperately. I watch Jojo and Kayla’s sprawled sleep and wonder if I ever slept like that when I was young. I wonder if Riv ever looked at me and saw a wild, naïve thing in the cot next to him. I wonder if he felt pity. Or if there was more love. Jojo snores to a snort and stops, and I feel something in my chest, where my heart would be if I were still alive, soften toward him.
* * *
I didn’t understand time, either, when I was young. How could I know that after I died, Parchman would pull me from the sky? How could I imagine Parchman would pull me to it and refuse to let go? And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present, and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once?
I was trapped, as trapped as I’d been in the room of pines where I woke up. Trapped as I was before the white snake, the black vulture, came for me. Parchman had imprisoned me again. I wandered the new prison, night after night. It was a place bound by cinder blocks and cement. I watched the men fuck and fight in the dark, so twisted up in each other I couldn’t tell where one man ended and another began. I spent so many turns of the earth at the new Parchman. I watched for the dark bird, but he was absent. I despaired, burrowed into the dirt, slept, and rose to witness the newborn Parchman: I watched chained men clear the land and lay the first logs for the first barracks for gunmen and trusty shooters. I thought I was in a bad dream. I thought that if I burrowed and slept and woke again, I would be back in the new Parchman, but instead, when I slept and woke, I was in the Delta before the prison, and Native men were ranging over that rich earth, hunting and taking breaks to play stickball and smoke. Bewildered, I burrowed and slept and woke to the new Parchman again, to men who wore their hair long and braided to their scalps, who sat for hours in small windowless rooms, staring at big black boxes that streamed dreams. Their faces in the blue light were stiff as corpses. I burrowed and slept and woke many times before I realized this was the nature of time.
It was a small mercy that I never surfaced in the old Parchman, the one where Riv and I lived. I only visited that Parchman in memory, memories that rose like bubbles of decay to the surface of a swamp. Riv had a woman in Parchman; she shines golden in the dark blanket of memory that surrounds me when I sleep. She was a prostitute who serviced the Black men in the prison, and she looked like she could have been my mama, skinny as me, as dark, eyes inky like the trees when night falls. She wore a lot of yellow. I asked Riv once why he liked her and he told me that was something I would know when I was older. I asked him if he loved her, and he shook his head and I wondered if there was somebody he loved down on the Gulf, some saltwater girl.
It was that yellow-wearing woman, that Sunshine Woman, all the other men called her, who told me and Riv about the lynching. It was her last day at Parchman, but neither of us knew it, and she sat with her arms across her chest and one hand covering her mouth, watching the trusty shooters. We sat in a corner of the yard, in the shade of a shed, and she told us about the latest hanged man. Was a Black man, she said, from outside of Natchez. He went into town one day with his lady, and he didn’t get off the sidewalk when a White woman walked by. Stepped too close to her, Sunshine Woman said, and brushed up against her real close-like. Felt her softness through her clothes, Sunshine Woman said. The White woman spat, cursed the Black man and woman, and the Black woman say she sorry. That her man ain’t mean to do it. Sunshine Woman thought the truth of it was he didn’t want his woman to have to step down into the street, as it was rutted with puddles because there had been bad rains and flooding. Maybe the Black man was prideful, thought he could be courteous to his woman, keep her walking and clean. She was
wearing her best dress, Sunshine Woman said. The White woman went home and told her husband that the Black man molested her and his woman disrespected her. The Black man and woman were on their way home when the mob caught up with them. That’s them, the White woman said, that’s them right there. Sunshine Woman said it was over a hundred of them. The people from the community saw all the lights out there, the torches and lanterns that lit up the night to dawn.
And that’s when Sunshine Woman started to whisper. She said their people went out in the woods and found them the next day. Said the mob beat them so bad they eyes disappeared in they swollen heads. There was wax paper and sausage wrappings and bare corncobs all over the ground. The man was missing his fingers, his toes, and his genitals. The woman was missing her teeth. Both of them were hanged, and the ground all around the roots of the tree was smoking because the mob had set the couple afire, too. A person ain’t safe, Sunshine Woman said, and that’s why this the last you seeing of me around here, Riv. I’m heading north to Chicago with my auntie and uncle, she said, and you be a fool if you don’t come north when you get out.
Riv looked like he had swallowed something nasty, some bug or a rock in his meal, and he said: Naw, Sunshine Woman, I got to go back south. Riv glanced at me and said: Maybe you shouldn’t have told both us that story. Maybe you should have waited.
He grown enough to be in here, Riv, Sunshine Woman said. That mean he grown enough to know.
Riv had pulled his arm from her then and stepped out into the sun.
Just ’cause he in here don’t mean he can bear that. He shouldn’t have to, Riv said.
Sunshine Woman seemed disappointed in Riv, angry, but she hooked her hand through his arm even though it look like it hurt her to do so, and she said: I’m sorry, Riv. Sorry, boy. She pulled him away, and they left me standing in the lee of the building. I looked up at the rusted tin of the walls and realized I could have told Sunshine Woman that she hadn’t told me something I didn’t already know. I wondered if that would have made Riv less angry with her. Once, when I was playing in the woods with my brothers and sisters, we found what had once been a man, hanging from a tree. He was a short man, short as me, but rubbery with rot and stinking and his mouth was open like he was grinning. That grin was the devil. My little brothers and sisters ran home screaming, and when I walked into the house, my mama slapped my face for being the oldest and leading us where we shouldn’t go. But when I thought about the way Riv admonished Sunshine Woman, how he stepped away from her to protect me, I began to understand love. I began to understand that what Riv and Sunshine Woman did wasn’t an expression of love, but Riv’s standing in the sun for me was. I sagged and sat on the ground with the weight of it. I wanted to call to Sunshine Woman and tell her I would do it: I would go north when I was free. Riv looked back at me and his eyes were glassy and dark; it was as if he could hear my thoughts, as if he knew what I wanted to say. As I watched Sunshine Woman pull Riv away from me, I felt a stinging in my toes, in my soles, in my legs, up my butt, and through my back, where it burst to fire in my bones, licking all through my ribs, a loose powerful feeling, like a voice freed from a throat, a screaming note all through me, and it was then I knew I was going to run.