by Jesmyn Ward
“Whatever.”
“I’m just saying you in the wrong state for heat.”
Misty’s hair is dark at the root, blond everywhere else. She has freckles on her shoulders.
“Maybe I need to move to Alaska,” Misty says.
We taking back roads all the way there. Leonie threw the atlas in my lap when I got in the backseat behind her, said: “Read it.” She’s marked the route with a pen; it scrawls north up a tangle of two-lane highways, smudged in places from Leonie’s finger running up and down the state. The pen’s marks are dark, so it’s hard for me to read the route names, the letters and numbers shadowed. But I see the prison name, the place Pop was: Parchman. Sometimes I wonder who that parched man was, that man dying for water, that they named the town and the jail after. Wonder if he looked like Pop, straight up and down, brown skin tinged with red, or me, an in-between color, or Michael, the color of milk. Wonder what that man said before he died of a cracked throat.
“Me, too,” Leonie says. Last night, she relaxed her hair in the kitchen and rinsed it out in the sink, so it’s as straight and wispy as Misty’s. Misty dyed the tips of Leonie’s hair the same blond as hers a few weeks ago, so when Leonie stood over the sink and rinsed and hissed as the water ran over her scalp, over the chemical burns I’d see later, little scabs like dimes on her scalp, her hair looked like it didn’t belong on her, limp and flowing an orange-blond down the drain. Now her hair is starting to puff and frizz.
“I like it,” I say. They ignore me. I do. I like the heat. I like the way the highway cuts through the forests, curves over hills heading north, sure and rolling. I like the trees reaching out on both sides, the pines thicker and taller up here, spared the stormy beating the ones on the coast get that keeps them spindly and delicate. But that doesn’t stop people from cutting them down to protect their houses during storms or to pad their wallets. So much could be happening in those trees.
“We got to stop,” Leonie says.
“Why?”
“Gas,” Leonie says. “I’m thirsty.”
“Me, too,” I say.
When we pull onto the gravel strip in front of the little gas station, Leonie hands me the same thirty dollars I saw Misty hand to her when she got in the car this morning and looks at me like she didn’t hear me say I’m thirsty.
“Twenty-five for gas. Get me a Coke, and bring me my change.”
“Can I have one?” I push. I can imagine the dark burning sweetness of it. I swallow and my throat seems to catch like Velcro. I think I know what the parched man felt.
“Bring me my change.”
I don’t want to go nowhere. I want to keep looking down Misty’s shirt. Her bra flashes bright blue again, the kind of blue I’ve only seen in photographs, the color of deep water off in the Gulf of Mexico. The kind of blue in the pictures Michael took when he worked on the oil rig offshore, and the water was a living wet plain around him, making a great blue bowl with the sky.
The inside of the store is even dimmer than the dull glow of the spring outside. There’s a woman sitting behind the counter, and she’s prettier than Misty. Black curly fro, her lips pinkish purple from the AC, her mouth an upside-down U. She’s my color, and thicker than Misty, too, and a whip of longing, like a cut power line set to sparking, jumps behind my ribs.
“Hey,” she mumbles, and goes back to playing on her cell phone. Every wall is lined with metal shelves, and the metal shelves are lined with dust. I walk toward the dimmer back like I’ve been here before, like I know what I want and I know where it’s at. Like a man would walk. Like Pop would. My eyes burn and find the display case of drinks in the front of the store. I stare at the glass, imagining how wet and fizzy a cold drink would be, swallowing against the parched closure of my throat: dry as a rocky river wash in drought. My spit is thick as paste. I look back at the clerk and she’s watching me, so I take the biggest Coke and don’t even try to slip another in my pocket. I walk toward the front.
