Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

When we pull off the highway and onto a back road, the sky is dark blue, turning its back to us, pulling a black sheet over its shoulder. The world shrinks to the headlights coming from the car, twin horns leading through the darkness, the car an old animal, limping to another clearing in the woods. Pop always told me you can trust an animal to do exactly what it’s born to do: to root in mud or canter through a field or fly. That no matter how domesticated an animal is, Pop say, the wild nature in it will come through. Kayla is her most animal self, a worm-ridden cat in my arms. When we finally pull into a yard and the trees open up, this place is different. It’s not like the huddle of houses in Forrest County. There is only one house here, and it is wide. There are windows all along the front, and warm yellow light shines through all of them. Leonie stops the car. Misty gets out and waves at us to follow. I walk to the porch with Kayla asleep in my arms, snoring, breathing out of her mouth, and I see up close the paint is peeling in thin strips with marker-thin lines of brown-gray showing through. The windows look a little cloudy, like the water my fish died in. The wisteria planted on each side of the front steps has rooted thick into the earth, grown as big around as a man’s muscley arm, and has twisted and twined up the railings to weave thick as a curtain along the front of the porch. Here, the animal coming out. Misty knocks on the door.

“Come in,” a man’s voice sings, and there is music behind it.

He’s a big man. We find him in the kitchen, boiling noodles for spaghetti. My mouth turns to water. I have never been so hungry.

“Smells good, doesn’t it?” he says as he walks toward us. He bounces, seems to walk on his tiptoes. He has a white long-sleeved shirt on, except it’s rolled up to his elbows. The shirt is like his porch; the thread coming loose at the neck, something that looks like green paint splattered across the front. His kitchen is green. I ain’t never seen a green kitchen. That’s when I smell the sauce. It pops in its pot on the stove and streaks his arm as he stirs it. He licks it off. The noodles he put in the water slowly sink, disappear down the edges of the pot as their bottoms turn soft. I frown when he licks his furry arm. His hair is pulled back on his head, and he has it in a little ponytail that sticks out, short as Kayla’s. “Figured y’all would be hungry,” he says. He’s the whitest White man I’ve ever seen.

“You figured right.” Misty hugs the man as she says this, turns her face so that she speaks it into his paint-splattered shirt. “Took us longer to make it here because the little one got sick.”

“Ah yes, the little girl!” he said. Leonie looks like she wants to shush him, but she doesn’t. “She’s—” He pauses. “Sticky.” Now Leonie looks like she wants to punch him in the face. Her mulish look , Pop says. “Is the young man sick too?” I already like him better, even though when he looks at me, I see something like sadness in his face, and I don’t know why.

“No,” Leonie says. She crosses her arms when she says it. “We’re not hungry.”

“Nonsense,” the man says.

“Leonie,” Misty says, and looks at Leonie. I know it’s the kind of look that says something else without saying it, but I can’t read Leonie’s eyebrows, her lips, the way she nods her head forward and her long bangs fall in her eyes. Whatever Misty says, Leonie understands and nods back.

“We’ll eat.” Leonie clears her throat. “I was wondering if I can use your stove. I got something I need to cook.”

“Of course, my dear, of course.”

Up close, the man smells like he ain’t took a bath in a few days, but it’s not a musty smell. Smells sweet and wrong at the same time, like sweet liquor that done sat out in the heat and started turning to vinegar.

“Excuse the French, Al, but I’m fucking starving.” Misty smiles.

When I sit in the living room, Kayla stays asleep, breathing hot into my shirt with little puffs. The room has high ceilings and bookshelves on every wall. There is no TV. There’s a radio in the kitchen, where Misty is sitting at a counter stool, drinking a glass of wine Al has poured for her in a Mason jar. The music, all violins and cellos, swells in the room, then recedes, like the water out in the Gulf before a big storm. When Leonie comes in from the car, holding her weeds in one hand, she trips on the rug covering the wooden floor, red and orange and white and frayed, and a bag falls from under her shirt, hits the carpet, and what was inside the crinkled brown paper slides out. It is clear, a whole pack of broken glass, and I’ve seen this before. I know what this is. The man is laughing at something Misty says, and Leonie will not look at me as she picks it up, scoops it back in the bag, and slumps over the counter before sliding it over to Misty, who passes the bag to Al. He picks it up, tosses it into the air, and then makes it disappear like a magician.

Al is Michael’s lawyer.

“Boy’s around his age,” he says, pushing his sleeves up his arm and frowning after pointing at me, “and they thought he was selling weed in school.”

Misty swigs her drink.

“And do you know what they did to him?”

She shrugs.

“Brought him into the principal’s office with two other boys his age. Friends. Made them drop their pants and strip so they could search them.”

Misty shakes her head, her hair swinging around her face.

“That’s a damn shame,” she says.

“It’s illegal, is what it is. It’s pro bono, and the school will probably get off with some sort of censure from the courts, but I couldn’t not take it,” he says, shrugging and drinking. “Long moral arc of the universe and all.”

Misty nods like she knows what he’s talking about. She’s pulled out her ponytail to let her hair hang, and every time she nods or shakes her head, she does it so violently her hair swings, as languid and pretty as Spanish moss, across her back. She’s pulled her shirt down at the collar, let it sag, so her shoulder is a gleaming globe in the living room light. Al has all the lamps lit. The more she drinks, the more her hair swings.

“You do what you can.” Al smiles, touches her shoulder, and lifts his cup of wine. “How do you like it? It’s good, right? I told you it was a good year.”

“So what you doing about my man?” Misty leans toward him and raises her eyebrows and smiles.

“Okay, okay,” Al says, leaning back away from her to laugh before coming toward her, talking with his hands, telling her about whatever he’s doing to help free Bishop.

Leonie is sitting on the sofa next to me, sippy cup in hand. It took her around thirty minutes to cut the blackberry plant, boil the roots and the leaves. She boiled the root in one pot and the leaves in the other, while I hunched over my plate shoving spaghetti into my mouth, hardly chewing. She let it cool. She stood at the counter, squinting and talking to herself with her arms crossed, and then she poured half from one pot and half from the other pot into Kayla’s cup. It was gray. I shoved the last of the food in my mouth, went to rinse my plate off and put it into the dishwasher, which smelled sour, and watched while she asked Al if he had any food coloring and sugar. He did. She dumped a few spoons of sugar and drops of food coloring into the cup and shook it until it looked like muddy Kool-Aid. Now she’s sitting next to Kayla, who we left sprawled, asleep, on the couch, and she’s trying to nuzzle her awake. Every time she asks Kayla to wake up, kisses her ear and neck, Kayla reaches up and put her arm around Leonie’s neck and pulls like she wants her to lay down, to go to sleep with her. Like she doesn’t want to be woken.