Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

“You ran her for a while.”

“Yeah.” Skeetah plays with the links the way he used to play with liver, with oatmeal, with beets from the can shaped like tubes of cranberry sauce. This was before he grew older, before his knees gained muscle and his shoulders knotted and he began shoveling his food, lima beans or mushrooms or chitterlings, as if he didn’t care what he ate anymore.

“And she still nursing. She probably just tired.”

Daddy’s tractor growls from the darkness, bullies the insects. It rolls over branches, discarded plastic garbage cans, detached fenders. They crack and break. Daddy leaves splinters. Randall and Junior follow in its wake, stumbling through the detritus. Skeetah shakes his head.

“He’s going to have them out there all gotdamn night.” Skeetah grabs China’s bowl from where he has secreted it high on a shelf; it is so high he has to stand on his toes. Randall or Big Henry could have grabbed it without even reaching. Daddy leaves the tractor running and swings one leg over and is down. Skeetah pours China’s food, sets it on top of the drum. “Hold on.”

Big Henry moves to let Skeetah walk out of the doorway, and then he smiles at me. The moon shines like a fluorescent bulb behind his head. A piping wind blows, and where my hair escapes and touches my face, it feels like a spider’s web unanchored, adrift. Randall climbs up the tractor and sits. Junior hoists himself up and begins scaling the metal.

“What you doing?” Daddy asks Junior.

“Helping Randall.”

“No you’re not. Get down.”

“I won’t be in the way.”

“Get down.”

“Please.”

“I said no.”

Randall scoots forward on the seat, motions behind him.

“He can sit behind me. He won’t be in the way.”

Junior is leaning back to please Daddy, to make him think that he is on the verge of obeying, of jumping off, but still he grips the seat with his hands, and he does not step down.

“Please, Daddy.”

Daddy clears his throat and spits. His T-shirt has a gaping hole at the neck, and it is uneven at the hem, as if someone has been pulling at it.

“Hurry up,” Daddy says.

Daddy waves Junior up to the tractor, and Junior climbs up, slides behind Randall, wraps his arms around Randall’s waist with the expectant look of a child on a carousel ride. Skeetah bangs out of the back door of the house with a cup of something in his hand. Moths flit about his head like mussed ash. He walks by and I smell bacon drippings.

“She has to eat,” Skeetah says as he dribbles the drippings, the color of pine sap, over China’s dried food. China looks at him, then away. He slides the bowl toward her, but she ignores him. His eyes are a darkness in his face. “Come on.”

China grimaces at him, a showing of tooth and red gum. The puppies are twitching toward her over the linoleum, as if they smell the milk through her breasts, through the pink meat of her. Her nipples look like chewed-up gum.

“Come on.” Daddy waves the tractor forward. “This the corner. Right here.”

“All right,” Skeetah breathes, heedless of the creeping puppies as he pushes China’s bowl so close to her that she could lay her head down in it. The lines between Skeet’s muscles looked filled in with charcoal.

“All right!” Daddy yells. “Now keep coming straight forward, right there.” Randall guns the tractor and it surges forward. Junior’s head snaps back, but he hangs on. There is a crack of wood and then a metal whine as Randall presses the gas again and the tractor jerks forward. “Hold it! You got chicken wire stuck in the grille.”

Daddy tugs at the wire, pulls at the grille and hood. He yanks, leans forward so far he almost puts his face in the grille, detangles, and then he begins pulling at the wire again. Randall is still.

“Do it,” Skeetah commands China.

China’s ears are flat as plastic knives laid on her head and her mouth is wet and pink as uncooked chicken, except here the bone shows. She is quivering, her muscles beset by a multitude of tics. She is shaking all over, now eye to eye with Skeetah, seemingly ignoring the dirt-red puppy rounding her bowl, waddling for milk. He is the one that is a model of the father, of Kilo; he is the fattest, the most well fed, the bully. Turgid with the promise of living. When their eyes eventually open, I think that his will be the first.

The tractor idles and the engine turns, sounds as if it going to move.

“Don’t do it!” Daddy yells against his tugging, but his grunts eat the Don’t , and I don’t know what Randall hears, but he lets up on the brake and slips it in gear, and the tractor eases forward. “Stop!” Daddy yells. He is pulling back, his hand clenched in the wire, and he twists so hard his arm looks long and ropy.

The red puppy creeps forward, rounds China’s bowl, noses her tit. China is rolling, rising. The rumble of the tractor is her growl. Her toes are pointed, her head raised. Skeetah falls back. The red puppy undulates toward her; a fat mite. China snaps forward, closes her jaw around the puppy’s neck as she does when she carries him, but there is no gentleness in it. She is all white eyes. She is chewing. She is whipping him though the air like a tire eaten too short for Skeetah to grab.

“Stop!” Skeetah yells. “Stop!”

Randall puts the tractor in gear, switches it to park, but the small hillock the coop is on pulls the tractor back as the engine idles.

“No!” Daddy calls.

Daddy flings his hand free. There is oil on it. He holds to his chest. His shirt is covered in oil. Daddy’s jaw is slack. He is walking toward the light of the shed. The oil on his T-shirt turns red. The sound coming out his open mouth is like growling.

“No!” Skeetah calls.

The blood on Daddy’s shirt is the same color as the pulpy puppy in China’s mouth. China flings it away from her. It thuds on the tin and slides. Randall comes running. Big Henry kneels with Daddy in the dirt, where what was Daddy’s middle, ring, and pinkie finger on his left hand are sheared off clean as fallen tree trunks. The meat of his fingers is red and wet as China’s lips.

Skeetah kneels in the dirt, feeling for the mutilated puppy; he knocks into metal drums and toolboxes and old chainsaws with his head and his shoulders.

“Why did you?” Skeetah wails.

“Why?” Daddy breathes to Randall and Big Henry standing over him, the blood sluicing down his forearm. They are gripping Daddy’s wrist, trying to stop the bleeding. Skeetah is punching the metal he meets. China is bloody-mouthed and bright-eyed as Medea. If she could speak, this is what I would ask her: Is this what motherhood is?

There were too many of us in the car on the way to the hospital. Daddy, with his hand wrapped in a red-blooming towel, sat in the front seat. Big Henry drove. Junior and Randall and I sat in the backseat, the smell of blood like the Gulf when the tide’s low. That and the smell of dog, like China was in the middle of the driver’s seat, licking her whiskers with her bloody tongue, nosing the absent Skeet. Daddy sounded like a larger version of the puppies, his breathing whining in and out. I wondered if he noticed it through the pain. His neck was stringy and long as a cooked turkey’s. We took the back way to the hospital, through miles of woods, lonely houses like possums in the dark, half caught and then left behind by the headlights. Junior let me hold his hand. When we arrived at the hospital, Randall and Big Henry half dragged, half carried Daddy through the doors to orderlies who were standing there as if they were waiting for us, and they put him in a wheelchair. We sat in the lobby. The orderlies wheeled Daddy next to us. They left us to whisper with the night admitting nurse, who rose from behind her desk, her scrubs pink with red hearts on them, wearing red Crocs, carrying a clipboard. Daddy bent over in the wheelchair, and the blood ran like a starving stream down his thigh, soaked into the seat, and the nurse began to ask questions and looked at Daddy as he sat up, his head rolling back, and saw his hand. The nurse had a gap between her two front teeth like Mama. She tucked the clipboard under her arm, grabbed the handles, asked Daddy’s name. Randall answered as she wheeled Daddy away and followed.