Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

  “Wake up,” I say, and Jojo sits straight up, still hugging Michaela to him. Given-not-Given sat outside their door until Misty and Al came back: it’s strange to see echoes of him in the way Jojo’s shoulders curl inward over Michaela, in his wide-open eyes that scan the room and stop on the one dresser, in how still he suddenly is. “It’s time to go,” I say.

  “Home?” he says.

  Michael has to sit on the trunk to close it. With three people in the back, we ain’t got room for the bags we rode up here with, so even though Jojo whined about it, I made them put everything in the back, including the sandwiches Al’s sending us down the road with. Jojo’s still pouting, and I’m two minutes away from turning and leaning over the backseat and slapping the expression off his face: the thread line, the moue of his lips, the low eyebrows, all wiped smooth. He sings nursery rhymes to Michaela through the pout: the baby claps her hands and works her fingers like little spiders and looks bored and fascinated in flashes. Every fifth word, she touches Jojo’s nose. Misty’s asleep after complaining for a good hour that the car still smells like throw-up, and Michael’s driving, so I watch the kids when I ain’t watching Michael, when I ain’t noting the way his skin eats up the light from the growing day.

  When Al handed Michael the sandwiches, Al was sweating all over, damp with salt and smelling like raw onions. He’d packed the sandwiches in a small hard plastic bag, a portable cooler with a Chimay logo printed on the side. “We don’t want to take your bag,” Michael said. “I insist,” Al said, his breath shuttering in and out of him fast, his eyes everywhere: the woods, the yard, the house sinking in gentle decline. Al was high again. “For services rendered,” he said, and smiled at me then. His teeth were bad, each one ringed with black like a dirty bathtub, his gums red. He never brushes, I thought. The men shook hands, and Michael curled a loose fist over whatever Al gave him. Michael slid it into his pocket.

  “Come here,” Michael says. His blood thuds thickly under my ear, the skin of his arm like tepid water. The road winds through fields and wood, all the way south to the Gulf, and the light that cuts through the windows flutters all around. Where the road meets the Gulf, it skirts the beach for miles. I wish it ran straight over the water, like the pictures of the bridge I’ve seen that links the Florida Keys to the coast, wish it was an endless concrete plank that ran out over the stormy blue water of the world to circle the globe, so I could lie like this forever, feeling the fine hair on his arm, my kids silenced, not even there, his fingers on my arm drawing circles and lines that I decipher, him writing his name on me, claiming me. The world is a tangle of jewels and gold spinning and throwing off sparks. I’m already home.

  I’ve never had enough of this. After Michael and I got together in high school, I got pregnant with Jojo in just under a year: I was seventeen. Ever since then we had Jojo and Michaela around us, making those spaces bigger between us. I remember it in flashes, mostly when I’m high, that feeling of it just being me and Michael, together: the way I swam up and surfaced out my grief when I was with him, how everything seemed so much more alive with him. We parked out in a field under the stars, in his pickup truck. We’d sneak and swim in his parents’ aboveground pool, sinking under the water in the blurry blue and kissing. On the beach near a seafood festival, with the lights from the carnival rides flickering in the distance, bad zydeco music sounding over the loudspeakers, he’d twirl me and make me dance with him until we tripped and fell in the sand.

  “It ain’t healthy,” Mama said after I brought Michael home the first time, and we sat on the sofa and watched TV. Pop walked through the house and looked past us. After Michael left, Mama began cooking. I sat at the kitchen table and polished my nails, a soft pastel pink, the color of cotton candy, because I thought it looked good on my hand. I hoped the color would make Michael take my fingers in his mouth and say: I gotta get me some of this sweet.

  “All you hear, all you see, is him,” Mama said.

  “I see plenty else,” I said. I wanted to defend myself, but I knew I was lying, because when I woke up in the morning, I thought of Michael’s laugh, of the way he flipped his cigarettes before he lit them, of the way his mouth tasted when he kissed me. And then I remembered Given. And the guilt I felt when I realized it.

