by Jesmyn Ward
“Cuz,” he says.
Randall almost drops the twenty-fourth egg he holds.
“Shit,” Randall says and turns.
“Sorry.” Manny’s shoulders. I loved his shoulders and his neck most of all. I want to open my mouth on his neck just once. He is the lightest thing in the clearing. I want to have him blazing over me again, just once. But he looks at Randall, and he half grins. It is only then that I can see the scar on his face, the skin pulling wrong. He has not come here for me. “We talk?”
Randall bends, places the last egg in the pot, puts the pot in my arms, and talks to Manny but looks at me. “Yeah,” he says. “Can you start these?” They walk outside together, stop at the foot of the back steps.
I stand with the pot. The eggs wobble against one another, sound like rocks at the bottom of a dry creek, rolling from a foot.
“Junior, go play,” Randall calls through the door. Junior shoots away, freed from his chores. He is all bald head and blurred arms and legs. I run water into the pot in the sink until it covers the eggs.
“Skeetah ain’t here?”
“Think he somewhere off in the woods running China.”
“She’s a beast.”
“Yeah.”
I sprinkle salt into the water, but there is more rice than salt in the shaker.
“Coach called you about the game?”
“Said they was paying for Bodean to go to camp.”
“I didn’t know.”
I light the stove with a match and set it to boil. I stand a few feet away from the door in the dark of the kitchen so they can’t see me, and I squint through the screen.
“I’m sorry,” Manny says.
“Well.” Randall sighs.
“I don’t know what happened.”
“My best friend got into a fight with my brother is what happened.”
“I had other shit on my mind. Wasn’t nothing against Skeet.”
“He don’t think that. He think you made him poison his dog.”
“I wouldn’t do no bullshit like that. You know me.”
Randall has nothing in his hands. Manny fans his face like he’s waving away gnats.
“He also think you dogging my sister.”
“Randall, come on, man.”
“What you want?”
“We like family.”
Manny shoves his hands into his pockets and bends in like he’s curling for a blow, as if he’s ashamed to say what he’s said.
“Rico your family. I ain’t blood.”
“Like blood.”
“That’s the problem.” Randall shakes his head like a horse trying to fling off reins. “I’m the only one.”
“That ain’t true.”
“Yeah it is.”
“I done watched Junior grow up with all of y’all. That’s real.”
“What about Esch and Skeet?”
“Them, too.”
“No,” Randall says. “It’s not the same.” Bubbles of air, tiny as those that rise up out of the mouths of fish in water, rise from the bottom of the pot, gather in the middle. Vapor mists from the center. “I got shit to do. I’ll see you later.”
Randall walks into the kitchen and I look up from the pot like I haven’t been standing on my tiptoes in the faint blue light of the burner’s fire, like I haven’t been listening.
“It’s going to take forever to boil. Leave it,” Randall says. He doesn’t look at me when he says it, tall and straight. He stalks past, closes the door to his room. I hear it shut, and I am out the screen door, running, still on my tiptoes, feet barely touching the ground. There he is, there, receding under the trees, a setting sun. I jump the ditch to the road.
“Wait!” I call. My voice is higher than I have ever heard it.
Manny stops, turning, and his face is a magnolia flower tossing in the wind, his eyes the bright yellow heart. Now I see it, now I don’t.
“What?” he says when I catch up to him. “Randall wanted something?”
Manny’s eyes slide past me to the ditch, to the road, up to the sky the color of a scoured pan.
“No,” I say. “Me.”
“I gotta go.” He turns, shows me the back of his head, his hair, his shoulders. Now I see it, now I don’t.
“I’m pregnant.”
He stops in profile. His nose is like a knife.
“And?”
His hair grows so fast it’s already starting to curl. Sweat beads at his hairline.
“It’s yours.”
“What?”
“Yours.”
Manny shakes his head. The knife cuts. The sweat rolls down his scar, is flung out onto the rotten asphalt.
“I ain’t got nothing here,” he says. Manny blinks at me when he says it. Looks at me head-on, for the second time ever. “Nothing.”
Nothing. For some reason I see Skeetah when I blink, Skeetah kneeling next to China, always kneeling, always stroking and loving and knowing her. Skeetah’s face when he stood across from Rico, when he told China, Make them know.
I am on him like China.
I fought Skeetah and Randall for play when we were younger. Once I punched Skeet in the stomach when we were wrestling and my arms felt like noodles, like he had no muscle to hit and I had no muscle to hit him with. I kicked Randall in the chest when he was picking with me and knocked the wind out of him. Once I fought a girl in the middle school locker room for laughing at my budding breasts; she sneered that I needed to tell my mama that I needed a training bra. My mama was four years dead then. That girl plucked my shirt where a bra strap would be and pushed me, and I turned back on her and swung blind, trying to smash her face in, kicking at her legs, elbowing her, beating with my whole body. She was twice my size, but I surprised her before she was able to push me off. I fell over the bench and the lockers cut a gash in my arm, but I left that girl with a knot rising purple on her head and a lip pink and tender as a pickled pig’s lips in a jar. She always says hello to me when she sees me in the hallway, three years after the fact. I am fast.
