Jesmyn Ward: Salvage the Bones

Skeetah must have found an axe, or maybe he used his bare hands to break the wood; he sits in the middle of the downed trees, his fire big, higher than the fire we barbecued on, so big that the flames leap past the top of his head, burnish him black and gleaming like the glass I found earlier. He sits on an overturned bucket in the circle of mud and dirt that he has made, his elbows on his knees, his eyes intent on the fire. He wears a pair of jean shorts and tennis shoes, and next to him is a rubber tire, a chain that is the same, dark cloudy gray of the hurricane clouds on top of that. China’s things. He has found China’s things.

“We brought you some food,” I say. He looks up, unsurprised, like he has been expecting us. The whites of his eyes are very white, and he seems more still than I have ever seen him before, as still as if there is some hard stone inside of him, at his center: a concrete foundation left still.

“Thank you,” he says. “Your shoes.” Skeetah motions to another, smaller pile I had not noticed. A muddy pile of shoes that looks exactly like the kind of pile the puppy China made. “I found them.”

We sift through the pile. Skeetah peels open the top of one of the Vienna sausage cans, unties the bag of saltines, makes a small sandwich, and begins eating. He chews very slowly. Crumbs gather at the corner of his lips, and he licks them away.

“You should come down with us,” Randall says, jamming his foot into his shoe. Junior slides down Randall’s side, a small black shadow. I throw him his shoes. Randall sits in the dirt, and Junior settles in his lap. Randall lets his chin sit on Junior’s bald, sweating egghead.

“We got plenty of room,” Big Henry says. He inhales his cigarello, and the tip lights red. “You could sleep in my room.”

“We’re worried about you.” I say it because they won’t.

Skeetah smiles around the food, shakes his head. He picks up the cream soda we brought him, his favorite, opens it, and takes a sip.

“I’m not going nowhere,” he says. He eats another cracker sandwich. The meat smells rich in the dark; the crackers smell like nothing. All of it smells like it is burning because of the smoky fire, which is unbearably hot. I sit next to Skeetah but scoot backward to feel leaves still green and fat on the fallen trees tickle my back. “She’s somewhere out there, and she’s coming back.”

“You didn’t see St. Catherine,” Randall says. “Look like somebody dropped a bomb. Like war.”

“Bois ain’t St. Catherine.” Skeetah frowns for a moment, a dark line like a slash between his eyes, his lips and nose like a puzzle with the pieces fit together wrong, and then his face is smooth and polished again. “She can swim.”

“You can come back up here during the day,” Big Henry suggests.

“No.”

“If she come back, Skeet, ain’t like she going to leave again,” I say.

“Ain’t no if .” Skeetah rubs his head from his neck to the crown like his skin is a T-shirt he could pull off and over his skull. Like he could pull who he is off and become something else. Like he could shed his human shape, in the dark, be hatched a great gleaming pit, black to China’s white, and run off into what is left of the woods, follow the line of the creek, and find China sniffing at the bole of an oak tree filled with quivering squirrels, or sniffing at the earth, at the rabbits between the waters. “Not if . When.”

When he looks back up at me, he is still again: sand seared to rock.

“She’s going to come back to me,” he says. “Watch.”

We will sit with him here, in the strange, insect-silent dark. We will sit until we are sleepy, and then we will remain until our legs hurt, until Junior falls asleep in Randall’s arms, his weak neck lolling off Randall’s elbow. Randall will watch Junior and Big Henry will watch me and I will watch Skeetah, and Skeetah will watch none of us. He will watch the dark, the ruined houses, the muddy appliances, the tops of the trees that surround us whose leaves are dying for lack of roots. He will feed the fire so it will blaze bright as a lighthouse. He will listen for the beat of her tail, the padding of her feet in mud. He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore, so she is the color of his teeth, of the white of his eyes, of the bone bounded by his blood, dull but alive, alive, alive, and when he sees her, his face will break and run water, and it will wear away, like water does, the heart of stone left by her leaving.

China . She will return, standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of light we have made in the Pit, and she will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a great waiting silence.

She will know that I am a mother.

I’d like to thank my editor, Kathy Belden, and all the folks at Bloomsbury for championing my novel. I’d like to thank my agent, Jennifer Lyons, who believed from the first word. My time as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University gave me time to write and revise this manuscript, and I’m deeply grateful to the English and creative writing departments at Stanford for that. During my time at Stanford, Elizabeth Tallent and Tobias Wolff were insightful readers and mentors. I couldn’t have written this novel without valuable feedback and encouragement from the truly amazing writers in my Stegner workshop: Sarah Frisch, Justin St. Germain, Stephanie Soileau, Jim Gavin, Vanessa Hutchinson, Ammi Keller, Harriet Clark, Will Boast, and Rob Ehle. In addition, many other writers have provided me with essential encouragement, friendship, and feedback: Mike McGriff, J. M. Tyree, Molly Antopol, Skip Horack, Shimon Tanaka, Jeremy Chamberlain, Peter Ho Davies, and Elizabeth Ames Staudt. In DeLisle, thanks to Mark Dedeaux, the Miller family, Sarah Hatcher, Jillian Dedeaux, Aldon Dedeaux, Judy Ann Dedeaux, Dorothy Smith, and everyone in my extended family who always gave me a place to return to and be loved. Finally, I’d like to thank my immediate family: Joshua for being my heart, Nerissa and Charine for being my sister-fighters, De’Sean for being my Buddy, Kalani for being my lion, Jerry for encouraging me as an artist, and Norine for performing miracles every day and making a way out of no way.

Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won five of the school’s esteemed Hopwood Awards for essays, drama, and fiction. Ward was the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and is currently the John and Renée Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds , was an Essence Magazine Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.