  “Every time you say something, you look at him like a little puppy dog. Like you waiting for him to pet you.”

  “Mama, I know I ain’t a puppy.”

  “You exactly that.”

  I blew on the fingers of my right hand and waved them in front of my face, breathed in the hot smells of the kitchen: beans bubbling on the stove, corn bread cooling, the smell of the nail polish, which made my stomach turn, but in a way that I liked. I’d huffed before I got pregnant with Jojo, on my knees in a shed in one of Michael’s friends’ yards, one of the many friends that Michael had whose parents were never home. The world had tilted and spun, and my brain had seemed to break out of my skull and float off. Michael had grabbed my shoulders, anchored me, pulled me back into myself.

  “So you don’t like him?” I asked.

  Mama breathed out hard and sat across from me at the wooden table. She grabbed my unpolished hand and turned it palm up and tapped it as she spoke.

  “I . . . it ain’t his fault what he was born to. Where.” Mama took a deep breath. “Into that family.” She took another hitching breath, and the way her face folded and smoothed, I knew she was thinking of Given. “He just a boy, a boy like any other his age. Smelling his piss for the first time and thinking with his nether-head.” Like your brother, she didn’t say. But I knew the sentence was in her.

  “I ain’t doing nothing crazy.”

  “If you ain’t already having sex with him, you will be soon. Protect yourself.” She was right, but I didn’t listen. Ten months later, I was pregnant. After Michael got the test and I took it, I brought it to Mama and told her. I told her on a Saturday because Pop worked on Saturdays, and I didn’t want him to be there. It was an awful day. It was early spring, and the rain had been booming all night and all morning: sometimes the thunder was so close, it made my throat judder, closed my windpipe, made it hard for me to breathe. I’d always been scared of lightning, always thought it would hit me one day, burn through the air and touch me with a great blue arc, like a spear streaming straight for me, and me helpless when the sharp head sank in. I’d grown up paranoid, thought the lightning followed me when I was in my car, when it rattled my windows. Mama was hanging plants to dry in the living room on string that Pop had hung on a zigzag back and forth across the room, so the plants listed in the electric air, and Mama half laughing and muttering, the soft backs of her arms flashing white and then not: a kitten showing its belly.

  “Here he come. Been singing for weeks.”

  “Mama?”

  She stepped down from the pine step stool Pop had built her. He’d carved her name into the top of it; the letters looked like wisps of smoke. Philomène. It had been her Mother’s Day present years before, when I was so little the only help I could give was to scratch a little star, four lines crossed at the middle, on the side of her name, and Given had carved a rose that looked like a muddy puddle, now worn smooth by Mama’s feet.

  “I was wondering how long it was going to take you to build up the nerve to tell me,” she said, the stool tucked under her arm like she would put it away, but instead of walking to the kitchen, she sat on the sofa and let the step stool hang over her legs across her lap.

  “Ma’am?” I asked. Thunder boomed. I felt hot around the neck and armpits, like someone had splashed hot grease across my face and chest. I sat down.

  “You’re pregnant,” Mama said. “I saw two weeks ago.”

  She reached across the wood in her lap and touched me then, not with the pitiless hand of the lightning, but with her dry, warm hands, soft under the skin she’d worked hard, just a second of a touch on my shoulder, like she had found a piece of lint there and was brushing it off. I surprised myself and curled in to it, l
eaning forward, put my head on the wood while her hand rubbed circles on my back. I was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. The wood hard against my mouth. Unyielding. Wetting with my tears. Mama leaned over me.

  “No room for sorries now, baby.” She grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled me up to look at my face. “What you want to do?”

  “What you mean?” The closest abortion clinic was in New Orleans. One of the more well-off girls in my school whose daddy was a lawyer had taken her after she’d gotten pregnant, so I knew it was there, and it was expensive. I thought we had no money for that. I was right. Mama gestured at the hanging plants, the listing jungle above our heads bristling in the cool electric air.

