Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Pop looks at me. Every piece of him aquiver.

“He wasn’t nothing but a boy, Jojo. They kill animals better than that.”

I nodded again. Richie is winding his arms around himself, hugging tighter and tighter, his arms and fingers growing incredibly long.

“I said: It’s going to be all right, Richie . He said: You going to help me? Riv, which way should I go? I heeled the dogs. Held out my hands to him, light side out. Moved slow. Soothed him. Said: We gone get you out of this. We gone get you away from here. Touched his arm: he was burning up. I’m going home, Riv? he asked. I squatted down next to him, the dogs steady yipping, and I looked at him. He had baby hair on the edge of his scalp, Jojo. Little fine hair he’d had since he sucked at his mama’s tit. Yes, Richie. I’m a take you home , I said. And then I took the shank I kept in my boot and I punched it one time into his neck. In the big vein on his right side. Held him till the blood stopped spurting. Him looking at me, mouth open. A child. Tears and snot all over his face. Shocked and scared, until he was still.”

Pop speaks into his knees. Richie’s head has tilted back until he is looking at the sky, at the great blue wash of it beyond the embrace of the trees. His eyes widen more, and his arms snap out and his legs spread and he doesn’t even see me and Pop, but he is looking at everything beyond us, past the miles we drove in that car, past the point where the pine trees turn to field and cotton and just-budding spring trees, past the highways and towns back to the swamps and stands of trees hundreds of years old. At first I think he is singing again, but then I realize it is a whine that rises to a yell that rises to a scream and the look on his face is horror at what he sees. I squint and barely hear Pop through Richie’s keening.

“I laid him down on the ground. Told the dogs to get. They smelled the blood. Tore into him.”

Richie roars. Casper is somewhere out on the road, furious, barking. The pigs are squealing. The horse is stamping its pen. Pop is working his hands like he doesn’t know how to use them. Like he’s not sure what they can do.

“I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain’t never come out. Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin. Smelled it when the warden and sergeant came up on us, the dogs yipping and licking blood from they muzzles. They’d torn his throat out, hamstringed him. Smelled it when the warden told me I’d done good. Smelled it the day they let me out on account I’d led the dogs that caught and killed Richie. Smelled it when I finally found his mama after weeks of searching, just so I could tell her Richie was dead and she could look at me with a stone face and shut the door on me. Smelled it when I made it home in the middle of the night, smelled it over the sour smell of the bayou and the salt smell of the sea, smelled it years later when I climbed into bed with Philomène, put my nose in your grandmother’s neck, and breathed her in like the scent of her could wash the other away. But it didn’t. When Given died, I thought I’d drown in it. Drove me blind, made me so crazy I couldn’t speak. Didn’t nothing come close to easing it until you came along.”

I hold Pop like I hold Kayla. He puts his face in his knees and his back shakes. Both of us bow together as Richie goes darker and darker, until he’s a black hole in the middle of the yard, like he done sucked all the light and darkness over them miles, over them years, into him, until he’s burning black, and then he isn’t. There is soft air and yellow sunlight and drifting pollen where he was, and me and Pop embracing in the grass. The animals are quieting in grunts and snorts and yips. Thank you , they say. Thank you thank you thank you , they sing.

When I get home with my load of cemetery rocks, Michael’s left in my car. The weight of the stones in my shirt is heavy, remind me of what it felt like to carry Jojo and Michaela, to bear another human being in my stomach. When I bang into the house, Phantom Given is standing outside Mama’s door. His head is cocked to the side, and he’s looking down the shotgun line of the house, through the living room, through the kitchen, out the back door. He’s listening. I stop where I am.

“What?” The word comes out like a little slung dart. Even though I know it must be the dregs of the meth I swallowed, I still feel sober as a lead weight, and here Given is, burnished and tall, in the living room. His mouth is moving like he’s repeating something that someone else is saying, and if he could speak, it would be a mumble. Whatever he’s hearing, whatever he’s mimicking, makes him run to the open doorway of the room, to pause on the threshold of the kitchen, to bow his head and grip the frame. Last time I saw him here, he was living. The blood beating through him like drums. He and Pop had just argued over something, over the Nova or his middling grades or the fact that besides the bow and arrow, he didn’t seem to have any passion for anything else besides playing football. You need direction, son , Pop had said to him. Given had been sitting on the couch, and he watched Pop walk out the back door, slumped down, and winked and whispered at me: And you need to take the stick out your ass, Pop .

Given-not-Given’s shoulder blades bunch together like fists under his shirt. He shakes his head at me once. Then again at whatever he hears.

“I’m going crazy,” I tell myself. “I’m going fucking crazy.”

I walk past Given to look out the screen door. Pop and Jojo are hunched down in the backyard, in the dirt by the pigpen, talking. I can’t hear anything from this far away, but Given can, and whatever he hears makes his head shake faster and faster, his fist punch noiselessly, once and again, in the molding. It leaves no mark. I expect to feel the brush of his T-shirt against my arm when I walk past, but feel nothing but misty cool. Given’s mouth moves, and I can make out what he’s saying without words. Pop , he mouths. Oh, Pop. I squint. It looks like Jojo is rubbing Pop’s back. Hugging Pop, and I realize I ain’t never seen Pop on the ground before if he wasn’t pushing a seed into it or wrestling some animal or pulling up weeds.

A dog bark rips through the creaking kitchen, and Given starts and turns to me, mouths one word, hands open and beckoning me like he could pull an answer from me. Who , he mouths. Who is that? He runs to the screen door. Casper barks again, a sound that shies up to a panicked yip. Pop seems to be sinking, Jojo holding him up. I don’t know this world. Given holds his arms up in front of him like he could block something. I wonder if this vision of my brother is an aftershock of yesterday’s high, a shaky meth tremor that comes once, if the massive hit I swallowed has unsewn my body and mind, unseamed me. Given is still there. As the dog’s bark rises, Given bleeds. I don’t see wounds, but he bleeds anyway, from his neck, from his chest. Where he was shot. He braces himself on the wood frame of the closed screen door, his arms and legs straining. Something is pulling him outside. Pop and Jojo are curled in two, and the dog is still barking, but I don’t see nothing, don’t see anything until I blink and like a dark flash at the corner of my eye I see a churning black cloud come to earth in the yard, but then I blink again and it’s gone. Given slumps and runs his hands up and down the doorsill; he did this when he was alive, wore the wood of the sills in the house smooth with his rubbing. He freezes and looks at me, and I wish he was alive, was flesh, because I’d kick him. Kick him for not being able to speak. Kick him for seeing whatever it is he sees or hears out in the yard and not sharing that with me. Kick him for being here, now, for taking up space in the waking, sober world, right before me. For knocking the world sideways—birds flying into glass windows, dogs barking until they piss themselves in fear, cows collapsing to their rumps in fields and never rising—still winking and smiling, every dimple and tooth declaring the joke. For dying. Always for that. Given shakes his head again, but this time, slowly—but still, his face blurs. I reach out and step toward him, to push him, maybe, to see if I can feel his brown arms, the calluses on his hands like patches of concrete, but Kayla’s cry pierces the air, and he’s gone.