by Jesmyn Ward
* * *
I began to understand home when Riv and I slept next to each other and Riv told me stories in the dark. Once, River told me about the ocean. He said: We got so much water where I’m from. It come down from the north in rivers. Pool in bayous. Rush out to the ocean, and that stretch to the ends of the earth that you can see. It changes colors, he said, like a little lizard. Sometimes stormy blue. Sometimes cool gray. In the early mornings, silver. You could look at that and know there’s a God, he said to me as the other gunmen coughed and tossed. Maybe one day, when you and me get out of here, you could come down and see it, Riv said.
Kayla has her palm curled around Jojo’s neck, and he throws an arm over her back, and I wonder if they dream the same dreams. I wonder if they dream of home: of jungle-tangled trees, bearing the weight of the sky. Of streams leading to rivers leading to the sea. I wonder if the reason I couldn’t leave Parchman before Jojo came was because it was a sort of home to me: terrible and formative as the iron leash that chains dogs, that drives them to bark hysterically and run in circles and burrow to the roots of the grass, to savage smaller animals, to kill the living things they can reach.
Today when Jojo came to Parchman, I woke to the whispering of the white snake, which had dug a nest down into the earth with me so he could speak to me in my ear. So he could curl about my head in the dark and whisper, If you would rise, I can take you across the waters of this world to another. This place binds you. This place blinds you. Keep the scale, even if you cannot fly. Go south, to River, to the face of the waters. He will show you. Go south. He curled around my neck and startled me to climb up and out of the dirt, to rise to the smell of Riv’s blood, thick as the fragrance of spider lilies in flower. When I saw Jojo and Kayla in the parking lot, the snake transformed to a bird on my shoulder before flying away on a wave of wind, speeding south on a lonely migration. As Kayla whines in her sleep and Jojo rubs her back to quiet her, a shadow alights and crosses over them. Up in the sky, the scaly bird drifts, shining a dark light.
I will follow, I say. I hope he can hear me. I say: I’m coming home.
Chapter 10
Leonie
When we first began dating, Michael and I spent a month of nights parking on the boat jetty out on the bayou, kissing, his face against mine, smooth skin, as the wind came in the open windows, briny and sweet. A month of riding everywhere but near his house in the Kill and getting dropped off at my house an hour before dawn. I jumped off the cliff at the river one of those nights. I ran before I leapt to clear the rocky bank; I dropped into the feathery dark heart of the water and went all the way to the bottom, where the sand was more muddy than grainy and downed trees decomposed, slimy and soft at the core. I didn’t swim up; the fall had stunned my arms and legs, the thunderous slap of the water numbed them. I let the water carry me. It was a slow rise: up, up, up toward milky light. I remember it clearly because I never did it again, scared by that paralyzing ascent. This is what it feels like to wake with my head in Michael’s lap, his fingers still on my scalp, the car rumbling, light slanting sharp through the window. This is what it feels like to rise from a dark deep place. I lift up a little and put my forehead on Michael’s thigh and groan.
“Hey.” I can hear the smile in his voice; the word sounds higher, thinner. I’m too close to his crotch.
“Hey,” I say, and raise up farther. By the time I’m sitting up straight, it feels wrong. Like every bone in my spine, each locking piece, been knocked over and built back up crooked.
“How you feel?”
“What?”
Michael pushes my hair back off my forehead and I close my eyes at the touch. My throat is burning. Michael looks in the rearview and then pulls me over so my head is on his shoulder, his lips at my ear.
“The cops pulled us over, remember? You swallowed that shit from Al because wasn’t no time to dump it. The fucking floor was covered in shit. You should clean your car, Leonie.” He sounds like Mama when he says it.
“I know, Michael. What else?”
“I got you milk and charcoal from a gas station. You threw up.”
I swallow, and the root of my tongue aches.
“My mouth hurts.”
“You threw up a lot.”
The world outside the car is a green, shaky blur, the color of Michael’s eyes, of the trees bursting to life in the spring. The memory that eased me up out the dark, the memory of jumping from that cliff, is a buzzing green, but there is none of that inside of me. Just some water oak limbs, dry and mossy, burned to ash, smoldering. I feel wrong.
“How long to the house?”
“ ’Bout an hour.”
Even the pine trees, with their constant muted green, seem brighter. Through them, I see the sun will set soon.
“Wake me up.”
I lie down in the ashes and sleep.
* * *
When I wake, Michael’s rolled all the windows down. I’ve been dreaming for hours, it feels like, dreaming of being marooned on a deflating raft in the middle of the endless reach of the Gulf of Mexico, far out where the fish are bigger than men. I’m not alone in the raft because Jojo and Michaela and Michael are with me and we are elbow to elbow. But the raft must have a hole in it, because it deflates. We are all sinking, and there are manta rays gliding beneath us and sharks jostling us. I am trying to keep everyone above water, even as I struggle to stay afloat. I sink below the waves and push Jojo upward so he can stay above the waves and breathe, but then Michaela sinks and I push her up, and Michael sinks so I shove him to the air as I sink and struggle, but they won’t stay up: they want to sink like stones. I thrust them up toward the surface, to the fractured sky so they can live, but they keep slipping from my hands. It is so real that I can feel their sodden clothes against my palms. I am failing them. We are all drowning.
