Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

When Mama first realized that something was seriously wrong with her body, that it had betrayed her and turned cancerous, she began by treating it herself with herbs. I’d come home on those spring mornings to find her bed empty. She’d be out in the woods, picking and slowly dragging bushels of young pokeweed shoots behind her. Every time, she said: I’m telling you, it’s going to cure it . I’d take the bundles from her, put my arm around her waist, and help her up the steps and into the house, where I’d set her in a chair in the kitchen. I was always buzzing from the night before, so while I chopped and cleaned and boiled and made pitcher after pitcher of tea for her to drink, the high would trill through my veins like a discordant song. But it didn’t cure it. Her body broke down over the years until she took to her bed, permanently, and I forgot so much of what she taught me. I let her ideas drain from me so that the truth could pool instead. Sometimes, the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes, it withholds.

If the world were a right place, a place for the living, a place where men like Michael didn’t end up in jail, I’d be able to find wild strawberries. That’s what Mama would look for if she couldn’t find milkweed. I could boil the leaves at Michael’s lawyer’s house, where we’re staying before we go pick Michael up in the morning. Put a little sugar in it, a little food coloring like Mama used to do whenever I had an upset stomach as a child, and tell her it’s juice.

But the world ain’t that place. Ain’t no wild strawberries at the side of the road. It ain’t boggy enough up here. But this world might be a place that gives a little luck to the small, sometimes shows a little mercy, because after I walk awhile down the side of the road out of sight of the gas station, after I leave Misty gesturing out the window with her arm, yelling, Fucking come on , I find wild blackberries. Mama always told me they could be used for upset stomach, but only for adults. But if there was nothing else, she said I could make a tea and give it to kids. Not a lot, I remember her saying. From the leaves. Or was it from the vine? Or the roots? The heat beats down so hard I can’t remember. I miss the late spring chill.

This is the kind of world it is. The kind of world that gives you a blackberry plant, a doughy memory, and a child that can’t keep nothing down. I kneel by the side of the road, grab the thorny stems as close to the earth as I can get them and pull, and the vine pricks my hand, tears at the skin, draws blood in tiny points that smear. My palms burn. This the kind of world , Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead . And devils them throughout. Even though the words were harsh, I saw hope in her face when she said it. She thought that if she taught me as much herbal healing as she could, if she gave me a map to the world as she knew it, a world plotted orderly by divine order, spirit in everything, I could navigate it. But I resented her when I was young, resented her for the lessons and the misplaced hope. And later, for still believing in good in a world that cursed her with cancer, that twisted her limp as a wet rag and left her to disintegrate.

I kneel and lean back on my haunches. The day pulses like a flush vein. Wipe my eyes, smear dirt across my face, and make myself blind.

Kayla need to eat. I can tell by the way she keep crying, the way she keep hunching over and then knocking her head back and arching against her seat once we get back on the road. And screaming. I can tell there’s something wrong with her stomach. It won’t stop hurting her. She need to put something in it, so I take her out and let her sit on my lap, thinking it might make her feel better, but it don’t. She scream a little softer, her cries a little less high pitched and sharp. The pain’s knife edge dulls. But she still knocks her head against my chest, and her skull feels thin against my bones, against the stone where my ribs meet, her skull easy to break as a ceramic bowl. Leonie done laid her plants on the armrest between her and Misty, and minute by minute, mile by mile, those blackberry leaves get more and more wilted, the roots get stringier and stringer, sling their dirt loose in clumps. Kayla growls and cries. I don’t want Leonie giving her that. I know that’s what she think she need to do, but she ain’t Mam. She ain’t Pop. She ain’t never healed nothing or grown nothing in her life, and she don’t know.

She bought me a betta fish when I was six, after I kept telling her the same story, every day, about the tanks we had in my class at school, the betta fish, red and purple and blue and green, swimming lazily in the tanks, flashing brilliant and then dull. She came home with one on a Sunday, after she’d been out all weekend. I hadn’t seen her since Friday, since she told Mam she was going to the store to buy some milk and some sugar and didn’t come back. When she came back, her skin was dry and flaking at the corner of her mouth, her hair stuck out in a bushy halo, and she smelled like wet hay. The fish was green, the color of pine needles, and he had stripes down his tail the color of red mud. I called him Bubby Bubbles, since he blew bubbles all day, and when I leaned over his tank, I could hear him crunching on the fish food Leonie had brought home in a sample-size bag. I imagined even then that one day I could lean over his bowl and instead of crunching, little words would pop out the bubbles that fizzed up to the surface. Big face. Light. And love . But when the sample size of fish food ran out, and I asked Leonie to buy me more, she said she would, and then forgot, again and again, until one day she said: Give him some old bread . I figured he couldn’t crunch like he needed on some old bread, so I kept bugging her about it, and Bubby got skinnier and skinnier, his bubbles smaller and smaller, until I walked into the kitchen one day and he was floating on top of the water, his eyes white, a slimy scrim like fat, no voice in his bubbles.

Leonie kill things.

Outside the car, the trees thin and change, the trunks shorten and they get fuller and green, the leaves not sharp dark pine but so full, hazy almost. They stand in thin lines between fields, fields of muddy green, bristling with low plants. The sky darkens. The forests and fields around us turn black. I put my mouth to Kayla’s ear and tell her a story.

You see them trees over there? She groans. If you look at the ground under them trees, there’s a hole. She moans. Rabbits live in them holes. One of them is a little rabbit, the littlest rabbit. She got brown fur and little white teeth like gum. She’s quiet for a second. Her name Kayla, like you. You know what she do? Kayla shrugs and sinks back into me. She the best at digging holes. She dig them the deepest and the fastest. One day it was dark and a big storm come and the rabbit family’s hole started filling up with water, so Kayla started digging. And digging. And digging. You know what she did? Kayla’s breath hitches, and then she turns to face me and puts her mouth in my shirt and sucks in more air. I rub her back in circles, rub it like I could rub away the cramping, the hurt, whatever’s making her sick. She dug and dug and the tunnel got longer and longer. The water wasn’t even coming in where Kayla was digging, but she kept on until she popped up out the ground and you know what? Kayla digs her fingernails into my arm, then raises up a little to look out the window and points at the dark fields, at the thin line of trees with the rabbit hole underneath it. Getting dark , she says. Then she leans back into me and slumps. Uh-huh. Little rabbit saw the gray barn and the fat pig and the red horse and Mam and Pop. She dug all the way to our house, Kayla. And when she saw Mam and Pop she loved them, and she decided to stay. So when we get home, she going to be waiting for us. You want to see her? I ask. But Kayla is asleep. She twitches and for a blink I imagine I know what she’s dreaming, but then I stop. She smells sharp like sweat and throw-up, but her hair smells like coconuts from the oil Mam used to put in it, the one that I use now when I pull her hair into little ponytails: two little cotton balls on the sides of her head. I block out the image of her in the wet earth, the size of a rabbit, digging a hole. I don’t want to know that dream.