Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

“It’s time.”

“What?” I say.

Mama clears her throat, but her whisper is no louder: too-long pant hems dragging over dirt.

“It’s time.”

“For what, Mama?”

“For me to go.”

“What you mean?”

I set the cup down on the edge of the nightstand.

“This pain.” She blinks as if to grimace, but doesn’t. “If I lay in this bed for much longer, it’s going to burn the heart out of me.”

“Mama?”

“I done did everything I could. Brewed all the herbs and medicines. Opened myself to the mystère. For Saint Jude, for Marie Laveau, for Loko. But they can’t enter. The body won’t let them,” she says.

Her knuckles bear all the scars: slipped knives, broken dishes, pounds of laundry. I wonder if I pull her hand to my nose and sniff, if I can smell all the offerings she done placed on her altar over the years, done used to heal: strings of peppers, potatoes, yams, cattail, spider lily, Spanish needle, sweet bedstraw, and wild okra. All the green of the earth in her hands. But when I sniff, her palms sandpaper dry, I smell threshed hay bleached by the winter sun. Dead. She squeezes, and it is pitiful. When I was a little girl, she kneaded my scalp when she washed my hair, scraped it with her fingernails as I sat in the tub with my knees in my chin. I want to cry. I don’t know what she’s saying to me.

“I got one left,” she says.

“What you mean?”

“The last mystère. Maman Brigitte. Let her come into me. Possess me. She the mother of the dead. The judge. If she come, maybe she take me with her.”

“There ain’t another? What about one that heals?” I ask.

“I didn’t teach you enough. You won’t be able to appease them.”

“I could try.” I let the words trail from my mouth and hang in the air like lax fishing line, dangling a hook nothing wants to bite. The night bugs call one to another, courting and threatening and singing, and I can’t understand any of it. Mama looks at me, and for one blink, hope shines, remote and brilliant as a full moon.

“No,” she says. “You don’t know. You ain’t never met the mystère. They look at you, they see a baby.”

I take my hand from hers, and she lays still, her eyes too wet, too large. Eyelids fluttering. She don’t ever blink.

“You can gather for me. I need rocks. From the cemetery. Enough to stack them in a pile. And cotton.”

I want to walk out the room. Walk out the front door. Walk straight to the bayou, to the water, step on it, shimmering glass under my soles, and walk until I disappear over the horizon.

“Cornmeal. And rum.”

“That’s it? You just going to go? Soon as you seek this spirit? Just like that?”

My voice breaks: my face is wet.

“Why can’t Pop do it?” I ask.

“You my baby.” She breathes heavy, and the grate cracks and sinks to rusted stillness. “Like I drew the veil back so you could walk in this life, you’ll help me draw it back so I can walk in the next.”

“Mama, no—”

“Help me prepare.” She sighs wetly then, and I reach out to wipe her face, the skin under the tears warm and wet and alive with salt and water and blood. “I don’t want to be empty breath. Bitter at the marrow of my bones. I don’t want that, Leonie.”

“Mama.”

The cup falls off the table, spreads a puddle of water around my shoes. The katydids clack in applause or disapproval, I don’t know.

“Baby, please,” Mama says.

Her eyes wild and wide. She moans, and what could be the pain moves through her, making her legs shuffle under the covers, then lay still: rough wind through bare winter branches. The morphine is not enough.

“Let me leave with something of myself. Please.”

I nod, and then her scalp is under my hands, hot to the touch, and I’m kneading and scratching like she did me, and her mouth is opening and closing in half pleasure, half pain. Opening and closing with what would be sobs, but she chokes them quiet. Relief again, but this time like a flood over dry plains, rushing from where I touch her head down her gaunt face, her sinewy neck, her flattened, etched chest, the dip of her stomach, the empty pot of her hips, the long, swollen black lines of her legs, to her flat feet. I wait, but nothing about her body changes. I expect her to lie slack, but it doesn’t happen. I only know she’s fallen asleep by her eyelids, the smooth marbles of them, relaxed. I leave her and pull the door behind me. Michael’s in the shower. Pop is still out on the porch, flashing in the darkness. Someone has turned a lamp on in the living room, and Given’s pictures, year after year of half smiles and angled legs like he’s a moment away from jumping up and running, look down on me. A multitude of Givens. And I want him back so bad then, because I want to ask him: What should I do?

Jojo and Michaela are on the second sofa in the living room: Jojo cocoons Michaela, his back turned to the room, his red-ringed wrists crossed behind her back. Michaela breathes into Jojo’s chest, open-mouthed, huffing crumbs into his shirt, and a half-eaten cracker falls from her hand to the floor. I don’t even pick it up. In my room, my full bed seems as small and narrow as Mama’s, and like her, I turn to the wall. I can feel her on the other side. She sears me. I couldn’t see before, but now I feel it; her chest packed tight with wood and charcoal, drenched in lighter fluid, empty no longer—the pain the great blaze, immolating all.

I pulled Kayla out and ran to the porch, to Pop and his lighter, bright as a lighthouse beacon as it flashed in the dark. I skipped the steps and leapt up to the porch, coming to a fast stop in front of Pop like the rabbits that creep around the house when the sun sets: eating, stilling, then running only to freeze again. Saying to me: So delicious, so delicious, but still, still, yes, I see you . Calling to one another: Run run run halt .

“Son,” Pop says, and grabs the back of my neck, his hand large and warm. My wrists feel raw. My mouth comes open and I breathe in. It sounds like a web of phlegm is in my throat. My eyes are burning and I shut my jaw and clench my teeth and try and try and try not to cry. I breathe again and it sounds like a sob. But I will not cry, even though I want to duck down with Kayla, want Pop to fold me in his arms and hug me to him, want to smash my nose in his shoulder so hard I can’t breathe. But I don’t. I feel his hand on me and rise on my toes so he presses harder. I can feel the heat of his fingers. He lets his hand run down my back to rest at the top of my spine, and I even imagine I can feel the whorl of his fingertips, the blood push back under his skin.

“Pop,” I say.

Pop shakes his head, gives my back a little rub.

“Go put your sister to sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

Me and Kayla eat crackers and pimento cheese and some smothered chicken legs Pop got in a skillet on the stove, wash it down with water. I think about putting Kayla in the tub but then I hear the shower, and when I hear Mam’s and Leonie’s voices in the room and see Pop’s lighter flash on the porch, I know it’s Michael. Kayla lays her head on my shoulder, grabs my hair, rolls my curls around her finger like a noodle.

“Mam? Pop?”

Her breathing gets slow and then she’s slobbering on my throat and I know she’s asleep, but I don’t put her down because I’m looking at Richie, who’s looking at Pop, who’s looking out to the black yard, the far road. The boy’s face shows in fire, and I ain’t never seen that look before. Ain’t never seen somebody look at someone else like Richie looks at Pop: all the hope on his face, plain in the circle of his mouth, his wide-open eyes, the wrinkle of his forehead. He step closer and closer to Pop, and he’s a cat then, fresh-born, milk-hungry, creeping toward someone he’d die without. I lay Kayla down on the sofa and step out onto the porch. Richie follows.