I am slapping him, over and over, my hands a flurry, a black blur. His face is hot and stinging as boiling water.
“Hey! Hey!” Manny yells. He blocks what he can with his elbows and forearms, but still I snake through. I slap so hard my hands hurt.
“I love you!”
“Esch!” The skin on his throat is red, his scar white.
“I loved you!”
I hit his Adam’s apple with the V where my thumb and pointer finger cross. He chokes.
“I loved you!” This is Medea wielding the knife. This is Medea cutting. I rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood.
“Stupid bitch! What is wrong with you?”
“You!”
Manny grabs me under my armpits, picks me up off the ground, and throws. I fly backward. My toes land first, skimming the road, then my heels thud, but I am moving too fast to stop and I hit the ground with my butt. I try to catch myself with my stinging hands and then they sting more. I’ve scraped the skin off.
“How you come to me saying something’s mines when you fuck everybody who come to the Pit?”
“You the only one I been with!” I rush him again.
“You better go to Big Henry with that bullshit!” Manny twists and shoves me away from him again, but I take the neck of his T-shirt with me when I go.
“I know!” I say. “I know it’s yours!”
“No it ain’t.”
“I’ma tell Randall.”
“You think they don’t know you a slut?” He spits this and it is red; I have drawn blood.
Manny shakes his head and snorts, skipping backward away from me, and then he is running down the narrowing road, being swallowed by the rustling brush, and I am shaking like the leaves, like the green around me, bent in the first fingering rush of the coming winds.
“You are!” I yell.
Tomorrow, I think, everything will be washed clean. What I carry i
n my stomach is relentless; like each unbearable day, it will dawn. I watch Manny getting smaller and smaller, and my ribs break like dry summer wood, and burn and burn and burn.
“The baby will tell,” I scream. “It’ll tell!” But the wind grabs my voice up and snatches it out and over the pines, and drops it there to die.
Randall finds me sitting in the ditch. My legs are over the side, and the blackberry vines are scratching them and there are ants crawling on my toes, but I don’t care. Tears run down my face like water and I cover my face with my shirt but it is too hot and I can’t make it go away. I can never make it stop never nothing. When Jason betrayed Medea to exile so he could marry another woman, she killed his bride, the bride’s father, and last her own children, and then flew away into the wind on dragons. She shrieked; Jason heard.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I tell him this through the cotton.
“We going to the white people’s house.”
“Who?”
“You and me.”
“For what?”
“We need supplies.” Randall says, and the day quiets for a moment, and I can hear the breath going in and out of him. “Did he say something to you?”
“No.” I wipe my face, let the shirt slide away and down. My eyes feel swollen and warm as ripe grapes. “He ain’t say nothing.”
“I need your help, Esch.” I have never seen one part of Randall soften when he’s awake, not the long line of his arms, his legs like steel posts, his face, always changing and making and saving and shooting things. But now, just for a breath, his face goes soft, and he looks like the baby pictures Mama took of him, pictures of a Randall I’d never seen before. “Please, Esch.”
I bend over and scrub my face dry with my shirt, but the tears still come.
“I can’t,” I sob.
“Please,” Randall whispers.
“Why?” I breathe.
“I need you.”
I scrub, wipe like I could wipe the love of Manny, the hate of Manny, Manny, away. And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do. I hiccup, but tears still run down my face. After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.
The start of my run through the woods with Randall is easier; where me and Skeet sprinted, hand in hand, Randall and I jog. I don’t breathe hard at the beginning, and I force myself to ask questions, to speak through the other pain.
“Where’s Junior?”
“Running around somewhere in here.”
“Skeet?”
“Him, too.”
There are no chattering squirrels, no haunted rabbits, no wading turtles in the woods. I don’t know where they have gone, but there are none here. When I look up into the sky, the gray of it shaking as I run, I see birds in great flocks that would darken the sun if we could see it through the thickening clouds. They are all flying away, all flying north. The flocks break and dip and soar, and they are Randall’s hand on a basketball, Skeet’s on a leash, my legs in a chase. I watch them until they vanish past the trees, and then there is only us, the woods, the leaves rattling underfoot. Vines catch my arms, my head; we tear through until we break out into the clearing before the fence, the field, the barn, the house, and I drop to my knees, and Randall leans back as if he would fall, both of us breathing hard, looking wet and newly born.