“A dollar thirty,” she says, and I have to lean toward her to hear because thunder booms, a great clacking split, and the sky dumps water on the tin roof of the building: a tumble of sound. I can’t see down her shirt but it’s what I think about when I’m standing out in the rain, the back of my shirt pulled over my head like it could protect me, but all of me wet, gas fumes thick with the smell of wet earth, rain running down to blind my eyes, to stream from my nose. It all makes me feel like I can’t breathe. I remember just in time and tilt my head back, hold my breath, and let rain trickle down my throat. A thin knife of cool when I swallow. Once. Twice. Three times because the pump is so slow. The rain presses my eyes closed, kneads them. I think I hear a whisper of something, a whoosh of a word, but then it’s gone as the tank pings and the nozzle goes slack. The car is close and warm, and Kayla is snoring.
“I could’ve got you a drink if you was that thirsty,” Misty says. I shrug and Leonie starts the car. I peel off my shirt, heavy as a wet towel, and lay it on the floor before bending to root through my bag for another one. When I pull it on, I notice Misty looking at me in the mirror attached to the back of the passenger shade while she reapplies gloss, her lips going from dry pink to glossy peach; when she sees I see her looking, she winks. I shiver.
* * *
I was eleven when Mam had the talk with me. By that time, she’d gotten so sick she spent a few hours in the middle of each day in the bed, a thin sheet looped around her waist, sleeping and startling awake. She was like one of Pop’s animals hiding in the barn or one of the lean-tos built on the side of the barn, secreted away from the heat. But this day she didn’t sleep.
“Jojo,” she called, and her voice was a fishing line thrown so weakly the wind catches it. But still, the lead weight settled in my chest, and I stopped mid-walk toward the back door, toward Pop, who was outside working, and walked into Mam’s room.
“Mam?” I said.
“The baby?”
“Sleep.”
Mam swallowed and it looked like it hurt, so I passed her water.
“Sit,” she said, so I pulled the chair next to her bed close, happy that she was awake, and then she pulled a slim, wide book from her side and opened it up to the most embarrassing diagrams I’d ever seen, flaccid penises and ovaries like star fruit, and began to teach me human anatomy and sex. When she started talking about condoms, I wanted to crawl under her bed and die. My face and my neck and my back were still burning when she laid the book down on the side closest to the wall, thankfully away so I couldn’t see it again.
“Look at me,” she said.
There were lines, new since the cancer, running from her nose down to the edges of her mouth. She smiled half a smile.
“I embarrassed you,” she said.
I nodded. The shame was choking me.
“You getting older. You needed to know. I gave your mama this talk.” She looked past me, to the doorway at my back, and I twisted, expecting to see Pop, or Kayla stumble-walking and cranky from her too-short nap, but there was nothing except the light from the kitchen casting a glowing doormat. “Your uncle Given, too, and he was redder than you.”
Not possible.
“Your pop don’t know how to tell a story straight. You know that? He tell the beginning but don’t tell the end. Or he leave out something important in the middle. Or he tell you the beginning without setting up how everything got there. He always been like that.”
I nod.
“I used to have to piece the things he told me together to get the whole picture. Piece his paragraphs together like puzzles. It was worse when we just started courting. I knew he’d been away for some years, up in Parchman. I knew because I listened when I shouldn’t have been. I was only five when he got arrested, but I heard about the brawl at the juke joint, and then him and his brother, Stag, disappearing. He went away and was gone for years, and when he came back, he moved into the house with his mama to take care of her, and worked. He was back for years before he started coming over, helping
my daddy and mama with little things around the house. Doing chore after chore before he even introduced himself to me. I was nineteen, and he was twenty-nine. One day, me and him was sitting on my mama and daddy front porch and we heard Stag a ways off, coming up the road, singing, and River said: There’s things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can’t help. Older I got, the more I found it true. What’s in Stag is like water so black and deep you can’t see the bottom. Stag was laughing now. But then Pop said: Parchman taught me the same in me, Philomène. Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex, or it could be something as complicated as falling in love, or it could be like going to jail with your brother, thinking you going to protect him.” The box fan hummed. “You understand what I’m telling you, Jojo?”
“Yes, Mam,” I said. I didn’t. Mam let me go and I wandered out to the yard and found Pop slopping the hogs. “Will you tell me again?” I asked him. “What happened, Pop? When you went to jail?” And he paused, a hitch in the smooth arc of the bucket, and he told me his story.
