Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

  “You ain’t have to do that,” I tell Michael. He’s backing away, shaking his spanking hand like it’s gone numb.

  “I told her,” he says.

  “You ain’t,” I say.

  “Y’all don’t listen,” Michael says.

  Kayla writhes and shrieks, her whole body coiling. I turn my back on Michael, run out the back door. Kayla rubs her face into my shoulder and screams.

  “I’m sorry, Kayla,” I say, like I’m the one hit her. Like she can hear over her crying. I walk around the backyard with her, saying it over and over, until the sun sits higher in the sky, bearing down on us, turning the muddy puddles to vapor. Burning the land dry, and burning me and Kayla: her to peanut butter, me to rust.

  * * *

  I apologize until she quiets to hiccups, until I know she can hear me. And I’m waiting, waiting for her small arms to fold around my neck, her head to drop to my shoulder, and I’m so intent on waiting for it that I don’t even see the boy staring at us from the shadow of a tall, many-armed pine tree until Kayla’s pinching my arms, saying, “No no, Jojo.” In the bright light of the day the shadow swallows him: cool dark bayou water, the color of mud—tepid and blinding. He moves and he is of a piece with the darkness.

  “He’s slopping the pigs. Your pop.”

  I blow air hard out my nose, hope it will mean nothing to him. That he will not read it as wanting to talk, that he will not read it as not wanting to talk.

  “He don’t see me. How come he don’t see me?”

  I shrug. Kayla says: “Eat-eat, Jojo.” All’s quiet in the house, and for a stupid second I wonder why Leonie and Michael ain’t arguing about him hitting Kayla. And then I remember. They don’t care.

  “You got to ask him about me,” Richie says. He steps out of the shadow and he is a swimmer surfacing for air, glistening in the light. And in the light, he is just a skinny boy, too narrow in the bones, the fat that should be on him starved off. Somebody that I can feel sorry for until his eyes widen, and I squeeze Kayla so hard she cries out. The face he pulls is pinched with hunger and longing.

  I shake my head.

  “It’s the only way I can go.” Richie stops, looks up in the sky. “Even if he don’t know me no more, don’t care about me. I need the story to go.” His afro is so long it sprouts from his head like Spanish moss. “The snake-bird says.”

  “What?” I say, and regret it.

  “It’s different here,” he says. “So much liquid in the air. Salt. And a mud smell. I can tell,” he says, “the other waters is near.”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. Kayla says: “Inside, Jojo, inside.”

  Richie looks at me like he’s seeing me the way I seen him. Like Pop looks at a hog at slaughtering time, measuring the meat. He nods.

  “You get him to tell you the story. When I’m there,” he says.

  “No,” I say.

  “No?” he says.

  “No.”

  Kayla is making little mewling sounds, pulling at my ears. “I want eat, Jojo,” she says. “It’s enough we brought you back. Brought you here. What if Pop don’t want to tell that story? What if it’s something he don’t want to say?”

  “Don’t matter what he want. It matter what I need.”

  I jiggle Kayla. Turn in a circle, my feet sinking in the muddied grass. A cow lows nearby, and I hear: Cool and becoming of green things, it is. All the new grass. I stop my spin when I see his fierce eyes again.

  “If I get the story, you going to leave, right? You going to go away?” My voice edging up to a question, high as a girl’s. I clear my throat. Kayla pulls my hair.

  “I told you I’m going home,” Richie says. He takes a step before me but parts no grass, squelches no mud, and his face is furrowed: a piece of paper crumpled over on itself, a smudged ball hiding words.

  “You ain’t answer.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  He’s not specific enough. If he had skin and bones, I’d throw something at him. Pick up the corner of a cinder block at my feet and hurl it. Make him say it. But he’s not, and I don’t want to give him cause to change, to stay lurking around the house, around the animals, stealing all the light, reflecting it back wrong: a warped mirror. Casper, the black shaggy neighborhood mutt, lopes around the corner of the house, freezes in a stop, and barks. You smell wrong, I hear. Snake coming through water. The quick bite! Blood! Richie walks backward into the shadows, his hands palms out.

