Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

  Pop speaks into his knees. Richie’s head has tilted back until he is looking at the sky, at the great blue wash of it beyond the embrace of the trees. His eyes widen more, and his arms snap out and his legs spread and he doesn’t even see me and Pop, but he is looking at everything beyond us, past the miles we drove in that car, past the point where the pine trees turn to field and cotton and just-budding spring trees, past the highways and towns back to the swamps and stands of trees hundreds of years old. At first I think he is singing again, but then I realize it is a whine that rises to a yell that rises to a scream, and the look on his face is horror at what he sees. I squint and barely hear Pop through Richie’s keening.

  “I laid him down on the ground. Told the dogs to get. They smelled the blood. Tore into him.”

  Richie roars. Casper is somewhere out on the road, furious, barking. The pigs are squealing. The horse is stamping its pen. Pop is working his hands like he doesn’t know how to use them. Like he’s not sure what they can do.

  “I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain’t never come out. Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin. Smelled it when the warden and sergeant came up on us, the dogs yipping and licking blood from they muzzles. They’d torn his throat out, hamstringed him. Smelled it when the warden told me I’d done good. Smelled it the day they let me out on account I’d led the dogs that caught and killed Richie. Smelled it when I finally found his mama after weeks of searching, just so I could tell her Richie was dead and she could look at me with a stone face and shut the door on me. Smelled it when I made it home in the middle of the night, smelled it over the sour smell of the bayou and the salt smell of the sea, smelled it years later when I climbed into bed with Philomène, put my nose in your grandmother’s neck, and breathed her in like the scent of her could wash the other away. But it didn’t. When Given died, I thought I’d drown in it. Drove me blind, made me so crazy I couldn’t speak. Didn’t nothing come close to easing it until you came along.”

  I hold Pop like I hold Kayla. He puts his face in his knees and his back shakes. Both of us bow together as Richie goes darker and darker, until he’s a black hole in the middle of the yard, like he done sucked all the light and darkness over them miles, over them years, into him, until he’s burning black, and then he isn’t. There is soft air and yellow sunlight and drifting pollen where he was, and me and Pop embracing in the grass. The animals are quieting in grunts and snorts and yips. Thank you, they say. Thank you thank you thank you, they sing.

  Chapter 14

  Leonie

  When I got home with my load of cemetery rocks, Michael left in my car. The weight of the stones in my shirt was heavy, remind me of what it felt like to carry Jojo and Michaela, to bear another human being in my stomach. After I picked up the stones I’d dropped in Mam’s room, I bang out the door to find Phantom Given. His head is cocked to the side, and he’s looking down the shotgun line of the house, through the living room, through the kitchen, out the back door. He’s listening. I stop where I am.

  “What?” The word comes out like a little slung dart. Even though I know it must be the dregs of the meth I swallowed, I still feel sober as a lead weight, and here Given is, burnished and tall, in the living room. His mouth is moving like he’s repeating something that someone else is saying, and if he could speak, it would be a mumble. Whatever he’s hearing, whatever he’s mimicking, makes him run to the open doorway of the room, to pause on the threshold of the kitchen, to bow his head and grip the frame. Last time I saw him here, he was living. The blood beating through him like drums. He and Pop had just argued over something, over the Nova or his middling grades or the fact that besides the bow and arrow, he didn’t seem to have any passion for anything besides playing football. You need direction, son, Pop had said to him. Given had been sitting on the couch, and he watched Pop walk out the back door, slumped down, and winked and whispered at me: And you need to take the stick out your ass, Pop.

  Given-not-Given’s shoulder blades bunch together like fists under his shirt. He shakes his head at me once. Then again at whatever he hears.

  “I’m going crazy,” I tell myself. “I’m going fucking crazy.”

  I walk past Given to look out the screen door. Pop and Jojo are hunched down in the backyard, in the dirt by the pigpen, talking. I can’t hear anything from this far away, but Given can, and whatever he hears makes his head shake faster and faster, his fist punch noiselessly, once and again, in the molding. It leaves no mark. I expect to feel the brush of his T-shirt against my arm when I walk past, but feel nothing but misty cool. Given’s mouth moves, and I can make out what he’s saying without words. Pop, he mouths. Oh, Pop. I squint. It looks like Jojo is rubbing Pop’s back. Hugging Pop, and I realize I ain’t never seen Pop on the ground before if he wasn’t pushing a seed into it or wrestling some animal or pulling up weeds.

