by Jesmyn Ward
“You left your lights on,” Skeetah says.
“Now how I’m going to make money after the storm?” Daddy slaps his truck, but it is awkward, at odds. It slides into a caress. “What you say?”
“I said you left your lights on.” Skeetah is prying at a reluctant nail, his head down, concentrating. He watches Daddy out of the corner of his eyes.
“Oh.” Daddy reaches into the truck and pushes the knob to turn off the headlights. He walks toward Skeetah slowly. This is his drunk walk: purposeful, plodding. “What you doing?”
“Nothing.” Skeetah stills, stops pulling at the nail, but stays bent over.
“Nothing?”
“At all.”
“I see you doing something, so you can’t be doing nothing.”
“Ain’t you tired?”
“What?”
“You been busy trying to get parts for that dump truck all day.”
“Damn right,” Daddy says. “The U-Pull-It, the Salvage, all looked at me crazy. No dump truck parts. No help when I was looking through the cars. Look at me like they don’t know when a man’s talking when I tell them a bad storm’s coming.”
Skeetah straightens, balances on the balls of his feet, preparing to outwait Daddy. The hammer is on his knee.
“Them’s boards. You been in my piles?”
“Naw.”
“I got them gathered for the house. You always meddling. You want the windows to shatter?”
“Daddy, I ain’t mess with your wood.”
“Well, where you get it from, then?”
“Found it off up in the woods.” Skeet is running the hammer back and forth on his leg. He is waiting for the step that turns Daddy mean.
“You ain’t found shit in them woods.” Daddy is waving his hand in the air as if he is waving away night beetles startled to flight, wading through the glossy brown bugs with shells as hard as butterscotch candies. He spits. “Did you?”
“Yes.” Skeetah is very quiet. The hammer is still.
“Bullshit!” Daddy yells. “Everything I do for y’all and y’all don’t appreciate shit!” He raises his arms again, as if he has stirred more bugs to motion. He reaches to grab Skeetah’s arm, to pull him to standing and then shove him, probably. This is what he does when he wants to manhandle, humiliate; he pulls one of us toward him, shakes, and then shoves us hard backward so that we fall in the dirt. So that we sprawl like toddlers learning to walk: dirt on our faces and our hands, faces wet with crying or mucus, ashamed. Skeetah is rigid, as straight as the hammer hanging at his side. Daddy tries to shove him but he is slow to let go; it is as if his hands are deaf to what his brain wants them to do, and they grip Skeetah’s shoulders, hard. He shakes Skeetah.
“Let me go, Daddy.” This is so quiet that I can barely hear it.
China is standing in the doorway of the shed. She does not growl. She does not bark. She only stands, head cocked to one side, her forelegs locked wide, her breasts adding more bulk to her, the rest of her lost to the darkness of the shed. She is still.
“Let go!”
“All I do!” Daddy shoves Skeet so hard that Daddy lurches backward with the force of it, but he catches himself before falling.
Skeetah stutters backward but lands crouching, still on his feet. China darts forward. Skeet holds the hammer like a baton.
“Hold,” Skeetah calls. “Hold!” There is wetness to his voice. China stops where she is. She is one of the flaking statues at the graveyard next to the park, an angel streaked by rain, burning bright.
“I wish she would,” Daddy says, his arms straight as his sides. “I wish she would.”
Skeetah edges sideways to China, lays down the hammer, and puts his hand over her muzzle. She is marble under his fingers.
“I’d take her upcountry and shoot her.”
“No.”
“Call the county pound. Make you watch them take her away.”
Skeetah has his arm around China’s back, tucked over and under her stomach, his hand lost somewhere in her breasts. China does not turn and lick him. She watches Daddy still. Skeetah rubs her chest with his other hand, smoothes the fur in broad downward strokes again and again.
“I’m trying to save us,” Daddy says. Skeetah crouches. “Y’all need to learn to appreciate me. You hear me?”
The nightbugs answer back yesssssssss. Skeetah ignores Daddy, rubs China, glances back and forth between them.
“Put them gotdamn boards back where you found them. You hear me?”
China’s tail lowers, but her ears are still laid back down her skull like a crest of feathers. Skeetah is whispering to her, murmuring.