  “I could give you something.” She let the end of the sentence trail off, disappear. She looked at me like I was a smudged book she was having trouble reading and cleared her throat. “It was one of the first things I learned how to do, in my training. It’s the one tea I never have enough of.” She touched my knee then; she’d found another piece of lint. She leaned back again, and her culottes stretched tight across her knees. Years later, that’s where she’d first start feeling the pain from the cancer: in her knees. Then it moved up to her hips, her waist, her spine, to her skull. It was a snake slithering along her bones. Sometimes I think back to that day, to her sitting on the sofa, giving me those little touches, little touches that didn’t want to turn me one way or the other, even though she wanted Jojo, I think, because her grief for Given was hungry for life. Sometimes I wonder if the cancer was sitting there with us in that moment, too, if it was another egg, a yellow egg knit of sorrow, bearing the shape of bullet holes, wiggling in the marrow of her bones. That day, she was wearing a blouse she’d sewn herself from a print full of pale yellow flowers. Roses, looked like. “You want this baby, Leonie?”

  A whip-crack of lightning lit the house, and I jumped as the thunder boomed.

  I choked and coughed; Mama patted my back. The humidity made her hair alive around her face, tendrils of it standing up and curling away from her buttery scalp. The lightning cracked again, this time like it was right on top of us, feet away from arcing through the house, and her skin was white as stone and her hair waving, and I thought about the Medusa I’d seen in an old movie when I was younger, monstrous and green-scaled, and I thought: That’s not it at all. She was beautiful as Mama. That’s how she froze those men, with the shock of seeing something so perfect and fierce in the world.

  “Yeah, Mama,” I said. It still twists something in me to think of that: the fact that I hesitated, that I looked at my mama’s face in that light and felt myself wrestle with wanting to be a mother, with wanting to bear a baby into the world, to carry it throughout life. The way we were sitting on that sofa, knees tight, backs curved, heads low, made me think of mirrors and of how I’d wanted to be a different kind of woman, how I’d wanted to move somewhere far away, go west to California, probably, with Michael. He talked about moving west and working as a welder all the time. A baby would make that harder. Mama looked at me and she wasn’t stone no more: her eyes were crumpled and her mouth crooked, and that told me she knew exactly what I was thinking, and I worried that she could read minds, too, that she would see me shying away from who she was. But then I thought of Michael, of how happy he would be, of how I would have a piece of him with me always, and that unease melted like lard in a cast-iron pot. “I do.”

  “I wish you would have finished school first,” Mama said. Another piece of lint, this time on my hair at the crown of my head. “But this is now, and we do what we do.” She smiled then: a thin line, no teeth, and I leaned forward and put my head in her lap again, and she ran her hands up and down my spine, over my shoulder blades, pressed in on the base of my neck. All the while shushing like a stream, like she’d taken all the water pouring on the outside world into her, and she was sending it out in a trickle to soothe me. Je suis la fille de l’océan, la fille des ondes, la fille de l’écume, Mama muttered, and I knew. I knew she was calling on Our Lady of Regla. On the Star of the Sea. That she was invoking Yemayá, the goddess of the ocean and salt water, with her shushing and her words, and that she was holding me like the goddess, her arms all the life-giving waters of the world.

  * * *

  I’m asleep and I don’t know it until Michael is shaking me awake, his fingers digging into my shoulder. My mouth is so dry, my lips are sealed shut.

  “The police,” Michael says. The road behind us is empty, but the tension in his hand and the way his eyes widen and roll make me know this is serious. Even though I can’t see them and don’t hear any sirens, they are there.

  “You don’t have a license,” I say.

  “We have to switch,” he says. “Grab the wheel.”

  I grab it and push my feet into the floorboards and raise my rear off the seat so he can put a leg over in the passenger seat and begin sliding over. He takes his foot off the gas, and the car begins to slow. I put my left foot over near the pedal, and I am sitting in his lap in the middle of the car for one awful, hilarious moment.