“Feel better?” Michael asks.
The sky has turned pink, and everybody looks ragged, even Misty, who has fallen asleep with her face smashed against the window, her hair falling over her forehead and down the line of her nose and cheek: a yellow head scarf.
“I guess,” I say.
And I do, except for the dream. It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it. I turn around to check on Michaela. Her shirt, cold and wet, clings to her small, hot body.
“We could drop the kids off. Go get something to eat before we go home.”
“Home?”
“To your mama and daddy’s,” Michael says.
I knew that’s where we were going, knew there was nowhere else for us to go. Not to the Kill, not to his parents, who’ve never even seen Michaela in the flesh. We could not go where we aren’t welcome. But I guess I had an apartment in my head. Once we’re on our feet we’ll get to it, but I had so envisioned it that when I thought about us going home, I only saw that place. I imagined us settling in one of the bigger towns on the Gulf Coast, in one of those three-story complexes with metal-and-concrete stairs leading from one level to another. We would have big whitewashed, carpeted rooms, space, anonymity, and quiet.
“Yeah,” I say.
“So you want to?”
Michaela kicks the back of my seat. Her hair is matted to her head, and she’s chewing on a sucker stick, the cardboard melting and coming away in papery bits to stick on the side of her mouth. I smile at her, wait for her to smile at me, but she doesn’t. She kicks again and bares her teeth around the stick, but it is no smile.
“Michaela, stop kicking Mama’s seat.”
“Ony,” she says, and sucks on the stick and waves both hands in the air. Jojo looks away from the window, down to her kicking feet, and frowns. “Ony!” she screams.
“She’s saying your name,” Michael says.
“Mama,” I tell Michaela.
“Ony,” Michaela says, and for a moment I’m in my drowning dream again, and I feel her hot, wet back buoyed up by my palms, slipping, slipping.
“Yeah,” I tell Michael. “Drop them off.”
<
br /> Michael turns from one narrow, tree-shrouded road to another, water dripping from the leaves to dot the windshield, and I know we’re in Bois by the map of the limbs. Two people walk in the distance, and as we cruise through the green tunnel, I see a man, short and muscled, who leads a black dog by a chain. And next to him, a skinny little woman with a sable, coily cloud of hair that moves like a kaleidoscope of butterflies. It’s not until we’re right up on them that I see who it is. Skeetah and Eschelle, a brother and sister from the neighborhood. The siblings walk in sync, both of them bouncing. Esch says something, and Skeetah laughs. We pass as dusk darkens the road.
Michaela kicks my seat again, and I turn around and slap her leg so hard my palm stings. Jealousy twins with anger. That girl: so lucky. She has all her brothers.
* * *
The house looks like it sunk. Drooping at the crown. Jojo seems taller than he was when we left as he jiggles the doorknob, as he disappears through the dark door. But soon he’s walking back out to the car, and it’s so dark now that I can’t see his face. Even when he leans into the window of the car and Michael turns on the overhead light, there is still a black film over his face.
“They not here,” he says.
“Mama and Pop?” I ask.
“No.”
“Did they leave a note?”
Jojo shakes his head.
“Get in the car,” Michael says.
“What?” I ask. I’m so tired that it feels like someone has placed a wet towel over my brain, the weight of it suffocating thought.
“We can wait here.” Jojo stands.
“Get in the car,” Michael says.
Jojo’s lips thin, and he climbs into the back of the car. Michaela has her face hidden in his neck again, one finger twirling a lock of Jojo’s hair. Michael reverses into the empty street.
“Where we going?” Jojo says.
“To visit your grandparents.”
My heart is a squirrel caught in a snare. The fine hair on my arms stands up and quivers. I see Michael’s daddy, fat and sweating, his rifle balanced loosely on his lawn mower, the sound of the motor grinding and whining because he’s pushing it as fast as it can go over the lawn, trying to get to my car, to me. I see my hands, black and thin-boned, on the steering wheel. I see Given’s hands, fine as mine, but hard with callused coins from the rub of the bowstring.
“Why now?” I ask.
“I’m home,” Michael says. “You know they never drove up to Parchman.”
“Because they didn’t care,” I say, even as I know it’s not true.
“They do. They just don’t know how to show it.”
“Because of me. And the kids,” I say.
This is an old argument between us. Michael tries something new.
“Plus, Jojo’s thirteen. It’s time.”
“He’s thirteen and they ain’t gave a shit to see him or Michaela,” I say.
Michael ignores me and heads north. The air is cooler up in the Kill, since there are even fewer houses and more dark land sleeping under the deepening sky.
“Maybe they’ll surprise us, Leonie,” Michael says.
My mouth tastes like vomit.
“Sugar baby.”
“No.”
Michael pulls to the side of the road. The crickets turn riot.
