by Jesmyn Ward
“That’s what it is? You seeing shit?”
“Just lines. Like neon lights or something. In the air.”
“Nice try. You tried to twitch your hands and everything. Now, what you really seeing?”
I wanted to punch her in her face.
“I told you.”
“Yeah, you lied again.”
But I knew this was her cottage, and when it all came down to it, I’m Black and she’s White, and if someone heard us tussling and decided to call the cops, I’d be the one going to jail. Not her. Best friend and all.
“Given,” I said. More like a whisper than anything, and Given leaned forward to hear me. Slid his hand across the table, his big-knuckled, slim-boned hand, toward mine. Like he wanted to support me. Like he could be flesh and blood. Like he could grab my hand and lead me out of there. Like we could go home.
Misty looked like she ate something sour. She leaned forward and sniffed another line.
“I ain’t a expert or nothing, but I’m pretty sure you ain’t supposed to be seeing nothing on this shit.”
She leaned back in her chair, grabbed her hair in a great sheaf, and tossed it over her back. Bishop loves it, she’d said of her boyfriend once. Can’t keep his hands out of it. It was one of the things she did that she was never conscious of, playing with her hair, always unaware of the ease of it. The way it caught all the light. The self-satisfied beauty of it. I hated her hair.
“Acid, yeah,” she continued. “Maybe even meth. But this? No.”
Given-not-Given frowned, mimicked her girly hair flip, and mouthed: What the fuck does she know? His left hand was still on the table. I could not reach out to it, even though everything in me wanted to do so, to feel his skin, his flesh, his dry, hard hands. When we were coming up, I couldn’t count how many times he fought for us on the bus, in school, in the neighborhood when kids taunted me about how Pop looked like a scarecrow, how Mama was a witch. How I looked just like Pop: like a burnt stick, raggedly clothed. My stomach turned like an animal in its burrow, again and again, seeking comfort and warmth before sleep. I lit a cigarette.
“No shit,” I said.
* * *
Jojo’s birthday cake doesn’t keep well: the next day, it tastes five days old instead of one. It tastes like paper paste, but I keep eating. I can’t help it. My teeth chomp and grind, even though I don’t have enough spit and my throat doesn’t want to swallow. The coke done had me chewing like this since last night. Pop’s talking to me, but all I can think about is my jaw.
“You don’t have to take them kids nowhere,” Pop says.
Most days, Pop is a younger man. Same way, most days, Jojo is stuck for me at five. I don’t look at Pop and see the years bending and creasing him: I see him with white teeth and a straight back and eyes as black and bright as his hair. I told Mama once that I thought Pop dyed it, and she rolled her eyes at me and laughed, back when she could laugh. That’s just him, she’d said. The cake is so sweet it’s almost bitter.
“I do,” I say.
I could just take Michaela, I know. It would be easier, but I know that once we get to the jail and Michael walks out, something in him would be disappointed if Jojo wasn’t there. Already Jojo looks too much like me and Pop, with his brown skin and black eyes, with the way he walks, bouncing on the balls of his feet, everything about him upright. If Jojo weren’t standing there with us, waiting for Michael, well, it wouldn’t be right.
“What about school?”
“It’s just two days, Pop.”
“It’s important, Leonie. Boy need his learning.”
“He smart enough to miss two days.”
Pop grimaces, and for the length of it I see the age in his face. The lines of it leading him inexorably down, like Mama. To infirmity, to bed, to the ground and the grave. This is coming down.
“I don’t like the idea of you with them two kids by y’all self out on the road, Leonie.”
“It’s going to be a straight trip, Pop. North and back.”
“You never know.”
I clench my mouth, speak through my teeth. My jaw aches.
“We’ll be fine.”
Michael’s been in jail three years now. Three years, two months. And ten days. They gave him five with the possibility of early release. The possibility’s real now. Present. My insides are shaking.
