Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Baby,” he says. I know he ain’t talking to me or Kayla, but only Leonie, because it’s her who drops her arm and turns, her who rises and walks stiff-kneed to him, her that he hugs, his arms wrapped around her like a tangled sheet, tighter and tighter, until they seem one thing standing there, one person instead of two. He’s bigger than I remember around the neck and shoulders and arms, wider than he was when the police took him away. They’re both shaking, speaking so low to each other I can’t hear them, whispering and shivering like a tree, juddering in the wind.

It takes less time than I thought it would to check Michael out. Maybe he done all his paperwork beforehand. Misty is still in another room, talking to Bishop, but Michael says: I can’t stay in here another minute. Let’s go. Before I know it, we’re walking back out into the weak spring light. Leonie and Michael have their arms around each other’s waist. When we get back to the parking lot, they stop and begin kissing, wet, openmouthed, their tongues sliding onto faces. He looks so different than he did when he left, but he’s still the same Michael underneath, in the neck, in his hands, kneading Leonie’s back the way Mam used to knead biscuits. Kayla points out to the fields, fields covered in a fog, and says, “Jojo.” I walk across the parking lot, closer to the fields with her.

“What you see, Kayla?” I ask.

“All the birds,” she says, and coughs.

I look out at the fields but I don’t see birds. I squint and for a second I see men bent at the waist, row after row of them, picking at the ground, looking like a great murder of crows landed and chattering and picking for bugs in the ground. One, shorter than the rest, stands and looks straight at me.

“See the bird?” Kayla asks, and then she lays her head on my shoulder. I blink and the men are gone and it is just fog rolling, wisping over the fields that stretch out endlessly, and then I hear Pop, telling me the last bit of the story he is willing to share about this place.

After the sergeant beat Richie, I told him: You got to keep that back clean. Got clean rags and put them on him, and then changed them with supplies I stole from the dogs’ stash. I bound them around Richie’s chest with long strips. His skin was hot and runny.

“It’s too much dirt,” Richie said. His teeth was chattering, so his words came out in stutters. “It’s everywhere. In the fields. Not just my back, Riv. It’s in my mouth so I can’t taste nothing and in my ears so I can’t hardly hear and in my nose, all in my nose and throat, so I can’t hardly breathe.”

He breathed hard then, and ran out the shack where our group of trusty shooters bunked, and threw up in the dirt, and then I remembered, again, how young he was, how his big teeth was still breaking through his gums in some places.

“I dream about it. Dream I’m eating it with a big long silver spoon. Dream that when I swallow, it go down the wrong hole, to my lungs. Out there in the fields all day, my head hurt. I can’t stop shaking.”

I touched his narrow back, pushed one of the cuts to see if pus would come out, trying to see if it was infected, if that’s why he was sick with fever and chills, but it oozed a little clear and that’s it.

“Something ain’t right,” I said to myself, but the boy was kneeling over his sick in the dirt, listening to the trusty shooters calling to each other on they patrol, shaking his head like I’d asked him a question, right to left, right to left. And then he said:

“I’m going home.”

“See the birds?” Kayla asks.

“Yeah, Kayla, I see,” I tell her.

“All the birds go bye,” Kayla says, and then she leans forward and rubs my face with both hands, and for a second I think she’s going to tell me something amazing, some secret, something come from God himself. “My tummy,” she says, “Jojo, tummy hurts.”

I rub her back.

“I ain’t had a chance to give y’all a good hello,” comes a voice, and I turn around and it’s Michael. He’s looking toward Kayla.

“Hello,” he says.

Kayla tenses up, grips me with her little legs, grabs both of my ears and pulls.

“No,” she says.

“I’m your daddy, Michaela,” Michael says.

Kayla puts her face in my neck and starts to shake, and I feel it like little tremors through my gut. Michael lets his hands drop. I shrug, look past Michael’s face, clean shaved and pale, purple under his eyes, sunburn high on his forehead. He got Michaela’s eyes. Leonie’s behind him, letting go of his hand to grab him around the waist. His hand goes back behind him to her, and rubs.

“She got to get used to you,” I say.

“I know,” he says.

When we get back to the car, Leonie pulls out her little cooler, and then hands out sandwiches that the lawyer must have made before me and Michaela woke up, sandwiches on brown bread thick with nuts with slabs of smelly cheese and turkey slices thin as Kleenex layered in between. I eat mine so fast I have trouble breathing, and I start to hiccup around the food, big bites, lodged in my throat. Leonie frowns at me, but it’s Michael who speaks.

“Take your time, son.”

He says it so easy. Son. He got his arm on the back of the driver’s seat, his hand wrapped around the back of Leonie’s neck, rubbing it, squeezing it soft. It’s something like the way Mam would hold me by the neck when we went to the grocery store when I was little and both of us could walk, up and down the grocery aisles. If I’d get too excited, like when we got to the checkout and saw all the candy, she’d squeeze. Not too hard. Just enough to remind me that we was in the store, around a whole bunch of White people, and that I needed to mind my manners. And then: she was behind me, with me, loving me. Here.

If I wasn’t hiccupping, I would cut my eyes at Michael, but the hiccupping is so bad I can’t. I think of Richie, and wonder if this is how he felt in them dusty rows, how they must have stretched to the end of the earth before him, how this place must have gone on forever. But even as I’m gulping to swallow past the food, to breathe easier, and another hiccup shakes through me, I know it must have been worse for the boy.

A rain begins so light it’s like a gentle spray from a water bottle, and it turns the air white, and everything looks hazy. I want another sandwich, but Michael is sitting where Misty sat, and he’s eating his sandwich slow, tearing off his bites before putting them in his mouth. It’s one of the things I heard Pop say about Michael when he moved in with us: Mike eat like he too good for the food , he told Mam. She shook her head and cracked another pecan, picking out the meat. We were sitting next to each other on the porch swing. I’m still so hungry I can imagine the taste of those pecans, how the dust around the nut taste bitter, but the pecan is wet and sweet. Mam knew, but she ignored my thieving and let me eat. There’s only one sandwich from the lawyer left in the bag, and Misty still hasn’t eaten hers yet, so I swallow.

“We got some water?” I ask.

Leonie passes me a bottle of water the lawyer must have given her. The plastic is thick and has mountains painted on the front. The water is warm, not cold, but I’m so thirsty and my throat so clogged I don’t even care. The hiccups stop.

“Your sister finish hers?” Leonie asks.

Kayla’s fallen asleep in her car seat, which I had to move to the middle since Misty’s going to be sitting in the back with me now that Michael’s here. Kayla has half of a sandwich in her hand, her fingers curled around it tight. Her head tilted back and hot. Her nose is sweating, and her curls are getting stringy. I pull the sandwich from her grip and it comes, so I eat the rest of it, even though it’s a little soggy where she was gumming it.