by Jesmyn Ward
“No,” I say. “I don’t remember.”
“I do,” Skeetah says, and he props his chin on his fists. “She told us she loved us when she got into the truck. And then she told us to be good. To look after each other.”
“I don’t remember that.” I think Skeetah is imagining it.
“She did.” Skeetah sits up, leans back in the bed again, and lays a still hand on China’s neck. She sighs. “You look like her. You know that?”
“No.”
“You do. You not as big as her, but in the face. Something about your lips and eyes. The older you get the more you do.”
I don’t know what to say, so I half grimace, and I shake my head. But Mama, Mama always here. See? I miss her so badly I have to swallow salt, imagine it running like lemon juice into the fresh cut that is my chest, feel it sting.
“Did you hear that?”
“What?” I sound stuffed again. Leaves slap the roof in great bunches. The rain is heavy, endless, hits the roof in quick crashing waves. At least the wind doesn’t sound like a train again.
“That,” Skeetah says, his head to one side, his ear cocked toward the window. His eyes gleam in the light of the lamp. He stands up, and China stands up with him, ears straight, tail pointed, tongue gone. Somewhere out in the storm, a dog is barking.
“Yeah,” I say, and then all three of us are at the window, peering out of the light edge left by the boards. We hear the dog but can’t see it; what we do see is the pines, the thin trees bending with the storm, bending almost to breaking. Even the oaks are losing leaves and branches in the gray light, the beating rain. The dog barks loudly, fast as a drum, and something about the way the bark rises at the end reminds me of Mama’s moans, of those bowing pines, of a body that can no longer hold itself together, of something on the verge of breaking. The high notes are little rips. It circles the house, its bark near and far. Is it one of Junior’s mutts, his mangy family member, seeking shelter, the cool bottom of a house and a knobby-kneed boy and no rain?
“We can’t.” Skeetah leans toward the window as if he could push his way through the glass and board and save that invisible dog, who for him, I know, must be China. She drops from where she has been standing on her hind legs with her paws pressed against the wall and leans into Skeetah’s side, head-butts his thigh, her smooth white head and floppy ears as soft as the swaddling blankets that Daddy brought Junior home in after he returned from the hospital and Mama didn’t. This your little brother. Claude Adam Batiste the second. Call him Junior. And then, Your mama didn’t make it. The searching dog barks one last time before the rain and wind tighten like a choke collar and silence him. China growls in answer, but swallows it when Skeetah kneels before her, takes her face in his hands, and smoothes her ears back so that her eyes are slits and she grins and her skin pulls tight and her head could be a naked skull.
China squeals and jumps up into a bark, skitters back and forth across Skeetah’s bed, over his knees; this is what makes me look up from my crouch on Randall’s bed, from my stomach, from me trying to burrow into myself, to safety. China looks to the ceiling, her teeth gleaming in the dark, ripping barks.
“China, what’s…?” Skeetah reaches out to grab her, to stop her from curling and running, and there is a loud, deafening boom. When it comes, China leaps from Skeetah’s bed and rushes to the door as if she would rip the wood to splinters with her teeth. Skeetah yanks the door open, and Randall is running into Daddy’s room with a lantern, Junior clinging to his waist while the wind yells outside and the house shudders. There was no need for the lamp; there is a hole in the ceiling in Daddy’s room, the trunk and branches of a tree tossing in the opening. It is a large bush growing wrong. China barks, her nose to the wind.
“Daddy!” Randall runs forward into the wind and rain streaming through the gaping hole, the gray day fisting through it. Daddy is on his knees in front of the dresser, pushing an envelope down his pants. He stands and sees us.
“Go on!” Daddy says. He waves at us, the bandage on his wounded hand flashing light. He is slack and then tight like a clothesline catching in the wind, and he shoves us out of the ruined room and into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him. Junior will not let go of Randall.
“We’ll stay in the living room.” Daddy says this as he slumps over on the sofa, pushing his head back into the cushion like Mama pushed hers back into the pillow, baring his neck. He’s blinking too much.
