by Jesmyn Ward
“Mam?” she asks. “Pop? Mam? Pop?”
“No,” Jojo says. “These new people.”
But he doesn’t say who they are, and I want to answer her question, want to be her mother, want to say: Your other grandma or grandpa, your other family, your other Mam and Pop. But I don’t know what to say, how to explain, so I say nothing and let Michael answer her questions. But he offers nothing, either: he walks up the deck steps to the front porch and the door, pulls the screen door open, and knocks: two sure knocks, hard as a horse’s hooves on asphalt. I follow, and Jojo’s dragging feet purr through the gravel in the dark. Michael walks down the steps, a white ghost in the dark; grabs my hand; and pulls me up to stand next to him at the door.
Michael knocks again, and I hear movement in the house. Jojo hears like an animal and takes a step back toward the car.
“Come on, Jojo,” Michael says.
The door opens and there is light so bright I look down at my feet, Michael’s hand hard as metal in mine, gripping so tight I am sure my fingers are purple and white, but I see him, see Big Joseph, wearing overalls and a too-tight T-shirt, his peppered beard, his fleshy arms, all of it too much in the yellow spill. I step back. Michael pulls.
“Daddy,” he says.
“Son,” Big Joseph says. It is only the second time I’ve heard him speak in person, and his voice surprises me with how high it is, so different from the rest of him, which seems so rooted, so close to the earth, so low. The first time was in the courtroom, but he didn’t mean anything to me then, beyond being the uncle of the boy who shot my brother.
“We here,” Michael says. He lifts our clenched hands. Big Joseph lists, an old oak in a bad wind, but does not move, does not step back, does not say: Come in. In the dark behind us, Michaela cries.
“Eat,” she says. “I eat, Jojo!”
There are footsteps. Not as heavy as Big Joseph’s, but a steady, solid thumping, and even though I know it’s his mother, know it’s Maggie, I still flinch when I hear her smoker’s voice: deep and gravelly. She yanks open the door and she looks like a rabbit: her robe like a cream fur, her house slippers like white paws. I’ve seen her twice outside of this house, know that her body underneath is rabbit, too: the thin arms and legs, the round ball of her stomach.
“Cheese, Jojo!” Michaela screams.
“You heard the child, Joseph,” she says. A spasm makes her face twitch, and then it is still. Her hair is a red cap, her eyes unfathomably dark. “Time for supper.”
“We already ate,” Big Joseph wheezes.
Michaela mewls.
“And she ain’t,” Maggie says.
“You know they ain’t welcome in this house.”
“Joseph,” Maggie says, and she frowns at him and pushes his shoulder.
Big Joseph makes a sound in his throat and sways again, but then I realize Maggie is the wind. Big Joseph looks at me like he wants that gun across his lap, but he steps out of the doorway. They’ve talked about this: I can tell by the way Maggie said his name, the way a woman says the name of a man that she has long lived with, long loved. The way she says his name is enough. I know they have spoken about me, about Jojo, about Michaela. Maggie pushes open the screen door. She doesn’t say come in or welcome, just stands there, turned sideways. When I walk past her, she smells like lotion and soap and smoke, but not cigarette smoke: like fallen burnt oak leaves. She has Michael’s face. I startle when I walk past because it’s so strange to see his face on a woman: narrow jaw, strong nose, but the eyes are all wrong, hard as green marbles. In the house, we stand in a cluster, shying away from the furniture: a herd of nervous animals. Big Joseph and Maggie stand side by side, touching but not. She’s taller than the pictures, and he’s shorter.
“You going to introduce us?” Maggie’s looking at Michael when she says it and he nods his head, just barely: a wink of a nod.
“Yes, ma’am. This—”
“Jojo,” Jojo says. He hoists Michaela. “Kayla.” She looks at Maggie with her beautiful green eyes, and then I realize those are Maggie’s eyes, too, and I squeeze Michael’s hand, and my children seem strangers. Michaela a golden, clinging toddler, the tilt of her head and those clear eyes direct and merciless as an adult’s. And Jojo, tall as Michael, almost tall as Big Joseph, shoulders back, the line of his back a metal fence post. I have never seen him look so much like Pop as he does right now.
“Nice to meet you,” Maggie says, but she does not smile when she says it.
