Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

“For you and your sister,” Michael says, and lifts the piece of bacon he’s been poking at. It’s already maroon and stiff, but he drops it back in the grease anyway.

I actually cried , Michael told the water. He seemed ashamed to say that, but he went on anyway. How the dolphins were dying off, how whole pods of them washed up on the beaches in Florida, in Louisiana, in Alabama and Mississippi: oil-burnt, sick with lesions, hollowed out from the insides. And then Michael said something I’ll never forget: Some scientists for BP said this didn’t have nothing to do with the oil, that sometimes, this is what happens to animals: they die for unexpected reasons. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes all at once. And then Michael looked at me and said: And when that scientist said that, I thought about humans. Because humans is animals. And the way he looked at me that night told me he wasn’t just thinking about any humans; he was thinking about me. I wonder if Michael thought that yesterday, when he saw that gun, saw that cop push me down so I bowed to the dirt.

Michael lifts out the bacon and drops it on the paper towel. That night on the pier, it was as if the pull of the moon on the water, the surge of the tide, drew the words from Michael. He said: My family ain’t always did right. Was one of my dumbass cousins that killed your uncle Given. I didn’t think Michael was telling me the whole story. Whenever Leonie or Mam or Pop talk about how Given died, they said: He got shot . But Michael said something different. Some people think it was a hunting accident. He winds up his line and gets ready to cast again. One day, I’ll tell you the whole story , he said. Now the faint smell of charred bacon wafts through the air, and Michael pulls out another piece, this one curled black and hard.

Kayla claps and pulls at my hair in bunches, the same way she does grass.

“I just want you and Michaela to know that I’m here. I’m here to stay. And I missed y’all.”

Michael pulls out the bacon and puts it on the plate. It’s all black and burnt at the edges. Char and smoke fill the room. He runs to the back door and opens and closes it, trying to wave out the smoke. The grease hisses to silence. I don’t know what he wants me to say.

“We call her Kayla,” I say. I pull Kayla up over my head and set her in my lap. “No no no no,” Kayla says, and starts kicking. My scalp burns. I bounce her on my knees, but that just pisses her off, and she straightens like an ironing board and slides off my legs onto the floor. Her whine escalates until it’s like a police siren. Michael shakes his head.

“That’s enough, young lady. Get up off the goddamn floor,” he says. His door waving ain’t doing much.

Kayla shrieks.

I kneel next to her, bend over, put my mouth next to her ear, and speak loud enough for her to hear me.

“I know you mad. I know you mad. I know you mad, Kayla. But I’m going to take you outside later, okay? Just sit up and eat, okay? I know you mad. Come here. Come here.” I say this to her because sometimes I hear words between her howls, hear her thinking: Why don’t he listen why don’t he listen I feel! I put my hands under her armpits, and she squirms and wails. Michael lets the door slam, walks toward us, and then stops.

“If you don’t get up off that floor right now, I’m going to whip you, you hear? You hear me, Kayla?” Michael says. He’s turning red around his eyes and his throat as he waves his arms in the air, and the smoke just follows him like a blanket he’s wrapped around himself. This makes him redder. I don’t want him to hit her with the fork.

“Come on, Kayla. Come on,” I say.

“Goddamnit,” Michael says. “Michaela!”

And then he’s hunching over both of us, and his arm whips out, whips in, and he’s dropped the fork and he’s smacking Kayla hard on the thigh, once and twice, his face as pale and tight as a knot. “What did I say?” He punctuates each word with a slap. Kayla’s mouth is open, but she’s not wailing: all of her seized up silent, eyes wide from the pain. I know this cry. I swing her up and away from Michael’s hand, spin her around and to me. Her back under my rubbing hand, hot. My shushes don’t mean nothing. I know what’s coming. She lets go of the breath in one long thunderous wail.

“You ain’t have to do that,” I tell Michael. He’s backing away, shaking his spanking hand like it’s gone numb.

“I told her,” he says.

“You ain’t,” I say.

“Y’all don’t listen,” Michael says.

Kayla writhes and shrieks, her whole body coiling. I turn my back on Michael, run out the back door. Kayla rubs her face into my shoulder and screams.

“I’m sorry, Kayla,” I say, like I’m the one hit her. Like she can hear over her crying. I walk around the backyard with her, saying it over and over, until the sun sits higher in the sky, bearing down on us, turning the muddy puddles to vapor. Burning the land dry, and burning me and Kayla: her to peanut butter, me to rust.

I apologize until she quiets to hiccups, until I know she can hear me. And I’m waiting, waiting for her small arms to fold around my neck, her head to drop to my shoulder, and I’m so intent on waiting for it that I don’t even see the boy staring at us from the shadow of a tall, many-armed pine tree until Kayla’s pinching my arms, saying, No no, Jojo . In the bright light of the day the shadow swallows him: cool dark bayou water, the color of mud—tepid and blinding. He moves and he is of a piece with the darkness.

“He’s slopping the pigs. Your pop.”

I blow air hard out my nose, hope it will mean nothing to him. That he will not read it as wanting to talk, that he will not read it as not wanting to talk.

“He don’t see me. How come he don’t see me?”

I shrug. Kayla says: Eat-eat, Jojo . All’s quiet in the house, and for a stupid second I wonder why Leonie and Michael ain’t arguing about him hitting Kayla. And then I remember. They don’t care.

“You got to ask him about me,” Richie says. He steps out of the shadow and he is a swimmer surfacing for air, glistening in the light. And in the light, he is just a skinny boy, too narrow in the bones, the fat that should be on him starved off. Somebody that I can feel sorry for until his eyes widen, and I squeeze Kayla so hard she cries out. The face he pulls is pinched with hunger and longing.

I shake my head.

“It’s the only way I can go.” Richie stops, looks up in the sky. “Even if he don’t know me no more, don’t care about me. I need the story to go.” His afro is so long it sprouts from his head like Spanish moss. “The snake-bird says.”

“What?” I say, and regret it.

“It’s different here,” he says. “So much liquid in the air. Salt. And a mud smell. I can tell,” he says, “the other waters is near.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. Kayla says: Inside, Jojo, inside .

Richie looks at me like he’s seeing me the way I seen him. Like Pop looks at a hog at slaughtering time, measuring the meat. He nods.

“You get him to tell you the story. When I’m there,” he says.

“No,” I say.

“No?” he says.

“No.” Kayla is making little mewling sounds, pulling at my ears. I want eat, Jojo , she says. “It’s enough we brought you back. Brought you here. What if Pop don’t want to tell that story? What if it’s something he don’t want to say?”

“Don’t matter what he want. It matter what I need.”

I jiggle Kayla. Turn in a circle, my feet sinking in the muddied grass. A cow lows nearby, and I hear: Cool and becoming of green things, it is. All the new grass. I stop my spin when I see his fierce eyes again.