by Jesmyn Ward
Christophe walked quickly. The fear kept surging back for him. Someone was on the verge of grabbing him. His shoulders itched. He swung the stick back and forth with his hand as he walked. He surprised himself with a high-pitched laugh. What the hell was he going to do with this stick? He was clutching the thing like a machete. He shook his head, tried to batten the fear down in his chest, and waved the stick like a wand. He flicked his wrist as if to throw it, but he didn’t. His fingers wouldn’t let it go. He thought to laugh again, but he didn’t. He quickened his pace. Vale’s house. The woods. Uncle Paul’s house. The woods. The field where Johnny kept his old, broke-down horse. It grazed, snorting softly, and pulled up bunches of grass. Christophe was surprised that he could hear the grass rip. The woods. Ma-mee’s house. He leapt over the ditch and ran to the porch. By the time he reached the screen door, he was sprinting. He threw the stick down next to the steps and pulled open the door and rushed inside. The fear had slammed into him, had choked him the most at the moment his hand closed over the door handle. He locked the door shut behind him and hopped across the kitchen floor and through the living room on his toes. He tried not to hit the worst of the boards that creaked.
Their room door was open. He eased into the room, breathing hard. He shucked his pants and squinted into the darkness. His brother was asleep: his back was turned to Christophe’s bed, his face to the wall. Christophe heard him breathing deeply and slowly. The alarm clock read 4:10. He cracked open a drawer and pulled out a pair of basketball shorts and put them on. He lay down in his bed on his back and stared at the ceiling as he pulled the sheet up to his chest. Only when the flat sheet slid coolly over his shins did the fear fully dissipate in his chest. It dissolved so quickly that he felt foolish lying there in his bed. Still he could not help himself from staring at the room, from lying on his side so that he faced the door. The light from the bathroom shone in the hallway and draped the doorway with a little weak half-moon. He blinked at it, half expecting a shadow to move across it and snuff it out, and fell asleep.
4
MA-MEE WOKE AROUND FIVE MINUTES before she felt the first heated touch of sunlight on her bed. When Lucien had built the house, she had insisted he put their room on the side of the house facing east, alongside the kitchen. Back then, he had bought the land from the county government for a little bit of nothing. He’d saved up working carpentry and yard jobs for vacationing white families who owned beach homes, mansions really, on the shore. It was what Paul did now. Lucien had been a hard worker: he was frugal, so he’d saved from the time he was twelve. After he’d married Ma-mee, then known as Lillian, at eighteen, he’d bought eight acres of property up the road from his father in Bois Sauvage. It was enough to build a house on, to raise a couple of small feed and food crops for the family, and to keep a horse or two. His brothers and his father had helped him lay the foundation, raise the frame, piece by piece in slow, painful spurts: Ma-mee remembered eating beans and portioning out biscuits for months to save money as they bought the house board by board. She remembered craving green things, craving watermelons swollen red with water, and after the house was completed, she was almost pleased enough with the produce to not resent the hours of work: of weeding and watering, her back a shield against the sun.
When the house was done, it was small and had an uneven look to it, as if all those boards had been nailed together crooked, as if they resisted fitting together cleanly. In those days, Ma-mee had hated waking up early in the morning to a day of hard work, of housekeeping and planting and child rearing, but somehow it made it easier to do so when the sun crept its way across the bed early in the morning, and she could rise to look out the window through the thin white cotton curtains to see beams of it lacing their way through the rows of corn.
