Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

“Sorry,” he says, glancing back.

I shrug even though he can’t see it as he peers toward the house. We are working our way toward the house side of the pasture, Skeetah looking for cars, for movement. In the shadow of the house away from the barn, a puppy lolls. A mutt. Skeetah pauses, drops to his knees. He puts on his T-shirt and wets one fingertip, holds it up to the air. His head is to the side with one ear up as if he is listening to the trees, the insects droning in waves. I shrug at him again, this time with my hands up.

“What are you doing?” I whisper.

“Seeing if we upwind or downwind.”

“Okay, Crocodile Hunter.” I expect him to laugh, but he doesn’t even grin. He wets two more fingers, holds them up. “You know he’s dead, right?”

“Shut up, Esch.” Skeetah’s quiet, wipes his hands off on his pants. “That must have been the dog we heard that first time.” He licks his finger and holds it up again, but soon drops it. “I can’t tell.”

We are standing in the middle of a patch of blackberry vines. Their barbed-wire twine catches on my ankles, fingers a shin, draws blood in short, deep lines like a child’s scratch. I knee the air, trying to pull away, only to get caught up in more on my calf, around my toe.

“Hold still.” Skeetah grabs them as he’d grabbed the branches and pulls. “They can smell blood, you know.”

“Not from this far, Skeet.”

“Fine, don’t believe me.” The vines peel away. Skeetah wets his fingers again, but this time he wipes away the droplets of blood that have gathered on my legs like summer gnats. He wipes them away in dabs, licks his fingers again, wipes. He has the same patient look Mama had on her face when she used to find us crusty in public, smears of Kool-Aid along our mouths, crumbs on our cheeks. She cleaned us like kittens. He bends to wipe the seams of my socks, and his bald head gleams with sweat. He picks up my leg and I balance with one hand on his head. His shaved skin reminds me of scales when I rub against it, and it is cool like a puddle of water that has been turning dark and dry at the edges in a tree’s shade.

We worm our way through the woods as we watch the house for movement. We slide on our stomachs under bushes so tangled and overgrown that we cannot crouch or crawl through them. We slither like snakes, grab dirt and pine straw with our elbows, and pull. Skeetah stops often, straw and twigs sliding off his slick head to catch on his shoulders like holiday tinsel, and he listens. I stop, too, try my hardest to be so still, to hear the threat, but the blood beats through my ears so strongly I cannot hear anything over that and the whooshing of my breath. Skeetah crawls through a stand, and we start again. Dust turns to mud on our arms, leaves us striped. Bits of sunlight bite through the tops of the pines, that murmur once and twice and are quiet. There is nothing but us creeping through the underbrush. A rabbit sits, watching us, as we make the halfway mark around the circle of the field and its quiet house. It twitches its ears, stares at us in profile, one large black eye like a wet marble in its face, wide and glazed as if it is seeing something supernatural. We keep walking, and it stays put, even after we leave it sitting in the little clearing we’d broken through, even after we leave it for the road.

The path to the road is less thick. Here the trees are mostly the kind that lose their leaves in the winter, but they are green and full with summer. The wind makes them clap as we pass. The road is narrow, and from what I can see of the house, we only have around three-fourths of the field between us and where we started. A vein of oyster shells runs down the middle of the road, but the rest is paved with small rocks that look like they come from the river. Sand rises up in little hills at the road’s edges, and Skeetah and I kneel next to them as he squints down the drive, his right hand up to me. Wait , his lacy knuckles say.

Insects sizzle and answer us. Heat. A little further down the drive, a snake sleeps. Skeetah waves me forward, and we run across the road. Our feet over the stones are light as skipped rocks.

The drive is endless, winks out in the distance where the trees on either side meet in the middle. For a year, we were very unlucky, and St. Catherine schools changed our bus route so that we were picked up at 6:30 A.M. and for the next hour we rode up and out of the black Bois that we knew and into the white Bois that we didn’t that spread out and upcountry, past churches and one-room stores selling cigarettes and hot fries, chips and cold drinks in glass bottles and penny candy, the kind of stores that have one gas tank out front with the writing scratched off. Randall would sleep with his head on the glass, Skeetah would do homework, and I would study all the other houses in other lonely fields; the trailers, the long low brick homes, small wood shacks that looked slapped together, that couldn’t be bigger than two rooms. And all the kids we picked up were white: broad-shouldered, thick boys with wiry hair on their lips and little girls with red cheeks and eyes watery blue, their faces scrubbed rough. I wonder if they have their own Skeetahs and Esches crawling around the edges of their fields, like ants under the floorboards marching in line toward sugar left open in the cabinet.

The house is plain from all angles: its white is faded to tan by the sun, and all the windows are shut with white curtains drawn over them. It’s a blind house with closed eyes. There’s a raised concrete porch running across the front of the house, and some rocking chairs, painted bright blue, the kind of bright blue I’ve seen on the lizards that live in the seams of our walls, that crouch still on the front porch. The barn is unpainted and tall, and the doors are shut. The wood is old and dark, like the kind of wood Papa Joseph used to build Mother Lizbeth’s house. It looks similiar, as if all the walls are so old they’re about to peel away from each other at the edges.

“Shhhh,” Skeetah breathes, and I don’t know if he’s telling me to be quiet or calling my name. But he is standing still, so I stop behind him. He points. There, in the cove of trees where we first viewed the house and barn, in the cove of trees that leads to the Pit-someone is there.

Skeetah moves with his back curved, his fingers touching the ground as we scoot forward from shadow to shadow. We hug the trees. It’s not until we’re laying on our sides, peeping over a red dirt hill, that I see things I think I know, like the rubber band swing of an arm, a careful sway and settle of limbs. Randall and Big Henry. And then a piping. Junior.

“Who house is that?”

“Some white people’s, Junior,” Randall answers.

“You sure you saw them heading this way?” Big Henry asks.

“Soon as me and Junior jumped the ditch to the yard, we saw them running off back in here. Fast.”

“How you know they came here?”

“I don’t,” Randall breathed. “But this all they got back here, and they ain’t got enough people for chase. If we find them, I bet they’re going to want to play.”

“I want to go see the cows,” Junior says, jumping up again and again, trying to bounce level with Randall’s face. He gets as far as his chest. “Please.”

“No,” Randall says. “You can see them from here.”

I push up from the hill, ready to walk over. Skeetah grabs my arm, stops me mid-rise, and it hurts almost, the way he pulls at the shoulder. He is shaking his head, and I cannot understand what is in his face. He points to the ground, tries to pull me down next to him so I won’t let them know where we are, what we’re about to do.

“They can help,” I whisper. “More eyes.”

He still has my wrist, pulling it tight to him like a rope to his side, as if he can make me heel. I snatch my hand from him, and it slides through his grip like a wet fish.