Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

  If Mam and Pop were there on the day of Leonie and Michael’s fight, they would have stopped it. The boy don’t need to see that, Pop would say. Or You don’t want your child to think that’s how you treat another person, Mam might’ve said. But they weren’t there. It’s not often I can say that. They weren’t there because they’d found out that Mam was sick with cancer, and so Pop was taking her back and forth to the doctor. It was the first time I could remember they were depending on Leonie to look after me. After Michael left with Big Joseph, it felt weird to sit across the table from Leonie and make a fried potato sandwich while she stared off into space and crossed her legs and kicked her feet, let cigarette smoke seep out of her lips and wreathe her head like a veil, even though Mam and Pop hated when she smoked in the house. To be alone with her. She ashed her cigarettes and put them out in an empty Coke she had been drinking, and when I bit into the sandwich, she said:

  “That looks disgusting.”

  She’d wiped her tears from her fight with Michael, but I could still see tracks across her face, dried glossy, from where they’d fallen.

  “Pop eat them like this.”

  “You got to do everything Pop do?”

  I shook my head because it seemed like what she expected from me. But I liked most of the things Pop did, liked the way he stood when he spoke, like the way he combed his hair back straight from his face and slicked it down so he looked like an Indian in the books we read in school on the Choctaw and Creek, liked the way he let me sit in his lap and drive his tractor around the back, liked the way he ate, even, fast and neat, liked the stories he told me before I went to sleep. When I was nine, Pop was good at everything.

  “You sure act like it.”

  Instead of answering, I swallowed hard. The potatoes were salty and thick, the mayonnaise and ketchup spread too thin, so the potatoes stuck in my throat a little bit.

  “Even that sounds gross,” Leonie said. She dropped her cigarette into the can and pushed it across the table to me where I stood eating. “Throw that away.”

  She walked out the kitchen into the living room and picked up one of Michael’s baseball caps that he’d left on the sofa, before pulling it low over her face.

  “I’ll be back,” she said.

  Sandwich in hand, I trotted after her. The door slammed and I pushed through it. You going to leave me here by myself? I wanted to ask her, but the sandwich was a ball in my throat, lodged on the panic bubbling up from my stomach; I’d never been home alone.

  “Mama and Pop be home soon,” she said as she slammed her car door. She drove a low maroon Chevy Malibu that Pop and Mam had bought her when she’d graduated from high school. Leonie pulled out the driveway, one hand out the window to catch the air or wave, I couldn’t tell which, and she was gone.

  Something about being alone in the too-quiet house scared me, so I sat on the porch for a minute, but then I heard a man singing, singing in a high voice that sounded all wrong, singing the same words over and over. “Oh Stag-o-lee, why can’t you be true?” It was Stag, Pop’s oldest brother, with a long walking stick in hand. His clothes looked hard and oily, and he swung that stick like an axe. Whenever I saw him, I couldn’t never make out any sense to anything he said; it was like he was speaking a foreign language, even though I knew he was speaking English: he walked all over Bois Sauvage every day, singing, swinging a stick. Walked upright like Pop, proud like Pop. Had the same nose Pop had. But everything else about him was nothing like Pop, was like Pop had been wrung out like a wet rag and then dried up in the wrong shape. That was Stag. I’d asked Mam once what was wrong with him, why he always smelled like armadillo, and she had frowned and said: He sick in the head, Jojo. And then: Don’t ask Pop about this.

  I didn’t want him to see me, so I jumped off and ran around the back to the woods. There was comfort in that, in hearing the pigs snuffle and the goats tear and eat, in seeing the chickens peck and scratch. I didn’t feel so small or alone. I squatted in the grass, watching them, thinking I could almost hear them talk to me, that I could hear them communicate. Sometimes when I looked at the fat pig with splashed black spots on his side, he’d grunt and flap his ears, and I’d think he meant to say: Scratch here, boy. When the goats licked my hand and head-butted me while nibbling at my fingers and bleated, I heard: The salt is so sharp and good—more salt. When the horse Pop keeps bowed his head and shimmied and bucked so that his sides gleamed like wet red Mississippi mud, I understood: I could leap over your head, boy, and oh I would run and run and you would never see anything more than that. I could make you shake. But it scared me to understand them, to hear them. Because Stag did that, too; Stag stood in the middle of the street sometimes and had whole conversations with Casper, the shaggy black neighborhood dog.

