Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Mama,” I choke, and it’s as weak and wanting as a baby. “Mommy.” My crying and Mama’s entreaties and Kayla’s wailing and Given’s shouting fill the room like a flood, and it must have been as loud outside as it is in here, because Jojo runs in to stand at my elbow and Pop’s at the door.

“You got what you came for. Now get,” Jojo says.

At first I think he’s talking to me but then he’s looking through me and up, and I know who he’s talking to. There’s strength in his voice, so much that I’m speaking even as I’m crying and pulling Mama up to my heart.

“For Maman Brigitte, Mother of all the Gede. Mistress of the cemetery and mother of all the dead.” I breathe hard and it is a ragged sob.

“No, Leonie,” says Jojo. “You don’t know.” He glares up at the ceiling.

“Leonie,” Mama chokes.

“Grande Brigitte, Judge. This altar of stones is for you. Accept our offerings,” I say. Mama’s eyes are steady rolling, steady rolling to the ceiling, where the boy with the smooth face hovered, needy and balled up like a baby.

“Shut up, Leonie. Please,” Jojo says. “You don’t see.”

Mama’s eyes steady rolling to the wall where Given has stopped thrashing. They turn to me, beseeching. “Enter,” I say.

“Go,” Jojo says. He looks up at where the boy flashed. “Ain’t no more stories for you here. Nobody owe you nothing here.” He raises a hand to Given, and it is as if Jojo has unlocked and opened a gate, because Given pushes through whatever held him.

“You heard my nephew,” Given says. “Go, Richie.”

I don’t see anything, but something must have happened, because Given walks unbothered toward the bed. Pop has slid down the wall, all the upright parts of him crumbling as he looks at Mama, makes himself look at Mama, for once. He’s been orbiting her like a moon, sleeping on the sofa with his back to the door, searching the yard and woods for pens and bins and machines to fix so he can repair in the face of what he cannot.

Mama’s breath is a jagged wind, coming slower and slower. Her eyes lowered to slits. Her body: ruined and still. Jojo steps out of Given’s way. He scoops Kayla, who’s crying, “Uncle.” Jojo swallows and looks right at Given. Jojo sees him. He recognizes him. He nods, and Given is Given again, only for a breath, because he smiles and there’s the joke again in his dimple.

“Nephew,” Given says.

Mama’s breath slows to a choke. She looks at me, her face twisted.

“Enter. Dance with us,” I whisper.

Given’s next to the bed, climbing into it, curling around her, saying Mama , saying I come for you, Mama , saying I come, Mama , and Mama takes one long, ripping breath, her breath and blood and spirit beating frantic as a moth caught in a spider’s web, and then Shhhh , Given says, I come with the boat, Mama , and then he moves his hand over her face, from her air-starved chin to her flared nostrils to her eyes, open and open, looking from me to Given to Jojo and Michaela to Pop at the door and then back to Given. Given’s hand flutters above her face like he is a groom and Mama is a bride and he has pulled the veil from her head and let it fall back so they can look upon each other with love, clear and sweet as the air between them. Mama bucks and goes still.

Time floods the room in a storm surge.

I wail.

We cry in chorus. Pop folded over in the door, me with Mama’s warm nightgown still in my hands, and Kayla with her face smashed into Jojo’s shoulder. But not Jojo. His eyes are shiny but nothing comes from them, not even when he asks:

“What did you say?”

I can’t speak. Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

“Leonie!”

Anger spreads through me: oil over water.

“She asked,” I say.

“Naw.” Jojo bounces Kayla in his arms, looks at Mama like he’s waiting for her to open her eyes, turn her head, say: Silly Jojo . “Your words. They let in a river. That’s what took her and Uncle Given away.”

“Yes.” He doesn’t understand what it means, to have the first thing you ever done right by your mama be to usher in her gods. To let her go.

Pop is sliding his way up the door to stand. But there’s still a curve there at the top of his back: his shoulders a bowl. His head swings on his neck like a pendulum. His throat: broken.

“She did, Jojo.” Pop’s voice is the only thing about him with some hardness to it: a sheathed knife. “She couldn’t bear that pain.”

“Mam wouldn’t leave us. Not even with Uncle Given.”

Jojo gains what Pop’s lost of his bearing. First, a brace across his thighs, all the bowlegged softness of his preadolescence dissolved to a granite stance.

“She did,” I say.

Then across his chest, which makes his shoulders crowbar straight.

“She said—” Jojo says.

“It was a mercy, son,” Pop says.

And then the headpiece so that the baby face, the last of the milk fat, is steel-still, frozen for war. Only Jojo’s eyes peer out, carrying some of the boy in them.

“What you want?” I ask. “To say I’m sorry?”

Those eyes.

“To say I ain’t want to?”

I can’t control my voice. It whistles, high and whip-thin. There is a rope of fire from my eyes, behind my nose, down my throat, and it coils in a noose in my stomach. Mama is still warm.

“’Cause I ain’t. I did what she needed me,” I say.

She could be sleeping. I ain’t seen her face this smooth, without tension, in years. I want to slap her awake, for asking me to let her go. I want to slap Jojo, for looking at me like I had a choice. And I want to bring Given back from the dead and make him flesh again just so I can slap him, too, for leaving. For taking her. There’s too much blank sky where a tree once stood. All wrong. The noose tightens.

“Nothing,” Jojo says. “You can’t give me nothing.”

He looks at Mama when he says it, and I stop smoothing her hair back from her still face. And then he’s looking at me and he’s hard as Pop and soft as Mama. Censure and pity. I’m a book and he can read every word. I know this. He sees me. He knows it all.

“Girl,” Pop says.

And then it stops tight and I am raging, hateful at this world, and I let Mama slide to the mattress and I stand and run at Jojo, who backs away, but he is not quick enough because I am there and when I hit his face, pain cracks through my palm, pings through my fingers. So I do it again. And I do it again before I realize Kayla’s squalling in his arms, scrambling up his chest, trying to get away from me. And Jojo’s straight, straight as Pop, all the little boy gone from his eyes: the tide gone out, the sun scorching the residue of water away, leaving hot sand baking to concrete. And Pop’s at my side, his body folding over me like a kite falling from the sky as he grabs both of my arms and pulls them together so that my palms touch.

“That’s enough,” Pop says. “No more, Leonie.”

“You don’t know,” I say. “You don’t!” Jojo’s rubbing his face into Kayla’s little shirt, and I want so much. I want to hit him again and I want to hold him to me and palm his head again like when he was a hairless baby and I want to tell Jojo, We a family , and I want to ask him: What you seen, boy, what you seen? But I don’t do none of that. Instead, I yank away from Pop, walk past Jojo and Kayla, and leave Mama on the bed, her face up to the ceiling, her eyes open, all the warmth gone from out the middle of her. Cold at the heart, time worming its way through her hardening veins.

When Michael comes back, I’m on the porch. He ignores the steps and leaps to where I am sitting. The wood creaks when he lands, and I imagine it crumbling, dry-rotted and warped from the heat, me falling through where I sit on the floor down to the clay earth underneath, that opening up, a hole straight down: an endless well. It is the first hot day of the spring, a foretaste of the damnation that will suffuse the air in the summer, that will make everyone and everything bend.