by Jesmyn Ward
When we pull into the parking lot of the station, the attendant is sitting on the front porch of the wooden building smoking a cigarette. She almost blends in to the wall she leans against, because her skin is as brown as the stained boards. She opens the door for me and follows me in, and the string of silver bells hung across the door jingles.
“Slow day,” she says as she slides behind the counter. She’s skinny, damn near as thin as Mama, and her buttoned-up work shirt hangs on her like a flat sheet spread to dry on a clothesline.
“Yeah,” I say, and wander toward the drink coolers in the back. I palm two bottles of Powerade and set them on the counter. The woman smiles, and I realize she’s missing her two front teeth, and a scar meanders in a scratchy line across her head. I wonder if she just has bad teeth, or if whoever gave her that forehead scar knocked them out.
Misty’s walking around the parking lot, holding her phone above her head, searching for a signal. All the car doors are open, and Jojo is sitting sideways in the back while Michaela climbs over him, rubbing her face into his neck and whining. He caresses her back, and their hair is molded to their heads. I pour half of a bottle into one of Michaela’s juice bottles and hold out my arms.
“Give her here.”
“Kayla, go,” Jojo says. He isn’t looking at me or the damp day or the empty road, but at Kayla, who begins to cry and grabs at his shirt and holds so tightly, her little knuckles turn white. When I pull her into my lap and sit in the front seat, she plants her chin in her chest and sobs, her eyes closed, her fists tucked under her chin.
“Michaela,” I say. “Come on, baby. You need to drink something.” Jojo is standing above me, his hands shoved into his pockets as he studies Michaela. She doesn’t hear me. She hiccups and wails. “Michaela, baby.”
I put the nipple of the sippy cup in her mouth, and she blocks it with her clenched teeth and whips her head to the side. I grip her harder, trying to hold her still, and her little milk muscles give under my fingers, soft as water balloons. We wrestle like this as she stands and sits and bends backward and writhes and says two words, over and over again.
“No. Jojo.”
I’ve had enough.
“Goddamnit, Michaela! Can you get her to drink some of this?” I ask.
Jojo nods, and I’m already handing her over. Without her, my arms feel weightless.
* * *
Michaela drinks a quarter cup, and then she slumps over Jojo’s shoulder, one arm around his neck, rubbing. I wait fifteen minutes, and just as Misty is buckling herself into the driver’s seat so we can get back on the road, Michaela vomits again. It is electric blue, the color of Powerade.
“You might as well take that off,” I tell Misty. She rolls her eyes and unbuckles her seat belt before squatting on a parking block in the shade to smoke a cigarette. “We going to be here for a minute.”
I don’t want Michaela to throw up in the car again, to retch in the backseat while I’m strapped in the front. We’d just have to pull over again so I can clean her up. The heat rises from the asphalt parking lot, along with steam from the rain. Jojo sits sideways, his feet on the ground, Michaela draped over him.
“You want to lay down, Kayla?” he asks. “You might feel better if you lay down.”
He slides his hands under her armpits and tries to ease her off of him and onto the seat, but she sticks to him, sure as a burr: her arms and legs thorny and cleaving. He gives up and rubs her back.
“I’m sorry you feel sick,” Jojo says, and Michaela begins to cry. He rubs her back and she rubs his, and I stand there, watching my children comfort each other. My hands itch, wanting to do something. I could reach out and touch them both, but I don’t. Jojo looks part bewildered, part stoic, part like he might start crying. I need a cigarette. I squat next to Misty on the concrete block and bum a smoke: the menthol shores me up, stacks sandbags up my spine. I can do this. I wait until the nicotine laps at my insides like a placid lake, and then I go back to the car.
“Make her drink more,” I tell Jojo.