  “Shit shit shit.” He laughs. It’s what he does when he’s frightened. When I went into labor, my water breaking in the snack aisle of a convenience store in St. Germaine, he scooped me up in his arms and carried me to his truck, laughing while cussing. He told me that once, when he was a boy, a cow kicked one of his friends in the middle of the night when they were out cow-tipping with flashlights: his friend, a redhead with pencil arms and a mouthful of rotten teeth from years of not brushing and chewing dip, braced himself as he fell, and his arm snapped like a tree limb. The elbow bent wrong, a piece of bone sticking out of his upper arm, pearly as a jagged oyster shell. Michael said his own laughter scared even him, then: high and breathless as a young girl’s. Michael lifts me off his lap, slides into the passenger seat, and I am behind the wheel when I see the lights behind me coming up fast on this two-lane highway, flashing blue, siren stuttering.

  “You got it?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “The shit. You know, the stuff from Al.”

  “Fuck!” Michael fumbles in his pockets.

  “What?” Misty wakes up in the backseat, twisting to look back. I begin slowing down. “Oh, shit,” she says when she sees the lights.

  I look in the rearview and Jojo is looking straight at me. He’s all Pop: upside-down mouth, hawk nose, steady eyes, the set of his shoulders as Michaela wakes up crying.

  “I don’t have time,” Michael says. He’s fumbling for the carpet, about to shove the plastic baggie out of the little door in the floor of the car, but there’s too much in the way with a balled-up shirt I bought for him in a convenience store when we stopped to get gas, with plastic bags of potato chips and Dr Pepper and candy we bought with the money Al gave us. “And it got a fucking hole in it.” The bottom of the plastic baggie is scored and jagged, the white and yellow crystal dry and crumbly at the corners.

  I snatch the small white baggie. I shove it in my mouth. I work up some spit, and I swallow.

  * * *

  The officer is young, young as me, young as Michael. He’s skinny and his hat seems too big for him, and when he leans into the car, I can see where his gel has dried and started flaking up along his hairline. He speaks, and his breath smells like cinnamon mints.

  “Did you know you were swerving, ma’am?” he asks.

  “No, sir, Officer.” The baggie is thick as a wad of cotton balls in my throat. I can hardly breathe.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, sir.” Michael speaks for me. “We been on the road for a few hours. She tired is all.”

  “Sir.” The officer shakes his head. “Can you step out of the car, ma’am, with your license and insurance?” I catch another whiff of him: sweat and spice.

  “Yes,” I say. The glove compartment is a mess of napkins and ketchup packets and baby wipes. As the officer walks away to talk with a static-garbled voice on his walkie-talkie, Michael leans in, puts a hand on
the small ribs of my back.

  “You all right?”

  “It’s dry.” I cough, and pull out the insurance paper. I snatch up my whole wallet and get out the car and wait for the officer to return, everybody but Michaela frozen in the backseat. Michaela flails and wails. It’s midafternoon, and the trees list back and forth at the side of the road. The newly hatched spring bugs hiss and tick. At the bottom of the shoulder, there is a ditch filled with standing water and a multitude of tadpoles, all wriggling and swimming.

  “Why isn’t the baby in her car seat?”

  “She been sick,” I say. “My son had to take her out.”

  “Who are the man and the other woman in the car?”

  My husband, I want to say, as if that would validate us. Even: My fiancé. But it’s hard enough to choke out the truth, and I know with this ball in my throat, I will surely choke on a lie.

  “My boyfriend. And my friend I work with.”

  “Where y’all going?” the officer asks. He doesn’t have his ticket book in his hand, and I feel the fear, which has been roiling in my belly, rise in my throat and burn hot like acid, push against the baggie on its slow descent down to my stomach.

  “Home,” I say. “To the coast.”

  “Where y’all coming from?”

  “Parchman.”

  I know it’s a mistake soon as I say it. I should have said something else, anything else: Greenwood or Itta Bena or Natchez, but Parchman is all that comes.