“You hear me?” Daddy yells, takes a halting step toward Skeet. China’s tail rises.
“Yes,” Skeetah says. He is facing Daddy, staring at him plainly, his face smooth and open, only his mouth barely moving when he speaks. “Yes.”
“Good.” Daddy steps back. Skeet leans on China to stop her from moving. Daddy turns to walk into the house. He shuffles sideways, slow and deliberate, watching Skeet and China watch him leave them to the abandoned hammer, the fallen frame, the dark expanse sounding of bug and wood and wind spreading out and away from the two of them like a bride’s train.
THE SIXTH DAY: A STEADY HAND
Daddy is knocking down what is left of the chicken coop. The chickens and rooster have long abandoned it. After summers of heavy rain the wood grew soft and rotten, and then the short, knuckle-freezing winters dried it up and hollowed the woody pulp out, and it began to sag and buckle into the earth. It used to have Mama’s clothesline tied to it with the other end fixed to a pine tree. After Mama died, Daddy moved the clothesline to a closer tree, but he didn’t tie it tight enough, so when Randall and I wash clothes and hang them out with wooden clothespins, the line sags, and our pants dangle in the dirt.
Skeetah slept out in the shed with the dogs after he faced Daddy with the hammer last night. I have been sitting on the sofa near the living room window, waiting for him to come into the house, because I know he will circle around and enter the front door to avoid passing Daddy in the back. But Skeet has not surfaced. He could always hold his breath the longest when we first began swimming in the pit, crouched on the silty, junk-reefed bottom; we would circle him like anxious boats, calling him to the surface, but he would remain still and bubbling below. I take breaks and sneak cans of Vienna sausages in the bathroom, swallowing all five quickly. They are so light they could be air. I tried to read this morning, but I stopped in the quest for the Golden Fleece, distracted again by Medea, who can only think of Jason, her face red, her heart aflame, engulfed by sweet pain. The goddess struck her with love, and she had no choices. I could not concentrate. My stomach was its own animal, and thoughts of Manny kept surfacing like swimmers in my brain; I had my own tender pain. I slid my book between the wall and my bed and slunk to the kitchen, filching Daddy’s hurricane supplies. I eat, and nothing touches my stomach, nothing tells me it is full with food, with something more than food.
Thwack, thwack, thwack, sounds the hammer. The wood creaks. One panel falls off. Daddy begins cussing, calling down sonofabitches, fuck this’s, and gotdamnits. I am tired of waiting. I grab another can of sausages, stick it in the pocket of my shorts. I will go to Skeetah like Medea went to her brother when they fled on their great adventure with the Argonauts. I will offer my help.
Skeetah looks like somebody’s punched him in both eyes. The sound of Daddy’s hammer in the shed threads through the door, and it steadily pulses like blood. China is reclined, the puppies squealing at her tits. Her head is laid on her paws, and she does not look up when I step over the threshold. Junior is a crow, perched on a metal drum beside the door, eating a pack of peanut butter crackers. It makes me hungry.
“Something’s wrong,” Skeetah says. He is sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. He lets his head roll back, and his Adam’s apple bulges so prominently it looks like bone.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
His eyes burn like he has fever.
“She been too-easy. Usually she let them suck and then fight them off when they done had enough, but they been sucking for almost an hour and she ain’t moved.”
“Maybe she just tired, like you said yesterday.”
Daddy’s hammer beats at the room.
“That ain’t it.”
“Well, then what?”
“I think I gave her too much.”
“You did what Manny said.”
“How you know Manny knew what he was doing?”
“Rico probably showed him how.”
“And who say Rico going to show him the right way to do it if he know Manny going to show me?”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“Who?”
“Manny.” I swallow his name. He has to be better than that. I know it.
Skeetah speaks to the ceiling, his eyes wide, his elbows hanging from his knees with his hands clasped; this is his prayer.
“You don’t know,” he says.
“Everybody ain’t always plotting against you and China, Skeet.”
He crawls across the floor, waves his hand in front of China’s face. She follows him with her eyes, sighs so hard she raises dirt on her linoleum floor in a dusty wave.