There are no cows, no egrets. Randall leaps over the fence without using his hands, jumps high as a deer, but I crawl through on my stomach, my belly feeling like a bowl sloshing with water. I swallow most of it now, and my face is wet with mostly sweat. We pick our way across the field, kicking at cow droppings and mushrooms. The grass seems denser, thicker. There is no blue truck, no white man and woman, no chasing dog. The windows of the house and the barn have been boarded over with thick pieces of plywood, but when I put my ear to the board over the window that Skeetah broke while Randall holds me up, one arm around the soft push of my abdomen and his other arm like a set under my butt, I can hear the cows, big and stupid, shuffling in the barn, letting out little lowing complaints, knocking the walls as if they are looking for escape. I wipe my eyes.
“The house,” Randall says.
Randall lets me down slow. The wood is rough under my hands. When I look at the boards in front of me, I see one dark splash like paint, one maroon tear from where Skeetah fell out of the window; it’s his blood. I wonder if the old limping man smiled when he saw it, felt some kind of joy at the fact that the boy was hurt, or if the limping white man just shook his head as he boarded it over, the anger making the hammer fly bad, bend the nails crooked so that they curve like commas.
The boards of the house are more even, more secure. They are not a patch-up of boards of different sizes like our house; there is no glass left peeking through cracks, only plywood closed smooth and tight as eyelids.
“Here.” Randall tries to slide his finger between the board and the wall, but only his fingernail fits. “You try,” he says, but my fingers will not go in either. I don’t even think Junior’s could. “We should’ve brought a crowbar.”
I shake my head.
“Fuck!” Randall yells. He punches the plywood and it dints, dimples in the middle, and there is the sound of breaking wood and breaking glass. When he pulls his fist back, he’s split the skin, smashed it, and he leaves blood on the board. He holds his hand. His face looks like how I imagine the glass behind the board looks; hard and lined, each piece sliding away from the other where they split, black in the cracks. His eyes look wet. “Shit.” The blood pools in the valleys between his knuckles, rolls to waterfall between his fingers. He looks at me. “I couldn’t do it even if I did have a crowbar.”
“You ain’t Skeet,” I say. The taste of my tears is like raw oysters.
“We have to, Esch.”
“It’s too thick.”
“We have to try.”
Randall knees his chest like he is putting on pants and then he kicks his heel hard into the center of the plywood where he dented it. The glass behind it shatters. He kicks again and the wood splits; it sounds like a shot. Randall stops, and we both look around, scared, but there is no old man swinging a gun like an axe, no pink-dressed woman, just the cows lowing in the barn in the dark, the wind rustling past the trees, the air so wet and hot it could be rain.
“One more time,” Randall says, and then he kicks again, all of his muscle straining against the hot day, the sealed gingerbread house, and the board cracks in two but will not fall because of the nails, and Randall is crouching on the ground, clutching his bad knee.
“The wrong knee,” he says, and blows on his kneecap like he’s scraped it bloody and he is trying to blow away the pain and grit, like Mama did to our scrapes when we were younger. If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles. “Look inside.”
I put my eye to the slit and there is darkness and the gauzy blow of curtains. Under the darkness, there is the empty smell of potpourri and Pine-Sol. Two fingers can fit through the crack, nothing more.
“There’s nothing there. It smells clean. Probably took everything when they evacuated.”
Randall rubs the skin around and below his knee.
“She looked like the type of woman that wouldn’t leave nothing to spoil.”
Randall laughs, but it is dry and scrapes past his throat like brown le
aves scratched along the ground by wind.
“Come on,” Randall says.
Randall clutches his hand to his chest when he walks, hopping on his bad knee. I stop at the edge of the clearing and look back at the barn, the cows safe inside it. I can see them brushing against one another in the rank hay dark, their wet noses turned up toward the ceiling, wondering where the blue has gone, the bitter green grass, their bird familiars. How they’d crave the touch of a wing.
On the walk back, it is weird to see Randall walking without swinging his long loose arms. The wood is a sleeping animal: still empty. It is all wrong. I hear the rustling before Randall does, and I have to reach out to stop him, since he has been watching his bad knee.
“Look.”
It is China. She drops something rust-colored and then shoves her nose in it from side to side like a screwdriver. Then she points with her head and dives into what she has dropped, rolling in it; she moves like smoke, the pink pads of her feet waving in the air. Her eyes are squeezed shut and she wears a wide, gum-bearing leer. Her fur is turning red.
“What is that?” Randall asks.
China must hear because she stops her squirming mid-roll and springs up, water frozen to ice, her lips sealed, her tail out. She sees us, looks down at her prize, and then raises her nose to the simmering sky and barks, once. Then she runs away.
It is a dead chicken, opened raw and still warm. I imagine that it looks like the inside of my throat, pink with salt and blood.
“That’s ours,” I say, but Randall is silent as he starts walk-hopping toward the Pit and the house.
“What are you doing?”