by Jesmyn Ward
I nod.
In the shed, the slick squirming balls are gone. In their places are new fluffy, downy balls. They almost look like chicks. Their eyes are still sealed shut, still thin black lines that look like closed mouths. But their mouths are open. They are wheezing and huffing and mewling in squeaks that would be barks. They are rolling against each other, tumbling one over the other to land against China’s side. She watches me. Skeetah closes the curtain.
“I never thought I’d get five, Esch. With it being her first, I thought I’d get two, maybe. I figured she trample them or that they’d just come out dead. But I never thought she’d let me save so many.”
Skeetah is standing so close we touch shoulders for a minute. He won’t look at me when he tells me this; he will study the ground. These are the things he says to no one, not even China. Sometimes he confesses to me; I always listen.
“You know how you hear daddies on TV talking about seeing birth being a miracle? For all them pigs and mutts and rabbits I seen give birth, I ain’t never felt nothing like that. Them puppies is real,” he says.
“You want something to eat?” I can’t talk past my stomach.
China grumble-barks, and Skeetah looks at me as if I haven’t said anything.
“No.” He grips the hammer. “I want to finish the frame, and then I got to make sure she nursing.” He scratches his forehead, shrugs. “Breeder stuff.” His glance is a comma, and then he begins to bang again. I go look for breakfast.
Mama taught me how to find eggs; I followed her around the yard. It was never clean. Even when she was alive, it was full of empty cars with their hoods open, the engines stripped, and the bodies sitting there like picked-over animal bones. We only had around ten hens then. Now we have around twenty-five or thirty because we can’t find all the eggs; the hens hide them well. I can’t remember exactly how I followed Mama because her skin was dark as the reaching oak trees, and she never wore bright colors: no fingernail pink, no forsythia blue, no banana yellow. Maybe she bought her shirts and pants bright and they faded with wear so that it seemed she always wore olive and black and nut brown, so that when she bent to pry an egg from a hidden nest, I could hardly see her, and she moved and it looked like the woods moved, like a wind was running past the trees. So I followed behind her by touch, not by sight, my hand tugging at her pants, her skirt, and that’s how we walked in the room made by the oaks, looking for eggs. I like looking for eggs. I can wander off by myself, move as slow as I want, stare at nothing. Ignore Daddy and Junior. Feel like the quiet and the wind. I imagine Mama walking in front of me, turning to smile or whistle at me to get me to walk faster, her teeth white in the gloom. But still, it is work, and I have to pull myself back and concentrate to find anything to eat.
The only thing that’s ever been easy for me to do, like swimming through water, was sex when I started having it. I was twelve. The first time was laying down on the front seat of Daddy’s dump truck. It was with Marquise, who was only a year older than me. Skeetah’s closest friend, he was so close to the both of us that he basically lived at our house during the summers. The three of us would run out back and get lost in Daddy’s woods, would spend days floating in the water in the Pit on our backs. We spent the summer dusted an orange color, and when we woke up every day of our months-long sleepover, the sheets would feel powdery like dry red clay. We were in the dump truck hiding from Skeetah, waiting for him to find us, and Marquise asked if he could touch my titty. They were growing then, but still small as the peaks of cream on lemon meringue pie with hard knots at the middle. I let him, and then he asked me to show him my private because he was scared he was going to never see one when he got older. I did. And then he started touching me, and it felt good, and then it didn’t, but then it did again. And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, Why not? It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer. Skeetah found us after. I was sweating so badly my eyes were stinging, and some of it was Marquise’s sweat, who was half smiling and then not, his eyes big at what we’d done. What was y’all doing? Skeetah asked, and I said, Nothing. It smelled like boiled milk in the truck. I was afraid that Skeetah could smell it, could smell Marquise and me, the way we slid together, all elbows and knees, bones and skin, Marquise’s face shocked and grinning and dirty, so I slid out of the cab first, and I left them looking around for a grill they could drag into the woods to cook Spam that Marquise had stolen from his house; we were supposed to camp out that night.
In the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror. Undressed and rinsed. Dressed again. My clothes fit the same. My stomach, my hips, my arms all fell in the same straight lines; there was nothing fine or curvy about me. I was still short and skinny, my hair big and curly and black, my lips thin. I didn’t look any different. Daddy taught every one of us to swim by picking us up when we was little, around six or so, and flinging us in the water. I’d taken to it fast, hadn’t coughed up the muddy pit water, hadn’t cried or flailed; I’d bobbed back up and cut the surface of the water and splashed my way back to where Daddy was standing in the shallows. I’d pulled the water with my hands, kicked it with my feet, let it push me forward. That was sex.