  “Fine,” I say.

  I let Casper’s bark turn me around. Know the dog is keeping him pinned to the tree, so I can jog up the steps and into the house, even as I feel Richie’s eyes tightening up my shoulders: a line pulled taut between us, razor-sharp.

  * * *

  The bacon is sitting on a plate lined with paper towels. I put Kayla on the table and pick the meat apart, peeling away what’s still a little gummy, still a little brown. I hand the meat to her, bit by bit, to eat. She eats so much I’m left with the charred pieces. I can’t even eat them, so I spit it all out and make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Michael and Leonie are in her room, their door closed, conversation a muffled purr. Mam’s room is still dark, her blinds closed. I walk in and open them and put the box fan in the window, turn it to a low hum. The air moves. Kayla marches around Mam’s bed, singing one of her nonsense songs. Mam stirs, her eyes open to slits. I get her water from the faucet and a straw, hold it up to her so she can drink. She holds the water in her mouth longer than she should, puffing out her cheeks in a balloon, works her way up to swallowing, and when it’s down, her face breaks like drinking that water hurt.

  “Mam?” I say, pulling a chair up to her bed, propping my chin on my folded fists, waiting for her to put a hand on my head like she always does. Her mouth quivers to a frown, and she doesn’t. I sit up, ask a question, and hope that it covers the pain behind my rib cage, which moves like a puppy turning in circles to settle and sleep. “How you feeling?”

  “Not good, baby.” She speaks in a whisper. I can hardly hear her over Kayla’s gibberish song.

  “The medicine ain’t working?”

  “Guess I’m getting used to it,” she huffs. The pain pulling all the lines of her face down.

  “Michael’s back,” I say.

  She raises her eyebrows. I realize it’s a nod.

  “I know.”

  “He hit Kayla this morning.”

  Mam looks straight at me then, not at the ceiling or off into the air, and I know she done shrugged off her pain as well as she can and she’s listening to me, hearing me the same way I hear Kayla when she’s upset.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I sit up straight-backed as Pop and frown.

  “No,” she says. “You old enough to hear this.”

  “Mam?”

  “Shush. I don’t know if it’s something I did. Or if it’s something that’s in Leonie. But she ain’t got the mothering instinct. I knew when you was little and we was out shopping, and she bought herself something to eat and ate it right in front of you, and you was sitting there crying hungry. I knew then.”

  Mam’s fingers is long and thin. Little more than bone. Cool to the touch, but I can still feel warmth like a small flame in the middle of her palm.

  “I never wanted you to be hungry, Jojo. It’s why I tried. I would do it if she wouldn’t. But now—”

  “It’s all right, Mam—”

  “Hush, boy.”

  Her fingernails used to be pink and clear. Now they seashells, salt-pitted and yellow.

  “She ain’t never going to feed you.”

  Her hands used to be muscled plump from all the work she did in the gardens, in the kitchen. She reaches out and I duck my head up under it so her palm on my scalp and my face in her sheets and I breathe it all in even though it hurts, and it smells like metal and sunburned grass and offal.

  “I hope I fed you enough. While I’m here. So you carry it with you. Like a camel.” I can hear the smile in her voice, fain
t. A baring of teeth. “Maybe that ain’t a good way of putting it. Like a well, Jojo. Pull that water up when you need it.”

  I cough into the blanket, partly from the smell of Mam dying, partly from knowing that she dying; it catches in the back of my throat and I know it’s a sob, but my face is in the sheets and nobody can see me cry. Kayla’s patting my leg. Her song: silent.

  “She hates me,” I say.

  “No, she love you. She don’t know how to show it. And her love for herself and her love for Michael—well, it gets in the way. It confuse her.”

  I wipe my eyes on the sheets by shaking my head and look up. Kayla climbs in my lap. Mam’s looking at me straight on. Her eyelashes ain’t never grew back, which makes her eyes look even bigger, and when Mam blinks, I realize we got the same eyes. Her mouth works like she’s chewing, and she swallows and grimaces again.