  But it was impossible to not hear the animals, because I looked at them and understood, instantly, and it was like looking at a sentence and understanding the words, all of it coming to me at once. So after Leonie left, I sat in the backyard for a while and listened to the pigs and the horses and old Stag’s singing sinking to silence like a whipping and dropping wind. I moved from pen to pen, watching the sun and estimating how long Leonie’d been gone, how long Mam and Pop were gone, how soon I could expect them to come back so I could go inside the house. I was walking with my head tilted up, listening for the growl of tires, so I didn’t see the jagged lid of the can rising from the earth, didn’t see it when I put my foot on it, stepped down in the instinct of walking. It sank deep. I screamed and dropped, holding my leg, and I knew the animals understood me then, too: Let me go, great tooth! Spare me!

  Instead, it burned and bled, and I sat on the ground in the horse’s clearing and cried and tasted ketchup and acid at the back of my throat and grabbed my ankle. I was too scared to pull the lid out, then I heard a car door slam shut and nothing else until Pop’s voice called and I answered and he found me sitting on the ground, sniffing with my breath hitching and not caring my face was wet. Pop came to my side and touched me on the leg like he does our horse when he’s checking the shoe. In a quick second, he pulled it out, and I hollered. It was the first time I thought Pop didn’t do something good.

  When Leonie came home that night, she didn’t say nothing. I don’t think she noticed my foot until Pop shouted at her, over and over again, Goddamnit, Leonie! I drowsed with pain medicine, itchy with antibiotics, my foot all wrapped in white, bound tight, and watched Pop slap the wall to punctuate: Leonie! She flinched, stepped away from him, and then said in a small voice: You was shucking oysters down at the docks when you was his age, Mam changing diapers. And then: He old enough. She said: You all right, huh, Jojo? And I looked at her and said: No, Leonie. It was a new thing, to look at her rubbing hands and her crooked teeth in her chattering mouth and not hear Mama in my head, but her name: Leonie. When I said it, she laughed, the sound erupting from her insides like a hard shovel cleaved it from her. Pop looked like he wanted to slap her face, but then he changed, and he snorted like he does when his crop don’t take or when one of his sows bears a half-dead litter: disappointed. He sat with me on one of the two sofas in the living room. That was the first night he let Mam sleep in the bed by herself. I slept on the love seat, and he slept on the sofa, where, after Mam got sicker and sicker, he stayed.

  * * *

  The goat smells like beef when it boils. It even looks like it, too, dark and stringy in the pot. Pop pokes it with a spoon, testing the tenderness, and cocks the lid crooked so that steam billows in the air.

  “Pop, you going to tell me about you and Stag again?” I ask.

  “About what?” Pop asks.

  “Parchman,” I say. Pop folds his arms. Leans over to smell the goat.

  “Ain’t I told it to you before?” he asks.

  I shrug. Sometimes I think I look like Stag around my nose and mouth. Stag and Pop. I want to hear about the ways they are different. The ways we are all different. “Yeah, but I want to hear it anyway,” I say.

  This is wh
at Pop does when we are alone, sitting up late at night in the living room or out in the yard or woods. He tells me stories. Stories about eating cattails after his daddy been out gathering them from the marsh. Stories about how his mama and her people used to collect Spanish moss to stuff their mattresses. Sometimes he’ll tell me the same story three, even four times. Hearing him tell them makes me feel like his voice is a hand he’s reached out to me, like he’s rubbing my back and I can duck whatever makes me feel like I’ll never be able to stand as tall as Pop, never be as sure. It makes me sweat and stick to the chair in the kitchen, which has gotten so hot from the boiling goat on the stove that the windows have fogged up, and the whole world is shrunk to this room with me and Pop.