“Please,” Michael says. He rubs the nape of my neck. I want to scramble out the window of the car and run, to disappear.
“No.”
“They made me, baby. And we made the kids. They going to look at Jojo and Michaela and see that,” Michael says. I feel my shoulders beginning to creep down, to relax, to settle.
“What you told them?” I ask.
Michael looks at the bugs skipping across the windshield like they are dragonflies and it is hard water.
“I told them it was time,” Michael says. “That if they love me, they got to love them, too, because they a piece of me.” He looks at me then, his green eyes look brown in the fading light, his hair dark: a stranger sitting in the driver’s seat. “Like you,” he says.
I bat his hand off my neck, rub where he touched like it’s a mosquito bite.
“Fine,” I say, and Michael heads north into the Kill.
* * *
“Kayla’s hungry,” Jojo says.
“Chip!” Michaela says. Outside, the world is dark, the fields and trees ink black. I roll up my window, which has been cracked. I woke Misty up when we pulled into her gravel driveway and she grabbed her bag from her feet and struggled out of the car with a sarcastic “Well, it’s been fun, folks.” She’ll hate me for a day or two, but once she washes her clothes and gets the smell of vomit out of her nose, she’ll call. I knew it by the way she leaned into my window after she slammed her door shut, glared at Michael, and said: “Good luck.” When I stretch over the backseat to roll up the window Misty slept against, Jojo’s looking at the floor like he’s lost something.
“They got leftovers down there?”
“No,” he says.
“We’re going to your grandparents’ house,” Michael says.
“Chip,” Michaela says.
“You’ll eat soon, Michaela,” I say. “Pass her here, Jojo.”
Jojo unbuckles her from the seat, and he pushes her forward. Her hair’s knotted in the back, curls worn fuzzy from the rub of her car seat. I smooth the hair up, trying to tame it into a puff on the top of her head, but she shakes and cries for a potato chip again. I dig in my purse. There’s nothing in the bottom but change and one peppermint I took from the bar. I unwrap it and give it to Michaela, and she sucks and quiets. The car smells like mint and her hair, sweet as sugar. Michael slows to cross the railroad tracks, and just as he does, a tusked wild hog, big as two men and covered in black fur, darts from the woods and sprints across the road, as light on his hooves as a child. Michael swerves a little, and I clutch Michaela but I can’t hold her and she flies forward, hitting her head on the dashboard. Michael swerves off the road and stops. Michaela bounces and slides down on my feet, and she is quiet.
“Michaela,” I say. I grab her under her armpits and drag her up, see a purple knot weeping red on her forehead. She’s alive, because her eyes are open and she’s hitching to cry, her breath stuttering in her throat. She wails.
“Kayla!” Jojo says.
“Jojo!” Michaela puts her forearms into my collarbones, pushing away from me, wanting Jojo again. The headlights vanish into the darkness along with the monstrous pig and suddenly I feel boneless, loose as a jellyfish, and I don’t have the strength to fight her.
“Shhhh,” I say, but even as my mouth is trying to comfort her, I hand her over the backseat, and she’s in Jojo’s arms. He’s patting her back as her arms settle around his neck. Michael and I turn to each other and I frown. We face forward, looking at the mist obscuring the windshield.
“Jojo, buckle her in.” I say this without turning to look at him, because I don’t want to see his face, afraid I might see the hard planes of Pop in his expression: judgment. Or worse, the soft quiver of Mama’s pity.
“You sure?” Michael’s shaken: I can tell by the way he grips the steering wheel and then lets go, grips and lets go, as if he’s testing his reflexes, gauging the nimbleness of his fingers. One bug crackles and hits the windshield, drunk in the lights. And then another.
“You want to go,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s go.”
There is no radio, no talk. Just the growl and pull of the car, the gravel ground under the tires, gatherings of frogs singing in hisses and croaks from ponds in woods and some perfect circles dug into yards. Michael’s parents’ house is different at night, and it’s been so many years since I’ve been there in the dark that it is a hazy memory, even as I look at it: long, straight gravel driveway, yellow in the moonlight, leading to the house through the fields; the gravel shimmers, an after-light left by a sparkler through night air. There are two lit windows, one at each end of the house. Michael cuts the
lights so the car creeps and crunches down the driveway, the roll of the rocks under the tires sounding little pops. We park next to Big Joseph’s pickup truck and a blue car with a short hood, boxy body and back. A rosary hangs from the rearview mirror. I ease the car door open, and I suddenly need to pee, desperately. I don’t want to be here. Michael holds out his hand, and I want to climb back in the car, slam the door, drive off with the kids, who are still sitting in the backseat. A dog barks in the distance.
“Come on,” Michael says.
“Let’s go,” I tell Jojo. He gets out of the car and stands in the dark. He is as tall as me, maybe a little taller, and I can see him tall as Pop in two or three years. He hoists Michaela up and holds her in front of his chest: her back, his shield. Michaela is touching her forehead, which shows a dark constellation of blood, and asking Jojo questions.