Ma-mee lay in the bed waiting for the rising heat to take form in the room and grab her by the leg. The ticking clock, the sound of the scrabbling chickens in the dilapidated coop in a corner of the yard, and the listing hum of insects saturated the room. The sound was like another body in the bed with her. She didn’t seem to need sleep these days. When she woke, she was instantly awake and alert. She couldn’t go to sleep before eleven and always woke up minutes before the rising sun entered the room. She’d taken such pleasure in sleeping when she was young that her inability to sleep tired her in an abstract way. It marked her as old, along with the diabetes, the partial blindness, the changes in the community around her. When she was younger, when Lucien had been alive and her children had been growing up, some of her uncles and brothers had been angry, unreasonable chronic drunks. She knew some of her kids smoked weed. But the crackheads and drugs that seemed to steal the sense from people, these were new. It made her feel weary and worn to sit on the porch and squint out at the small dark spots she could see passing back and forth on the street, a few lonely, solitary crackheads searching for dealers, cousins or neighbors’ children who walked the road and looked to her like flies crawling across a screen.
She did not like the slow ache of all her movements. It bothered her that she often dreamt in a language that no one around her spoke any longer, that she woke still thinking in creole French, to a wide, lonely bed, an emptying house. Her boys could not understand this. She was afraid of the lethargic feeling that washed over her sometimes that reminded her of floating in water. She’d feel it while sitting in the chair in front of the TV staring at the blobs of color and light as she listened to one of the boys describing a show for her, and it made her want to close her eyes, to blink slowly, and just stop moving. Later, when she’d lie in bed at night with her rosary in her hand before she went to sleep and fingered the plastic beads, the litany of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, she’d absently think that it was death approaching. She thought of gathering Spanish moss with her mother as a young child to stuff their mattresses with and pausing to look up at the sky when she was in a patch of sunlight to realize that the sun was not blinking on and off, but rather, clouds were moving quickly through the sky. They were passing between her and the sun and impeding the light. This is what these fits of lethargy and utter exhaustion felt like to her: a shadow passing over her, a scuttling cloud obscuring her from the sun of life.
It was tentative, the first touch. It was no more than a tap, really, there on the left side of her calf. It stung a little through the sheet. The day would be hot like all the rest. She lay there for a minute, felt the touch spread, felt the stinging bear down on her leg, and pushed herself up and out of the bed. It was time to get up. Paul had brought a couple of pounds of shrimp to the house the night before. She wanted to clean and cook them before the worst heat of the day, before they began to turn to meal and stink like warm flesh and sea salt. She pulled on a gown, and didn’t bother with socks or slippers. She’d rather go barefoot.
Even though she had memorized the contours of the house long ago through habit, it still comforted her to feel her way through the rooms with her feet, to know that the facets of the house existed as absolutes even though it all looked to her as if she had her eyes open underwater. When she noticed the blurriness the first time, that’s what she had thought, that there was excess water in her eye: tears, maybe. Things like that happened to older people. When she awoke the next morning, it was still there: a watery film. She denied it, afraid. She prayed and waited until she woke up one morning and realized the edges had been washed out of everything. She was drowned. Ma-mee walked to the kitchen in a sliding shuffle: carpet, wood of the hallway, scratchy carpet of the living room, the uneven tile of the kitchen.
Ma-mee heard it: a body rising, someone awake, one of the boys moving around in their room. She placed the plastic bag of shrimp in the sink, plugged the drain, and turned on the water so the ice could melt, so the shrimp could defrost. Which boy was it? The sounds were light and quick. They were moving fast, and they were trying to be quiet. A drawer slid shut a little too hard, and she heard a clipped tread. Christophe. So he would be the one up and running then. She sat down at the table ju
st in time for him to come tiptoeing into the kitchen and stop short.
“Good morning.”
“Morning, Ma-mee.”
“You sleep alright?”
“Yes, ma’am.” His voice sounded like he’d swallowed a mouthful of gravel.
“Sounds like you done had better.”
Christophe shifted: he was leaning as if he was about to go. He was thinking of an excuse. She ran her fingertips across the wood of the tabletop and thought of his thick curly hair. She wanted him next to her, and she would not allow him to run. He took a step.
“Paul brought some shrimp by last night. Around ten pounds or so.”
“Oh yeah?” He hadn’t spoken so softly since he was a little boy.
“Yes, sir. More than I can peel by myself. They in the sink defrosting.” She passed her hand across the wood again, and gave him her best sweet, flirting smile. “I’m glad you woke up so early. I was hoping you could help me with them.”