Jojo doesn’t even nod. Just looks at her and shifts Michaela to his other hip. Big Joseph shakes his head.
“I’m your grandmother,” she says.
There is a large wall clock in the kitchen, and the minute hand ticking its way around the face sounds loud in the uncomfortable silence, so loud I begin counting the seconds. My fingers squeeze tighter and tighter around Michael’s as his turn lax as he looks from his mother to his father, frowning. Jojo shrugs, and Michaela sticks her middle two fingers in her mouth and sucks hard. The house smells like lemon cleaner and fried potatoes.
Big Joseph falls into an armchair and wrenches it to the television.
“Figured they’d be rude,” he says.
“Daddy,” Michael says.
“Won’t even say hello to your mother.”
“They’re shy,” Michael says.
“It’s all right,” Maggie says. She bites the words short.
I must be sweating it out. A fire in my chest licks along my breasts. There’s rock in my stomach, at the base of the fire. I squeeze my legs. I don’t know whether I want to throw up or pee.
“Say hello,” I croak.
Jojo looks at me: mutinous. The corner of his mouth, frowning; his eyes almost closed. He bounces Michaela and steps backward toward the door. I don’t know why I said it. Michaela looks at me as if she has not heard; if nobody knew better, they’d think she was deaf.
“Raised by her, what you’d expect, Maggie?”
“Joseph,” Maggie says.
I would throw up everything. All of it out: food and bile and stomach and intestines and esophagus, organs all, bones and muscle, until all that was left was skin. And then maybe that could turn inside out, and I wouldn’t be nothing no more. Not this skin, not this body. Maybe Michael could step on my heart, stop its beating. Then burn everything to cinders.
“Hell, they half of her. Part of that boy Riv, too. All bad blood. Fuck the skin.” His voice is so high by the end of it that I can hardly hear him over the television, over an enthusiastic car salesman whose prices are miraculously dropping. Maggie’s mouth is a seam. Her hands worrying one another, and suddenly I hate her because she can walk and my mama can’t. And then I hate Joseph because he’s called my daddy a boy. I wonder what he knows of my daddy, how he could look at Pop and see every line of Pop’s face, every step Pop takes, every word out of Pop’s mouth, and see anything but a man. Pop’s at least twenty years older than Big Joseph; he was a grown man when Big Joseph was pissing his diapers. So how can Big Joseph see Pop, see how stonelike he is, like Pop’s taken all the hardship of the world into him and let it calcify him inch by inch till he’s like one of them petrified trees, and see anything but a man? Pop would whip his ass. And I can see Big Joseph in my mind’s eye, standing over Given, breathing down on him like he’s so much roadkill, how he would ignore the perfection of him: the long bow-drawing arm, the high forehead over the dead eyes.
“Goddamnit, Daddy!” Michael says.
Quick as he fell into the chair, Big Joseph is up, walking toward us but facing Michael.
“I told you they don’t belong here. Told you never to sleep with no nigger bitch!”
Michael head-butts Big Joseph. The crack of their skulls ricochets through the air, and Big Joseph’s nose is gushing blood, and then him and Michael are on the floor, but Michael isn’t punching him. They’re pushing against each other, each trying to pin the other down, rolling like children. Breathing hard. Sweating. Maybe crying. Michael saying ove
r and over: “Goddamnit, Daddy, goddamnit, Daddy,” and Big Joseph saying nothing but wheezing so hard it sounds like sobbing.
“Enough!” Maggie screams. “That’s enough!” And then she’s running away and I can’t believe she’s going to leave them fighting in the kitchen, but then she’s running back with a broom and beating Michael over the shoulders with it because he’s on top of Big Joseph now, yelling, “Get up. Get up.” And I still feel sick, and cold, and too small for all this, and part of me wants to go grab Jojo’s hand and pull them out this house and leave them fighting. And another part of me wants to open my mouth and laugh, because it’s all so ridiculous, all of it, and I look over at my son and I think for sure he’s smiling, for sure he can see how stupid all of it is, but he ain’t looking at them tussling. He’s looking at me, and I see a flash of something I ain’t never seen before. He’s looking at me like I’m a water moccasin and I just bit him, just sank my teeth into the bone of his ankle, bit it to swelling. Like he would step on my head, crush my skull, stomp me into red mud until I wasn’t nothing but bone and skin and mud oozing in my slits. Like he ain’t no child of mine. Michaela’s climbing her brother, getting higher and higher on him until she’s almost sitting on his shoulder, so I do it. I stalk over and I grab Jojo’s hand even though I half expect him to yank it away, and I pull him toward the door.
