by Jesmyn Ward
“Naw, Esch. I can jump.”
“No you can’t,” Daddy says. “Go on.”
Skeet puts one hand on my shoulder. I’m surprised by how hard his skin is; his calluses are like pebbles embedded in the soft sandy skin of his hand, where Daddy’s whole hands are like gravel. When Skeetah isn’t smiling, the corners of his lips turn down. Now that he’s mad, his chin looks hard, and his mouth is a straight line.
“I’m going to step and grab, okay? Quick as I can.”
I nod. Skeetah looks at me for a moment more, and says it again.
“Quick as I can.”
When Skeetah steps, his sneaker bears down on my thigh and the rubber grooves feel like cleats. It hurts. I can’t help but let a little sound come out of my throat, but then I close it off so that I can’t even breathe. He stands and grabs a ceiling beam behind the plaster. My leg is shaking.
“Right there,” Daddy says.
When Skeetah pushes off my leg and pulls with his arms, it feels like his foot is grinding into my skin. Another noise surprises its way out of my throat, and I breathe hard, ashamed. When we were little and we would fall and skin a knee and cry, Daddy would roll his eyes, tell us to stop. Stop. I straighten up and rub my leg.
“All right,” Daddy says. Daddy throws up the hammer and Skeetah moves over to the side of the attic where I can’t see and starts wrenching. I huddle over my leg, rubbing at the marks Skeetah’s left in my skin. The first board comes away fast. I look up to see Skeetah flinging it through the hole in the ceiling, and it lands too near Daddy’s feet. I jump out of the way. “Watch out, boy.”
Daddy hands me the plywood and motions toward the door. The other piece of plywood cracks and comes away, and I look back to see Skeetah sending it sailing through the ceiling like a paper airplane, directly for Daddy, who ducks.
“Shit!”
“Sorry,” Skeetah says as he jumps down, landing like a cat. The board has clipped Daddy, bounced off the wall to clatter to the floor. Skeetah is smiling.
“Gotdamnit, boy.”
“I said I was sorry.” Skeetah’s not smiling anymore, but when I push my board through the door, I smile into my shirt, because he has that same look on his face as he did the day he mastered the razor eating, and I know it’s for me.
Into the woods to the east of us, about a mile through pine and oaks so big and old their arms have grown to rest in the dirt, there is a pasture full of grazing cows. A wooden and barbed-wire fence rims the pasture. In the middle sits a big brown barn, and next to it, a small white house with a high sloped tin roof and small windows. White people live there.
Skeetah found the place one day by accident while we were playing an all-day game of chase in the woods, running in circles, hiding and seeking for hours in teams. He stumbled into a clearing where the pines had been cut brutally away so that stumps dotted the field beyond the fence like chairs that no one would ever sit on. Egrets picked their way through the grass, attentive and showy as fussy girlfriends at the cows’ sides. When I came crashing out of the woods, I forgot to touch Skeetah, startled at the way the sky opened up at the field, the way the land looked wrong. There was too much blue. A pickup truck slid soundlessly out of a shadow in a gap in the woods, which I figured must’ve been their driveway, and a cow lowed. An older white man and woman got out of the truck when it parked, waving away the cloud of dust they’d kicked up. Off in the distance, we heard a dog bark.
“Come on, Skeet,” I said.
He stood a moment longer, squinting at the house, his head to one side.
“I’ma leave you,” I said, and I turned to trot off back into the soft underside of the woods, the green reach of the trees. It wasn’t until I was deep in the gloom of the forest that I heard him running so quickly to catch up with me that I looked back scared, thinking the white people who lived in that house on the edge of the black heart of Bois Sauvage had come after us, but saw only Skeet jogging, his face so calm. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
This is where Skeetah says we are going when he comes into my room, changed out of the jeans he was wearing in Mother Lizbeth’s house into a T-shirt the color of pine needles and dark brown Dickies that have holes in both of the knees. He doesn’t have any socks on under his tennis shoes.