Thirty minutes later, she vomits that up. I give her fifteen minutes and I tell Jojo again: “Make her drink.” Even though Michaela is letting out a steady whine now, bewildered at the cup in her brother’s hand, Jojo does what I ask. Twenty minutes later, she vomits again. Michaela is desolate, hanging on Jojo, blinking at me when I stand inside the car door with more electrolytes. “Make her drink,” I say again, but Jojo sits there as if he does not hear me, his shoulders hunched up around his ears like he knows I’m out of patience, like he knows that I want to hit him. “Jojo,” I say. He flinches and ignores me. Michaela rubs her snotty nose and leaking mouth in his shoulder. “Jojo, no,” she says. The attendant steps out onto the porch, her cigarette already lit.
“Y’all all right?” she asks.
“Y’all got something for vomiting? For kids?”
She shakes her head, and her straightened hair flies free at the temples, waving around like insect antennae.
“Nope. Owner won’t stock nothing like that. He say only the basics. But you’d be surprised how many people come through here carsick, needing Pepto-Bismol.”
Weeds are flowering in bushes at the edge of the gas station lot; purple and yellow and white blooms nod at the edge of the pines. I palm the back of Michaela’s neck where she slumps over on Jojo, who is sitting on the trunk of my car, jiggling his knee and watching me and Misty, frowning.
“Hold on,” I say, and walk off the parking lot and along the tree line.
Mama always told me that if I look carefully enough, I can find what I need in the world. Starting when I was seven, Mama would lead me out in the woods around the house for walks, and she’d point out plants before digging them up or stripping their leaves and telling me how they could heal or hurt. The wind moved high in the trees, but nearly everything was silent below, except for me and Mama, who said: That right there is cow parsnip. You can use the young leaves like celery when you cook, but the roots is more useful. You can make a decoction for cold and flu. And if you make them into a poultice, you can ease and heal bruises, arthritis, and boils. She dug around the roots of the plant with a small shovel she carried on our walks, and then pulled the whole plant up by its leaves and doubled it up before putting it in the bag she carried across her chest. She searched the ground until she found another plant, and said: This pigweed. Ain’t good for any medicine, really, but you can cook with it, use it like you use spinach. Got a lot of vitamins in it, so it’s good for you. Your daddy like it sautéed with his rice, and he say his mama used to make bread with the ground-up seeds. I ain’t never tried that, though. On our way back to the house with the day’s haul, she quizzed me. As I grew older, it was easier for me to remember, to answer her quickly as we picked our way around tree roots. Wormseed, I would say. Good for getting rid of worms if you use it like seasoning in food. But it was hard for me to remember everything. Every day, Mama would point out a plant that had parts that could help women, specifically, seeing as how it was mostly women that searched her out, needing her skills and knowledge. She’d say: Remember you can use the leaves to make a tea that helps with cramps. And it could bring on a period, too. I’d look away and roll my eyes to the pines, wishing I were in front of the TV, not out trudging through the woods with my mama talking about periods. But now, as I walk through the clearing and peer into the woods, looking for milkweed, I wish I’d listened more carefully. I wish I could remember more than the fact that it has pinkish-purple flowers. And even though milkweed grows wild on parcels of land like this and flowers in the spring, I don’t see its white-beaded, downy leaves anywhere.
When Mama first realized that something was seriously wrong with her body, that it had betrayed her and turned cancerous, she began by treating it herself with herbs. I’d come home on those spring mornings to find her bed empty. She’d be out in the woods, picking and slowly dragging bushels of young pokeweed shoots behind her. Every time, she said: I’m telling you, it’s going to cure it. I’d
take the bundles from her, put my arm around her waist, and help her up the steps and into the house, where I’d set her in a chair in the kitchen. I was always buzzing from the night before, so while I chopped and cleaned and boiled and made pitcher after pitcher of tea for her to drink, the high would trill through my veins like a discordant song. But it didn’t cure it. Her body broke down over the years until she took to her bed, permanently, and I forgot so much of what she taught me. I let her ideas drain from me so that the truth could pool instead. Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.
* * *
If the world were a right place, a place for the living, a place where men like Michael didn’t end up in jail, I’d be able to find wild strawberries. That’s what Mama would look for if she couldn’t find milkweed. I could boil the leaves at Michael’s lawyer’s house, where we’re staying before we go pick Michael up in the morning. Put a little sugar in it, a little food coloring like Mama used to do whenever I had an upset stomach as a child, and tell her it’s juice.