“Your hand,” Randall says.
“It’s fine,” says Daddy. “We going to stay here until the storm’s over.”
“When you think?” Skeetah asks.
“A few hours.”
China squeals and barks again.
“She knew,” I say.
“Knew what?” Daddy’s face is wet, and I don’t know whether it is water or sweat.
“Nothing,” Skeetah says.
“About the tree,” I say at the same time. Skeetah rubs China’s neck, and she gives a swallowed growl and sits, lays her head along Skeetah’s thigh and up his hip, her nose to him.
“She didn’t know nothing,” Skeetah says, and then he and China step as one, a new animal, toward the light opening of the hallway where the wind whistles in a thin sheet under Daddy’s door. They are going back to Skeetah and Randall’s room.
“Come in the living room, Skeet,” Daddy says. He rolls his eyes, closes them. Bares his teeth. “Please.”
I pick my blankets up, wrap them around me, and sit where I had lain. Skeetah walks back in with China, sets the bucket and China’s food and leashes and toys in the corner of the living room farthest away from Daddy, next to the TV. Skeetah lays his blanket against the corner, makes a chair, and China drapes herself across his lap, long and white, and lays her head along her paw and begins licking the pink pads of her feet. Skeetah rubs her, sets his small kerosene lamp down, and in the half-dark, China gleams butter yellow with the flame.
“Junior,” Randall says, “I know you ain’t pee yourself.”
Junior leans over, touches the ground beneath his butt, his face in his thighs.
“I didn’t do that.”
“Then why it’s all wet over here?”
We have been sitting in the living room, terrified and bored. I’m trying to read by the oil lamp, but the sound of the words are not coming together over the sound of the wind and the rain relentlessly bearing down on the house; they are fragments. Jason has remarried, and Medea is wailing. An exile, oh God, oh God, alone. And then: By death, oh, by death, shall the conflict be decided. Life’s little day ended. I shut the book, don’t even mark my place, and sit on it. I am cold. Skeetah and China look like they’ve fallen asleep, his hand on her flank and her breastbone on his knee, but when Randall says this, their eyes open to slits at the same time. The half deck of UNO cards that Randall had been attempting to teach Junior how to play stick to the floor around Junior’s legs. I shrug out of my covers; the thin stream of air that whispers from under Daddy’s door brushes past me like a boy in a school hallway, insistent and brusque, and Why are my shorts wet? Is it gone? Am I bleeding? Shouldn’t I be cramping? I stand. The floor underneath me is dark.
China rolls to her feet, her teeth out, and Skeetah grabs her by her scruff as she lunges. He holds her still. He stands, looking calmly about the room.
“It’s water. It’s coming in the house,” Skeetah says.
“Ain’t no water coming in the house. Wood just getting a little damp from the rain,” Daddy says.
“It’s coming up through the floor,” says Skeetah.
“Ain’t nowhere for it to come from.” Daddy waves at the room, waves like he’s stopping one of us from giving him something he doesn’t want: his antibiotics, a letter from a teacher, a school fund-raising brochure.
“Look,” Randall says, and he walks over to the window facing the street and bends like an old man, peering out. “Lot of trees on the road.”
“But you don’t see no water,” Daddy says.
Skeetah and China walk past Junior, who stands where Randall left him in front of the sofa. Junior is picking up each foot, setting it down; he looks at the bottoms as if he cannot believe that he has feet and that they are wet. He pulls his shorts away from him, but they stick anyway. Skeetah peers out of the window, with China next to him.
“There,” Skeetah says. Randall and I run to the window at Skeetah’s side, but Junior is there first, and we are all over each other, our feet wet, the carpet a soaked sponge where we stand, Daddy looking at the window like it isn’t boarded up, like he can see through it.
There is a lake growing in the yard. It moves under the broken trees like a creeping animal, a wide-nosed snake. Its head disappears under the house where we stand, its tail wider and wider, like it has eaten something greater than itself, and that great tail stretches out behind it into the woods, toward the Pit. China barks. The wind ripples the water and it is coming for us.