“Nice meeting y’all,” I say, and it sounds high-pitched and ridiculous coming out of my mouth, with the men still tussling and Maggie still whacking. Big Joseph’s on top now, choking Michael, and even though I want to go back and help Michael, I don’t. I open the door and pull Jojo and Michaela. I take one look back and see Michael punch his daddy in the throat. Then we’re out the door, and the sky in the Kill is wide and open and cold, awash in stars, and we down the porch steps, standing by the car, shivering, listening to the banging in the house. A crash, and a light goes out.
“Get in,” I say, and Jojo climbs in the backseat with Michaela.
“Shit,” Michaela lisps, and it sounds like thit.
“Don’t say that,” I say. We sit in the car in the dark with the first of the crickets and katydids that come alive in the warmer months and listen to them trill, protesting the frigid air, the unfeeling stars, and we wait.
* * *
It’s minutes. Or it’s hours. Could be days, too, and maybe we slept through the sunrise and sunset, and woke to the night, again and again, and them still rolling and breaking things inside. Daddy and son. Until Michael and his mama come out the door, Michael kicking right through the screen, Maggie rushing out behind him to grab his shoulders. To turn him to her. To yell at him, then talk to him, then murmur. Michael leans down toward his mother in breaths until he’s hunched over her, his head on her shoulder, her rubbing his back like a baby. Her robe turning black where he brushes against it: blood dabbed from his touch. Michael sobbing then. The bugs quiet.
“We should’ve left,” Jojo whispers.
“Shut up,” I say.
“Kayla’s still hungry,” Jojo says.
I should leave. I should leave Michael to his family. Take my daughter home and feed her, fill her stomach, quiet her whimpering. But I don’t. I can’t. Maggie pulls the door open, disappears inside, and I expect Michael to walk toward the car but he doesn’t. He just leans over and crosses his arms and puts them on the porch railing and hunches over, waiting. His mother opens the door again and almost hits him, and then she’s passing him a paper grocery bag and hugging him to her and talking to him again, and with each word, she thumps his back with the flat of her hand. And he’s a baby again, and it looks like she’s trying to burp him. I look down at my lap. Out the driver’s side window. Off into the far line of the woods. There’s the sound of a door slamming shut, and then a creak, and Michael’s opening the car and sliding into the passenger seat. The bugs loud and then dim again. The bag crackles.
“Are you okay?” I ask. I know it’s stupid, but still, this is what I say.
“Let’s go,” Michael says.
The car chokes and cranks to life. I drive slowly down the driveway, swerving around muddy potholes, the bugs scatting our way. When I turn onto the street, the house is all dark. All the windows dim: the siding and beams and glass of the front of it smooth and still as a blank face.
* * *
Pop is home when I turn in to the gravel drive. He’s sitting on the porch, still as the swing and the potted plants at both sides of the door; he’s cut the light off so he is a darkness in the darkness, and the only reason I know it’s him is by the way he flicks his lighter to life and then releases it, lets it flutter, and then he flicks again. He smoked when I was younger. Packed and rolled the cigarettes himself. But after he caught me around the back of the shed lighting one of his spent cigarettes with only a fingernail’s worth of tobacco in it, he slapped it and the match out of my hand, and I never saw nor smelled the scent of one on him again. The way he looked at me when the cigarette hit the ground. Eyes wide, disappointed: pained. It was the first time I remember Pop looking at me like that. I was eleven and my breasts were budding and my friends at school were already smoking weed and worse, so I wanted to try at least a cigarette, but recalling his face, the way he looked guilty and angry at the same time, made me wish I’d never picked up that bud of rolled tobacco, never stole that match, never lit it, never hid back there for Pop to catch me.