But the world ain’t that place. Ain’t no wild strawberries at the side of the road. It ain’t boggy enough up here. But this world might be a place that gives a little luck to the small, sometimes shows a little mercy, because after I walk awhile down the side of the road out of sight of the gas station, after I leave Misty gesturing out the window with her arm, yelling, “Fucking come on,” I find wild blackberries. Mama always told me they could be used for upset stomach, but only for adults. But if there was nothing else, she said I could make a tea and give it to kids. Not a lot, I remember her saying. From the leaves. Or was it from the vine? Or the roots? The heat beats down so hard I can’t remember. I miss the late-spring chill.
This is the kind of world it is. The kind of world that gives you a blackberry plant, a doughy memory, and a child that can’t keep nothing down. I kneel by the side of the road, grab the thorny stems as close to the earth as I can get them, and pull, and the vine pricks my hand, tears at the skin, draws blood in tiny points that smear. My palms burn. This the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout. Even though the words were harsh, I saw hope in her face when she said them. She thought that if she taught me as much herbal healing as she could, if she gave me a map to the world as she knew it, a world plotted orderly by divine order, spirit in everything, I could navigate it. But I resented her when I was young, resented her for the lessons and the misplaced hope. And later, for still believing in good in a world that cursed her with cancer, that twisted her limp as an old dry rag and left her to disintegrate.
I kneel and lean back on my haunches. The day pulses like a flush vein. Wipe my eyes, smear dirt across my face, and make myself blind.
Chapter 5
Jojo
Kayla need to eat. I can tell by the way she keep crying, the way she keep hunching over and then knocking her head back and arching against her seat once we get back on the road. And screaming. I can tell there’s something wrong with her stomach. It won’t stop hurting her. She need to put something in it, so I take her out and let her sit on my lap, thinking it might make her feel better, but it don’t. She scream a little softer, her cries a little less high-pitched and sharp. The pain’s knife edge dulls. But she still knocks her head against my chest, and her skull feels thin against my bones, against the stone where my ribs meet, her skull easy to break as a ceramic bowl. Leonie done laid her plants on the armrest between her and Misty, and minute by minute, mile by mile, those blackberry leaves get more and more wilted, the roots get stringier and stringier, sling their dirt loose in clumps. Kayla growls and cries. I don’t want Leonie giving her that. I know that’s what she think she need to do, but she ain’t Mam. She ain’t Pop. She ain’t never healed nothing or grown nothing in her life, and she don’t know.
She bought me a betta fish when I was six, after I kept telling her the same story, every day, about the tanks we had in my class at school, the betta fish, red and purple and blue and green, swimming lazily in the tanks, flashing brilliant and then dull. She came home with one on a Sunday, after she’d been out all weekend. I hadn’t seen her since Friday, since she told Mam she was going to the store to buy some milk and some sugar and didn’t come back. When she came back, her skin was dry and flaking at the corners of her mouth, her hair stuck out in a bushy halo, and she smelled like wet hay. The fish was green, the color of pine needles, and he had stripes down his tail the color of red mud. I called him Bubby Bubbles, since he blew bubbles all day, and when I leaned over his tank, I could hear him crunching on the fish food Leonie had brought home in a sample-size bag. I imagined even then that one day I could lean over his bowl, and instead of crunching, little words would pop out the bubbles that fizzed up to the surface. Big face. Light. And love. But when the sample size of fish food ran out, and I asked Leonie to buy me more, she said she would, and then forgot, again and again, until one day she said: Give him some old bread. I figured he couldn’t crunch like he needed on some old bread, so I kept bugging her about it, and Bubby got skinnier and skinnier, his bubbles smaller and smaller, until I walked into the kitchen one day and he was floating on top of the water, his eyes white, a slimy scrim like fat, no voice in his bubbles.
Leonie kill things.
* * *
Outside the car, the trees thin and change, the trunks shorten and they get fuller and green, the leaves not sharp dark pine but so full, hazy almost. They stand in thin lines between fields, fields of muddy green, bristling with low plants. The sky darkens. The forests and fields around us turn black. I put my mouth to Kayla’s ear and tell her a story.