The chicken eggs in my shirt are warm as stones, but light, too light to be the color of rocks. I expect them to be heavy as the clay pebbles that share their color, to pull me down in the front. They don’t. I’ve seen frog eggs that turn into tadpoles; in the springtime the ditches around the property are alive with them. When me and Skeet were little we’d lay on our stomachs over the ditches and reach into them and pull up some of the eggs, hold them close so we could see if the little wormy frogs in them had begun to shake, to squirm, to turn long and pointed to spear their way out. When they look like hundreds of little shut eyeballs still, they are lighter than light, cool as a breeze. I wonder if inside eggs, the kind that need the shelter of a body-horse eggs, pig eggs, human eggs-are so light. Would they look clear as jelly with firefly hearts, or would they look as solid and silent as stone? Would they show their mystery, or would they cover it like a secret? Would a human egg let itself be seen?
Junior is pouting because he doesn’t want scrambled eggs again. He is sitting on the floor in front of the TV that works, which is on top of a big old wooden TV that doesn’t work, and he is ignoring the plate of eggs I set in front of him because he won’t eat at the table unless Daddy whips him to it or Randall talks him into it.
“They taste like rubber bands!” he mutters.
I remember the taste of rubber bands. Sharp, like metal. Bitter. For something so soft and forgiving, its taste is awful and not right; the tongue jerks back like an earthworm from a child’s hand. And I know these eggs taste nothing like that.
“Junior, stop being orner.” It’s what Mama used to say to us when we were little, and I say it to Junior out of habit. Daddy used to say it sometimes, too, until he said it to Randall one day and Randall started giggling, and then Daddy figured out Randall was laughing because it sounded like horny. About a year ago I figured out what it was supposed to be after coming across its parent on the vocabulary list for my English class with Miss Dedeaux: ornery. It made me wonder if there were other words Mama mashed like that. They used to pop up in my head sometime when I was doing the stupidest things: tetrified when I was sweeping the kitchen and Daddy came in dripping beer and kicking chairs. Belove when Manny was curling pleasure from me with his fingers in mid-swim in the pit. Freegid when I was laying in bed in November, curled to the wall like I was going to burrow into another cover or I was making room for a body to lay behind me to make me warm. Junior doesn’t giggle. “Somebody has to eat the eggs, Junior. You can’t waste food. They got kids in Africa that’s starving.”
“Give them to China,” Junior mumbles. He is rubbing his ear. “I’m going to eat some noodles.”
“I ain’t cooking you no noodles, Junior. I already cooked you
some eggs.”
“You don’t have to cook them.” He stares at the television. There’s a commercial for toys on. He will eat them dry, and he will stick something sharp that he will sneak from the kitchen into the flavor packet to make a small hole. He will suck the spice from that damn flavor packet all day. I grab his plate, and the eggs jiggle like rubber.
Skeetah walks me in the shed after I interrupt his hammering by nudging his leg and pointing at the plate of eggs. I don’t feel like yelling. Feels too embarrassing, too big, too showy, even when it’s only me and Skeet around. Inside, China is laying on her side, and the puppies are squirming in a pile against her, sucking. She looks up, bares her teeth. Sees Skeetah and lets her lips fall a little bit, but still shows fangs. I want to pick one of the puppies up and hold it like Skeet did when China gave birth, let the puppy shove its wet nose into my shirt. Instead I stand at the door and watch Skeet set the plate in front of her on the ground.
“The white one is almost as big as the red one.”
China decides to ignore me and shoves her nose into the plate, licks up some egg. She leaves a slimy web of spit.
“Want to see?” Skeetah says. He bends and picks the red puppy away from China’s tit, and milk dribbles down her belly. All eight of her titties are so swollen with milk they look like human breasts. I breathe in air and swallow past the rock in my throat. The rock melts and burns. I run outside and crouch down and brace myself on my knees and throw up all over the red dirt, my hair falling forward like a black cloud. I can feel Skeetah watching me. When he touches my back with the puppy-free hand, I know this is how he touches China.
Daddy is grinning a beer out of Big Henry, who can buy beer at the gas station on the interstate because he’s so tall and solid, his face so square and serious, that he looks like he’s over twenty-one. He never gets carded, even though he’s only eighteen.
“Big boy like you, I know you know all about that.”
Daddy is leaning into Big Henry’s bulk so that he is cloaked in his shadow, and Daddy looks like he doesn’t know whether he wants to poke or punch.
“Them women like to have something to hold on to.”
Daddy elbows him in the ribs; he has his head down and he’s grinning. This is the way he tells a joke.
“Cost me some women back in the day, not having nothing to me.”
Daddy rubs his hand over his stomach, which I know is flat under his shirt, lean and dark with a thin layer of skin and fat that hangs over his muscle like a light T-shirt. With all that beer, you’d think he’d have a bowling-ball gut, but he doesn’t.
