by Jesmyn Ward
“I got one left,” she says.
“What you mean?”
“The last mystère. Maman Brigitte. Let her come into me. Possess me. She the mother of the dead. The judge. If she come, maybe she take me with her.”
“There ain’t another? What about one that heals?” I ask.
“I didn’t teach you enough. You won’t be able to appease them.”
“I could try.” I let the words trail from my mouth and hang in the air like lax fishing line, dangling a hook nothing wants to bite. The night bugs call one to another, courting and threatening and singing, and I can’t understand any of it. Mama looks at me, and for one blink, hope shines, remote and brilliant as a full moon.
“No,” she says. “You don’t know. You ain’t never met the mystère. They look at you, they see a baby.”
I take my hand from hers, and she lays still, her eyes too wet, too large. Eyelids fluttering. She don’t ever blink.
“You can gather for me. I need rocks. From the cemetery. Enough to stack them in a pile. And cotton.”
I want to walk out the room. Walk out the front door. Walk straight to the bayou, to the water, step on it, shimmering glass under my soles, and walk until I disappear over the horizon.
“Cornmeal. And rum.”
“That’s it? You just going to go? Soon as you seek this spirit? Just like that?”
My voice breaks: my face is wet.
“Why can’t Pop do it?” I ask.
“You my baby.” She breathes heavy, and the grate cracks and sinks to rusted stillness. “Like I drew the veil back so you could walk in this life, you’ll help me draw it back so I can walk in the next.”
“Mama, no—”
“Help me prepare.” She sighs wetly then, and I reach out to wipe her face, the skin under the tears warm and wet and alive with salt and water and blood. “I don’t want to be empty breath. Bitter at the marrow of my bones. I don’t want that, Leonie.”
“Mama.”
The cup falls off the table, spreads a puddle of water around my shoes. The katydids clack in applause or disapproval, I don’t know.
“Baby, please,” Mama says.
Her eyes wild and wide. She moans, and what could be the pain moves through her, making her legs shuffle under the covers, then lay still: rough wind through bare winter branches. The morphine is not enough.
“Let me leave with something of myself. Please.”
I nod, and then her scalp is under my hands, hot to the touch, and I’m kneading and scratching like she did me, and her mouth is opening and closing in half pleasure, half pain. Opening and closing with what would be sobs, but she chokes them quiet. Relief again, but this time like a flood over dry plains, rushing from where I touch her head down her gaunt face, her sinewy neck, her flattened, etched chest, the dip of her stomach, the empty pot of her hips, the long, swollen black lines of her legs, to her flat feet. I wait, but nothing about her body changes. I expect her to lie slack, but it doesn’t happen. I only know she’s fallen asleep by her eyelids, the smooth marbles of them, relaxed. I leave her and pull the door behind me. Michael’s in the shower. Pop is still out on the porch, flashing in the darkness. Someone has turned a lamp on in the living room, and Given’s pictures, year after year of half smiles and angled legs like he’s a moment away from jumping up and running, look down on me. A multitude of Givens. And I want him back so bad then, because I want to ask him: What should I do?
Michaela’s on the second sofa in the living room. Michaela breathes openmouthed, huffing crumbs, and a half-eaten cracker falls from her hand to the floor. I don’t even pick it up. In my room, my full bed seems as small and narrow as Mama’s, and like her, I turn to the wall. I can feel her on the other side. She sears me. I couldn’t see before, but now I feel it: her chest packed tight with wood and charcoal, drenched in lighter fluid, empty no longer—the pain the great blaze, immolating all.
Chapter 11
Jojo
I pulled Kayla out and ran to the porch, to Pop and his lighter, bright as a lighthouse beacon as it flashed in the dark. I skipped the steps and leapt up to the porch, coming to a fast stop in front of Pop like the rabbits that creep around the house when the sun sets: eating, stilling, then running only to freeze again. Saying to me: So delicious, so delicious, but still, still, yes, I see you. Calling to one another: Run run run halt.
