Jesmyn Ward: Salvage the Bones

“I heard they always eat the afterbirth,” Randall says. China walks past Skeetah, licks his pinkie. It is a kiss, a peck. She stands over the dirty towel that holds her puppies.

“Look,” I say.

There is something moving where she dropped, where she ate. Skeetah crawls over on his hands and knees, and picks it up.

“A runt,” he says. He carries it into the light.

It is brindle. Stripes of black and brown ride its ribs like a zebra’s. It is half the size of its brothers and sisters. Skeetah closes his fist, and it vanishes. “It’s alive,” he says. There is delight on his face. He is happy to have another puppy; if it lives, he can get maybe $200 for it, even if it is a runt. He opens his hand, and the puppy appears like the heart of a bloom. It is as still as a flower’s stigma. Skeetah’s mouth falls straight, his eyebrows flatten. He lays it down. “Probably going to die anyway.”

China does not lay down like a new mother. She does not suckle. She licks the big red puppy and then forgets him. She is looking past Skeetah to us. She bristles at us standing at the door. Skeetah grabs her neck collar, tries to calm her, but she is rigid. Junior pulls his way up Randall’s back. I think about hugging Skeetah before I go, but China is glowering, so I just smile at him. I don’t know if he sees me in the dark. He has done a good job. Only one puppy is dead, even though it is China’s first time birthing. China scratches at the earth floor of the shed as if she would dig a hole and bury the puppies from sight. In the ruins of the refuse-laden yard, Daddy is hitting something metal. We leave. Skeetah refastens the curtain behind us, pulling it tight against the still clear night. The shed falls dark.

I tell Junior to take a bath once we enter the house, but he ignores me, and it is not until Randall turns on the water and carries him to the bathtub that he washes off. Randall stands in the doorway watching Junior because he is convinced that when Junior closes the door to wash, he only sits on the edge of the bathtub and kicks his feet in the water. Junior hates bathing. I am the last to take a shower, and the water, even though I have only the cold spigot on, is lukewarm. August is always the month of the deepest heat, the heat that reaches so far in the earth it boils the water in the wells. When I go to bed, Junior is already asleep. The box fan in the window hums. I lie on my back and feel dizzy, light-headed, nauseous. I only ate once today. I see Manny above me, his face licking mine, the heat of his sweat, our waists meeting. How he sees me with his body. How he loves me like Jason. Junior snorts a baby snore, and I drift off with Manny’s breathing in my brain.

Mornings after birth should be quiet; the air should muffle sounds. But quiet comes and goes here on the Pit like the pack of stray dogs that Daddy used to run off with his gun before Skeetah brought China here to stay. When Daddy kept hogs, in the morning the sows squealed at their sticky piglets. The chickens hatched the chicks from their hidden eggs, and they woke us with flapping and clucking. China’s pups’ first day in the world was no different. I woke up to hammering.

Outside, Skeetah looks clean. He’s wearing a different shirt at least, and his face is shining like he’s just scrubbed it. He is hammering a nail into a two-by-four, attaching that two-by-four to another. I am still in my night T-shirt, and it is so early that the morning could be called cool.

“What you doing?”

“Building a kennel.” Skeetah smacks in a nail. “They’re going to need it in six weeks.”

“Ain’t it a little early for that? A kennel?” I rub my eyes. I’m hungry, and I know I won’t be able to go back to sleep. I should’ve yelled out the window and told him to stop hammering, and then pulled the sheet over my head.

“They’re going to live, and they’re going to be big. I can’t have them running free all the time. They might get hit.” He tilts the upside-down bucket he’s sitting on forward, and he slips the hammer into his pants leg. “Want to see them?”

I nod.

In the shed, the slick squirming balls are gone. In their places are new fluffy, downy balls. They almost look like chicks. Their eyes are still sealed shut, still thin black lines that look like closed mouths. But their mouths are open. They are wheezing and huffing and mewling in squeaks that would be barks. They are rolling against each other, tumbling one over the other to land against China’s side. She watches me. Skeetah closes the curtain.

“I never thought I’d get five, Esch. With it being her first, I thought I’d get two, maybe. I figured she trample them or that they’d just come out dead. But I never thought she’d let me save so many.”

Skeetah is standing so close we touch shoulders for a minute. He won’t look at me when he tells me this; he will study the ground. These are the things he says to no one, not even China. Sometimes he confesses to me; I always listen.

“You know how you hear daddies on TV talking about seeing birth being a miracle? For all them pigs and mutts and rabbits I seen give birth, I ain’t never felt nothing like that. Them puppies is real ,” he says.

“You want something to eat?” I can’t talk past my stomach.

China grumble-barks, and Skeetah looks at me as if I haven’t said anything.

“No.” He grips the hammer. “I want to finish the frame, and then I got to make sure she nursing.” He scratches his forehead, shrugs. “Breeder stuff.” His glance is a comma, and then he begins to bang again. I go look for breakfast.

Mama taught me how to find eggs; I followed her around the yard. It was never clean. Even when she was alive, it was full of empty cars with their hoods open, the engines stripped, and the bodies sitting there like picked-over animal bones. We only had around ten hens then. Now we have around twenty-five or thirty because we can’t find all the eggs; the hens hide them well. I can’t remember exactly how I followed Mama because her skin was dark as the reaching oak trees, and she never wore bright colors: no fingernail pink, no forsythia blue, no banana yellow. Maybe she bought her shirts and pants bright and they faded with wear so that it seemed she always wore olive and black and nut brown, so that when she bent to pry an egg from a hidden nest, I could hardly see her, and she moved and it looked like the woods moved, like a wind was running past the trees. So I followed behind her by touch, not by sight, my hand tugging at her pants, her skirt, and that’s how we walked in the room made by the oaks, looking for eggs. I like looking for eggs. I can wander off by myself, move as slow as I want, stare at nothing. Ignore Daddy and Junior. Feel like the quiet and the wind. I imagine Mama walking in front of me, turning to smile or whistle at me to get me to walk faster, her teeth white in the gloom. But still, it is work, and I have to pull myself back and concentrate to find anything to eat.

The only thing that’s ever been easy for me to do, like swimming through water, was sex when I started having it. I was twelve. The first time was laying down on the front seat of Daddy’s dump truck. It was with Marquise, who was only a year older than me. Skeetah’s closest friend, he was so close to the both of us that he basically lived at our house during the summers. The three of us would run out back and get lost in Daddy’s woods, would spend days floating in the water in the Pit on our backs. We spent the summer dusted an orange color, and when we woke up every day of our months-long sleepover, the sheets would feel powdery like dry red clay. We were in the dump truck hiding from Skeetah, waiting for him to find us, and Marquise asked if he could touch my titty. They were growing then, but still small as the peaks of cream on lemon meringue pie with hard knots at the middle. I let him, and then he asked me to show him my private because he was scared he was going to never see one when he got older. I did. And then he started touching me, and it felt good, and then it didn’t, but then it did again. And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, Why not? It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer. Skeetah found us after. I was sweating so badly my eyes were stinging, and some of it was Marquise’s sweat, who was half smiling and then not, his eyes big at what we’d done. What was y’all doing? Skeetah asked, and I said, Nothing . It smelled like boiled milk in the truck. I was afraid that Skeetah could smell it, could smell Marquise and me, the way we slid together, all elbows and knees, bones and skin, Marquise’s face shocked and grinning and dirty, so I slid out of the cab first, and I left them looking around for a grill they could drag into the woods to cook Spam that Marquise had stolen from his house; we were supposed to camp out that night.