by Jesmyn Ward
“You figured right.” Misty hugs the man as she says this, turns her face so that she speaks it into his paint-splattered shirt. “Took us longer to make it here because the little one got sick.”
“Ah yes, the little girl!” he said. Leonie looks like she wants to shush him, but she doesn’t. “She’s—” He pauses. “Sticky.” Now Leonie looks like she wants to punch him. Her mulish look, Pop says. “Is the young man sick too?” I already like him better, even though when he looks at me, I see something like sadness in his face, and I don’t know why.
“No,” Leonie says. She crosses her arms when she says it. “We’re not hungry.”
“Nonsense,” the man says.
“Leonie,” Misty says, and looks at Leonie. I know it’s the kind of look that says something else without saying it, but I can’t read Leonie’s eyebrows, her lips, the way she nods her head forward and her long bangs fall in her eyes. Whatever Misty says, Leonie understands and nods back.
“We’ll eat.” Leonie clears her throat. “I was wondering if I can use your stove. I got something I need to cook.”
“Of course, my dear, of course.”
Up close, the man smells like he ain’t took a bath in a few days, but it’s not a musty smell. Smells sweet and wrong at the same time, like sweet liquor that done sat out in the heat and started turning to vinegar.
“Excuse the French, Al, but I’m fucking starving.” Misty smiles.
When I sit in the living room, Kayla stays asleep, breathing hot into my shirt with little puffs. The room has high ceilings and bookshelves on every wall. There is no TV. There’s a radio in the kitchen, where Misty is sitting at a counter stool, drinking a glass of wine Al has poured for her in a mason jar. The music, all violins and cellos, swells in the room, then recedes, like the water out in the Gulf before a big storm. When Leonie comes in from the car, holding her weeds in one hand, she trips on the rug covering the wooden floor, red and orange and white and frayed, and a bag falls from under her shirt, hits the carpet, and what was inside the crinkled brown paper slides out. It is clear, a whole pack of broken glass, and I’ve seen this before. I know what this is. The man is laughing at something Misty says, and Leonie will not look at me as she picks it up, scoops it back in the bag, and slumps over the counter before sliding it to Misty, who passes the bag to Al. He picks it up, tosses it into the air, and then makes it disappear like a magician.
* * *
Al is Michael’s lawyer.
“Boy’s around his age,” he says, pushing his sleeves up his arm and frowning after pointing at me, “and they thought he was selling weed in school.”
Misty swigs her drink.
“And do you know what they did to him?”
She shrugs.
“Brought him into the principal’s office with two other boys his age. Friends. Made them drop their pants and strip so they could search them.”
Misty shakes her head, her hair swinging around her face.
“That’s a damn shame,” she says.
“It’s illegal, is what it is. It’s pro bono, and the school will probably get off with some sort of censure from the courts, but I couldn’t not take it,” he says, shrugging and drinking. “Long moral arc of the universe and all.”
Misty nods like she knows what he’s talking about. She’s pulled out her ponytail to let her hair hang, and every time she nods or shakes her head, she does it so violently her hair swings, as languid and pretty as Spanish moss, across her back. She’s pulled her shirt down at the collar, let it sag, so her shoulder is a gleaming globe in the living room light. Al has all the lamps lit. The more she drinks, the more her hair swings.
“You do what you can.” Al smiles, touches her shoulder, and lifts his cup of wine. “How do you like it? It’s good, right? I told you it was a good year.”
“So what you doing about my man?” Misty leans toward him and raises her eyebrows and smiles.
“Okay, okay,” Al says, leaning back away from her to laugh before coming toward her, talking with his hands, telling her about whatever he’s doing to help free Bishop.
Leonie is sitting on the sofa next to me, sippy cup in hand. It took her around thirty minutes to cut the blackberry plant, boil the roots and the leaves. She boiled the root in one pot and the leaves in the other, while I hunched over my plate shoving spaghetti into my mouth, hardly chewing. She let it cool. She stood at the counter, squinting and talking to herself with her arms crossed, and then she poured half from one pot and half from the other pot into Kayla’s cup. It was gray. I shoved the last of the food in my mouth, went to rinse my plate off and put it into the dishwasher, which smelled sour, and watched while she asked Al if he had any food coloring and sugar. He did. She dumped a few spoons of sugar and drops of food coloring into the cup and shook it until it looked like muddy Kool-Aid. Now she’s sitting next to Kayla, who we left sprawled, asleep, on the couch, and she’s trying to nuzzle her awake. Every time she asks Kayla to wake up, kisses her ear and neck, Kayla reaches up and puts her arm around Leonie’s neck and pulls like she wants her to lay down, to go to sleep with her. Like she doesn’t want to be woken.
