Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

“Where’s the lamp?”

“On the table,” I squeaked. Skeetah walked toward the table, bumping into things in the half-light, and fumbled the kerosene lantern to light.

“Come on,” Skeetah says, and I follow him to the back of the house, to his and Randall’s room, which seems smaller than it is, and close and hot and red in the light of a smaller kerosene lamp that Skeet must have found in the shed. He shuts the door behind us after eyeing Daddy’s open door. The wind shrieks. Trees reach out their arms and beat their limbs against the house. Skeet sits on his bed next to China, who sprawls and lifts her head to look at me lazily, and who licks her nose and mouth in one swipe. I climb onto Randall’s bed, hug my knees. The puppies’ bucket is quiet.

“You scared?”

“No,” Skeetah says. He rubs a hand from the nape of China’s neck over her shoulder, her torso, her thigh. She lets her head roll back and licks again.

“I am,” I say. “I never heard the wind sound like that.”

“We ain’t even on the bay. We back far enough up in the trees to be all right. All these Batistes been living up here all these years through all these hurricanes and they been all right. I’m telling you.”

“Remember when Mama told us that the wind sounded like that when Camille hit?” I squeeze tighter. “Elaine wasn’t nothing like this.”

“Yeah, I remember.” Skeetah rubs his fingers under China’s chin, and it is like he is coaxing something from her because she leans toward him and grins, tries to kiss him. “I can remember her saying it.” He stops rubbing China, leans forward to put his elbows on his knees, rubs his hands together, looks away. “But I can’t remember her voice,” he says. “I know the exact words she said, can see us sitting there by her lap, but all I can hear is my voice saying it, not hers.”

I want to say that I know her voice. I want to open my mouth and have her voice slide out of me like an impression, to speak Mama alive for him as I hear her. But I can’t.

“At least we got the memory,” I say. “Junior don’t have nothing.”

“You remember the last thing she said to you?”

When Mama was birthing Junior, she put her chin down into her chest. She panted and moaned. The ends of her moans squeaked, sounded like bad brakes grinding when a car stops. She never screamed, though. Skeetah and Randall and I were sneaking, standing on an old air-conditioning unit outside her and Daddy’s window, and after she pushed Junior out, once he started crying, she let her head fall to the side, her eyes like mirrors, and she was looking at us, and I thought she would yell at us to get down out of the window, to stop being nosy. But she didn’t. She saw us. She blinked slow. The skin above her nose cracked and she bit her lip. She shook her head then, raised her chin to the ceiling like an animal on the slaughter stump, like I’ve seen Daddy and Papa Joseph hold pigs before the knife, and closed her eyes. She started crying then, her hands holding her belly below her deflated stomach, soft as a punctured kickball. I had never seen her cry. But she hadn’t said anything, even after Daddy called some of their friends, Tilda and Mr. Joe, to the house to watch us, even after he carried her and Junior out to the truck and she slumped against the window, watching us as Daddy drove away. Shaking her head. Maybe that meant no . Or Don’t worry-I’m coming back . Or I’m sorry . Or Don’t do it . Don’t become the woman in this bed, Esch , she could have been saying. But I have.

“No,” I say. “I don’t remember.”

“I do,” Skeetah says, and he props his chin on his fists. “She told us she loved us when she got into the truck. And then she told us to be good. To look after each other.”

“I don’t remember that.” I think Skeetah is imagining it.

“She did.” Skeetah sits up, leans back in the bed again, and lays a still hand on China’s neck. She sighs. “You look like her. You know that?”

“No.”

“You do. You not as big as her, but in the face. Something about your lips and eyes. The older you get the more you do.”

I don’t know what to say, so I half grimace, and I shake my head. But Mama, Mama always here. See? I miss her so badly I have to swallow salt, imagine it running like lemon juice into the fresh cut that is my chest, feel it sting.

“Did you hear that?”

“What?” I sound stuffed again. Leaves slap the roof in great bunches. The rain is heavy, endless, hits the roof in quick crashing waves. At least the wind doesn’t sound like a train again.

“That,” Skeetah says, his head to one side, his ear cocked toward the window. His eyes gleam in the light of the lamp. He stands up, and China stands up with him, ears straight, tail pointed, tongue gone. Somewhere out in the storm, a dog is barking.

“Yeah,” I say, and then all three of us are at the window, peering out of the light edge left by the boards. We hear the dog but can’t see it; what we do see is the pines, the thin trees bending with the storm, bending almost to breaking. Even the oaks are losing leaves and branches in the gray light, the beating rain. The dog barks loudly, fast as a drum, and something about the way the bark rises at the end reminds me of Mama’s moans, of those bowing pines, of a body that can no longer hold itself together, of something on the verge of breaking. The high notes are little rips. It circles the house, its bark near and far. Is it one of Junior’s mutts, his mangy family member, seeking shelter, the cool bottom of a house and a knobby-kneed boy and no rain?

“We can’t.” Skeetah leans toward the window as if he could push his way through the glass and board and save that invisible dog, who for him, I know, must be China. She drops from where she has been standing on her hind legs with her paws pressed against the wall and leans into Skeetah’s side, head-butts his thigh, her smooth white head and floppy ears as soft as the swaddling blankets that Daddy brought Junior home in after he returned from the hospital and Mama didn’t. This your little brother. Claude Adam Batiste the second. Call him Junior . And then, Your mama didn’t make it . The searching dog barks one last time before the rain and wind tighten like a choke collar and silence him. China growls in answer, but swallows it when Skeetah kneels before her, takes her face in his hands, and smoothes her ears back so that her eyes are slits and she grins and her skin pulls tight and her head could be a naked skull.

China squeals and jumps up into a bark, skitters back and forth across Skeetah’s bed, over his knees; this is what makes me look up from my crouch on Randall’s bed, from my stomach, from me trying to burrow into myself, to safety. China looks to the ceiling, her teeth gleaming in the dark, ripping barks.

“China, what’s…?” Skeetah reaches out to grab her, to stop her from curling and running, and there is a loud, deafening boom. When it comes, China leaps from Skeetah’s bed and rushes to the door as if she would rip the wood to splinters with her teeth. Skeetah yanks the door open, and Randall is running into Daddy’s room with a lantern, Junior clinging to his waist while the wind yells outside and the house shudders. There was no need for the lamp; there is a hole in the ceiling in Daddy’s room, the trunk and branches of a tree tossing in the opening. It is a large bush growing wrong. China barks, her nose to the wind.

“Daddy!” Randall runs forward into the wind and rain streaming through the gaping hole, the gray day fisting through it. Daddy is on his knees in front of the dresser, pushing an envelope down his pants. He stands and sees us.

“Go on!” Daddy says. He waves at us, the bandage on his wounded hand flashing light. He is slack and then tight like a clothesline catching in the wind, and he shoves us out of the ruined room and into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him. Junior will not let go of Randall.