Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

Michael knocks on the door. All of us are huddled on the porch, smelling like vomit and salt and musk, when Al opens it.

“I’m surprised they processed you so quickly!” Al says.

He has another cooking spoon in his hand, a hand towel tossed over his shoulder like a scarf. I feel sorry for his housekeeper, if he has one, because I’m pretty sure he never washes any of his pots, just stacks one on the other on his counter. Whenever he’s not at his office, he must be cooking.

“Michaela’s still sick.” Misty shoulders her way past all of us and through the front door.

“Well, that just won’t do,” Al says, and he steps back so the rest of us can file past him. Jojo is last; Michaela won’t let him go, and he won’t put her down.

“Clean towels are in the hall closet,” Al says. “Y’all should wash up. I’ll borrow Misty and we’ll go to the store for medicine.” Misty nods, looks relieved at being able to ride in a vehicle not splashed with vomit. “Bread and ginger ale are in the pantry,” Al says. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that yesterday.” Al studies the carpet, then looks up and passes the towel over his face. “Oh yes, I remember.” He smiles at me and Michael. “I was dazzled by my company and their gifts, no?”

Michael holds out his hand. They are callused from the farm work he did in Parchman: looking after dairy cows and chickens, tending to some vegetable patches. He told me the warden thought it would be a good idea to get the inmates to working the land again, that he thought it was a shame all that good Delta soil was going to waste with all them able-bodied men there, with all them idle hands. But it had put a bug in Michael. He liked it, he told me in his letters. When he finally got home, he wanted us to put in a garden, wherever we ended up at. Even if it was a cluster of pots on a concrete slab. Can’t nothing bother me when I got my hands in the dirt , he said. Like I’m talking to God with my fingers. Al’s hand looks soft, big, and when he shakes Michael’s hand, his flesh is an envelope, swallowing.

“Thank you,” Michael says. “For everything you done for my family and me.”

Al shrugs, looks down at their hands, turns redder than he already is.

“It’s my job,” Al says, “for which I am well compensated. Thank you .”

After Misty and Al leave, I strip Michaela and make Jojo take off his shirt, and then I throw it all in Al’s washing machine, a fancy upright that takes me five minutes of jabbing buttons and turning dials to figure out how to work. Michaela shrieks the entire time she’s in the bathtub, her eyes rolling to Jojo, and I’m rougher than I should be with her, soaping her little lean belly, her legs, her back. Picking chunks out of her hair. Pushing that rag against her face to wipe the slime and crust and tears from it, pushing harder than I should, because I’m so pissed. Mama carried an orange bracelet always, woven orange yarn with little orange beads on it, and she knotted it and put it in the pocket of her skirt every day, and when me or Given done something stupid, something like Given getting drunk for the first time and showing up with a sick mouth throwing up all over her herbs on the porch, or like when I pulled up some plant she was growing in the garden, mistaking it for a weed, she’d grab that little piece of orange and start praying: Saint Teresa , I’d hear. Our Lady of Candelaria , she’d mutter. And then: Oya . And I don’t know the French, just words here and there, but sometimes she’d say it in English, and I was there often enough to understand: For Oya of the winds, of lighting, of storms. Overturn our minds. Clean the world with your storms, destroy it and make it new with the winds of your skirts. And when I asked her what she meant, she said: Ain’t no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that’s going to flush out the truth.

“Saint Teresa,” I mutter. “Oya,” I say, and rinse Michaela, dumping a cup of water over her head. She wails. I wrap a towel around her that soaks at the bottom, turns heavy with water, before picking her up and lifting her out of the tub. She kicks. I want to hit her. Don’t make me feel this for nothing , I think. Give me some truth. But ain’t no truth coming when I dry her off, ignore the lotion for her flailing, and shoulder past Jojo, who been cleaning off his chest at the sink and mirror and, I know, watching, like a blue jay mother, ready to dart in and peck if I do her wrong. Ready to take the hits for himself if I do lose my temper and start swatting at her bottom, still clammy with water and fever. He’s at that age where skinny boys either stretch and get skinnier and leaner and harder, or where skinny boys get fat and spend their early teen years trying to learn how to move bodies made bulky by hormones. Jojo is a mix of both: fat collects all along his belly, but avoids his chest and arms and face. With a shirt on, he still looks as lean as he did when he was younger. I can tell by the way he wash himself he’s ashamed of it, that he don’t know like I do that in a few years that stomach’s going to melt away, layer by layer, as he gets taller and more muscular, and he’ll emerge, his body an even-limbed machine like Michael’s. Tall like Pop.

“Make sure you get in them rolls,” I say. Jojo flinches like I’ve hit him. Shies closer to the mirror. It feels good to be mean, to speak past the baby I can’t hit and let that anger touch another. The one I’m never good enough for. Never Mama for. Just Leonie, a name wrapped around the same disappointed syllables I’ve heard from Mama, from Pop, even from Given, my whole fucking life. I dump Michaela, the wailing bundle, on the bed and begin toweling her off and she’s still kicking and screaming and moaning and now saying, Jojo , and I just want to give her one slap, or maybe two, enough to sting her good, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop, Saint Teresa, I won’t be able to stop, help me. I leave her trembling and walk to the door and yell at the bathroom, at Jojo, who stands with his hands tucked in his armpits, his arms like football pads across his chest, and watches us.

“Get her dressed. Put her to sleep for a nap. Don’t leave this room.”

I slam the door.

When I run out of the hallway and see Michael standing in the milky light, my anger turns so quickly to love I stop, silenced. All I can do is watch him walk the four corners of the room, and then shrug.

“He ain’t got no TV,” Michael says. “He got this big old nice house, but no TV.”

I laugh and it’s like the bad-ass little boy who ruined the TV down the road is in the room with us: the delighted trembling he must have felt at his wickedness rushes like water through me.

“He got something better than that,” I say.

The fireplace is big, the molding blackened at the edges and the paint long since sloughed off like a snake’s skin. There are three ceramic bowls capped with tops on the mantel, vases at least five shades of blue. Like the ocean , Al said the night before. Not like your ocean—I mean seriously, they shouldn’t even call that a gulf since it’s the color of ditch water. I mean real water. I mean Jamaica and Saint Lucia and Indonesia and Cyprus. He smiled away the insult and pointed at the two larger urns at the corners of the mantel. Mater and Pater , he said. And then he slid the small center urn across the sooty wooden plane and cradled it in his arms. And my Baby: my Beloved. When Al pulled out the pack, Misty yelped, excited. I pull out the pack and Michael looks as if he wants to turn and run—and then like I am holding his favorite food, macaroni and cheese, and he wants to eat. Instead, he grabs my hand and pulls me toward him, surrounds me, breathes heavy into the hair at my temple, making it flutter. Five minutes later, we are high.