Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

It scares me.

“Come on, Michaela,” she says, and she tugs Kayla upright. Kayla opens her eyes and slumps like Leonie did in the kitchen when she passed that package across, whining and trying to lie back down. “You thirsty?” Leonie whispers, putting the cup in front of Kayla. “Here. Drink,” she says.

“No,” Kayla says, and slaps the cup away. It flies out of Leonie’s hand and rolls across the floor.

“She don’t want it,” I say.

“Don’t matter what she want,” Leonie say, rolling her eyes at me. “She need it.”

I want to tell her: You don’t know what you doing. And then: You ain’t Mam. But I don’t. The worry bubbling up in me like water boiling over the lip of a pot, but the words sticking in my throat. She might hit me. I did a lot of talking when I was younger, when I was eight and nine, in public. And then one day she slapped me across the face, and after that, every time I opened my mouth to talk against her, she did that. Hit me so hard her slaps started feeling like punches. Made me twist to the side, my hand on my face. Made me sit down once in the middle of the aisle in Walmart. So I stopped. But she doesn’t know how to make medicine out of plants, and I worry for Kayla. Two years ago, when I was so sick with a stomach bug that I could hardly get up off the sofa and make it to the bathroom, Mam told Leonie to go gather some plant in the woods and make a tea out of the roots. She did it. And because Mam told her to do it, I trusted her, and I drank it, even though it tasted like rubber. Leonie must have picked the wrong plant, or prepared it wrong, because whatever she gave me made me even sicker. She poured the gritty, bitter mess by the back steps, and a few days afterward, when I had worked whatever she gave me and the bug out of my system, I found a stray cat dead, carbuncular and rotting, by the steps. It had drunk whatever she’d poured into a pool on the ground.

Leonie’s picked up the cup, holding it to Kayla’s lips.

“You thirsty, right,” she says, and it’s an answer, not a question. Kayla coughs and grabs at the cup. My underarms spike and sweat, and I want to grab that sippy cup and throw it like she did, bat it across the room and snatch her out of the loose circle of Leonie’s arm. But I don’t. And then she’s sucking at the spout and turning up her cup and drinking, and I feel like I lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.

“She just need to sleep it off,” Misty says then. “Probably carsick, that’s all.”

Kayla is thirsty. She’s drunk half of it, and she’s pulling hard on the spout, her lips puckered like it’s a bottle. When she’s done, she lets the cup clatter to the floor, and then she crawls across the sofa and into my lap, grabbing my hand and saying down , which means up. She wants me to tell her a story. I lean in.

“I have a better vintage in the kitchen,” Al says, looking at Leonie. “Maybe we could sample it this evening.”

“Sounds good to me,” Misty says.

“I don’t know,” Leonie says. She’s looking at Kayla in my lap, Kayla who is beginning to fuss because I haven’t begun the story yet. She’s beginning to squirm and cry again like she did in the car before she threw up. “She ain’t feeling good.”

“I’m telling you it’s probably carsickness. Let her sleep it off,” Misty says. “She’ll be fine.” And then she looks at Leonie like she’s saying two things at once, one with her mouth and the other with her eyes. “You been driving all day. Might be nice to unwind and take a break.”

I can’t read her yet. Leonie reaches out and smooths Kayla’s hair down, but it springs back up. Kayla curves away from her.

“You probably right,” she says.

“You know how many times I threw up with my head out the window when I was a kid? I lost count. She’ll be fine,” Misty says.

It looks like Misty’s said the right thing this time, because Leonie sits back then. There is a wall between us.

“Michael got motion sickness bad. He can’t even ride in the backseat without feeling like throwing up.” It makes sense to her then. “Must have got it from him.”

“See?” Misty nods. Al nods. They all nod and rise and head off to the kitchen. I take Kayla into the bedroom Al pointed us to earlier, with two twin beds. I take off Kayla’s shirt, which smells like acid, and wet and soap a rag from the bathroom next to the bedroom, and then wipe her off. She’s hot. Even her little feet. So hot. I take off everything but her drawers and lay down with her in one of the twin beds, and she puts her little arm over my shoulder and pulls me to her, like she does every morning we wake up together. Doe-doe , she says.

I lay there until the music goes quiet in the kitchen and I hear them moving out to the back porch. No glasses clink, no wine. I figure they’re opening up that pack Leonie brought. I lay there until I can’t no more, and then I carry Kayla into the bathroom and stick my finger down her throat and make her throw up. She fights me, hitting at my arms, crying against my hand, sobbing but not making no words, but I do it three times, make her vomit over my hand, hot as her little body, three times, all of it red and smelling sweet, until I’m crying and she’s shrieking. I turn off the light and go back into the room and wipe her with my shirt and lay in the bed with her, scared that Leonie’s going to walk in and find all that red throw-up in the bathroom, find out I made Kayla throw up Leonie’s potion. But nobody comes. Kayla sniffs and dozes off, hiccupping in her sleep, and then I clean all of it up with soap and water until the bathroom is as white as it was before. All the while, my heart beating so hard I can hear it in my ears, because I knew what Kayla was saying. I knew.

I love you, Jojo. Why you make me, Jojo? Jojo! Brother! Brother.

I heard her.

I try to sleep, but for hours, I can’t. All I can do is lay there and listen to Kayla breathe. Outside, somewhere far away off in the dark reach of the woods, a dog barks. It’s a hacking sound, full of anger and sharp teeth. At the heart of it all: fear. When I was younger, I wanted a puppy. I asked Pop for one, and he said ever since his time in Parchman, he couldn’t keep a dog. He said he tried when he got let out, but every one of the dogs he got, mutts and hounds, died within the first year of him getting it. When he was in Parchman, Pop said, once he started working with the hounds the prison used to track escapees, all he could smell, when he was eating or waking or falling asleep, was dog shit. All he could hear was the dogs, yipping and howling and baying, raring to tear. Pop said he tried to get Richie on with dogs so he could get him out the fields, but it didn’t work. I close my eyes and imagine Pop sitting on the high-backed chair in the corner of the room. Pop, with his straight back and his hands like tree roots, telling me more stories, speaking me to sleep.

Was one of them days when the sun bear down on you so hard feel like it’s twisting you inside out, and all you do is burn. One of them heavy days. Down here, it’s different; we got that wind coming off the water all the time, and that eases. But up there, they ain’t got that, just the fields stretching on, the trees too short with not enough leaves, no good shade nowhere, and everything bending low under the weight of that sun: men, women, mules, everything low under God. Was a day like that the boy broke his hoe.

I don’t think he meant to do it. He wasn’t nothing but a scrawny thing, littler than you, I already told you that, so he must have hit a rock or leant on it the wrong way, and that’s what did it. Kinnie had me running the dogs around the fields, working on they sense of smell. I was circling Richie’s field when I saw him walking with the two pieces in his hand, just dragging the handle in the dirt, little trail following him to the wood line. The driver, the man who set the pace for the day’s work, something like an overseer, saw Richie. He sat up on his mule and watched the boy’s back, looking more and more mad, like a snake drawing down and bunching up before he strike. I edged around the field until I could get close enough to Richie to hiss at him.