“Son,” Pop says, and grabs the back of my neck, his hand large and warm. My wrists feel raw. My mouth comes open and I breathe in. It sounds like a web of phlegm is in my throat. My eyes are burning and I shut my jaw and clench my teeth and try and try and try not to cry. I breathe again and it sounds like a sob. But I will not cry, even though I want to duck down with Kayla, want Pop to fold me in his arms and hug me to him, want to smash my nose in his shoulder so hard I can’t breathe. But I don’t. I feel his hand on me and rise on my toes so he presses harder. I can feel the heat of his fingers. He lets his hand run down my back to rest at the top of my spine, and I even imagine I can feel the whorl of his fingertips, the blood push back under his skin.
“Pop,” I say.
Pop shakes his head, gives my back a little rub.
“Go put your sister to sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Me and Kayla eat crackers and pimento cheese and some smothered chicken legs Pop got in a skillet on the stove, wash it down with water. I think about putting Kayla in the tub but then I hear the shower, and when I hear Mam’s and Leonie’s voices in the room and see Pop’s lighter flash on the porch, I know it’s Michael. Kayla lays her head on my shoulder, grabs my hair, rolls my curls around her finger like a noodle.
“Mam? Pop?”
Her breathing gets slow and then she’s slobbering on my throat and I know she’s asleep, but I don’t put her down because I’m looking at Richie, who’s looking at Pop, who’s looking out to the black yard, the far road. The boy’s face shows in fire, and I ain’t never seen that look before. Ain’t never seen somebody look at someone else like Richie looks at Pop: all the hope on his face, plain in the circle of his mouth, his wide-open eyes, the wrinkle of his forehead. He step closer and closer to Pop, and he’s a cat then, fresh-born, milk-hungry, creeping toward someone he’d die without. I lay Kayla down on the sofa and step out onto the porch. Richie follows.
“Riv,” he says.
Pop flicks his light, lets it die, and flicks it again.
“Riv,” Richie says again.
Pop pulls phlegm up his throat, spits off the porch. Looks down at his hands.
“It was quiet here without y’all,” Pop says. “Too quiet.” The lighter flame shows his quick smile, and then it’s gone. “I’m glad y’all back.”
“I didn’t want to go,” I say.
“I know,” Pop says.
I rub my wrists and look at Pop’s profile flare and fade in the light.
“Did you find it?” Pop asks.
Richie takes a step forward, and the look changes. Just a flicker. He glances between me and Pop and he frowns.
“The bag?” I say.
“Yeah,” Pop says.
I nod.
“Did it work? It’s a gris-gris bag.”
I shrug.
“I think so. We made it. Got stopped by the police, though. And Kayla was sick the whole time.”
Pop flicks the lighter, and the flame blazes for one half of a second, the fire bright and cold and orange, and then sparks out. Pop shakes the lighter by his ear and lights it again.
“Why can’t he see me?” Richie asks.
“It was the only way I could send a little of me with y’all. With Mam”—Pop clears his throat—“sick. And that being a place I can’t go back to. Parchman.”
Richie is inches away from Pop. I can’t even nod.
“See your face every day. Like the sun,” Richie says.
Pop pockets the lighter.
“You left me,” Richie says.
I slide closer to Pop. Richie reaches out a hand to touch P
op’s face and sweeps his fingers across his eyebrows. Pop sighs.
“You better watch out, boy. He used to look at me like that,” Richie says. His teeth are white in the black: tiny and sharp as a kitten’s. “And then he left me.”
I have to talk against the pockets of silence he creates whenever he speaks: the bugs shush for him with every word.
“Do she feel any better, Pop?”
Pop searches in his pocket for something and then stops. “Sometimes I forget. I forget I don’t smoke,” he says. He shakes his head in the darkness: I can hear the slide of his hair against the wall of the house he sits against. “She got worse, son,” Pop says.
“You was the only daddy I ever knew.” Richie’s voice was soft as a mewl. “I need to know why you left me.”
Richie is quiet. So is Pop. I slide down the wall and sit next to Pop on the porch. I want to lay my head on his shoulder, but I’m too old for that. It’s enough to feel his shoulder rub mine when Pop passes a hand over his face, when he begins to flip the lighter over and under his knuckles, like he does sometimes with knives. The trees murmur around us, nearly invisible in the black. When I hear Leonie come walking out Mam’s room, breathing as hard and deep as if she been running, pulling in her breaths like it hurt, I look up at the glittery sky and search for the constellations Pop taught me.