  A dog bark rips through the creaking kitchen, and Given starts and turns to me, mouths one word, hands open and beckoning me like he could pull an answer from me. Who? he mouths. Who is that? He runs to the screen door. Casper barks again, a sound that shies up to a panicked yip. Pop seems to be sinking, Jojo holding him up. I don’t know this world. Given holds his arms up in front of him like he could block something. I wonder if this vision of my brother is an aftershock of yesterday’s high, a shaky meth tremor that comes once, if the massive hit I swallowed has unsewn my body and mind, unseamed me. Given is still there. As the dog’s bark rises, Given bleeds. I don’t see wounds, but he bleeds anyway, from his neck, from his chest. Where he was shot. He braces himself on the wood frame of the closed screen door, his arms and legs straining. Something is pulling him outside. Pop and Jojo are curled in two, and the dog is still barking, but I don’t see nothing, don’t see anything until I blink, and like a dark flash at the corner of my eye I see a churning black cloud come to earth in the yard, but then I blink again and it’s gone. Given slumps and runs his hands up and down the doorsill; he did this when he was alive, wore the wood of the sills in the house smooth with his rubbing. He freezes and looks at me, and I wish he was alive, was flesh, because I’d kick him. Kick him for not being able to speak. Kick him for seeing whatever it is he sees or hears out in the yard and not sharing that with me. Kick him for being here, now, for taking up space in the waking, sober world, right before me. For knocking the world sideways—birds flying into glass windows, dogs barking until they piss themselves in fear, cows collapsing to their rumps in fields and never rising—still winking and smiling, every dimple and tooth declaring the joke. For dying. Always for that. Given shakes his head again, but this time, slowly—but still, his face blurs. I reach out and step toward him, to push him, maybe, to see if I can feel his brown arms, the calluses on his hands like patches of concrete, but Michaela’s cry pierces the air, and he’s gone.

  * * *

  Michaela’s standing on the sofa, walking from one end of it to another, yelling. Sleep-matted hair, sleep-swollen face. Her little legs clumsy with waking, she trips and falls face-first and mouths the cushion.

  “The boy, the black bird,” she sobs.

  I kneel next to the sofa, pat her hot little back.

  “What boy, Michaela?”

  “The black bird. The Black boy.”

  She stands, runs to the arm of the sofa farthest from me, straddles, and slides off.

  “He flies!”

  She wakes up like that all the time, trailing the blankets of her dreams behind her. She’s still sleepy. I catch her under one armpit, swing her up, put her head down on my shoulder.

  “Go back to sleep,” I say.

  When Michaela kicks, her toes are little shovels digging into my belly, trying to break the dirt of the softest part of me. It used to be my walk rocked her to sleep. She dreamed in my womb with sightless blue eyes. Now she flails, smashes my mouth with her hand, and will not let me hold her.

  “He want Mam!” she screams, and at that my arms go dead, and Michaela slides down m
y front, noodle-limp. She lands running, straight to Mama’s door, and knocks at it with her little fists. Each little thud married to a breathy whine. Her eyes rolling like a panicked colt’s.

  “Michaela.” I kneel. “Ain’t no man trying to take Mama nowhere.” Her little knobby knees brush the wood as she hangs from the doorknob, trying to turn with her weight. What I say is mangled truth: no man wants to take Mama, but what she’s tasked me to do will usher her away. I move to Michaela on my knees, floorboards grinding my bones, and I wonder at the fear spilling through my chest, scalding-hot grits. I wonder at my short, round toddler with her toes grazing the door, at the future and what it will demand of me. Of her. Michaela’s fingers lose their grip on the knob, and I turn it, open it, point at Mama with an upturned palm. “See?”

  I am not prepared to see.

  Mama hangs half off the bed, half on, her toes on the floor, her legs bound up in sheets, twisted around her, stretched tensile and thin as rope here, wide and voluminous there: Mama caught like a prized sailfish. The one who sails through the air, silver and white, still with the silky feel of the salt water on her: the one who shivers in the sun and fights. It is colder than a spring morning warrants in the room, cold as a November morning, and yet Mama sweats and moans and kicks. Michaela hops into the room, sniffs the air, takes hesitant steps, and reaches to the ceiling. She breathes one little word, again and again.