“You all right?” Pop asks. He’s looking at me like he looks at one of his animals when something’s wrong with it, the way he looks like when his horse limps and needs to be reshoed, or when one of his chickens starts acting funny and feral. He sees the error, and he’s dead committed to fixing it. Armor the horse’s tender hooves. Isolate the chicken. Wring its neck.
“Yeah,” I say. My head feels filled with exhaust fumes: light and hot. “Fine.”
* * *
Sometimes I think I know why I see Given-not-Given whenever I’m high. When I had my first period, Mama sat me down at the kitchen table while Pop was at work and she said: “I got something to tell you.”
“What?” I said. Mama looked at me sharp. “Yes, ma’am,” I said instead, swallowing my earlier words.
“When I was twelve, the midwife Marie-Therese came to the house to deliver my youngest sister. She was sitting a moment in the kitchen, directing me to boil water and unpacking her herbs, when she start pointing and asking me what I thought each of the bundles of dried plants did. And I looked at them, and knew, so I told her: This one for helping the afterbirth come, this one for slowing the bleeding, this one for helping the pain, this one for bringing the milk down. It was like someone was humming in my ear, telling me they purpose. Right there, she told me I had the seed of a gift. With my mama panting in the other room, Marie-Therese took her time, put her hand on my heart, and prayed to the Mothers, to Mami Wata and to Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, that I would live long enough to see whatever it was I was meant to see.”
Mama put her hand over her mouth like she’d told me something she shouldn’t have, like she could cup her words and scoop them back inside, back down her throat to sink to nothing in her stomach.
“Do you?” I asked.
“See?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” Mama said.
I wanted to ask her: What you see? But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and waited for her to talk. I might have been scared of what she would tell me if I asked her what she saw when she looked at me. Dying young? Never finding love? Or if I lived, bent by hard work and hard living? Growing old with my mouth twisted bitter at the taste of what I’d been accorded in the feast of life: mustard greens and raw persimmons, sharp with unfulfilled promise and loss?
“You might have it,” Mama said.
“Really?” I asked.
“I think it runs in the blood, like silt in river water. Builds up in bends and turns, over sunk trees.” She waved her fingers. “Rises up over the water in generations. My mama ain’t have it, but heard her talk one time that her sister, Tante Rosalie, did. That it skips from sister to child to cousin. To be seen. And used. Usually come around full-blown when you bleed for the first time.”
Mama worried her lip with her fingernails and then tapped the kitchen table.
“Marie-Therese herself could hear. Could look at a woman and hear singing: If she was pregnant, could tell her when she going to have a baby, what sex the baby going to be. Could tell her if she going to see trouble and how she could avoid it. Could look at a man and tell him if the ’shine done ate up his liver, done cured his insides like sausage, could read it in the yellow of his eyes, the shake of his hands. And something else, she said. How she might hear a multitude of voices ringing from any living thing, and how she followed the loudest voices, ’cause these was the most likely. How the clearest voices sang over the jumble of the rest. She could hear sound come from one woman’s face in the supply store: Flip slice me across the face for dancing with Ced. From the man that run the store who had a leg that sang: The blood turns black and pools, the toes
rot. How a cow’s belly said: The calf is coming hooves first. How she first heard the voices when she came to puberty. And when she explained it like that, I realized I had been hearing voices, too. When I was younger, my mama complained about her stomach, how she had ulcers. They was sounding to me, saying, We eat, we eat, we eat; I was confused and kept asking her if she was hungry. Marie-Therese trained me, taught me everything she knew, and when your pop and me got married, that was my job. I was busy birthing babies and doctoring folks and making gris-gris bags for protection.” Mama rubbed her hands like she was washing them. “But it’s slow now. Don’t nobody but the old folks come to me for remedies.”