That twelve-year-old boy I told you about? Richie? They put him on the long line. From sunup to sundown we was out there in them fields, hoeing and picking and planting and pulling. A man get to a point like that, he can’t think. Just feel. Feel like he want to stop moving. Feel his stomach burn and know he want to eat. Feel his head packed full of cotton and know he want to sleep. Feel his throat close and fire run up his arms and legs, his heart beat out his chest, and know he want to run. But wasn’t no running. We was gunmen, under the gun of them damn trusty shooters. That was our whole world: the long line. Men strung out across the fields, the trusty shooters stalking the edge, the driver on his mule, the caller yelling to the sun, throwing his working song out. Like a fishing net. Us caught and struggling. Once, my grandmama told me a story about her great-grandmama. She’d come across the ocean, been kidnapped and sold. Said her great-grandmama told her that in her village, they ate fear. Said it turned the food to sand in they mouth. Said everyone knew about the death march to the coast, that word had come down about the ships, about how they packed men and women into them. Some heard it was even worse for those who sailed off, sunk into the far. Because that’s what it looked like when the ship crossed the horizon: like the ship sailed off and sunk, bit by bit, into the water. Her grandmama said they never went out at night, and even in the day, they stayed in the shadows of they houses. But still, they came for her. Kidnapped her from her home in the middle of the day. Brought her here, and she learned the boats didn’t sink to some watery place, sailed by white ghosts. She learned that bad things happened on that ship, all the way until it docked. That her skin grew around the chains. That her mouth shaped to the muzzle. That she was made into an animal under the hot, bright sky, the same sky the rest of her family was under, somewhere far aways, in another world. I knew what that was, to be made a animal. Until that boy came out on the line, until I found myself thinking again. Worrying about him. Looking out the corner of my eye at him lagging crooked like a ant that’s lost scent.
* * *
It’s not until an hour later, when I figure the shirt’s as dry as it’s going to get in the humid-close car, that I see it. A small bag, so small two could fit in the palm of my hand, secreted in the middle of my bundle of clothes. Like the dot of blood the size of a pin at the center of the yolk in an egg: life that would have been life, but not. It’s smooth and warm, soft to my touch. Feels like leather, and it’s tied together with a sinewy leather strip. I glance up. Misty’s dozing in the front seat, her head falling forward and jerking upright only to list forward again. Leonie’s got both hands on the wheel, her fingers tapping to the music on the radio; we’re listening to country, which I hate. We’ve been in the car a little over two hours, so we lost the Black station from the coast at least an hour ago. Leonie smooths the hair at the nape of her neck with one hand, as if she could caress it into flatness, and then she taps again. I hunch over my lap, turning toward the door, making a small room with my body, a screen. I pull the strip. The knot gives, and I tease it open.
I find a white feather smaller than my pinkie finger, tipped with blue and a slash of black. Something that at first looks like a small chip of white candy, but when I pick it up and hold it close to my face, it’s some kind of animal tooth, lined with black in the chewing grooves, sharp like a canine. Whatever animal it came from knew blood, knew how to tear knotty muscle. Then I see a small gray river rock, a little perfect dome. I swirl my pointer finger into the dark of the sack, searching, and pull out a piece of paper, rolled thin as a fingernail. In slanted, shaky script, in blue ink: Keep this close.
It’s either Pop’s or Mam’s handwriting. I know this because I’ve seen it all my life, on Catholic wall calendars, on the inside of a kitchen cabinet next to the refrigerator where they tack a list of important names and phone numbers, starting with Leonie’s. On permission slips and report cards when Leonie was too busy or absent to sign. And because Mam hasn’t left her bed in weeks and can’t hold a pen, I know it’s Pop who wrote the note, Pop who gathered the feather, the tooth, the rock, who sewed the leather pouch, who says to me: Keep this close.
