Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

He accelerates.

“Goddamnit!”

I shift the car to drive, look back to check the street, and see a car advancing, a gray SUV. Fear rises to my shoulders, up my neck, a bubbling choke. I don’t know what I’m afraid of. What can he do but curse me? What can he do? I’m not in his driveway. Doesn’t the county own the sides of the road? But something about how fast he’s gunning that lawn mower, the way he points to that tree, the way that tree, a Spanish oak, reaches up and out and over the road, a multitude of dark green leaves and almost black branches, the way he’s coming at me, makes me see violence. I press the gas and swerve out into the street, the car behind me skids and its horn sounds, but I don’t care. My transmission switches gears with a high whine. I sling the car around at the cul-de-sac that forms the dead end and go faster. The gray SUV has pulled into a driveway, but the driver is waving his arm out the window, and Big Joseph is passing under the tree, stopping at the mailbox I just abandoned, lumbering off his lawn mower, striding toward the box. He is taking something off the seat of the mower, a rifle that was strapped there, something he keeps for wild pigs that root in the forest, but not for them, now. For me.

When I pass him, I stick my left arm out the window. Make a fist. Raise my middle finger. I see my brother in his last photo: one taken on his eighteenth birthday, leaning back on the kitchen counter while I hold his favorite sweet potato pecan cake up to his face so he can blow his candles out; his arms are crossed on his chest, his smile white in his dark face. We are all laughing. I accelerate so quickly my tires spin and burn rubber, throwing up clouds of smoke. I hope Big Joseph has an asthma attack. I hope he chokes on it.

Breakfast today was cold goat with gravy and rice: even though it’s been two days since my birthday, the pot was still halfway full. When I woke up, it was to Leonie stepping over me. She had a bag over her shoulder and was grabbing Kayla. Wake up , Leonie said, not looking at me, but frowning as Kayla whimpered to waking. I got up, brushed my teeth, threw on one of my basketball shorts and a T-shirt, and brought my bag out to the car. Leonie had a real bag, something made of cotton and canvas, although it was a little beat up, pulling loose at the edges. Mine was a plastic grocery bag. I ain’t never needed no overnight bag, so Leonie ain’t never got me one. This is our first trip north to the jail with her. I wanted to eat the goat hot, to heat it up in the small brown microwave, the one Pop say is leaking cancer in our food because the enamel on the inside is peeling off like paint. Pop won’t heat anything in it, and Leonie won’t give him half to replace it. When I started to put it in the microwave, Leonie walked by and said: We ain’t got time . So I put my birthday leftovers in a Styrofoam bowl; crept in the room to kiss sleeping Mam, who muttered babies and twitched in her sleep; and then went out to the car.

Pop was waiting for us. Looked like he had slept in his clothes, his starched khaki pants, his short-sleeved button-up shirt, all gray and brown, like him. He matched the sky, which hung low, a silver colander full to leak. It was drizzling. Leonie threw her bag in the backseat and marched back into the house. Misty was playing with the radio controls and the car was already running. Pop frowned at me, so I stopped and shuffled in front of him. Looked down at my feet. My basketball shoes were Michael’s; an old pair an inch too big for me I found abandoned under Leonie’s bed. I didn’t care. They were Jordans, so I wore them anyway.

“Might rain bad up the road.”

I nodded.

“You remember how to change a tire? Check the oil and coolant?”

I nodded again. Pop taught me all of that when I was ten.

“Good.”

I wanted to tell Pop I didn’t want to go, that I wanted me and Kayla to stay home, and I might have if he didn’t look so mad, if his frown didn’t seem carved into his mouth and brow, if Leonie hadn’t walked out then with Kayla, who was rubbing her eyes and crying at being woken up in the gray light. It was 7 a.m. So I said what I could.

“It’s okay, Pop.”

His frown eased then, for a moment, long enough for him to say:

“Watch after them.”

“I will.”

Leonie rose from buckling Kayla into her seat in the back.

“Come on. We got to go.”

I stepped into Pop and hugged him. I couldn’t remember the last time I had, but it seemed important to do it then, to fold my arms around him and touch my chest to his. To pat him once, twice, on his back with my fingertips and let him go. He’s my pop , I thought. He’s my pop.

He put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed, and then looked at my nose, my ears, my hair, and finally my eyes when I stepped back.

“You a man, you hear?” he said. I nodded. He squeezed again, his eyes on the forgotten shoes I wore, rubbery and silly next to his work boots, the ground worn sandy and grassy thin in the driveway from the beating it took from Leonie’s car, the sky bearing down on us all, so all the animals I thought I could understand were quiet, subdued under the gathering spring rain. The only animal I saw in front of me was Pop, Pop with his straight shoulders and his tall back, his pleading eyes the only thing that spoke to me in that moment and told me what he said without words: I love you, boy. I love you.

It’s raining now, the water coming down in sheets, beating against the car. Kayla sleeps, a deflated Capri Sun in one hand, a stub of a Cheeto in another, her face muddy orange. Her brown-blond afro matted to her head. Misty is humming to the song on the radio, her hair piled in a nest. Some of it escapes, a loose twig, to hang against her neck. Her hair turning dark with sweat. It’s hot in the car, and I watch the skin all around her nape dampen and bead, and the beads run like the rainwater down the column of her neck to disappear in her shirt. The longer we ride, the hotter it gets, and Misty’s shirt, which is cut wide and loose around the neckline, stretches out even more so that the tops of her bra peek through, and tall as I am, I realize I can see it from the backseat if I look diagonally across the car. It’s electric blue. The windows begin to fog.

“Ain’t it hot in here?” Misty’s fanning herself with a piece of paper she’s pulled out of Leonie’s glove box. Looks like Leonie’s forged car insurance papers. People pay Misty twenty dollars to make copies of cards and insert their names into the copies so if they get stopped by the county police, it looks like they have insurance.

“A little,” Leonie says.

“You know I can’t stand heat. It makes my allergies act up.”

“This coming from somebody born and raised in Mississippi.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m just saying you in the wrong state for heat.”

Misty’s hair is dark at the root, blond everywhere else. She has freckles on her shoulders.

“Maybe I need to move to Alaska,” Misty says.

We taking back roads all the way there. Leonie threw the atlas in my lap when I got in the backseat behind her, said: Read it. She’d marked the route with a pen; it scrawls north up a tangle of two-lane highways, smudged in places from Leonie’s finger running up and down the state. The pen’s marks are dark so it’s hard for me to read the route names, the letters and numbers shadowed. But I see the prison name, the place Pop was: Parchman. Sometimes I wonder who that parched man was, that man dying for water, that they named the town and the jail after. Wonder if he looked like Pop, straight up and down, brown skin tinged with red, or me, an in-between color, or Michael, the color of milk. Wonder what that man said before he died of a cracked throat.