“The Unicorn,” I say as I identify it. Monoceros. “The Rabbit.” Lepus. “The Great Snake.” Hydra. “The Bull.” Taurus. I learned the proper names from a school library book. I know Leonie must be looking out at the porch, wondering what me and Pop are doing in the dark. “The Twins,” I say. Gemini. Leonie’s room door opens and shuts, and I see Michael babying Leonie when she was sick. I see the way Leonie didn’t do nothing when that cop put those handcuffs on me. Richie looks at me like he knows what I’m remembering, and then he sits across from us, curls over his knees, wraps his arms around his back, makes a sound like crying, and rubs what he can reach of his shoulder blades.
“My wounds were here. Right here. From Black Annie. And you healed them. But you left and now you won’t see me.”
I lay my head on Pop’s shoulder anyway. I don’t care. Pop breathes deeply and clears his throat like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t. But he doesn’t shrug me away.
“You forgot about the Lion,” Pop says. The trees sigh.
When we go inside to lay down, Richie still sits, no longer rubbing. Instead, he rocks back and forth, faintly, and the look on his face is broken. Pop shuts the door. I curl around Kayla on the sofa and try to lie still, to forget the broken boy on the porch long enough to drift to sleep. My spine, my ribs, my back: a wall.
* * *
“Jojo,” she says, and pats my cheeks, my nose. Pulls open my eyelids. I jump and wake and fall off the sofa, and Kayla laughs, bright and yellow and shiny as a puppy that just got the knack of running without tripping over her own legs. Happy, like that. My mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking on chalk and licking oyster shells, and my eyes feel grainy. Kayla claps her hands and says, “Eat-eat,” and it’s then I realize that I smell bacon, and I realize I ain’t smelled it ever since Mam got too sick to cook. I sling Kayla on my back and she clings. I think it’s Leonie, and I feel something in me soften for a minute, rethink all the bad I thought about her the night before, and something inside me say: But she do. She do. And then I step into the narrow kitchen, and it ain’t her; it’s Michael. He got a shirt on that look like it’s been washed and dried a size too small, the letters on it faded: it’s one of mine. An old one Mam bought me to wear one Easter. He look all wrong at the counter, the way he reflect too much of the morning light.
“Y’all hungry?” he asks.
“Naw,” I say.
“Yes,” Kayla lisps.
Michael frowns at us.
“Sit down,” he says.
I sit, and Kayla climbs up on my shoulder, straddles my neck, and beats my head like a drum.
Michael takes the pan off the gas, sets it to the side. He lets the fork he was turning the bacon with drip at his side, drip oil on the floor, as he turns to face us.
He crosses his arms, and the oil drips again. The bacon is still sizzling, and I wish he would take it out and drain it so me and Kayla can eat it hot.
“You remember that time we went fishing?”
I shrug, but the memory comes anyway, like someone pouring a bottle of water over my head. Just the boys, he’d told Leonie, and she looked at him like he’d jabbed her in her softest parts. And I thought he’d renege then, say I’m just joking, but he didn’t. It was late, but we went out to the pier anyway and cast lines. He called me son with his fingers, with the way he tied the sinkers and speared the bait. Laughed at me when I wouldn’t spear the worm, when I wouldn’t touch them. Michael waves his fork at me, and he knows I’m lying. He knows I remember.
“We going to have more of that now.”
He told me a story that night. As the fishermen gigged for flounder with their lights and their nets, he said: What you know about your uncle Given? And I told Michael that Mam had showed me his pictures, talked about him, told me he wasn’t here no more, that he was in another world, but hadn’t told me what that meant. I told Michael that because it was true, and because I wanted him to tell me what she meant. I was eight then.
“That’s what me coming home means.”