It scares me.
“Come on, Michaela,” Leonie says, and she tugs Kayla upright. Kayla opens her eyes and slumps like Leonie did in the kitchen when she passed that package across, whining and trying to lie back down. “You thirsty?” Leonie whispers, putting the cup in front of Kayla. “Here. Drink,” she says.
“No,” Kayla says, and slaps the cup away. It flies out of Leonie’s hand and rolls across the floor.
“She don’t want it,” I say.
“Don’t matter what she want,” Leonie say, rolling her eyes at me. “She need it.”
I want to tell her: You don’t know what you doing. And then: You ain’t Mam. But I don’t. The worry bubbling up in me like water boiling over the lip of a pot, but the words sticking in my throat. She might hit me. I did a lot of talking when I was younger, when I was eight and nine, in public. And then one day she slapped me across the face, and after that, every time I opened my mouth to talk against her, she did that. Hit me so hard her slaps started feeling like punches. Made me twist to the side, my hand on my face. Made me sit down once in the middle of the aisle in Walmart. So I stopped. But she doesn’t know how to make medicine out of plants, and I worry for Kayla. Two years ago, when I was so sick with a stomach bug that I could hardly get up off the sofa and make it to the bathroom, Mam told Leonie to go gather some plant in the woods and make a tea out of the roots. She did it. And because Mam told her to do it, I trusted her, and I drank it, even though it tasted like rubber. Leonie must have picked the wrong plant, or prepared it wrong, because whatever she gave me made me even sicker. She poured the gritty, bitter mess by the back steps, and a few days afterward, when I had worked whatever she gave me and the bug out of my system, I found a stray cat dead, carbuncular and rotting, by the steps. It had drunk whatever she’d poured into a pool on the ground.
Leonie’s picked up the cup, holding it to Kayla’s lips.
“You thirsty, right,” she says, and it’s an answer, not a question. Kayla coughs and grabs at the cup. My underarms spike and sweat, and I want to grab that sippy cup and throw it like she did, bat it across the room and snatch her out of the loose circle of Leonie’s arm. But I don’t. And then she’s sucking at the spout and turning up her cup and drinking, and I feel like I lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.
“She just need to sleep it off,” Misty says then. “Probably carsick, that’s all.”
Kayla is thirsty. She’s drunk half of it, and she’s pulling hard on the spout, her lips puckered like it’s a bottle. When she’s done, she lets the cup clatter to the floor, and then she crawls across the sofa and into my lap, grabbing my hand and saying, “Down,” which means up. She wants me to tell her a story. I lean in.
“I have a better vintage in the kitchen,” Al says, looking at Leonie. “Maybe we could sample it this evening.”
“Sounds go
od to me,” Misty says.
“I don’t know,” Leonie says. She’s looking at Kayla in my lap, Kayla who is beginning to fuss because I haven’t begun the story yet. She’s beginning to squirm and cry again like she did in the car before she threw up. “She ain’t feeling good.”
“I’m telling you, it’s probably carsickness. Let her sleep it off,” Misty says. “She’ll be fine.” And then she looks at Leonie like she’s saying two things at once, one with her mouth and the other with her eyes. “You been driving all day. Might be nice to unwind and take a break.”
I can’t read her yet. Leonie reaches out and smooths Kayla’s hair down, but it springs back up. Kayla curves away from her.
“You probably right,” Leonie says.
“You know how many times I threw up with my head out the window when I was a kid? I lost count. She’ll be fine,” Misty says.
It looks like Misty’s said the right thing this time, because Leonie sits back then. There is a wall between us.
“Michael got motion sickness bad. He can’t even ride in the backseat without feeling like throwing up.” It makes sense to Leonie then. “Must have got it from him.”
“See?” Misty nods. Al nods. They all nod and rise and head off to the kitchen. I take Kayla into the bedroom Al pointed us to earlier, with two twin beds. I take off Kayla’s shirt, which smells like acid, and wet and soap a rag from the bathroom next to the bedroom, and then wipe her off. She’s hot. Even her little feet. So hot. I take off everything but her drawers and lay down with her in one of the twin beds, and she puts her little arm over my shoulder and pulls me to her, like she does every morning we wake up together. “Doe-doe,” she says.