There is water over my toes.
“The Pit,” Randall sighs.
Daddy gets up then, walks slowly over to the window, each bone bent the wrong way in each joint. Randall moves so Daddy can see out of the crack.
“No,” Daddy says.
I shift, and the water licks my ankles. It is cold, cold as a first summer swim. China barks, and when she jumps down from the window and bounces, there is a splash.
“Daddy?” Randall says. He puts his arm over Junior, who, cringing with his eyes wide, hugs Randall’s leg. But for once, Randall’s arm doesn’t look like metal, like ribbon, like stone; it bends at the elbow, soft, without muscle, and looks nothing but human.
“Daddy!” Junior squeals, but he buries his face in Randall’s hip, and Randall’s hip eats the end of the word. Junior rises an inch or so; he must be on his toes. The water is up to the middle of my calf.
“Look,” I say.
There is something long and dark blue between the trees. It is a boat. Someone has come to save us. But then I squint and the wind lags clear for one second, and it is not a boat, and no one has come to save us. It is Daddy’s truck. The water has picked it up, pushed it from the Pit. The snake has come to eat and play.
“Your truck,” Skeetah says.
Daddy begins to laugh.
The snake has swallowed the whole yard and is opening its jaw under the house.
“Open the attic,” Daddy says.
The water is lapping the backs of my knees.
“It’s stuck,” Randall says. He is pulling at the string that hangs from the door of the attic, which is in the ceiling of the hallway.
“Move,” says Skeetah.
The water is tonguing its way up my thighs. Skeetah hands me the puppies’ bucket.
“Hurry,” Randall says.
The three puppies squeal little yips that sound like whispered barks. These are their first words.
“Pull down,” Daddy says. He frowns, holds his hand up like he is pulling the cord.
The water slides past my crotch, and I jump.
“All right!” Skeet yells. He pulls himself up on the cord, like he is swinging from a swing rope in a tree, and the attic door groans downward.
“Up!” Randall says, and he is shoving Junior up the ladder into the attic. China is swimming next to Skeetah, her head bobbing like a buoy.
“Go!” Skeetah says, and he pushes me toward the ladder. I float on the water, my toes dragging on the hallway carpet. He grabs my back and steadies me as I slog into the attic with the bucket.
“Esch!” Junior says.
“I’m here.” Junior’s eyes are white in the dark. The wind beats the roof, and it creaks. Randall is next, then Daddy, and last, Skeetah and China. I cup the bucket with my knees, sit on a pile of boxes, fish out a broken ornament that is digging into my thigh. Christmas decorations. Randall is sitting on an old chain saw, Junior cowering next to him. Daddy takes out the package he put in his pants after the tree fell into his room. It is a clear plastic bag. He opens the packet, pulls out pictures. Just before Skeetah pulls shut the attic door, seals us in darkness, Daddy makes as if he would touch one of the pictures, hesitant, as lightly as if he is dislodging an eyelash, but his glistening finger stops short, and he wraps the pictures again and puts them in his pants. Mama.
The attic door moans shut.
The roof is thin; we can hear every fumbling rush of the wind, every torrent of rain. And it is so dark that we cannot see each other, but we hear China barking, and her bark sounds like a fat dog’s, so deep, like dense cloth ripping.
“Quiet, China!” Skeetah says, and China shuts her jaw so quickly and so hard, I can hear the click of her teeth shuttering together. I put my face down in the bucket; the puppies do not hear. They mewl still. I feel them with my hand, still downy, their coats just now turning to silk, and they squirm at my touch. The white, the brindle, the black and white. They lick for milk.
“The house,” Randall says, and his voice is steady, calm, but I can hardly contain the panic I feel when the house tilts, slowly as an unmoored boat.
“It’s the water,” Skeetah says. “It’s the water.”
“Shit!” Daddy yells, and then we are all bracing in the dark as the house tilts again.
“Water,” I say.
“It never came back here.” Daddy breathes. “The damn creek.”
