by Jesmyn Ward
“A runt,” he says. He carries it into the light.
It is brindle. Stripes of black and brown ride its ribs like a zebra’s. It is half the size of its brothers and sisters. Skeetah closes his fist, and it vanishes. “It’s alive,” he says. There is delight on his face. He is happy to have another puppy; if it lives, he can get maybe $200 for it, even if it is a runt. He opens his hand, and the puppy appears like the heart of a bloom. It is as still as a flower’s stigma. Skeetah’s mouth falls straight, his eyebrows flatten. He lays it down. “Probably going to die anyway.”
China does not lay down like a new mother. She does not suckle. She licks the big red puppy and then forgets him. She is looking past Skeetah to us. She bristles at us standing at the door. Skeetah grabs her neck collar, tries to calm her, but she is rigid. Junior pulls his way up Randall’s back. I think about hugging Skeetah before I go, but China is glowering, so I just smile at him. I don’t know if he sees me in the dark. He has done a good job. Only one puppy is dead, even though it is China’s first time birthing. China scratches at the earth floor of the shed as if she would dig a hole and bury the puppies from sight. In the ruins of the refuse-laden yard, Daddy is hitting something metal. We leave. Skeetah refastens the curtain behind us, pulling it tight against the still clear night. The shed falls dark.
I tell Junior to take a bath once we enter the house, but he ignores me, and it is not until Randall turns on the water and carries him to the bathtub that he washes off. Randall stands in the doorway watching Junior because he is convinced that when Junior closes the door to wash, he only sits on the edge of the bathtub and kicks his feet in the water. Junior hates bathing. I am the last to take a shower, and the water, even though I have only the cold spigot on, is lukewarm. August is always the month of the deepest heat, the heat that reaches so far in the earth it boils the water in the wells. When I go to bed, Junior is already asleep. The box fan in the window hums. I lie on my back and feel dizzy, light-headed, nauseous. I only ate once today. I see Manny above me, his face licking mine, the heat of his sweat, our waists meeting. How he sees me with his body. How he loves me like Jason. Junior snorts a baby snore, and I drift off with Manny’s breathing in my brain.
About the Author
© BEOWULF SHEEHAN
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She is also the editor of the New York Times bestselling anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living award.
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ALSO BY JESMYN WARD
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (editor)
Men We Reaped: A Memoir
Salvage the Bones: A Novel
Where the Line Bleeds: A Novel
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This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Jesmyn Ward
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First Scribner hardcover edition September 2017
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ISBN 978-1-5011-2606-2
ISBN 978-1-5011-2609-3 (ebook)
Excerpt from “The Gulf” from The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 by Derek Walcott, selected by Glyn Maxwell. Copyright © 2014 by Derek Walcott.