I lay there until the music goes quiet in the kitchen and I hear them moving out to the back porch. No glasses clink, no wine. I figure they’re opening up that pack Leonie brought. I lay there until I can’t no more, and then I carry Kayla into the bathroom and stick my finger down her throat and make her throw up. She fights me, hitting at my arms, crying against my hand, sobbing but not making no words, but I do it three times, make her vomit over my hand, hot as her little body, three times, all of it red and smelling sweet, until I’m crying and she’s shrieking. I turn off the light and go back into the room and wipe her with my shirt and lay in the bed with her, scared that Leonie’s going to walk in and find all that red throw-up in the bathroom, find out I made Kayla throw up Leonie’s potion. But nobody comes. Kayla sniffs and dozes off, hiccupping in her sleep, and then I clean all of it up with soap and water until the bathroom is as white as it was before. All the while, my heart beating so hard I can hear it in my ears, because I knew what Kayla was saying. I knew.
I love you, Jojo. Why you make me, Jojo? Jojo! Brother! Brother.
I heard her.
* * *
I try to sleep, but for hours, I can’t. All I can do is lay there and listen to Kayla breathe. Outside, somewhere far away off in the dark reach of the woods, a dog barks. It’s a hacking sound, full of anger and sharp teeth. At the heart of it all: fear. When I was younger, I wanted a puppy. I asked Pop for one, and he said ever since his time in Parchman, he couldn’t keep a dog. He said he tried when he got let out, but every one of the dogs he got, mutts and hounds, died within the first year of him getting it. When he was in Parchman, Pop said, once he started working with the hounds the prison used to track escapees, all he could smell, when he was eating or waking or falling asleep, was dog shit. All he could hear was the dogs, yipping and howling and baying, raring to tear. Pop said he tried to get Richie on with dogs so he could get him out the fields, but it didn’t work. I close my eyes and imagine Pop sitting on the high-backed chair in the corner of the room. Pop, with his straight back and his hands like tree roots, telling me more stories, speaking me to sleep.
Was one of them days when the sun bear down on you so hard feel like it’s twisting you inside out, and all you do is burn. One of them heavy days. Down here, it’s different; we got that wind coming off the water all the time, and that eases. But up there, they ain’t got that, just the fields stretching on, the trees too short with not enough leaves, no good shade nowhere, and everything bending low under the weight of that sun: men, women, mules, everything low under God. Was a day like that the boy broke his hoe.
I don’t think he meant to do it. He wasn’t nothing but a scrawny thing, littler than you, I already told you that, so he must have hit a rock or leant on it the wrong way, and that’s what did it. Kinnie had me running the dogs around the fields, working on they sense of smell. I was circling Richie’s field when I saw him walking with the two pieces in his hand, just dragging the handle in the dirt, little trail following him to the wood line. The driver, the man who set the pace for the day’s work, something like an overseer, saw Richie. He sat up on his mule and watched the boy’s back, and he looked more and more mad, like a snake drawing down and bunching up before he strike. I edged around the field until I could get close enough to Richie to hiss at him.
“Pick the handle up, boy. Driver watching you,” I said.
“He going to beat me anyway,” Richie said, but he picked the handle up.
“Who say?”
“He say.”
The boy was jittery around the eyes, even though he walked like he wasn’t scared. Them marks I saw on him when he came in Parchman told me he knew what it was to be beat, whether it was his mama taking a belt buckle to him or some man. But I knew the boy wasn’t ready for the whip. I knew he wasn’t ready for Black Annie.
I was right. Sun went down, and after supper, sergeant tied him to some posts set at the edge of the camp. So hot the sun still felt like it was up, and the boy laid there spread-eagle on the ground in the dirt with his hands and legs tied to them posts. When that whip cracked in the air and came down on his back, he sounded like a puppy. Yelped so loud. And that’s what he kept doing, over and over. Just yelping for every one of them lashes, arching up off the ground, turning his head like he wanted to look at the sky. Yelling like a drowning dog. When they untied him, his back was full of blood, them seven gashes laid open like filleted fish, and sergeant told me to doctor on him. So I cleaned him up as he lay there throwing up with his face in the dirt. I ain’t tell him to stop. Sergeant gave him a day to heal, but when they sent him back out in the field, them lashes on his back wasn’t anywhere near healed, and they oozed and bled through his shirt.
