by Jesmyn Ward
Time floods the room in a storm surge.
I wail.
* * *
We cry in chorus. Pop folded over in the door, me with Mama’s warm nightgown still in my hands, and Michaela with her face smashed into Jojo’s shoulder. But not Jojo. His eyes are shiny but nothing comes from them, not even when he asks:
“What did you say?”
I can’t speak. Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.
“Leonie!”
Anger spreads through me: oil over water.
“She asked,” I say.
“Naw.” Jojo bounces Michaela in his arms, looks at Mama like he’s waiting for her to open her eyes, turn her head, say: Silly Jojo. “Your words. They let in a river. That’s what took her and Uncle Given away.”
“Yes.” He doesn’t understand what it means, to have the first thing you ever done right by your mama be to usher in her gods. To let her go.
Pop is sliding his way up the door to stand. But there’s still a curve there at the top of his back: his shoulders a bowl. His head swings on his neck like a pendulum. His throat: broken.
“She did, Jojo.” Pop’s voice is the only thing about him with some hardness to it: a sheathed knife. “She couldn’t bear that pain.”
“Mam wouldn’t leave us. Not even with Uncle Given.”
Jojo gains what Pop’s lost of his bearing. First, a brace across his thighs, all the bowlegged softness of his preadolescence dissolved to a granite stance.
“She did,” I say.
Then across his chest, which makes his shoulders crowbar straight.
“She said—” Jojo says.
“It was a mercy, son,” Pop says.
And then the headpiece so that the baby face, the last of the milk fat, is steel-still, frozen for war. Only Jojo’s eyes peer out, carrying some of the boy in them.
“What you want?” I ask. “To say I’m sorry?”
Those eyes.
“To say I ain’t want to?”
I can’t control my voice. It whistles, high and whip-thin. There is a rope of fire from my eyes, behind my nose, down my throat, and it coils in a noose in my stomach. Mama is still warm.
“ ’Cause I ain’t. I did what she needed me,” I say.
She could be sleeping. I ain’t seen her face this smooth, without tension, in years. I want to slap her awake, for asking me to let her go. I want to slap Jojo, for looking at me like I had a choice. And I want to bring Given back from the dead and make him flesh again just so I can slap him, too, for leaving. For taking her. There’s too much blank sky where a tree once stood. All wrong. The noose tightens.
“Nothing,” Jojo says. “You can’t give me nothing.”
He looks at Mama when he says it, and I stop smoothing her hair back from her still face. And then he’s looking at me and he’s hard as Pop and soft as Mama. Censure and pity. I’m a book and he can read every word. I know this. He sees me. He knows it all.
“Girl,” Pop says.
And then it stops tight and I am raging, hateful at this world, and I let Mama slide to the mattress and I stand and run at Jojo, who backs away, but he is not quick enough because I am there, and when I hit his face, pain cracks through my palm, pings through my fingers. So I do it again. And I do it again before I realize Michaela’s squalling in his arms, scrambling up his chest, trying to get away from me. And Jojo’s straight, straight as Pop, all the little boy gone from his eyes: the tide gone out, the sun scorching the residue of water away, leaving hot sand baking to concrete. And Pop’s at my side, his body folding over me like a kite falling from the sky as he grabs both of my arms and pulls them together so that my palms touch.
“That’s enough,” Pop says. “No more, Leonie.”
“You don’t know,” I say. “You don’t!” Jojo’s rubbing his face into Michaela’s little shirt, and I want so much. I want to hit him again and I want to hold him to me and palm his head again like when he was a hairless baby and I want to tell Jojo, We a family, and I want to ask him: What you seen, boy, what you seen? But I don’t do none of that. Instead, I yank away from Pop, walk past Jojo and Michaela, and leave Mama on the bed, her face up to the ceiling, her eyes open, all the warmth gone from out the middle of her. Cold at the heart, time worming its way through her hardening veins.