  “Please,” I say. Pop beats the meat he still has left to add to the boil, making it soft and tender, and clears his throat. I put my elbows on the table and listen:

  Me and Stag, we got the same papa. My other brothers and sisters got different daddies because my papa died young. Think he was in his early forties. I don’t know how old he was because he ain’t know how old he was. Said his maman and daddy avoided them census takers, never answered their questions right, changed the number of kids they had, never registered none of they births. Said them people came around sniffing out that information to control them, to cage them like livestock. So they never did any of that official stuff, held to the old ways. Papa taught us some of that before he died: some hunting and tracking, some animal work, some things about balance, things about life. I listened. I always listened. But Stag ain’t never listen. Even when we was little, Stag was too busy running with the dogs or going to the swimming hole to sit and listen. And when he got older, he was off to the juke joint. Papa said he was too handsome, said he’d been born pretty as a woman, and that’s why he got into so much trouble. Because people like pretty things, and things came to him too easy. Maman say hush when Papa say that, say Stag just feel things too much, is all. Say that make it hard for him to sit and think. I ain’t tell them this, but I thought both of them was wrong. I think Stag felt dead inside, and that’s why he couldn’t sit still and listen, why he had to climb the highest cliff when we went swimming at the river and jump off headfirst into the water. That’s why Stag went to the juke joint damn near every weekend when he got eighteen, nineteen, drinking, why he walked with a knife in each shoe and one up each sleeve, why he cut and came home cut so often—he needed that to feel more alive. And he could have kept it up if that navy man ain’t came up in there, one in a group of White men from up north stationed out on Ship Island. Wanted to have a good time with the coloreds, I guess, but bumped into Stag at the bar, and they had words, and then the man broke a bottle over Stag’s head, and then Stag cut him, not enough to kill him, but enough to hurt him, to make him slow so Stag could run, but his friends beat up Stag before he could get a clean break. I was at the house alone when Stag got here, Maman up the road taking care of her sister and Papa out in the fields. When all them White men came to get Stag, they tied both of us and took us up the road. You boys is going to learn what it means to work, they said. To do right by the law of God and man, they said. You boys is going to Parchman.

  I was fifteen. But I wasn’t the youngest noway, Pop says. That was Richie.

  Kayla wakes up all at once, rolling over and pushing up and smiling. Her hair is everywhere, tangled as the sticker vines that hang from pine trees. Her eyes are green as Michael’s, her hair caught somewhere between Leonie’s and Michael’s with a hint of hay color to it.

  “Jojo?” she asks. That’s what she always says, even when Leonie is next to her in the bed. That’s the reason I can’t sleep on the love seat with Pop in the living room anymore; when Kayla was a baby, she got so used to me coming in the middle of the night with her bottle. So I sleep on the floor next to Leonie’s bed, and most nights Kayla ends up on my pallet with me, since Leonie’s mostly gone. There’s something gummy on the side of Kayla’s mouth. I lick the hem of my shirt and wipe her cheek, and she shakes my hand off and crawls onto my lap: she’s a short three-year-old, so when she curls into me, her feet don’t even hang over my lap. She smells like hay baked in the sun, warm milk, and baby powder.

  “You thirsty?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she whispers.

  When she’s done, Kayla drops her sippy cup on the floor.

  “Sing,” she says.

  “What you want me to sing?” I ask, even though she never tells me. Like I love to hear Pop tell stories, she loves to hear me sing. “ ‘Wheels on the Bus’?” I say. I remember that one from Head Start: sometimes the local nuns would visit the school, acoustic guitars slung over their backs like hunting rifles, and play for us. So I sing it low enough that I won’t wake Mam, my voice dipping and cracking and grating, but Kayla swings her arms and marches around the room anyway. When Pop leaves the boiling pot and comes into the living room, I can hardly breathe and my arms are burning. I’m singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” another Head Start hit, and throwing Kayla up in the air, almost to the high ceiling, before catching her. If she was a squealer, I wouldn’t do it, because then she would definitely wake Mam. But as the smell of onions and garlic, bell pepper, and celery cooked in butter clouds the air, Kayla rises and falls, her arms and legs flung out, her eyes shining, her mouth open in a smile so wide it looks like she could be screaming.