“Ain’t nobody said that, Esch.” Skeetah puts his hand on China’s neck, as careful as Mama used to take biscuits from the oven. China breathes hard again, pushes one of the puppies away from her desultorily. “That’s my girl.”
“She probably just need to eat something.”
“I can’t lose her.” Skeetah’s bald head looks muddy from sleeping on the dirty floor of the shed. Mama’s arms would look like that when she was pulling greens in the small garden plot she kept behind the house. It was fenced off with wooden slats from an old baby crib Daddy had found at the side of the road. There is danger in what Skeetah says, in even thinking China could die. Reckless to say it aloud, to call it down, to make it possible.
“Why don’t you go take a bath?” I imagine the gashes at his side, seeing them turn red with infection under Randall’s old wrap. We catch boils on the Pit as easily as we used to catch stray dogs, and I know enough about them to understand that they are bacterial infections. He’s not going to want to go to the hospital, and Daddy isn’t going to want to take him if it comes to that. “Your stomach.”
“I’m all right.” He is rubbing China’s head to the beat of Daddy’s hammer.
“You need to be clean at the fight. Healthy. So do she. If you hurting, what she going to do?” This is the way to his heart. His pride. He stops petting China, lets his hand rest on the warm globe of her skull. She sighs and kicks another puppy away. The triangle of sunshine disappears and appears again on the floor, hidden by clouds and then free again; when Skeetah looks up at me, he squints.
“Fine. Watch her.” Skeetah stands, walks to the door, shoves Junior in passing so that he almost falls off the barrel.
“Scab!” Junior yells.
“And don’t let Junior touch nothing.”
China feebly kicks at the puppies. She scoots along on her back to get away from them, and only stops twitching when her back is against the wall. The puppies make little squeaking noises, paw the air, roll helplessly on their sides. Their eyes are slivers of fingernails. There are four: the white China clone, the red one that looks like Kilo, the brindle runt, and the black-and-white one with patterns on the fur. They wobble away from China. I crouch in the door, my belly pushing out so that it pushes against my thighs, my knees; I pull my T-shirt away from my stomach. China eyes us all lazily, and then puts her head to her paws, closes her eyes, and, as far as I can tell, falls asleep.
“Esch?”
“What, Junior?” The puppies are flailing across the floor. Junior jumps down from his perch, lands with a thud in the dirt next to me, and crouches.
“They need to go back by China,” he says. He lets his hands hang across his knees and dangle down, but even then, it still looks as if he is reaching out to them. “They going to go out the door.”
“How they going to do that with us sitting here?”
“They got gaps.” Junior brushes his hand between us. “Here.”
“Don’t touch them.” I pull at my T-shirt again. Junior’s breath smells like peanut butter. I’m so tired; it washes through me like blinding, heavy rain. China’s ear twitches in her sleep. I wish she could talk.
“Aw, Esch.” Junior leans forward on his haunches, tipping over toward the puppies, slowly. “I’m just going to put them back. See?” He grabs the white one by the nape, pinches it with his whole hand, and moves it a foot back so it is closer to China. She breathes sleepily. Junior looks back at me, smiling, his lips closed over his teeth, the multiple gaps, the digs of decay in the crevices. “See?”
“You do it, but quick.” China’s tail jerks in her sleep, and then she is still. “Before she wakes up.”
“Okay.” Junior picks up the red puppy, drops it next to its sibling. His lips part over his teeth, and he is really smiling.
“Hurry,” I whisper. I want to sleep like China, lie down on the cool dirt of the shed.
“All right,” he whispers. The spotted one wiggles a little in his hand, feeble and blind as an earthworm, before he sets it down.
“You can’t touch them again,” I breathe. A muscle spasms in China’s side: a white sheet flapping in the wind on a clothesline. “Hear?”
Junior grabs the last puppy, the brindle runt, around the belly. His thumb and middle finger touch as he grabs its rib cage. The puppy is skinny, not growing milk fat like the others. Junior brings it to his nose; this close, its fur looks like it’s moving. Fleas thread their way through its downy hair. Its head falls to the side, and it yanks it back in the other direction. I’m surprised its neck is so strong when it is only a child’s handful of fur and skin and bones.
