Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Baby?”

“Let’s go.”

“What? I just got back. I figured we could take the kids up to the river today.”

“Mama’s gone.” I can’t stop my voice breaking between the two words. Can’t stop the cry that comes out of my mouth instead of the sigh.

Michael sits on the floor next to me, pulls me into his lap: arms, rump, legs, and all, so that I am a great baby, and I slump into him, knowing that he can bear me. Will bear me. I put my nose in his stubble-roughened neck.

“Let’s go.”

“Shhhh,” he murmurs.

“Up to Al’s.”

Michael knows. He knows what I’m really asking for: the seed at the pulpy heart of the fruit.

“We can just leave.”

To get high. To see Given again. Even as I think it, I know he won’t come. That wherever he has gone with Mama is final. But the part that Mama looked at in pity across the table, that part hopes.

“We can’t,” he says.

“Please.” The word is small and acid as a burp. It lingers between us. Michael grimaces as if he can smell the horror and grief in it, all of it distilled to one pungent syllable.

“The kids.”

The sky has turned the color of sandy red clay: orange cream. The heat of the day at its heaviest: the insects awoken from their winter slumber. I cannot bear the world.

“I can’t,” I say, and there are so many other words behind that. I can’t be a mother right now. I can’t be a daughter. I can’t remember. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. And he hears them, because he rolls forward and stands with me, picks me up again, and carries me off the porch to the car. He puts me in the passenger seat, closes the door, and climbs behind the wheel. The car shrinks the world to this: me and him in this dome of glass, all the hateful light and dogs shying into ditches and docile cows and crowding trees, the memory of my words, of Mama’s gray paper face, of Jojo’s and Kayla’s reaction to my slaps, of Pop’s shrinking, and of Given’s second leaving. Our world: an aquarium.

“Just a ride,” Michael says.

But I know that if I continue to ask, sour the air of the car with please s, he will drive to Misty’s, get her to call her friends up north, call Al, make one last call to Pop to say: Just a few days . That he will drive for hours into the black-soiled heart of the state, back toward the cage that held him, drive so far the horizon opens up like a shucked oyster shell. That if I ask, he will go. Because something in him also wants to leave his teary hug with his mother, his fight with his father, my death-crowded household, behind. We move forward, and the air from the open windows makes the glass shudder alive as a bed of mollusks fluttering in the rush of the tide: a shimmer of froth and sand. The tires catch and spit gravel. We hold hands and pretend at forgetting.

I sleep in Leonie’s bed now. I don’t have to worry about her kicking me out of it, waking me up with a punch to the back, because she ain’t never here. Not really. She come back every week, stay for two days, and then leave again. Her and Michael sleep on the sofa, both of them fish-thin, slender as two gray sardines, packed just as tight. They don’t move when I walk past them out the door in the morning to bring Kayla to the Head Start bus. Some mornings they gone by the time I come back inside for my book bag. The long dent in the sofa the only way I know they was there.

They sleep in the sofa because Pop sleeps in Mam’s room now. He got rid of the hospital bed the day we buried her. Dragged it out behind the house, into the woods, and burned it. Told me not to come back there, but I saw the smoke. Heard the flames slapping. Sometimes, at night, after Kayla done fell asleep on my shoulder, so deep her head’s heavy as a cantaloupe, I walk to the kitchen to get a glass of water and I hear Pop through the door, hear his voice threading through the keyhole. Once I heard him clear through the wall. First, I thought he was praying, but then, from the way his voice whipped up and down, I knew he wasn’t. Sound like he was talking to somebody. I asked him the next day, when I got home from school and he was sitting in his usual spot, waiting on the porch with Kayla sitting next to him on the swing.

“Pop?”

He was shelling pecans. He looked up at me, but his hands kept working, kept breaking the shell into shards, prying the meat free. Every other half he’d get, he’d pass it to Kayla, and she popped the whole thing in her mouth, smiled at me when she chewed.

“Was you talking to somebody last night?”

He paused, half a pecan in his hand. Kayla patted his arm, prodding.

“Pop,” she said. “I want it, Pop.”

He passed it to her.

“Did Leonie call?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“I should’ve known,” I said, and spit off the porch into the sand. I wished she was there, imagined what it would feel like if I spit right at her. If she’d even notice.

“Don’t,” Pop said, and went back to shelling. “She’s still your mother.”

“Michael?” I said.

Pop brushed the bitter dust that rinds the meat from his hands and shook his head, and after that, if I heard him through the door or through the walls, his voice rising like smoke up into the night, I didn’t even ask. Because in the swing of his head, the swish, the folding of his wrinkled neck, I saw him lying in the bed in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, looking where she looked when she died, his eyes staring, heard him calling her name, a name I hadn’t said since before the cancer: Philomène . And then: Phillie . And then I knew what he was doing when he thought us asleep. Something like praying, but not to God. How he was speaking and asking and searching the craters and the mountains in the ceiling. Searching for Mam. Kayla patted his arm again, but she didn’t ask for another pecan. Just rubbed him like Pop was a puppy, flea-itching and half bald, starved for love.

Sometimes, late at night, when I’m listening to Pop search the dark, and Kayla’s snoring beside me, I think I understand Leonie. I think I know something about what she feels. That maybe I know a little bit about why she left after Mam died, why she slapped me, why she ran. I feel it in me, too. An itching in my hands. A kicking in my feet. A fluttering in the middle of my chest. An unsettling. Deeper. It turns me awake every time I feel myself slipping. It tosses me like a ball through the air. Around three a.m., it lets me drop, and I sleep.

I don’t feel it during the day. Mostly. But something about the way the sky turns peach when the sun’s on its way down, sinking into the horizon like a rock into water, brings it back. So I take to walking when I know it’s coming. But not down the street like my crazy grand-uncle. I walk back through the woods. Follow the trails past Pop’s property line, down into the shadowed half-light under the pine trees, where the brown needles spread like a carpet over the red clay earth, and when I walk, it makes no sound.

One day, there’s a raccoon pawing at a fallen tree, digging grubs out the trunk. He hisses: Mine, mine, all mine . Another, a large white snake drops onto the path in front of me, falls from a branch of a crooked oak before slithering to the roots and climbing back up the tree to hunt newborn squirrels and weak-beaked, just-hatched birds. The rasp of scales against bark: The boy floats and wanders. Still stuck. And the next, a vulture circles overhead, black-feathered and strong, calling: Here, boy. The way through is here. You have the scale still? Here. And then that feeling of dissatisfaction, of wormy grief, eases a little, because I know I see what Mam saw. I hear what she heard. In those meetings, she’s a little closer. Until I see the boy laying, curled into the roots of a great live oak, looking half-dead and half-sleep, and all ghost.