“You got to change,” he says. “Wear something green or brown or black. Don’t wear nothing white or tan.”
“Why not?”
“You got to blend in.” Skeetah leaves to wait in the hallway, and I dig through my drawers until I find a black T-shirt and a pair of black basketball shorts that Randall gave me because they were too small for him. They originally had the St. Catherine high school logo on them, which means he stole them and that they were practice shorts, but they’re so old that the dragonfly blue writing at the bottom that would have made them unacceptable to Skeetah has flaked off and left a faded gray shadow where it was. I pull my hair back into a ponytail, put on some black socks and my tennis shoes, smooth my big T-shirt over my puffy stomach. Skeetah knocks on the wall twice, and I know this is his way of telling me to hurry up.
“Let’s go.”
We run out the door, scatter the chickens before us, and they whirl about like crape myrtle petals blown loose by summer rain. Brown and rust red and white, the only sound the swish of their wings. China interrupts, barks.
Away from the Pit, the pine trees reach skyward, their green-needled tops stand perfectly still. Once in a while, they shiver in the breeze that moves across their tops. They seem to nod to something that I cannot hear, and I wonder if it is the hum of José out in the Gulf, singing to himself. The breeze doesn’t touch us down here. Down here, the air is thick and hot. The trees are so dense that there’s only a little undergrowth, and the bushes fight for their bright spots on the hard-packed, shadowy earth. There are birds, like yesterday, but these are small and brown, so small that they could fit in the middle of my hand or in the maw of China’s mouth. They are following us. As we walk through the wood on an unseen trail, the tiny birds fly from tree to tree, chattering sharply with each other, keeping pace with us. In the dense air, the oaks stand apart from the piney clusters: solemn, immovable. Spanish moss hangs from their arms, gray as an old king’s beard. Skeetah grabs my hand, and I almost jump away from him, surprised at the feel of it around mine, his fingers hard, the small calluses on his palm from China’s leash now dry and scratchy as old bread. He pulls and we run through a corridor of pines, oaks, birch, birds. I can’t help it. I lean back against his pull, and I laugh.
We fall into a pace. My face feels tight and hot, and the air coming into my nose feels like water. I am swimming through the air. My body does what it was made to do: it moves. Skeetah cannot leave me. I am his equal. Skeetah sprints a little faster, and when the slack in my arm is still there because I am still at his side, he looks back at me quickly and smiles widely. There, silver. He has a razor in his cheek. Is this how Medea ran with her brother, hand in hand, away from their father’s hold to join the Argonauts? Did every step feel like the running leap a bird takes before flight? When we come to the edge of the clearing, he lets my hand go. I sink to my knees, lean forward, and bury my face in the pine straw, breathing in the baked sap of the fallen leaves, feeling the sweat dripping off of me everywhere. I need to pee; there is a wet weight that makes me think of the baby. I find a bush. When I come back, Skeetah is flipping the razor over his scarred knuckles, his shirt in his hand. He wipes his pale head, drying stinging sweat. I don’t want to bare my stomach, so I don’t wipe my face with the hem of my heavy shirt. Beyond the barbed wire and the lolling cows, the barn and house sit, small in the distance. The house must have been added on to over the years because it is uneven: on one end of the house there is a lean-to shed, and with the roof of the sloping front porch, it looks like a ship manned by rowers on each side. We are here.
“You got to keep watch.”
“Where you going?”
“I’m going to see if I can get into the barn.
See that little window on the side? The one right above that trailer?”
“Yeah.”
“I bet you they don’t even lock them.”
“Why do you want to go in a barn?”
“They got cow wormer in there. I know it.”
“You can’t give your dogs cow wormer.”
“Yes, I can. Rico was talking about it when his dog and China was mating. Say that’s the best kind of wormer to give a dog. Make them a little sick, but it knock all of them worms out. Everybody does it.”
“So you going to steal it?”
“I can’t lose no more.”
“Well, how I’m going to let you know if somebody’s coming?”
“You see that group of stumps right there? Them three all huddled up next to each other close to the middle of the field?”