  “Bird,” she says.

  The room smells like Mama has been turned inside out. Like piss and shit and blood. Like intestines, a heartbeat away from rot. Her eyes are wild. Her arms are pinned in the sheets. Mama struggles to shrug them off.

  “Mama?” I say, and my voice seems high and small as Michaela’s. “Let me help.”

  “Too late,” Mama says. “Too late, Leonie.”

  I have to grab her arm hard to free it. My fingers leave shallow ditches in a row in her flesh, my handprint visible on her with every touch. Mama moans. I try to touch lighter, to hurt less, but I can’t.

  “What you mean?” I say.

  Mama is bleeding under the skin. Everywhere my hands touch, there is blood. Trenches in the sand filling with seawater. Underneath: doom.

  Mama looks beyond me, to the corner where Michaela has seated herself, still except for the song she is singing as she squints and then glares at Mama. Mama’s eyes skitter to my face, up to the ceiling, down at her ruined body. Away, away.

  “I heard him,” she whispers. “Thought it was a . . .” She pants. “Cat.”

  “Who, Mama?”

  “Ain’t never seen them. Sometimes heard them.”

  “What?”

  “Like somebody talking three doors down. In another room.”

  I free one hand, balled to a fist.

  “Said he’d come for me.”

  All these petals of blood.

  “Ain’t lè mistè.” No spirit. No God. No mystery.

  On her wrist.

  “He lè mò.” The dead.

  Her forearm.

  “Young. Full of piss and vinegar.”

  Rotting flowers.

  “Vengeful as a beat dog.”

  Fruitfulness gone to seed.

  “Pulling all the weight of history behind him.”

  Her breath whines.

  “Like a cotton sack full of lead.”

  She’s right.

  “But still a boy.”

  I’m too late.

  “Hungry for love.”

  The cancer done broke her.

  “Says he want me to be his mama.”

  Broke her clean through.

  “I always thought—”

  Mama claws at my arm as I free her other hand.

  “It would be your brother.”

  I stop.

  “The first dead I see . . .”

  I can’t breathe.

  “Would be him.”

  Given is in the corner of the room, stretched along the seam where the walls join. He looms over Michaela, rigid and fierce as Pop, and for the first time, I am afraid. In life, there was a joke in every line of him, humor that ran along the bones of him, that everyone read in the hang of his shoulders, the shake of his head, his smile. There is none now. The weight of time he never bore in life holds him rigid now, cloaks him somber, whittles him sharp as Pop. He shakes his head, and speaks.

  “Not.”

  Michaela’s little song sinks.

  “Your.”

  Mama begins to fight me.

  “Mother.”

  Mama looks beyond me, up to the cracked ceiling, pocked with thousands of little stalactites like the roof of a cave. Pop spent hours dipping a broom in paint and then stabbing the ceiling with the bristles, making circles and loops and swirls, shaping the paint into stars and comets. Mama opens and closes her mouth but makes no sound. I follow her gaze but don’t see nothing but the ceiling, that sorry drywall, turning gray from humidity. But Michaela, who whispers her song and waggles her fingers like she does when she sings “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” does.

  “Not.” And Given, who speaks, the planes of his face converging and turning sharp as knives, does.

  “Your.”

  And Mama does. She rolls her eyes to the corner of the room where Given looms. She bares her teeth in something like a smile, something like a rictus.

  “Mother,” Given finishes.

  Mama slaps me. Where her hand hit burns. She cuffs me with an open palm on the other side, and my ear throbs with blood. Her right fingers grab my cheek, dig into my eyebrow ridge, and she’s holding my face straight, whispering against whatever is above us, at my back, whatever awful thing that’s come for her. I hear a whisper above me.

  “Come with me, Mama,” he says. “Come on.”

  “No,” she says.

  Her fingers pull my eyelids up, up, painfully.

  “Not my boy,” she says.

  Feel like she’s peeling the skin.

  “Given,” she breathes.

  I yank my head away.

  “Baby. Please.”