* * *
When Michael comes back, I’m on the porch. He ignores the steps and leaps to where I am sitting. The wood creaks when he lands, and I imagine it crumbling, dry-rotted and warped from the heat, me falling through where I sit on the floor down to the clay earth underneath, that opening up, a hole straight down: an endless well. It is the first hot day of the spring, a foretaste of the damnation that will suffuse the air in the summer, that will make everyone and everything bend.
“Baby?”
“Let’s go.”
“What? I just got back. I figured we could take the kids up to the river today.”
“Mama’s gone.” I can’t stop my voice breaking between the two words. Can’t stop the cry that comes out of my mouth instead of the sigh.
Michael sits on the floor next to me, pulls me into his lap: arms, rump, legs, and all, so that I am a great baby, and I slump into him, knowing that he can bear me. Will bear me. I put my nose in his stubble-roughened neck.
“Let’s go.”
“Shhhh,” he murmurs.
“Up to Al’s.”
Michael knows. He knows what I’m really asking for: the seed at the pulpy heart of the fruit.
“We can just leave.”
To get high. To see Given again. Even as I think it, I know he won’t come. That wherever he has gone with Mama is final. But the part that Mama looked at in pity across the table, that part hopes.
“We can’t,” he says.
“Please.” The word is small and acid as a burp. It lingers between us. Michael grimaces as if he can smell the horror and grief in it, all of it distilled to one pungent syllable.
“The kids.”
The sky has turned the color of sandy red clay: orange cream. The heat of the day at its heaviest: the insects awoken from their winter slumber. I cannot bear the world.
“I can’t,” I say, and there are so many other words behind that. I can’t be a mother right now. I can’t be a daughter. I can’t remember. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. And he hears them, because he rolls forward and stands with me, picks me up, and carries me off the porch to the car. He puts me in the passenger seat, closes the door, and climbs behind the wheel. The car shrinks the world to this: me and him in this dome of glass, all the hateful light and dogs shying into ditches and docile cows and crowding trees, the memory of my words, of Mama’s gray paper face, of Jojo’s and Michaela’s reaction to my slaps, of Pop’s shrinking, and of Given’s second leaving. Our world: an aquarium.
“Just a ride,” Michael says.
But I know that if I continue to ask, sour the air of the car with pleases, he will drive to Misty’s, get her to call her friends up north, call Al, make one last call to Pop to say: Just a few days. That he will drive for hours into the black-soiled heart of the state, back toward the cage that held him, drive so far the horizon opens up like a shucked oyster shell. That if I ask, he will go. Because something in him also wants to leave his teary hug with his mother, his fight with his father, my death-crowded household, behind. We move forward, and the air from the open windows makes the glass shudder, alive as a bed of mollusks fluttering in the rush of the tide: a shimmer of froth and sand. The tires catch and spit gravel. We hold hands and pretend at forgetting.
Chapter 15
Jojo
I sleep in Leonie’s bed now. I don’t have to worry about her kicking me out of it, waking me up with a punch to the back, because she ain’t never here. Not really. She come back every week, stay for two days, and then leave again. Her and Michael sleep on the sofa, both of them fish-thin, slender as two gray sardines, packed just as tight. They don’t
move when I walk past them out the door in the morning to bring Kayla to the Head Start bus. Some mornings they gone by the time I come back inside for my book bag. The long dent in the sofa the only way I know they was there.
They sleep on the sofa because Pop sleeps in Mam’s room now. He got rid of the hospital bed the day we buried her. Dragged it out behind the house, into the woods, and burned it. Told me not to come back there, but I saw the smoke. Heard the flames slapping. Sometimes, at night, after Kayla done fell asleep on my shoulder, so deep her head’s heavy as a cantaloupe, I walk to the kitchen to get a glass of water and I hear Pop through the door, hear his voice threading through the keyhole. Once I heard him clear through the wall. First I thought he was praying, but then, from the way his voice whipped up and down, I knew he wasn’t. Sound like he was talking to somebody. I asked him the next day, when I got home from school and he was sitting in his usual spot, waiting on the porch with Kayla sitting next to him on the swing.
