Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Me too,” Leonie says. Last night, she relaxed her hair in the kitchen and rinsed it out in the sink, so it’s as straight and wispy as Misty’s. Misty dyed the tips of Leonie’s hair the same blond as hers a few weeks ago, so when Leonie stood over the sink and rinsed and hissed as the water ran over her scalp, over the chemical burns I’d see later, little scabs like dimes on her scalp, her hair looked like it didn’t belong on her, limp and flowing an orange-blond down the drain. Now her hair is starting to puff and frizz.

“I like it,” I say. They ignore me. I do. I like the heat. I like the way the highway cuts through the forests, curves over hills heading north, sure and rolling. I like the trees reaching out on both sides, the pines thicker and taller up here, spared the stormy beating the ones on the coast get that keeps them spindly and delicate. But that doesn’t stop people from cutting them down to protect their houses during storms or to pad their wallets. So much could be happening in those trees.

“We got to stop,” Leonie says.

“Why?”

“Gas,” Leonie says. “I’m thirsty.”

“Me too,” I say.

When we pull into the gravel strip in front of the little gas station, Leonie hands me the same thirty dollars I saw Misty hand to her when she got in the car this morning and looks at me like she didn’t hear me say I’m thirsty.

“Twenty-five for gas. Get me a Coke, and bring me my change.”

“Can I have one?” I push. I can imagine the dark burning sweetness of it. I swallow and my throat seems to catch like Velcro. I think I know what the parched man felt.

“Bring me my change.”

I don’t want to go nowhere. I want to keep looking down Misty’s shirt. Her bra flashes bright blue again, the kind of blue I’ve only seen in photographs, the color of deep water off in the Gulf of Mexico. The kind of blue in the pictures Michael took when he worked on the oil rig offshore, and the water was a living wet plain around him, making a great blue bowl with the sky.

The inside of the store is even dimmer than the dull glow of the spring outside. There’s a woman sitting behind the counter, and she’s prettier than Misty. Red hair, her lips pinkish purple from the AC, her mouth an upside-down U. She’s thicker than Misty, too, and a whip of longing, like a cut power line set to sparking, jumps behind my ribs.

“Hey,” she mumbles, and goes back to playing on her cell phone. Every wall is lined with metal shelves, and the metal shelves are lined with dust. I walk toward the dimmer back like I’ve been here before, like I know what I want and I know where it’s at. Like a man would walk. Like Pop would. My eyes burn, and find the display case of drinks in the front of the store. I stare at the glass, imagining how wet and fizzy a cold drink would be, swallowing against the parched closure of my throat: dry as a rocky river wash in drought. My spit is thick as paste. I look back at the clerk and she’s watching me, so I take the biggest Coke and don’t even try to slip another in my pocket. I walk toward the front.

“A dollar thirty,” she says, and I have to lean toward her to hear because thunder booms, a great clacking split, and the sky dumps water on the tin roof of the building: a tumble of sound. I can’t see down her shirt but it’s what I think about when I’m standing out in the rain, the back of my shirt pulled over my head like it could protect me, but all of me wet, gas fumes thick with the smell of wet earth, rain running down to blind my eyes, to stream from my nose. It all makes me feel like I can’t breathe. I remember just in time and tilt my head back, hold my breath, and let rain trickle down my throat. A thin knife of cool when I swallow. Once. Twice. Three times because the pump is so slow. The rain presses my eyes closed, kneads them. I think I hear a whisper of something, a whoosh of a word, but then it’s gone as the tank pings and the nozzle goes slack. The car is close and warm, and Kayla is snoring.

“I could’ve got you a drink if you was that thirsty,” Misty says. I shrug and Leonie starts the car. I peel off my shirt, heavy as a wet towel, and lay it on the floor before bending to root through my bag for another one. When I pull it on, I notice Misty looking at me in the mirror attached to the back of the passenger shade while she reapplies gloss, her lips going from dry pink to glossy peach; when she sees I see her looking, she winks. I shiver.

I was eleven when Mam had the talk with me. By that time, she’d gotten so sick she spent a few hours in the middle of each day in the bed, a thin sheet looped around her waist, sleeping and startling awake. She was like one of Pop’s animals hiding in the barn or one of the lean-tos built on the side of the barn, secreted away from the heat. But this day she didn’t sleep.

“Jojo,” she called, and her voice was a fishing line thrown so weakly the wind catches it. But still, the lead weight settled in my chest, and I stopped mid-walk toward the back door, toward Pop, who was outside working, and walked into Mam’s room.

“Mam?” I said.

“The baby?”

“Sleep.”

Mam swallowed and it looked like it hurt, so I passed her water.

“Sit,” she said, so I pulled the chair next to her bed close, happy that she was awake, and then she pulled a slim, wide book from her side and opened it up to the most embarrassing diagrams I’d ever seen, flaccid penises and ovaries like star fruit, and began to teach me human anatomy and sex. When she started talking about condoms, I wanted to crawl under her bed and die. My face and my neck and my back were still burning when she laid the book down on the side closest to the wall, thankfully away so I couldn’t see it again.

“Look at me,” she said.

There were lines, new since the cancer, running from her nose down to the edges of her mouth. She smiled half a smile.

“I embarrassed you,” she said.

I nodded. The shame was choking me.

“You getting older. You needed to know. I gave your mama this talk.” She looked past me, to the doorway at my back, and I twisted, expecting to see Pop, or Kayla stumble-walking and cranky from her too-short nap, but there was nothing except the light from the kitchen casting a glowing doormat. “Your uncle Given, too, and he was redder than you.”

Not possible.

“Your pop don’t know how to tell a story straight. You know that? He tell the beginning but don’t tell the end. Or he leave out something important in the middle. Or he tell you the beginning without setting up how everything got there. He always been like that.”

I nod.

“I used to have to piece the things he told me together to get the whole picture. Piece his paragraphs together like puzzles. It was worse when we just started courting. I knew he’d been away for some years, up in Parchman. I knew because I listened when I shouldn’t have been. I was only five when he got arrested, but I heard about the brawl at the juke joint, and then him and his brother Stag disappearing. He went away and was gone for years, and when he came back, he moved into the house with his mama to take care of her and worked. He was back for years before he started coming over to my house, helping my daddy and mama with little things around the house. Doing chore after chore before he even introduced himself to me. I was nineteen, and he was twenty-nine. One day, me and him was sitting on my mama and daddy front porch and we heard Stag a ways off, coming up the road, singing, and River said: There’s things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can’t help. Older I got, the more I found it true. What’s in Stag is like water so black and deep you can’t see the bottom . Stag was laughing now. But then Pop said: Parchman taught me the same in me, Philomène . Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex, or it could be something as complicated as falling in love, or it could be like going to jail with your brother, thinking you going to protect him.” The box fan hummed. “You understand what I’m telling you, Jojo?”