  It’s the word baby that makes me jump off the bed. Because I hear her say it now and I’m her baby again, soft-gummed and wet-eyed and fat, and she is whole and sweet-milked. Her hands fall away from me like husks from corncobs, land just as brittle and dry on the bed before she whips them up, faces them out palms up.

  “No, boy. No,” Given says.

  I sweep the cemetery rocks from the floor where they’ve fallen, dumping them on the altar to join the rest of it I’ve already gathered. From the bathroom: cotton balls. From the cupboard: cornmeal. From my trip to the liquor store yesterday: rum.

  “Say it,” Mama says. She’s let her hands fall. “The litany,” she says again, and her breath rattles in her throat. She doesn’t turn her head to the side, to look at the wall beyond me where Given stands, thrashing against some invisible thing that holds him there. Her mouth opens: a silent wail. Michaela is crying in a way I’ve never seen her cry before: mouth working, but no sound. There’s no time. This moment done ate it all up: the past, the future. Do I say the words? I blink, and up on the ceiling there is a boy, a boy with the face of a toddler. I blink again, sand scouring my eye, and there is nothing.

  “Mama,” I choke, and it’s as weak and wanting as a baby’s. “Mommy.” My crying and Mama’s entreaties and Michaela’s wailing and Given’s shouting fill the room like a flood, and it must have been as loud outside as it is in here, because Jojo runs in to stand at my elbow and Pop’s at the door.

  “You got what you came for. Now get,” Jojo says.

  At first I think he’s talking to me, but then he’s looking through me and up, and I know who he’s talking to. There’s strength in his voice, so much that I’m speaking even as I’m crying and pulling Mama up to my heart.

  “For Maman Brigitte, Mother of all the Gede. Mistress of the cemetery and mother of all the dead.” I breathe hard and it is a ragged sob.

  “No, Leonie,” says Jojo. “You don’t know.” He glare
s up at the ceiling.

  “Leonie,” Mama chokes.

  “Grande Brigitte, Judge. This altar of stones is for you. Accept our offerings,” I say. Mama’s eyes are steady rolling, steady rolling to the ceiling, where the boy with the smooth face hovered, needy and balled up like a baby.

  “Shut up, Leonie. Please,” Jojo says. “You don’t see.”

  Mama’s eyes steady rolling to the wall where Given has stopped thrashing. They turn to me, beseeching. “Enter,” I say.

  “Go,” Jojo says. He looks up at where the boy flashed. “Ain’t no more stories for you here. Nobody owe you nothing here.” He raises a hand to Given, and it is as if Jojo has unlocked and opened a gate, because Given pushes through whatever held him.

  “You heard my nephew,” Given says. “Go, Richie.”

  I don’t see anything, but something must have happened, because Given walks unbothered toward the bed. Pop has slid down the wall, all the upright parts of him crumbling as he looks at Mama, makes himself look at Mama, for once. He’s been orbiting her like a moon, sleeping on the sofa with his back to the door, searching the yard and woods for pens and bins and machines to fix so he can repair in the face of what he cannot.

  Mama’s breath is a jagged wind, coming slower and slower. Her eyes lowered to slits. Her body: ruined and still. Jojo steps out of Given’s way. He scoops Michaela, who’s crying, “Uncle.” Jojo swallows and looks right at Given. Jojo sees him. He recognizes him. He nods, and Given is Given again, only for a breath, because he smiles and there’s the joke again in his dimple.

  “Nephew,” Given says.

  Mama’s breath slows to a choke. She looks at me, her face twisted.

  “Enter. Dance with us,” I whisper.

  Given’s next to the bed, climbing into it, curling around her, saying “Mama,” saying, “I come for you, Mama,” saying, “I come, Mama,” and Mama takes one long, ripping breath, her breath and blood and spirit beating frantic as a moth caught in a spider’s web, and then “Shhhh,” Given says, “I come with the boat, Mama,” and then he moves his hand over her face, from her air-starved chin to her flared nostrils to her eyes, open and open, looking from me to Given to Jojo and Michaela to Pop at the door and then back to Given. Given’s hand flutters above her face like he is a groom and Mama is a bride and he has pulled the veil from her head and let it fall back so they can look upon each other with love, clear and sweet as the air between them. Mama bucks and goes still.