“Daddy,” I say, and I’m surprised at how clear my voice is, how solid, how sure, like a hand that can be held in the dark. “Water’s in the attic.”
The water is faster this time; it wraps liquid fingers around my toes, my ankles, begins creeping up my calves. This is a fast seduction. The wind howls.
“There was a family…,” Randall says.
“We know,” Daddy says. Fourteen of them drowned in Camille. In their attic. The house lifts up off of its bricks again, and rocks.
“We’re not drowning in this fucking attic,” Skeet says, and I hear a banging, again and again. I look up and debris falls in my eyes. He is beating at the inside of the roof. He is making a way.
“Move,” Randall says. “Junior, go by Esch.” And I feel Junior’s little pin fingers on my wrists, and he bangs into something, and he is a monkey on top of the bucket, locked to my lap. “I got it.”
Randall is swinging something in the dark, and when it crashes into the roof, it makes a dent, a chink of light. He bashes the wood, grunts. Whatever he swings is making a hole. He swings it again, and the wood opens to a small hole no bigger than my finger, and I see that he is swinging the chain saw, hitting the roof with the blunt end.
“Any gas”-Randall bashes-“in here?”
“Can’t remember,” Daddy yells. The storm speaks through the hole, funnels wind and rain through. We squint toward it. The water is over my crotch. The house lists.
Randall cranks once, twice. He pulls the cord back a third time and it catches, and the saw buzzes to life. He shoves it through the finger-wide opening, cuts a jagged line, draws it back out, cuts another jagged line, a parenthesis, before it chugs to a stop. He tries to crank it again, but it will not start. He swings it instead, an awkward hammer, and the wood cracks, bends outward. He swings again, and the closed eyelid he drew with the cutting saw, with the blows, flutters, and the roof opens. The storm screams, I have been waiting for you. Light floods the flooded attic, close as a coffin. Randall grabs Junior, who swings around and clings to his back, his small hands tight as clothespins, and Randall climbs out and into the hungry maw of the storm.
It is terrible. It is the flailing wind that lashes like an extension cord used as a beating belt. It is the rain, which stings like stones, which drives into our eyes and bids them shut. It is the water, swirling and gathering and spreading on all sides, brown with an undercurrent of red to it, the clay of the Pit like a cut that won’t stop leaking. It is the remains of the yard, the refrigerators and lawn mowers and the RV and mattresses, floating like a fleet. It is trees and branches breaking, popping like Black Cat firecrackers in an e
ndless crackle of explosions, over and over and again and again. It is us huddling together on the roof, me with the wire of the bucket handle looped over my shoulder, shaking against the plastic. It is everywhere. Daddy kneels behind us, tries to gather all of us to him. Skeetah hugs China, and she howls. Daddy’s truck careens slowly in the yard.
Skeetah is hunched over, picking at his jeans. He takes off his pants, tries to hold them still in front of him; the legs whip in the wind. He shoves China’s back legs into the crotch, and then he flings one pant leg over his shoulder, and the other he tucks under his underarm.
“Tie it!” Skeetah yells.
I tie it in a knot. My fingers are stiff and numb. I pull the wet fabric as hard as I can, test it. China’s head and legs are smashed to his chest, pinned under the fabric. She is his baby in a sling, and she is shaking.
“Look!” Skeet says and points. I follow his finger to the hollow carcass of Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph’s house. The top half and the eaves of the house are above water. “It’s on a hill!” Skeetah screams.
“How are we going to get there?” Randall yells.
“The tree!” Skeetah is inching down the roof to a spreading oak tree that touches our house and stretches to MaMa’s house. It rises like a jungle gym over the seething water. “We’re going to climb the tree!”
“No!” Daddy yells. “We’re going to stay here!”
“What if the water keeps coming?” Randall asks. “Better for us to take that chance than stay here and drown!”
Junior’s teeth are sealed together, his lips peeled back. His eyes are blasted open. As Randall picks his way down the roof toward the branch, Junior looks back. Randall braces an arm across his chest, holds Junior’s arm.