She heard him brush his hands down the front of his white shirt. She knew that if she could see details, it would be wrinkled. Clean, but wrinkled.
“I got to take a shower.”
“Alright.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Christophe was looking at her, studying her. He whispered, “Yes, ma’am.” He walked slowly from the room. Seconds later, she heard the shower running. She hummed to herself as Otis Redding’s harsh, surging voice wound its way through her head. The cock announced itself from below the kitchen window, excited by the sounds of movement from the kitchen. She loved Otis Redding. She tried not to influence the boys with her affinity for sad love songs, with the melancholy in her that responded to them, but after Cille had gone to Atlanta and she’d been left alone in the house with the boys, she’d played his album over and over on a little portable record player she’d given Cille as a birthday present when she was a teenager: Cille had left the house without it. The Otis record was one of a few Cille had left: Otis, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Earth, Wind & Fire, some boy who looked like a girl on an album cover who called himself Prince. She never listened to that one. But the others, the others she liked.
She kept the record player in her room now on a dresser in a corner. She rarely played it.
The small cassette radio player in the kitchen window had taken its place in the kitchen. The boys kept that radio tuned to an oldies R&B station, and that suited her. She liked to listen to it while she cooked or cleaned in the kitchen. Sometimes they would play some of the songs she liked, some Al Green or some Sam Cooke. Some song where the man sounded like he’d been crying in the recording booth when he made the song, like his fingers had been itching with the phantom feel of some woman on them when he’d hit the high notes in the recording studio. It was always a woman. She knew that there was something new that played music now, CD players that played hard shiny discs that looked like small records, but she was too old for those: her eyesight prevented her from reading the digital display on the stereo in the boys room, so she figured it was a waste to fool with it. She felt the shrimp through the plastic bag, felt the small bodies give under the pressure of her fingers. They were ready. The shower shut off in the bathroom, and she pulled the plug. The water gurgled down the drain like a throat: a noisy swallowing.
When Christophe walked into the kitchen in a T-shirt and shorts, barefoot, Ma-mee had spread newspaper over the table and piled the shrimp in the middle of it. An empty gallon plastic ice-cream bucket sat in the middle of the table next to the shrimp. She was waiting on him. He sat and passed his hand over his face. She thought he must be tired. She was surprised he wasn’t wearing shoes. She expected him to come to the table in them so he could be prepared to run out the door if his brother woke soon—after kissing her hastily on the cheek and tossing some hurried excuse over his shoulder, of course. Christophe was the type of child to run from something for only so long, but she knew he was no coward. He would face it. She reached for a shrimp, for the grayish-silvery pile before her, the quivering mass of glistening sea-bodies, and peeled. The shell came away easily in her fingers; it was hard like plastic in some segments and gummy in others. Christophe grabbed a shrimp and followed suit. Ma-mee let the room settle, let the morning sounds gather around them. Christophe peeled the shrimp slowly and carefully: that was his way around her, and it was the exact opposite of his usual demeanor. She knew it for what it was: love. The shrimp smelled faintly like tears beneath her fingers as she beheaded them, broke open their backs, and made them shed their skins. She hummed a bit of Harold Melvin and under the table, swung one foot back and forth. He surprised her by saying something first. She smiled: she hadn’t thought the silence that uncomfortable.
“I got that on tape, Ma-mee, if you want to hear it.” He coughed into the back of his hand. “Uncle Paul gave it to me a long time ago.” The paper crinkled as he used it to wipe. “I could bring it in here and put it in the tape deck so you could play it sometime. I know they don’t play everything you want to hear on the radio.”
She decided to spare him the risk it took for him to go back into the room he shared with his brother to dig around in the closet and wake him. She was surprised he’d even offered to get the tape, or for that matter, that he’d even mentioned he owned it. “Naw, that’s alright. For some reason I done had all these songs running through my head this morning. I don’t know what it is. But I don’t want to hear nothing.” She took in a deep breath. “I like it quiet in the morning.”