“Yeah.”
“You going to lay there, and if the white people come, you going to whistle. And then you going to keep low and start running to the woods.”
“What if they get you?”
“Don’t stop,” he says, looking me in the face, his head forward and down like a dog standing across from another at the end of his leash, straining, ready to fight. “You hear me? Don’t stop.”
We pick our way around the edges of the field, circle the eye of the house and barn, fight through the wooden lash. Skeetah is still holding his shirt in one hand, but he’s eaten the razor. He moves through the wood carefully, folding branches in his hands like dog chains, holding them lightly so he doesn’t break them, and letting them go with two fingers. He holds them for me, but even then he still catches me with several of them, and the branches feel like popped rubber bands when they hit me on my arms, or in my forehead. I make a noise.
“Sorry,” he says, glancing back.
I shrug even though he can’t see it as he peers toward the house. We are working our way toward the house side of the pasture, Skeetah looking for cars, for movement. In the shadow of the house away from the barn, a puppy lolls. A mutt. Skeetah pauses, drops to his knees. He puts on his T-shirt and wets one fingertip, holds it up to the air. His head is to the side with one ear up as if he is listening to the trees, the insects droning in waves. I shrug at him again, this time with my hands up.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Seeing if we upwind or downwind.”
“Okay, Crocodile Hunter.” I expect him to laugh, but he doesn’t even grin. He wets two more fingers, holds them up. “You know he’s dead, right?”
“Shut up, Esch.” Skeetah’s quiet, wipes his hands off on his pants. “That must have been the dog we heard that first time.” He licks his finger and holds it up again, but soon drops it. “I can’t tell.”
We are standing in the middle of a patch of blackberry vines. Their barbed-wire twine catches on my ankles, fingers a shin, draws blood in short, deep lines like a child’s scratch. I knee the air, trying to pull away, only to get caught up in more on my calf, around my toe.
“Hold still.” Skeetah grabs them as he’d grabbed the branches and pulls. “They can smell blood, you know.”
“Not from this far, Skeet.”
“Fine, don’t believe me.” The vines peel away. Skeetah wets his fingers again, but this time he wipes away the droplets of blood that have gathered on my legs like summer gnats. He wipes them away in dabs, licks his fingers again, wipes. He has the same patient look Mama had on her face when she used to find us crusty in public, smears of Kool-Aid along our mouths, crumbs on our cheeks. She cleaned us like kittens. He bends to wipe the seams of my socks, and his bald head gleams with sweat. He picks up my leg and I balance with one hand on his head. His shaved skin reminds me of scales when I rub against it, and it is cool like a puddle of water that has been turning dark and dry at the edges in a tree’s shade.
We worm our way through the woods as we watch the house for movement. We slide on our stomachs under bushes so tangled and overgrown that we cannot crouch or crawl through them. We slither like snakes, grab dirt and pine straw with our elbows, and pull. Skeetah stops often, straw and twigs sliding off his slick head to catch on his shoulders like holiday tinsel, and he listens. I stop, too, try my hardest to be so still, to hear the threat, but the blood beats through my ears so strongly I cannot hear anything over that and the whooshing of my breath. Skeetah crawls through a stand, and we start again. Dust turns to mud on our arms, leaves us striped. Bits of sunlight bite through the tops of the pines, that murmur once and twice and are quiet. There is nothing but us creeping through the underbrush. A rabbit sits, watching us, as we make the halfway mark around the circle of the field and its quiet house. It twitches its ears, stares at us in profile, one large black eye like a wet marble in its face, wide and glazed as if it is seeing something supernatural. We keep walking, and it stays put, even after we leave it sitting in the little clearing we’d broken through, even after we leave it for the road.
The path to the road is less thick. Here the trees are mostly the kind that lose their leaves in the winter, but they are green and full with summer. The wind makes them clap as we pass. The road is narrow, and from what I can see of the house, we only have around three-fourths of the field between us and where we started. A vein of oyster shells runs down the middle of the road, but the rest is paved with small rocks that look like they come from the river. Sand rises up in little hills at the road’s edges, and Skeetah and I kneel next to them as he squints down the drive, his right hand up to me. Wait, his lacy knuckles say.