So now whenever Pop is thinking about something but doesn’t want to let anyone know he’s thinking about something, worrying it over, he does this. Light, gutter, light, gutter. Where I was the one hesitant in the Kill, now it’s Michael that stands at my elbow, slumped, curled in on himself: like I got a cur dog on a short, frayed leash. He tries to grab Michaela out of the car, but by the time he gets around to her side, Jojo is out and Michaela is patting his face, saying “Eat-eat,” with every little tap, and they are already walking toward Pop in the darkness. Michael and I grab bags, so by the time we get up the porch steps, Michaela is disentangling herself from Pop’s arms, and Jojo is carrying her into the house. Here, Pop is a dusky smudge, the tattoos on his arms lit up in a flash with the lighter, and then out again. When I was younger, I would sneak and stand next to him when he took a nap on the couch, smell his breath, the way it smelled of tobacco and mint and musk, and I would trace over his tattoos with my pointer finger, without touching him, just follow the illustrations around: a ship; a woman who looked like Mama, clothed in clouds and carrying arrows and a pine branch in her hand; and two cranes: one for me and one for Given. Given’s is alight, poised in flight, feet skimming the marsh grass, while mine is beak down in the mud. When I was five, Pop pointed at mine and told me: This the one I got for you: they a sign of luck when you see them, mean everything is in balance, that it’s raining good and there’s fish and there’s things squirming under the marsh mud, that the bayou grass going to be green soon. They a sign of life. The light gutters, and they are erased in the dark. Pop speaks and I see his teeth.
“Your mama been asking about you.”
“Sir,” Michael says. I feel the words as much as I hear them, hot puff of air that caresses my shoulder.
“Michael,” Pop says. He clears his throat. “I expect it’s good to be home.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your mama—” Pop’s voice breaks off.
“We getting a place,” Michael interrupts. “Soon.”
Pop lights and his face flashes. He is frowning, and then the flame dies.
The night is country dark.
“It’ll keep until tomorrow.” Pop rises. “Leonie, go on and see your mother.”
* * *
Mama is laying in the bed with her face turned to the wall, and her chest is still, the bones from the spoon of her clavicle close and hard under the skin: a rusted cooking grate over a busted barbecue pit. Her arms are all bone, the skin and thin muscle overlaying them sliding to bunch at odd places: too far away from the elbow, too near the center of her throat. She swallows, and I feel
relief wash through me, and I realize I was watching to see if she was breathing, to see if she was moving, to see if she was still here. It’s like a quick rain over hot, dry earth.
“Mama?”
Her head moves an inch, and then one more, and then she’s looking at me, her eyes too alive in her face. The pain glistens in her black irises, moves like smoke over the whites. The only thing bright while the rest of her dulls.
“Water?” she asks. It’s a scratchy whisper, hardly there in the din of the night insects trilling through the open window.
I lift the cup and straw Pop left next to the bed for her to drink. I should have been here.
“Michael’s home,” I say.
She tongues the straw out of her mouth and swallows. Lays her head back. Her hands curled on the thin white blanket like an invalid’s.
“It’s time.”
“What?” I say.
Mama clears her throat, but her whisper is no louder: too-long pant hems dragging over dirt.
“It’s time.”
“For what, Mama?”
“For me to go.”
“What you mean?”
I set the cup down on the edge of the nightstand.
“This pain.” She blinks as if to grimace, but doesn’t. “If I lay in this bed for much longer, it’s going to burn the heart out of me.”
“Mama?”
“I done did everything I could. Brewed all the herbs and medicines. Opened myself to the mystère. For Saint Jude, for Marie Laveau, for Loko. But they can’t enter. The body won’t let them,” she says.
Her knuckles bear all the scars: slipped knives, broken dishes, pounds of laundry. I wonder if I pull her hand to my nose and sniff, if I can smell all the offerings she done placed on her altar over the years, done used to heal: strings of peppers, potatoes, yams, cattail, spider lily, Spanish needle, sweet bedstraw, and wild okra. All the green of the earth in her hands. But when I sniff, her palms sandpaper-dry, I smell threshed hay bleached by the winter sun. Dead. She squeezes, and it is pitiful. When I was a little girl, she kneaded my scalp when she washed my hair, scraped it with her fingernails as I sat in the tub with my knees in my chin. I want to cry. I don’t know what she’s saying to me.