“Hear?”
“Yeah.” Junior is not moving.
“Put it down!” I hiss. I want to slap Junior, but I know it will wake China. Junior is sniffing the puppy, and I swear that if I weren’t there, he would lick it. China lets out a mewling sleep growl.
“Gotdamnit!” I grab the slim stick of his arm hard. Dig my fingernails in. Hope he can feel the fear in my hands.
“All right, Esch!” Junior whines, pulling from me, still clutching the puppy. China kicks.
“Do it!” I dig. I am sweating, hot under my arms. I am burning. “Junior!”
“All right.”
Junior’s smile is gone. His mouth pulls tight at the corners, baring his bottom gums. That is his crying face. His back is narrow and hard as a ruler. He leans over, lets the puppy roll from his hand. It tumbles on its side, stops, and sweeps its head along the floor. Junior yanks his arm away, cradles it to his chest, and refuses to look at me. Instead he gazes at the puppies, whispers furiously through his downturned lips.
“That hurt, Esch. That really hurt.”
“What if Skeet had come in? What if China had woke up?”
My hands feel weak now that they are not gripping Junior. When he was a baby, Randall and I would pass him back and forth on the sofa, feeding him, rubbing his stomach, palming his head. Randall said that he frowned like Mama.
“You made me bleed.” Junior spits on his hand, rubs it back and forth across his forearm where I have left red marks that look like winking eyes. “You didn’t have to do it so hard.”
“You don’t listen,” I say. Junior never cried when he was little.
“Still.” He wipes his spitty hand across his eyes.
“You never know,” I say. China huffs in her sleep again. “You know that Junior, don’t you?” My hand flops in China’s direction. “You know her.”
China sleep-growls again, high and sharp. I touch Junior’s back, feel down the marble chain of his spine. He yanks away, still holding his arm, and looks at me, his eyes like the dark heart of an oyster. I look back to China to make sure she is asleep, make sure that her pupp
ies aren’t straying too far away, make sure that my shirt is still pulled away from my stomach. I am tired again. Junior sits on his legs in the dirt, far enough away from me so that I can’t grab him, but still next to me. I had expected him to run under the house.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Junior bends over and braces himself on his arms in the dirt, his butt in the air. He nods at the puppies. When he was a baby, this is how he would fall asleep on the sofa, in the bed with Randall. The puppies are swimming blindly, as if through very deep water, away from China, toward him again. I wonder if he has been sneaking into the shed when we are gone with China, whether he has already been playing with them.
“Can we go to the park today?” he asks. Daddy beats the coop twice, then swears. He is hung over. He will be mean. I peel back the top of the sausage can, take one out, and hand it to Junior. China rolls on her back to face the wall, to escape her puppies in sleep the best that she can, and I nod.
“Yeah, we can go.”
When we were younger and Mama had to get us up in the morning for school, she would touch us on our backs first. And when she felt us twitch under her hands, felt us move toward morning, she would softly tell us to wake up, that it was time for school. When she died and Daddy had to wake us up, he wouldn’t touch us. He’d knock on the wall next to our door, hard: shout, Wake up. When Skeetah comes back out to the shed in a black wifebeater and jean shorts, he’s already sweating. He wakes China like Mama used to wake us. The puppies roll away from him. He puts them in a larger box, where they scuffle and scratch unseen.
“She needs to get up,” Skeet says. When we tell him that we are walking to the park, he is resolved. “She needs to work it out.”
Skeetah puts her on a leash and then picks her up, slinging her over one shoulder. Her hind legs tangle in his thighs and make it hard for him to walk. He hasn’t done this since she was a puppy. Then she would smile over his shoulder, licking the salt from his ear and neck. Now she frowns, her eyes half closed, nodding to sleep. A thin line of spit stretches to his back. Skeetah hoists her up again and again, and it is only when we have rounded the house, circled an old tub, the husk of a car I never remember seeing run, and jumped the ditch to the ragged asphalt road does he set her down. Pines sway on both sides with a sudden wind, and China lists with them. She is shaking. Her white hair dusts Skeetah’s shoulders, which look hard. He is frowning. He yanks at her leash.