  “More,” she pants. “More,” she grunts when I catch her to toss her again.

  Pop shakes his head, but I keep throwing, because I know, by the way he wipes his hands on the dish towels and leans in the wood doorjamb he planed and nailed to make the archway, he doesn’t disapprove. He built the ceilings high on purpose, twelve feet, because Mam asked him to, said that the more room in the house from floor to roof, the cooler it would be. He knows I won’t hurt her.

  “Pop,” I huff when Kayla lands more on my chest than in my arms. “You’ll tell me the rest before you take the meat out to the smoker?”

  “The baby,” Pop says.

  I catch Kayla and spin her around. She pouts when I put her down and pull a Fisher-Price play set that used to be mine from under the sofa. I blow off the dust and push it toward her. There’s a cow and two chickens in the set, and one of the red barn doors is broken, but she still sinks to the floor and lies on her chest to make the plastic animals hop.

  “See, Jojo?” Kayla asks, and bounces the goat. “Baa, baa,” she says.

  “She all right,” I say. “She ain’t paying no attention to us.”

  Pop sits on the floor behind Kayla and flicks the remaining door.

  “It’s sticky,” he says. And then he looks up at the dimpled ceiling and sighs into a sentence, and then another. He is telling the story again.

  Richie, he was called. Real name was Richard, and he wasn’t nothing but twelve years old. He was in for three years for stealing food: salted meat. Lot of folks was in there for stealing food because everybody was poor and starving, and even though White people couldn’t get your work for free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying you for it. Richie was the youngest boy I ever saw up in Parchman. There was a couple thousand men separated into work farms over all them acres. Damn near fifty thousand acres. Parchman the kind of place that fool you into thinking it ain’t no prison, ain’t going to be so bad when you first see it, because ain’t no walls. Back in the day, it was just fifteen camps, each one surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Wasn’t no brick; wasn’t no stone. Us inmates was called gunmen because we worked under the trusty shooters, who was inmates theyselves, but who the warden gave guns to oversee the rest of us. The trusty shooters was the type of men that be the first one to speak when they walk into a room. The kind that draws attention to hisself, talks big about the beating and stabbing and killing they did to get up in a place like that because it makes them feel bigger to be seen. Makes them feel like real men to see fear.

  When I first got to Parchman, I worked in the fields, planting and weeding and harvesti
ng crops. Parchman was a working farm right off. You see them open fields we worked in, the way you could look right through that barbed wire, the way you could grab it and get a toehold here, a bloody handhold there, the way they cut them trees flat so that land is empty and open to the ends of the earth, and you think, I can get out of here if I set my mind to it. I can follow the right stars south and all the way on home. But the reason you think that is because you don’t see the trusty shooters. You don’t know the sergeant. You don’t know the sergeant come from a long line of men bred to treat you like a plowing horse, like a hunting dog—and bred to think he can make you like it. That the sergeant come from a long line of overseers. You don’t know them trusty shooters done been sent to Parchman for worse than getting into a fight at a juke joint. Just know the trusty shooters, the inmate guards, was sent there because they like to kill, and because they done it in all kind of nasty ways, not just to other men, but to women and—

  Me and Stag was put in separate camps. Stag got convicted of assault, I got convicted of harboring a fugitive. I’d worked, but never like that. Never sunup to sundown in no cotton field. Never in that kind of heat. It’s different up there. The heat. Ain’t no water to catch the wind and cool you off, so the heat settles and bakes. Like a wet oven. Soon enough my hands thickened up and my feet crusted and bled and I understood that when I was on that line in them fields I had to not think about it. I ain’t think about Papa or Stag or the sergeant or the trusty shooters or the dogs, barking and slobbering at the mouth at the edge of the fields, daydreaming of tearing into a heel, a neck. I forgot it all and bent and stood and bent and stood and only thought of my mother. Her long neck, her steady hands, the way she braided her hair forward to cover her crooked hairline. The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming. It was the only way I could untether my spirit from myself, let it fly high as a kite in them fields. I had to, or being in jail for them five years woulda made me drop in that dirt and die.