“I ain’t really been up this early before—so I wouldn’t know.” Ma-mee heard that he was smiling. She laughed in reply.
“Like I don’t know,” she said. “When your grandfather was alive and we was younger, I used to hate getting up in the morning. And he loved it. Woke up right after the sun rose. He had to work, you know; the carpentry and the yard work and the little bit of cornfield we raised for the animals, so he had to get up early. And Lord knows I had enough work so I couldn’t have slept all day if I wanted to. I made myself get into the habit of waking up before him, even if it was only for twenty minutes just so I could come up here and sit down for a second before I started on breakfast. Just sit and listen. Soak up the quiet. I was snappy as a snapping turtle when I couldn’t get it. And once I got started, I wouldn’t let go neither.”
Ma-mee saw a stretch of white in the dusky tan of his face. A smile.
“I ain’t no morning person, neither. Too lazy, I guess.” He snorted.
She shook her head no, and her hair brushed along her shoulder with the fine touch of insects.
“You ain’t lazy, Christophe. You work good as anybody. You take after Lucien with the yard work. You better than Paul at landscaping.”
He was picking at one particular shrimp. The shell must have stuck to the flesh. She knew he was trying not to yank away the meat with the shell. He was trying to be careful, to conserve food. She had expected him to say something, to reply to her in some way, but he didn’t. He pried at the sharp tail fin with his fingernails. Ma-mee could feel her hands moving, could feel the naked shrimp falling away from her fingers into her own neat pile that was twice the size of Christophe’s, but it seemed as if it were happening without her, as if the wet, lukewarm bodies were sliding through another woman’s fingers. She realized she was squinting as if she could see him. He was stubborn. It wasn’t something an outsider would expect from Christophe, the quick, hotheaded, trigger-tempered one—but they never conformed, those two. They harbored their secrets and held on to them: Christophe with his occasional slow, smoldering anger, and Joshua with his own occasional quick, glancing, irrational recklessness. Yes, they conformed to character, but these two traded skin like any set of twins.
Ma-mee remembered Christophe glowering when Cille left: he had holed himself up in the boys’ room and sulked, moving listlessly from bed to bed, sitting with his back to corners. Once she found him curled up in the closet in a fetal position, asleep. He refused to talk about Cille, refused to even say her na
me when Ma-mee tried to explain why she’d left them. While Christophe wrestled long and slow with his own grief, Joshua expressed his pain in erratic flares of emotion: he ran around the house in circles, sobbing. After hours passed and she could not coax or threaten him inside, she gave up and let him run, thinking that he would exhaust himself. Over and over, around and around the house, the only word she could understand of his garbled litany was “Mama.” After half the day had passed, he quieted. She stepped off the front porch and walked around the side of the house to find him sitting upright on his knees in the grass, his legs beneath him, his hands folded demurely in his lap, his head listing to one side as he nodded off to sleep, his mouth a perfect O.
“Just because Joshua got called back for a job and you didn’t don’t mean nothing, Chris.” Ma-mee watched his hands still their tugging on the shrimp, watched him let the shrimp roll into the palm of his hand, watched it disappear in the blur of his fist. “Christophe, I wouldn’t lie to you. I never lied to you,” she said.
He opened his palm and grabbed at the tail: she saw a bit of gray come off easily. He had warmed it with the palm of his hand; he had coaxed it with the heat of his skin. He was resourceful. She reached across the table and cupped his now empty hand with her own, ran her fingers over the hard, serrated skin of his knuckles. He had fought with them numerous times, and scraped them on river rocks and tree bark and asphalt. He would find something for himself.
“This just means you have a little bit more time to look. This way you’ll find something that suits you real good,” she said.
Christophe circled her hand with his. His calluses felt as hard and tough as an oyster shell.
“I know, Ma-mee.” His voice dwindled to a whisper. “I’ll find something to do.”