“You see them trees over there?” She groans. “If you look at the ground under them trees, there’s a hole.” She moans. “Rabbits live in them holes. One of them is a little rabbit, the littlest rabbit. She got brown fur and little white teeth like gum.” She’s quiet for a second. “Her name Kayla, like you. You know what she do?” Kayla shrugs and sinks back in to me. “She the best at digging holes. She dig them the deepest and the fastest. One day it was dark and a big storm come and the rabbit family’s hole started filling up with water, so Kayla started digging. And digging. And digging. You know what she did?” Kayla’s breath hitches, and then she turns to face me and puts her mouth in my shirt and sucks in more air. I rub her back in circles, rub it like I could rub away the cramping, the hurt, whatever’s making her sick. “She dug and dug and the tunnel got longer and longer. The water wasn’t even coming in where Kayla was digging, but she kept on until she popped up out the ground, and you know what?” Kayla digs her fingernails in to my arm, then raises up a little to look out the window and points at the dark fields, at the thin line of trees with the rabbit hole underneath it. “Getting dark,” she says. Then she leans back in to me and slumps. “Uh-huh. Little rabbit saw the gray barn and the fat pig and the red horse and Mam and Pop. She dug all the way to our house, Kayla. And when she saw Mam and Pop she loved them, and she decided to stay. So when we get home, she going to be waiting for us. You want to see her?” I ask. But Kayla is asleep. She twitches and for a blink I imagine I know what she’s dreaming, but then I stop. She smells sharp like sweat and throw-up, but her hair smells like coconuts from the oil Mam used to put in it, the one that I use now when I pull her hair into little ponytails: two little cotton balls on the sides of her head. I block out the image of her in the wet earth, the size of a rabbit, digging a hole. I don’t want to know that dream.
When we pull off the highway and onto a back road, the sky is dark blue, turning its back to us, pulling a black sheet over its shoulder. The world shrinks to the headlights coming from the car, twin horns leading through the darkness, the car an old animal, limping to another clearing in the woods. Pop always told me you can trust an animal to do exactly what it’s born to do: to root in mud or canter through a field or fly. That no matter how domestica
ted an animal is, Pop say, the wild nature in it will come through. Kayla is her most animal self, a worm-ridden cat in my arms. When we finally pull into a yard and the trees open up, this place is different. It’s not like the huddle of houses in Forrest County. There is only one house here, and it is wide. There are windows all along the front, and warm yellow light shines through all of them. Leonie stops the car. Misty gets out and waves at us to follow. I walk to the porch with Kayla asleep in my arms, snoring, breathing out of her mouth, and I see up close the paint is peeling in thin strips with marker-thin lines of brown-gray showing through. The windows look a little cloudy, like the water my fish died in. The wisteria planted on each side of the front steps has rooted thick into the earth, grown as big around as a man’s muscley arm, and has twisted and twined up the railings to weave thick as a curtain along the front of the porch. Here, the animal coming out. Misty knocks on the door.
“Come in,” a man’s voice sings, and there is music behind it.
He’s a big man. We find him in the kitchen, boiling noodles for spaghetti. My mouth turns to water. I have never been so hungry.
“Smells good, doesn’t it?” he says as he walks toward us. He bounces, seems to walk on his tiptoes. He has a white long-sleeved shirt on, except it’s rolled up to his elbows. The shirt is like his porch, the thread coming loose at the neck, something that looks like green paint splattered across the front. His kitchen is green. I ain’t never seen a green kitchen. That’s when I smell the sauce. It pops in its pot on the stove and streaks his arm as he stirs it. He licks it off. The noodles he put in the water slowly sink, disappear down the edges of the pot as their bottoms turn soft. I frown when he licks his furry arm. His hair is pulled back on his head, and he has it in a little ponytail that sticks out, short as Kayla’s. “Figured y’all would be hungry,” he says. He’s the whitest White man I’ve ever seen.