“Pop?”
He was shelling pecans. He looked up at me, but his hands kept working, kept breaking the shell into shards, prying the meat free. Every other half he’d get, he’d pass it to Kayla, and she’d pop the whole thing in her mouth, smile at me when she chewed.
“Was you talking to somebody last night?”
He paused, half a pecan in his hand. Kayla patted his arm, prodding.
“Pop,” she said. “I want it, Pop.”
He passed it to her.
“Did Leonie call?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“I should’ve known,” I said, and spat off the porch into the sand. I wished she was there, imagined what it would feel like if I spat right at her. If she’d even notice.
“Don’t,” Pop said, and went back to shelling. “She’s still your mother.”
“Michael?” I said.
Pop brushed the bitter dust that rinds the meat from his hands and shook his head, and after that, if I heard him through the door or through the walls, his voice rising like smoke up into the night, I didn’t even ask. Because in the swing of his head, the swish, the folding of his wrinkled neck, I saw him lying in the bed in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, looking where she looked when she died, his eyes staring, heard him calling her name, a name I hadn’t heard said since before the cancer: Philomène. And then: Phillie. And then I knew what he was doing when he thought us asleep. Something like praying, but not to God. How he was speaking and asking and searching the craters and the mountains in the ceiling. Searching for Mam. Kayla patted his arm again, but she didn’t ask for another pecan. Just rubbed him like Pop was a puppy, flea-itching and half bald, starved for love.
* * *
Sometimes, late at night, when I’m listening to Pop search the dark, and Kayla’s snoring beside me, I think I understand Leonie. I think I know something about what she feels. That maybe I know a little bit about why she left after Mam died, why she slapped me, why she ran. I feel it in me, too. An itching in my hands. A kicking in my feet. A fluttering in the middle of my chest. An unsettling. Deeper. It turns me awake every time I feel myself slipping. It tosses me like a ball through the air. Around 3 a.m., it lets me drop, and I sleep.
I don’t feel it during the day. Mostly. But something about the way the sky turns peach when the sun’s on its way down, sinking into the horizon like a rock into water, brings it back. So I take to walking when I know it’s coming. But not down the street like my crazy grand-uncle. I walk back through the woods. Follow the trails past Pop’s property line, down into the shadowed half-light under the pine trees, where the brown needles spread like a carpet over the red clay earth, and when I walk, it makes no sound.
One day, there’s a raccoon pawing at a fallen tree, digging grubs out the trunk. He hisses: Mine, mine, all mine. Another day, a large white snake drops onto the path in front of me, falls from a branch of a crooked oak before slithering to the roots and climbing back up the tree to hunt newborn squirrels and weak-beaked, just-hatched birds. The rasp of scales against bark: The boy floats and wanders. Still stuck. And the next, a vulture circles overhead, black-feathered and strong, calling: Here, boy. The way through is here. You have the scale still? Here. And then that feeling of dissatisfaction, of wormy grief, eases a little, because I know I see what Mam saw. I hear what she heard. In those meetings, she’s a little closer. Until I see the boy laying, curled into the roots of a great live oak, looking half-dead and half-sleep, and all ghost.
“Hey,” Richie says.
Sometimes I see more than Mam.
“Ugh,” I say.
I’m mad as shit. Because when I see his big ears and his arms and legs skinny and brittle as fallen branches, I know part of me been waiting on Mam. Been hoping I’d run into her on one of my walks. And when I see him, part of me know it ain’t never going to be Mam, never going to be her sitting on a tree trunk, a rotten stump, waiting for me. That I’m never going to see her or hear Uncle Given call me nephew again.
The wind swoops down into the gloaming, brushes me with a great wing, and rises.
“What you doing here?” I say.
