Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

“I’m sick,” Daddy moans. “Can’t stop.”

“Come on, Daddy.”

“No.” Daddy tries to push Randall away from him as Randall bends over, grabbing Daddy under his arms, but Daddy is weak, and his hands fall away like dry branches. “Got to stay by the toilet.”

“I’ma put a garbage can next to your bed.” Randall tugs Daddy up, gets his chest in the air, but Daddy’s legs drag, and Daddy hangs there limp as sheets on a clothesline before they’ve been stretched and pinned. When the grandparents were still living, Mama washed all the sheets for both houses at once, and there was so much bedding that Daddy had to hang extra lines. Mama would walk through and hang them bunched first before spreading them. The sheets were so thin we could almost see through them. They made cloudy rooms, and we played hide-and-seek in them. In the winter, they made our faces wet and achingly cold, but in the summer, it was so hot the sheets didn’t stay wet long, but we smashed our faces into them anyway, trying to find the hidden cool. Mama yelled at us for dirtying them once when we left muddy prints on them; afterward, we let our hands hover over them, shoved our noses into them to see if we could see the other person running down the next billowing hallway. Now, washing and hanging clothes is me and Randall’s job: I don’t even think Skeetah knows how to work the washing machine.

“Grab his legs,” Randall says, so I bend and lift. Daddy is heavier than he looks. His eyes are closed and he is wheezing into his bicep; his breath gargles in his throat. “Come on.”

I have to back down the dark hallway, so we shuffle slowly. After Mama died, Daddy taught Randall and me how to use the washing machine. It was our job to wash the sheets, to hang them up. At first we only washed them when Daddy told us to, and later we washed them when they’d get so dirty we’d wake up often in the middle of the night, itching, scratching a shin, an ankle. This is how we hung the sheets in the beginning, when we were both too short to put them over the line: the wet sheet sagging in the middle, us counting and lifting and flinging the damp cotton at the same time hoping it would catch. Daddy’s ankles feel smooth as oranges. I don’t expect them to be so smooth.

“One, two, three,” Randall says, and we are lifting and rolling Daddy onto the bed like our sheets. For one moment, Randall is half his size, thin as a stretched belt, his knees big as softballs, all bone and skin, and we are children again, and Mama has just died and we are hanging her sheets. My eyes sting. Daddy leaves a wet trail across the pillowcase. He moans and holds his bad hand.

There are more beer cans on the nightstand, half empty. They shake when Randall kneels next to the bed, looking for Daddy’s medicine, which is on the floor.

“Your hand hurt?” Randall asks. Daddy rolls on his side, facing us, and I go to the bathroom and come back with the garbage can and put it under his nose next to the bed. There are candy wrappers and wadded-up toilet paper at the bottom of the can, but it is mostly empty. Randall turns on Daddy’s bedside lamp, reads the bottles to see which is his pain medicine. He is big and dark and every inch of him is pebbled with muscle, and sometimes I wonder if Daddy is amazed at how this tall machine of a boy came out of him and Mama. Sometimes I wonder if he’s amazed at Randall. And then I see Manny, almost as bright as China in the clearing, and wonder what will come from him and me: something gold and broad like him, black and small like me, or something more than either of us. Daddy came to one of Randall’s games, once, and stood by the gym doors the entire time, nodding to himself with his baseball cap in his hand, frowning at the court and half watching the game. He left before halftime.

“Daddy, it say here you wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol with these antibiotics. Or with these pain pills.”

Daddy shakes his head and lays still.

“Beer ain’t nothing,” he croaks into the pillow. “Just like a cold drink.”

“It’s probably why you throwing up.”

“I can’t lay here.” Daddy’s good hand is shaking. “Got to get the house ready.”

“Esch, get some water.” Randall grabs a can, crushes it in one hand with his long fingers, which closes like a spider. “And take these with you.”

I load the beer cans into my shirt. Daddy mumbles. When I come back with the water, Randall is handing Daddy his pills, and Daddy is at least up on an elbow, even if the side of his head is smashed into the headboard. He gulps down all the water and the pills as if taking it down fast will stop it from coming back up later.

“The hurricane,” Daddy says.

“You tell us what to do,” Randall says, and then asks me to get Daddy two pieces of bread for his stomach and put them on the table.

The breeze has become a wind today, its gusts stronger, harder than yesterday in the woods and clearing. With my fingers I find a flashlight in the metal storage box on the back of Daddy’s pickup truck along with a hammer and a drill. The nails are are all along the bottom of the box, like feathers and hay in a chicken coop. The windows first , Daddy had said. You have to cover all the windows . Picking the nails out is slow; I prick my finger on one, suck it, but there isn’t any blood, just the pain. I wonder if China’s ruined nipple will feel like this in her puppy’s mouth when it heals: hard, healed over hurt.

Skeetah walks out of the door of the shed and slides the tin slab he has been using as a door back in place. He turns on the water at the faucet, bends and drinks, lets it run over his head. When he comes over to me, the water is streaming in beads down his neck, down and over his collarbone like Kilo’s red shawl.

“What y’all in Daddy’s truck for?”

“He sick,” I say.

Randall is leaning half in and half out of the truck, tuning the radio to the black radio station. His legs are so long that they rest flat-footed on the hard packed dirt below the passenger door. He yells into the windshield so Skeetah can hear him. “He wants us to get the house ready for the hurricane.”

“He say to do the boards first,” I tell Skeet. He is shirtless, and his belt is looped so tight around his shorts that the waistband hangs from it like a shower curtain, and the leather cuts into his skin. They are the shorts from the day before. I was right; he slept in the shed with China.

“I can’t,” Skeetah says. “I need to wash China again, treat her cuts. Make sure they don’t start looking ugly.”

“That’s going to take what? Fifteen, thirty minutes?” Randall is leaning out of the truck now, the music curling back up behind him, tiny and metal-sounding because Daddy’s truck doesn’t have any bass. The song tinkles to an end, and the DJ, a woman, speaks smoothly, her voice calm and almost as deep as a man’s.

“Hurricane Katrina is now a category three hurricane. It is scheduled to make landfall in Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, sometime Monday morning. The NHC has issued a hurricane watch for southeastern Louisiana and the Mississippi and Alabama coasts. We at JZ94.5 will keep you updated about the status of the storm throughout-” Randall switches off the radio. Skeetah works his mouth, looks down at the ground. His eyebrows, so dark and even they look drawn on, meet and form a hook. Daddy’s do that. Mine are so light you can barely see them.

“I need to go to the store for some supplies. Wraps and stuff,” Skeetah says.

“You can pick up some more canned goods when you go.” Randall rolls his eyes.

“I ain’t got no money for that.”

“Well, then how you was going to get-” Randall stops mid-sentence. “Shit. I’ll get some money from Daddy’s wallet. Get the cheapest. Anything in a can. We ain’t going to be able to cook nothing.”