  “You ain’t never going to have that problem.”

  While she talking, I want to tell her about the boy. Want to ask her what she thinks I should do about Richie, but I don’t want to worry her, don’t want to put another thing on her when it’s taking everything in her to bear the pain, which I can see now. Like she’s floating on her back in an ocean of it. Like her skin’s a hull eaten hollow with barnacles, and the pain’s seeping through. Filling. Pushing her down and down and down. There’s a sound outside the window, and the blades of the box fan cut it as it carries into the room. Chopping it up. Sound like a baby crying. I look out and Richie’s passing under the window, letting out one little cry and then gulping in air. And then he’s letting out another cry, this one sounds like a cat yowling, and then gulping in air. He touches the bark of each pine tree as he passes up underneath it.

  “Mam? After you . . .” I can’t bring myself to say it, so I talk around it. Richie moans. “After, where you going to go?” Richie stops and lists. He’s staring up at the window, his face like a shattered plate; Casper barks off in the distance, a series of high yips. Richie rubs his neck. Mam looks at me and startles like a horse: for her, this means her eyelids jump.

  “Mam?”

  “You ain’t let that dog get into my garden, did you, Jojo?” she whispers.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Sounds like he treed a cat.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Kayla slides off my lap, walks to the fan, and puts her mouth on it. Every time Richie lets out a little catlike yowl, she hoots back. She laughs as the fan chops it up. Richie gets up, hands still kneading his throat, and walks, crooked and limping, right underneath the window.

  “After, Mam,” I say. “What happens when you pass away?”

  I couldn’t bear her being a ghost. Couldn’t take her sitting in the kitchen, invisible. Couldn’t take seeing Pop walk around her without touching her cheek, without bending to kiss her on her neck. Couldn’t bear to see Leonie sit on her without seeing, light up a cigarette, blow smoke rings in the warm, still air. Michael stealing her whisks and spatulas to cook in one of the sheds.

  “It’s like walking through a door, Jojo.”

  “But you won’t be no ghost, huh, Mam?” I have to ask even though I know the telling hurts her. Even though I feel like speaking’s bringing her leaving closer. Death, a great mouth set to swallow.

  Richie is rubbing the screen, his hand sliding from side to side. Kayla giggles.

  “Can’t say for sure. But I don’t think so. I think that only happens when the dying’s bad. Violent. The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it’s so awful even God can’t bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water.” She frowns: two fishhooks dimpling down. “That ain’t my way.”

  I rub Mam’s arm and the skin slides with my finger. Too thin.

  “That don’t mean I won’t be here, Jojo. I’ll be on the other side of the door. With everybody else that’s gone before. Your uncle Given, my mama and daddy, Pop’s mama and daddy.”

  There’s a growl and a hacking bark come from underneath the house, from underneath the floorboards, and I know Casper’s back and in the crawl space between the cinder blocks: a black shadow in the dusty dark.

  “How?”

  “Because we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.” Mam looks to the wall, closes her eyes. “My son.”

  Richie jerks away from the window and backs up, stumbling like an old man. His arms out in front of him. Casper saying: Wrong! No smell! Wingless bird. Walking worm. Back! I stop rubbing. Mam looks back at me like she can see me clear through the pain. Like she looked at me when I was younger and I lied to her when I got caught having a who-can-pee-the-furthest-up-the-wall contest in the boys’ bathroom at school.

  “You ever seen something like that? Something like a ghost?” Mam wheezes. “Something you thought was strange?”

  Richie’s climbing the tree like a rope. Gripping the young pine with his insoles, pushing, his hands flat to the feathered bark. Inching up. Swinging his leg around and sitting on a low branch, his arms and legs still wrapped around the trunk. The tree holding him like a baby. He yelps at Casper.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I ain’t never have the talent for it. Seeing the dead. I could read people, read the future or the past in they bodies. Know what was wrong or needed by their songs: in the plants, in the animals, too. But never saw the dead. Wanted it so bad after Given died—”

  Richie’s yelp slides into a humming. He’s singing to Casper, and there are words in it but I can’t understand them, like language flipped inside out. A skinned animal: an inverted pelt. I can’t help it. I gulp against the feeling I want to throw up all the food that I ever ate. Kayla’s rubbing the screen like Richie did, back and forth. Humming.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “But you could. You could have it. The vision.”