Insects sizzle and answer us. Heat. A little further down the drive, a snake sleeps. Skeetah waves me forward, and we run across the road. Our feet over the stones are light as skipped rocks.
The drive is endless, winks out in the distance where the trees on either side meet in the middle. For a year, we were very unlucky, and St. Catherine schools changed our bus route so that we were picked up at 6:30 A.M. and for the next hour we rode up and out of the black Bois that we knew and into the white Bois that we didn’t that spread out and upcountry, past churches and one-room stores selling cigarettes and hot fries, chips and cold drinks in glass bottles and penny candy, the kind of stores that have one gas tank out front with the writing scratched off. Randall would sleep with his head on the glass, Skeetah would do homework, and I would study all the other houses in other lonely fields; the trailers, the long low brick homes, small wood shacks that looked slapped together, that couldn’t be bigger than two rooms. And all the kids we picked up were white: broad-shouldered, thick boys with wiry hair on their lips and little girls with red cheeks and eyes watery blue, their faces scrubbed rough. I wonder if they have their own Skeetahs and Esches crawling around the edges of their fields, like ants under the floorboards marching in line toward sugar left open in the cabinet.
The house is plain from all angles: its white is faded to tan by the sun, and all the windows are shut with white curtains drawn over them. It’s a blind house with closed eyes. There’s a raised concrete porch running across the front of the house, and some rocking chairs, painted bright blue, the kind of bright blue I’ve seen on the lizards that live in the seams of our walls, that crouch still on the front porch. The barn is unpainted and tall, and the doors are shut. The wood is old and dark, like the kind of wood Papa Joseph used to build Mother Lizbeth’s house. It looks similiar, as if all the walls are so old they’re about to peel away from each other at the edges.
“Shhhh,” Skeetah breathes, and I don’t know if he’s telling me to be quiet or calling my name. But he is standing still, so I stop behind him. He points. There, in the cove of trees where we first viewed the house and barn, in the cove of trees that leads to the Pit-someone is there.
Skeetah moves with his back curved, his fingers touching the ground as we scoot forward from shadow to shadow. We hug the trees. It’s not until we’re laying on our sides, peeping over a red dirt hill, that I see things I think I know, like the rubber band swing of an arm, a careful sway and settle of limbs. Randall and Big Henr
y. And then a piping. Junior.
“Who house is that?”
“Some white people’s, Junior,” Randall answers.
“You sure you saw them heading this way?” Big Henry asks.
“Soon as me and Junior jumped the ditch to the yard, we saw them running off back in here. Fast.”
“How you know they came here?”
“I don’t,” Randall breathed. “But this all they got back here, and they ain’t got enough people for chase. If we find them, I bet they’re going to want to play.”
“I want to go see the cows,” Junior says, jumping up again and again, trying to bounce level with Randall’s face. He gets as far as his chest. “Please.”
“No,” Randall says. “You can see them from here.”
I push up from the hill, ready to walk over. Skeetah grabs my arm, stops me mid-rise, and it hurts almost, the way he pulls at the shoulder. He is shaking his head, and I cannot understand what is in his face. He points to the ground, tries to pull me down next to him so I won’t let them know where we are, what we’re about to do.
“They can help,” I whisper. “More eyes.”
He still has my wrist, pulling it tight to him like a rope to his side, as if he can make me heel. I snatch my hand from him, and it slides through his grip like a wet fish.
“Yes,” I say, and I start walking. He doesn’t have any choice but to follow, so I don’t even look back. There is a rustling and a wet crunch of pine needles, and I know that he is following.
Randall, who is all edges and honed sharp to see what others can’t, hear what others can’t, is the first to hear us.
“I thought I saw y’all coming back here.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Why y’all was running so fast?” Randall asks. Big Henry is resting on a tree, bent over so that he is sitting on air, the trunk his chair back.