My knees rub the seat in front of me. I can’t help it; I’ve gotten tall enough that the backseat of Leonie’s hatchback is close and tight. Leonie glances in the rearview.
“Stop kicking the back of my seat.”
I hold my palms, a warm open bowl, over the things that Pop has given me, which are in a tiny pile in my lap.
“I didn’t mean to,” I say.
“You should have said sorry,” Leonie says.
I wonder if Pop ever did something like this for her when she made this trip before. If he snuck out in the morning when Leonie was sleeping, at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m., and secreted something in her car, some little collection of things he thought might be able to keep her safe, to watch for her when he couldn’t, to protect her on her trips to north Mississippi. Some of my friends at school have people living up there, in Clarksdale or outside of Greenwood. What they say: You think it’s bad down here. What they do: frown. What they mean: Up there? In the Delta? It’s worse.
Up ahead, the trees by the side of the road begin to thin, and there are suddenly billboards. A picture of a new baby in the womb: a red-yellow tadpole, skin and blood so thin the light shines through it like a gummy candy. Protect Life, the sign says. I put the feather, the rock, and the tooth in the bag. Roll Pop’s note so thin it could be a straw for a mouse, and put it in the bag before tying it shut and putting it into the small square pocket sewn into the waistband of my basketball shorts. Leonie is not looking at me anymore.
“Sorry,” I say.
She grunts.
I think I know what my friends mean when they talk about north Mississippi.
* * *
Pop’s told me some parts of Richie’s story over and over again. I’ve heard the beginning at least too many times to count. There are parts in the middle, about the outlaw hero Kinnie Wagner and the evil Hogjaw, that I’ve only heard twice. I ain’t never heard the end. Sometimes I’d try to write them down, but they were just bad poems, limping down the page: Training a horse. The next line. Cut with the knees. Sometimes I got fed up with Pop. At first, he told me the stories while we were awake at night in the living room. But after some months, he always seemed to tell me part of his Richie story when we were doing something else: eating red beans and rice, picking our teeth with toothpicks on the porch after lunch, sitting in front of the television in the living room watching westerns in the afternoon, when Pop would interrupt the cowboy on the screen to say this about Parchman: It was murder. Mass murder. When Pop told me about the small pouch he kept tied to one of his belt loops, it was cold outside, and he was splitting logs for the woodstove that heated the living room. We were out of gas
for the weekend. Mam had all the covers in the house on her, crocheted blankets and quilts and flat and fitted sheets, and still she moaned: My bones. Her hands tucked up under her neck, wringing one against the other, the skin raspy and chafed white, even though I lotioned them every hour. It’s so cold. Her teeth rattling like dice in her mouth.
“Everything got power.”
He hit a log.
“My great-granddaddy taught me that.”
The log split.
“Said there’s spirit in everything. In the trees, in the moon, in the sun, in the animals. Said the sun is most important, gave it a name: Aba. But you need all of them, all of that spirit in everything, to have balance. So the crops will grow, the animals breed and get fat for food.”
He put another log on the stump, and I breathed into my hands, wishing I had a hat for my ears.
“Explained it to me like this: if you got too much sun and not enough rain, crops will wither. If you got too much rain, they rot in the ground.”
He swung again.
“You need a balance of spirit. A body, he told me, is the same way.”
The logs fell.
“Like this. I’m strong. I can split this wood. But maybe if I had some of the boar’s strength, a little bit of wild pig’s tusk at my side, something to give me a little bit of that animal’s spirit, then maybe, just maybe,” he huffed, “I’m better at this. Maybe it come a little easier to me. Maybe I’m stronger.”
He split another.
“But never more than I could handle. The boar share so much, and I take so much. No waste. Waste rots. Too much either way breaks the balance.” He rested his axe on the ground. “Get me another log.”
I returned from the pile, put the wood on the stump, balanced it just so. Snatched my hand away as Pop brought the axe down, clean through the center of it.
“Or a woodpecker could share something, too. A feather, for aim.”
My finger stung from the nearness of that blade, how close Pop come to my hand.