  Mam turns her head to one side, hearing Richie’s song. A grimace, like if she could move without pain, she’d be shaking her head no.

  “Is there something outside?”

  I shake my head for her. Casper whines.

  “You sure?”

  The blades cut Richie’s song. I can feel every wave of his dark crooning on my skin: a bad touch. Leonie slapping my face. Michael punching me in my chest. An older boy named Caleb who sat next to me in the last seat on the bus and put his hand on my lap and squeezed my dick before I elbowed him in the neck and the bus driver wrote me up when Caleb fell into the aisle, choking. All bad.

  “No, ma’am,” I say. I will not sink her.

  Chapter 12

  Richie

  Riv hugs them even when he’s not in the same room with them, even when he’s not touching them. The boy, Jojo, and the girl, Kayla. Riv holds them close. He sees that they eat in the morning: oatmeal and sausages. He cuts little slivers of butter and slides them into the steaming insides of the biscuits he mixes and kneads and bakes. The butter melts and oozes out of the sides, and I would give anything to taste bread made with such care: I imagine it moist and crumbly. Kayla smears butter over her face, and Riv laughs at her. Jojo has food at the side of his mouth, and Riv tells him to clean it off. Then they go off to Riv’s garden, where they pick strawberries and blackberries and weed until the sun is high. They eat the berries from the bush. I expect to see a winged shadow over them, but there is nothing but this: the garden, green and sweet. Life-giving flowers, ushering forth sweetness from fruit. Jojo sits on his haunches and chews. I bend over him.

  “Tell me,” I say, “what it taste like.”

  He ignores me.

  “Please.”

  He swallows, and I can read the answer in his face. No. How he holds the deliciousness inside him, a rich secret.

  “I want to remember,” I say. “Ask Riv. Ask him to tell you.”

  “Enough,” Jojo says, pulling at a weed with a deep root.

  “What you say?” Riv a
sks. He whips the weeds from the soil like knives through cake.

  “I done had enough berries,” Jojo says. “I’m full.” He looks through me and bends to pick at stray grass.

  Leonie and Michael leave without walking out to the garden. The red car cranks to life and growls down the road, and they disappear in the tunnel of trees. I think about climbing into the car with them, just to see where they go, but I don’t. I follow Jojo and Riv and Kayla instead. I walk in the boy’s footsteps, and I watch. I watch the way Riv ushers them around furrows and troughs, how he cooks them beans for dinner, the way he makes sure they are clean when they lie down to sleep. Watching this family grabs me inside, twists, and pulls tight. It hurts. It hurts so much I can’t look at it, so I don’t. I go outside. The night is cloudy. I want to burrow into the earth, to sleep, but I’m so close. I’m so close, I can hear the sound of the waters the scaly bird will lead me over tumbling with the wind. So I crawl under the house instead, and I lie in the dirt under the living room where they all sleep, making a cot of the earth. And I sing songs without words. The songs come to me out of the same air that brings the sound of the waters: I open my mouth, and I hear the rushing of the waves.

  * * *

  This is what I see:

  Across the face of the water, there is land. It is green and hilly, dense with trees, riven by rivers. The rivers flow backward: they begin in the sea and end inland. The air is gold: the gold of sunrise and sunset, perpetually peach. There are homes set atop mountain ranges, in valleys, on beaches. They are vivid blue and dark red, cloudy pink and deepest purple. They are yurts and adobe dwellings and teepees and longhouses and villas. Some of the homes are clustered together in small villages: graceful gatherings of round, steady huts with domed roofs. And there are cities, cities that harbor plazas and canals and buildings bearing minarets and hip and gable roofs and crouching beasts and massive skyscrapers that look as if they should collapse, so weirdly they flower into the sky. Yet they do not.