Michael pokes the bacon. That night on the dock, he didn’t tell me how or why Uncle Given left. Instead, he told me about working out on the rig. How he liked working through the night so when the sun was rising, the ocean and the sky were one thing, and it felt like he was in a perfect egg. How the sharks were birds, like hawks, hunting the water. How they were drawn to the reef that grew up around the rig, how they struck under the pillars, white in the darkness, like a knife under dark skin. How blood followed them, too. How the dolphins would come after the sharks left, and how they would leap from the water if they knew anyone was watching, chattering. How he cried one day after the spill, when he heard about how all of them was dying off.
“For you and your sister,” Michael says, and lifts the piece of bacon he’s been poking at. It’s already maroon and stiff, but he drops it back in the grease anyway.
I actually cried, Michael told the water. He seemed ashamed to say that, but he went on anyway. How the dolphins were dying off, how whole pods of them washed up on the beaches in Florida, in Louisiana, in Alabama and Mississippi: oil-burnt, sick with lesions, hollowed out from the insides. And then Michael said something I’ll never forget: Some scientists for BP said this didn’t have nothing to do with the oil, that sometimes this is what happens to animals: they die for unexpected reasons. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes all at once. And then Michael looked at me and said: And when that scientist said that, I thought about humans. Because humans is animals. And the way he looked at me that night told me he wasn’t just thinking about any humans; he was thinking about me. I wonder if Michael thought that yesterday, when he saw that gun, saw that cop push me down so I bowed to the dirt.
Michael lifts out the bacon and drops it on the paper towel. That night on the pier, it was as if the pull of the moon on the water, the surge of the tide, drew the words from Michael. He said: My family ain’t always did right. Was one of my dumbass cousins that killed your uncle Given. I didn’t think Michael was telling me the whole story. Whenever Leonie or Mam or Pop talked about how Given died, they said: He got shot. But Michael said something different. Some people think it was a hunting accident. He wound up his line and got ready to cast again. One day I’ll tell you the whole story, he said. Now the faint smell of charred bacon wafts through the air, and Michael pulls out another piece, this one curled black and hard.
Kayla claps and pulls at my hair in bunches, the same way she does grass.
“I just want you and Michaela to know that I’m here. I’m here to stay. And I missed y’all.”
Michael pulls out the bacon and puts it on the plate. It’s all black and b
urnt at the edges. Char and smoke fill the room. He runs to the back door and opens and closes it, trying to wave out the smoke. The grease hisses to silence. I don’t know what he wants me to say.
“We call her Kayla,” I say. I pull Kayla up over my head and set her in my lap. “No no no no,” Kayla says, and starts kicking. My scalp burns. I bounce her on my knees, but that just pisses her off, and she straightens like an ironing board and slides off my legs onto the floor. Her whine escalates until it’s like a police siren. Michael shakes his head.
“That’s enough, young lady. Get up off the goddamn floor,” he says. His door waving ain’t doing much.
Kayla shrieks.
I kneel next to her, bend over, put my mouth next to her ear, and speak loud enough for her to hear me.
“I know you mad. I know you mad. I know you mad, Kayla. But I’m going to take you outside later, okay? Just sit up and eat, okay? I know you mad. Come here. Come here.” I say this to her because sometimes I hear words between her howls, hear her thinking: Why don’t he listen why don’t he listen I feel! I put my hands under her armpits, and she squirms and wails. Michael lets the door slam, walks toward us, and then stops.
“If you don’t get up off that floor right now, I’m going to whip you, you hear? You hear me, Kayla?” Michael says. He’s turning red around his eyes and his throat as he waves his arms in the air, and the smoke just follows him like a blanket he’s wrapped around himself. This makes him redder. I don’t want him to hit her with the fork.
“Come on, Kayla. Come on,” I say.
“Goddamnit,” Michael says. “Michaela!”
And then he’s hunching over both of us, and his arm whips out, whips in, and he’s dropped the fork and he’s smacking Kayla hard on the thigh, once and twice, his face as pale and tight as a knot. “What did I say?” He punctuates each word with a slap. Kayla’s mouth is open, but she’s not wailing: all of her seized up silent, eyes wide from the pain. I know this cry. I swing her up and away from Michael’s hand, spin her around and to me. Her back under my rubbing hand, hot. My shushes don’t mean nothing. I know what’s coming. She lets go of the breath in one long thunderous wail.