“You could deliver a baby?” I asked. The other thing she’d said, about the gris-gris bags, sat unspoken on the table between us, as matter-of-fact as a butter dish or a sugar bowl. She blinked and smiled and shook her head, all of which meant one thing: yes. In that moment, Mama became more than my mother, more than the woman who made me say my rosary before I went to sleep with the words Make sure you pray to the Mothers. She’d been doing more than mothering when she put homemade ointments on me when I broke out in rashes or gave me special teas when I was sick. That half smile hinted at the secrets of her life, all those things she’d learned and said and seen and lived, the saints and spirits she spoke to when I was too young to understand her prayers. The half smile angled to a frown when Given walked in the door.
“Son, how many times I got to ask you to take off your muddy boots when you walk in the house?”
“Sorry, Ma.” He grinned, bent to kiss her, and then stood and walked backward out the door. He was a shadow through the screen as he slipped out of his shoes by stepping on the toes. “Your brother can’t even hear what I tell him, never mind what the world sings. But you might. If you start hearing things, you tell me,” she said.
Given crouched down on the steps, beating his shoes on the wood, shaking out the mud.
* * *
“Leonie,” Pop says.
I wish he would call me something else. When I was younger he would call me girl. When we were feeding the chickens: Girl, I know you can throw that corn farther than that. When we were weeding the vegetable garden and I complained about my back hurting: You too young to know pain, girl, with that young back. When I brought report cards home with more As and Bs than Cs: You a smart one, girl. He laughed when he said it, sometimes just smiled, and sometimes said it with a plain face, but it never felt like censure. Now he never calls me by anything but my name, and every time he says it, it sounds like a slap. I throw the rest of Jojo’s birthday cake in the garbage before filling a glass with tap water and drinking it so I don’t have to look at Pop. I can feel my jaw tick every time I gulp.
“I know you want to do right by that boy and go pick him up. You do know they’ll put him on a bus, don’t you?”
“He’s my kids’ daddy, Pop. I got to go get him.”
“What about his mama and pappy? What if they want to go get him?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I place the empty glass in the sink and leave it there. Pop will complain about me not washing my dishes, but he usually only fights with me about one thing at a time.
“If they were coming to get him, he would have told me that. But he didn’t.”
“You can wait for him to call again before you decide.”
I catch myself massaging the back of my neck and stop. Everything hurts.
“No, I can’t do that, Pop.”
Pop steps away from me, looks up at the kitchen ceiling.
“You need to talk to your mama before you leave. Tell her you going.”
“Is it that serious?”
Pop grips a kitchen chair and jerks it an inch or two, straightening it, then stills.
Given-not-Given stayed with me for the rest of the night at Misty’s. He even followed me out to the car and climbed into the passenger seat, right through the door. When I pulled out of Misty’s gravel driveway into the street, Given looked straight ahead. Halfway home, on one of those dark two-lane country roads, the asphalt worn so bare the grind of the car’s tires made me think it wasn’t paved, I swerved to avoid hitting a possum. It froze and arched its back in the headlights, and I could swear I heard it hissing. When my chest eased and didn’t feel like a cushion studded with hot pins anymore, I looked back over to the passenger seat, and Given was gone.
“I have to go. We have to go.”
“Why?” Pop says. It almost sounds soft. The worry he feels makes his voice an octave lower.
“Because we his family,” I say. A line sizzles from my toes to my belly and up to the back of my head, a lick of what I felt last night. And then it goes, and I’m static, still, a depression. The corners of Pop’s mouth pull tight, and he’s a fish pulling against a hook, a line, something much bigger than him. And then it’s gone, and he blinks at me and looks away.
“He got more than one, Leonie. The kids got more than one, too,” Pop says, and then he’s walking away from me, calling Jojo.
“Boy,” he says. “Boy. Come here.”
The back door slams.
“Where you at, boy?”
It sounds like a caress, like Pop’s singing it.
* * *
“Michael’s getting out tomorrow.”
Mama pushes her palms down on the bed, shrugs her shoulders, and tries to raise her hips. She grimaces.
“He is, now?” Her voice is soft. Barely a breath.