I can almost hear Pop in the dim room, which feels wet and close from all the hot water I ran to cover the sound of Kayla throwing up and to clean up after. He would shift and lean on his elbow, and his voice would rise out of the black like smoke. I wipe Kayla’s hair away from her head, and she sweats. Whenever Pop talked about Richie getting whipped, he told me about Kinnie, his boss in charge of the hunting hounds, who escaped the day after they flayed Richie’s back.
Kinnie Wagner pulled his last escape that day. It was 1948. Walked right out the front gates of Parchman with a machine gun he’d stole out of munitions. Warden was pissed.
“I’ll look a fool,” he said, “being the warden who let the damn man escape a third time. You want your job, you better catch him. Let the dogs,” he told the sergeant.
Sergeant looked at me and I got the best of the pack: Axe and Red and Shank and Moon, all dogs Kinnie’d named, and I let them loose and started tracking. But the dogs wouldn’t track the man that fed them, the man that first touched them, the man that raised them. Kept walking slow and sad in circles through that country, slinking through those thin trees under that heavy sky, and I followed them, catching Kinnie’s tracks clear, but slowed down by the animals so I had to go back at the end of the day, tell the sergeant the dogs wouldn’t track they master.
Him and two other sergeants and a gang of trusty shooters came out with me the next day, and it was the same. The hounds smelled that son of a bitch and thought he was they daddy. Couldn’t savage him because when they slept, they dreamed of him, of his big red hands and his gray mouth. The stink that came
off of him from all his sweating as dear to them as the scent from they mama’s ears.
* * *
I can tell Leonie ain’t slept. She never came in the room last night, and this morning, the music is still playing in the kitchen on Al’s stereo, and all three of them look wrinkled: their clothes, their hair, their faces. Leonie’s looking at the empty chair across from her, so she misses when I walk in the room, Kayla in my arms, her head on my shoulder. Normally, she’d be asking for a dog (she likes hot dogs for breakfast), or pointing outside and pulling my hand and saying Pop. But I woke to her touching my cheek right underneath my eye, looking very serious, not smiling. Her little hand like a stick burned with fire and now throwing off heat, red and black. As I walk into the kitchen, Kayla breathes little huffs into my neck. I rub her back, and Leonie finally notices us.
“They got oatmeal on the stove,” Leonie says. All three of them are drinking coffee, black and strong. “Did she throw up again?”
“No,” I say. Leonie looks toward that empty chair again. “She hot, though.”
Leonie nods, but she don’t look at me. She look at the chair. Raise her eyebrows like somebody said something surprising, but Al and Misty are leaning in to each other, murmuring things, whispering. Leonie ain’t part of that conversation. I walk over to the pot and see the oatmeal crusted to the sides, burnt crispy on the edges, and jelly in the middle with cold.
“Let’s go get your man,” says Misty, and they all stand.
“But they haven’t eaten,” Al says. “They have to be hungry.”
“I’m not,” I say, and my mouth tastes like old gum chewed almost to paste. I figure I’ll eat some of the food I stole in the backseat on the way to the jail, ease the grinding suck of my stomach. Sneak some to Kayla if she’ll let me. She burns in my arms, her neck against my neck, her little chin digging in to my collarbone. Her legs dangle, lifeless as a carcass’s from a hook.
“Let’s go get your father,” Leonie says.
* * *
The jail is all low, concrete buildings and barbed-wire fences crisscrossing through fields. The road stretches onward, out into the distance, and for a while, this road points us toward the men housed here. There’s no other sign, nothing in those fields: no cows, no pigs, no chickens. There are crops coming in, baby plants, but they look small and stunted, as if they’ll never grow. But a great flock of birds wheels through the sky, swooping and fluttering, moving graceful as a jellyfish. I watch them as Kayla mewls in my ear, as we pass another sign, old and wooden, that says Welcome to Parchman, Ms. And then: Coke is it! But by the time we get out of the car in the parking lot, the birds have turned north, fluttered over the horizon. I hear the tail end of their chatter, of all those voices calling at once, and I wish I could feel their excitement, feel the joy of the rising, the swinging into the blue, the great flight, the return home, but all I feel is a solid ball of something in my gut, heavy as the head of a hammer.