“I’m here,” he says. He runs his hand through his hair, and it is still as rain-eaten stone.
“I see that.”
“No.” Richie reclines against the trunk like it is a great seat. “I thought . . .” He looks toward the trail behind me. Looks toward my house. Makes a sound like breath but doesn’t breathe.
“What?”
“I thought once I knew, I could. Cross the waters. Be home. Maybe there, I could”—the word sounds like a ripped rag—“become something else. Maybe, I could. Become. The song.”
I am cold.
“I hear it. Sometimes. When the sun. Sets. When the sun. Rises. The song. In snatches. The stars. A record. The sky. A great record. The lives. Of the living. Of those beyond. See it in flashes. The sound. Beyond the waters.”
“But?”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t—”
“I can’t. Come inside. I tried. Yesterday. There has to be some need, some lack. Like a keyhole. Makes it so I can come in. But after all that—your mam, your uncle. Your mama. I can’t. You’ve”—he makes that breath-sucking sound again—“changed. Ain’t no need. Or at least, ain’t no need big enough for a key.”
A yellow jacket whizzes my neck, wanting to land and suck. I wave it away, and it circles again, until I slap at it, feel the hard little body ping off my palm and ricochet off into the gloom, in search of easier food.
“There’s so many,” Richie says. His voice is molasses slow. “So many of us,” he says. “Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song.” He sounds tired. He lies down, looks up at me from his bed. His head is bent wrong from the root beneath it, which butts up against his neck. A hard pillow. “Stuck. You seen. The Snake? Did you know?”
I shake my head.
“Me,” he drags, “neither. So many crying loose. Lost.”
His blinks: a cat on the ledge of a nap.
“Now you understand.” He closes his eyes. Lets go a bullfrog’s croak. “Now you understand life. Now you know. Death.” He is quiet as sleep, but he moves. One long brown line, rippling like water. And then I see it. He ascends the tree like the white snake. He undulates along the trunk, to the branches, where he rolls out along one, again in a recline. And the branches are full. They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves. There are women and men and boys and girls. Some of them near to babies. They crouch, looking at me. Black and brown and the closest near baby, smoke white. None of them reveal their deaths, but I see it in their eyes, their great black eyes. They perch like birds, but look as people. They speak with their eyes: He raped me and suffocated me until I died I put my hands up and he shot me eight times she locked me in the shed and starved me to death while I listened to my babies playing with her in the yard they came in my cell in the middle of the night and they hung me they found I could read and
they dragged me out to the barn and gouged my eyes before they beat me still I was sick and he said I was an abomination and Jesus say suffer little children so let her go and he put me under the water and I couldn’t breathe. Eyes blink as the sun blazes and winks below the forest line so that the ghosts catch the color, reflect the red. The sun making scarlet plumage of the clothes they wear: rags and breeches, T-shirts and tignons, fedoras and hoodies. Their eyes close and then open as one, looking down on me, and then up at the sky, as the wind circles them and moans, their mouths gaping now, the airy rush their song, the rush: Yes.
I stand until there is no sun. I stand until I smell pine through the salt and sulfur. I stand until the moon rises and their mouths close and they are a murder of silver crows. I stand until the forest is a black-knuckled multitude. I stand until I bend, find a hollow stick, turn to the house, and whip the air in front of me, away from the dead, to find Pop, holding Kayla. They shine bright as the ghosts in the dark.
“We was worried about you,” Pop says.
Yes, they hiss.
“You didn’t come back,” he says. I shrug even though he can’t see it. Kayla squirms.
“Down,” she says.
“No,” Pop says.
“Down, Pop. Please,” she says.
“Let’s go,” I say. Knowing that tree of ghosts is there makes the skin on my back burn, like hundreds of ants are crawling up my spine, seeking tenderness between the bones to bite. I know the boy is there, watching, waving like grass in water.
“Please,” Kayla says, and Pop lets her slide down.