“Yeah.”
She lets herself fall back against the bed again.
“Where’s your pop?”
“Out back with Jojo.”
“I need him.”
“I got to go to the store. I’ll get him on my way out.”
Mama scratches her scalp and lets out a breath. Her eyes close to seams.
“Who going get Michael?”
“Me.”
“And who else?”
“The kids.”
She’s looking at me again. I wish I could feel that sizzling lick, but I’ve come all the way down, and I’m left with a nothing feeling. Hollow and dry. Bereft.
“Your friend ain’t going with you?”
She’s talking about Misty. Our men are in the same penitentiary, so we ride up around once every four months. I hadn’t even thought to ask.
“I ain’t asked her.”
Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once a year or so, I see it in Pop, how he got leaner and leaner with age, the tendons in him standing out, harder and more rigid, every year. His Indian cheekbones severe. But since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that, too. Can eat a person until there’s nothing but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left. How it can eat your insides and swell you in wrong ways: Mama’s feet look like water balloons set to burst under the cover.
“You should.”
I think Mama’s trying to roll on her side, because I can see the strain in her, but in the end all she does is roll her head to the side and look at the wall.
“Turn on the fan,” she says, so I scoot Pop’s chair back, and I switch on the box fan propped in the window. The air ululates through the room, and Mama turns back to face me.
“You wondering . . . ,” she says, and stops. Her lips thin. That’s the place I see it most. Her lips, which were always so full and soft, especially when I was a girl, when she kissed my temple. My elbow. My hand. Even sometimes, after I had a bath, my toes. Now they’re nothing but differently colored skin in the sunken topography of her face.
“. . . why I ain’t fussing.”
“A little,” I say. She’s looking at her toes.
“Pop stubborn. You stubborn.”
Her breath stutters, and I realize it’s a laugh. A weak laugh.
“Y’all always going to fuss,” she says.
She closes her eyes again.
Her hair is so threadbare, I can see her scalp: pale and blue-veined, hollowed and dimpled, imperfect as a potter’s bowl.
“You full grown now,” she says.
I sit, cross my arms. It makes my breasts stick out a little. I remember the horror of them coming in, budding like little rocks, when I was ten. How those fleshy knots felt like a betrayal. Like someone had lied to me about what life would be. Like Mama hadn’t told me that I would grow up. Grow into her body. Grow into her.
“You love who you love. You do what you want.”
Mama looks at me, only her eyes looking full in that moment, round as they ever were, almost hazel if I lean in close enough, water gathering at the edges. The only thing time hasn’t eaten.
“You going to go,” she says.
I know it now. I know my mother is following Given, the son who came too late and left too early. I know that my mother is dying.
* * *
Given played football with single-minded purpose his senior year, the fall before he died. Recruiters from local community and state colleges came every weekend to see his games. He was tall and well muscled, and his feet didn’t touch the ground once he got the pigskin in his hand. Even though he was serious about football, he was still social when he wasn’t at practice or on the field. Once he told Pop his teammates, White and Black, were like brothers to him. That it was like the team went to war every Friday night, came together and became something more, something greater than themselves. Pop looked down at his shoes and spat a brown stream in the dirt. Given said he was going up to the Kill to party with his White teammates, and Pop cautioned him against it: They look at you and see difference, son. Don’t matter what you see. It’s about what they do, Pop had said, and then spit the whole mess of chew out. Given had rolled his eyes, leaned into the hood of the ’77 Nova they were fixing up for him to drive, and said: All right, Pop. Looked up at me and winked. I was just grateful Pop hadn’t sent me inside, glad I could hand them tools and fetch them water and watch them work because I didn’t want to go in the house just in case Mama decided to give me one of her plant lessons. Herbs and medicine, she’d told me when I turned seven, I can teach you. I was hoping somebody, Big Henry or one of the twins, would walk down the street, emerge whole out of the green, so we’d have somebody else to talk to.