“Used to tell me, ‘Claude, I need a little more man than you. Need something warm. Don’t want no bony hard legs up on me at night.’ ”
Big Henry nods like he’s agreeing. Opens his eyes like Daddy’s interesting.
“Used to say, ‘You know how them big men is.’ ”
Big Henry hands Daddy the beer he’d been sipping on and slumps over the top of Daddy’s truck. The last of the jugs from under the house catches the light; the soap and water look like diamonds inside.
“What y’all did to get ready for them hurricanes today, Mr. Claude?” Big Henry asks. He scans the yard for Randall, for Skeetah, and when he doesn’t see them, snags on me and, resigned, shrugs.
When we were little, Big Henry used to let me ride on his back in the deep part of the pit, the part that was lined with oyster shells. He used to carry me so my feet wouldn’t get cut, even though his feet were bare as mine. They never bled. He hasn’t touched me since then. I thought that one day we would have sex, but he never came for me that way; since the boys always came for me, I never tried to have sex with him. He’s always around, moving in that big careful way of his. He bounces when he walks, sways side to side on his tiptoes. He swings his arms like he’s wading through water. He holds his beer bottles with three fingers.
“I’m going for dog food. Want to come?”
Skeetah asks me this as he rounds the side of the house; Big Henry looks relieved. Skeetah hits the shed, makes China yell. The jugs sit still in the dirt, but the water won’t stop shimmering and swishing inside. Big Henry cranks his car, and we ride.
Most times when we go to the grocery store in St. Catherine, cars fill half the parking lot. Now the whole lot is full, and we have to ride around for ten minutes waiting on a spot. The heat beats at the car like Mardi Gras parade-goers looking for a ride. It slinks in the seams of the windows like beads. Big Henry’s air-conditioning brushes across my face and chest, light as cotton candy, and melts like the heat is a tongue. The walk across the parking lot is slow and long, even though we have a decent spot that’s almost in the middle; Skeetah walks so quickly, he leaves me dragging through the heat, but Big Henry lingers, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.
Inside, I follow Big Henry, who follows Skeetah, who bumps past carts pushed by ladies with feathery-light hair and freckled forearms pulling tall men wearing wraparound sunglasses. The rich ones wear khakis and yacht club shirts, the others wear camouflage and deer prints.
“We need water and batteries and…,” one woman lists as she swerves her buggy away down an aisle, a teenage boy with a mop of big curls loping along in her wake. He is not listening; he looks over Skeetah and Big Henry, and away.
Skeetah ignores everyone like they’re pits of inferior breeding. Big Henry dances past, mumbles “Sorry” and “ ’Scuse me.” I am small, dark: invisible. I could be Eurydice walking through the underworld to dissolve, unseen.
There are only a dozen or so different kinds of dog food, and I know that Skeetah already knows what kind he wants. He always gets the same kind: the most expensive. Daddy once bought Skeet a big fifty-pound bag of generic dog food at the feed store. Skeetah fed China the food and she ate it in gulps, swallowed it down like it was water, and shat it out in runny lumps, like sunny-side-up eggs, all over the Pit. After that, she ate table scraps Skeet sneaked out the house for a month. He spent that month in the shed, banging at one of Daddy’s junk lawn mowers until one day he started it screaming to life, and then he went down to the Catholic church and convinced them to pay him to cut the grass and pull weeds at the graveyard. Mostly because they knew about Mama, I think, they let him do it. He mows three times a week during the summer, and in the winter, he weeds. That’s how he gets his dog food money. On a few of Daddy’s drunk nights when he’s down at the Oaks nodding off to the blues, I’ve seen Skeet walking out of Daddy’s room with his hands balled into stealing fists in his pockets. I keep expecting Daddy to wake up one morning to find some of his money missing. He’d be out in the hallway, yelling for Skeetah, throwing off anger and alcohol like steam, but we’ve been lucky. That hasn’t happened yet.
“My dog do good on that one.” When I walk up, Big Henry is pointing to a big green bag; it’s not the cheapest dog food, but it’s not the most expensive either. Skeetah ignores him; he’s already pulling at a fifty-pound sack.
“China like what she like.” He mumbles this. The bag hangs like a limp child over his shoulder, and it crunches.
“Next thing you know, you going to be buying her allergy medicine. Marquise said there’s a white girl at y’all school that got a dog that’s allergic to grass. Grass,” Big Henry whispers.
“That’s ’cause some people understand that between man and dog is a relationship.” Skeet jumps and shifts the bag. It hangs even, covers half his chest. “Equal.”
“My dog would just be sneezing.” Big Henry says. He shrugs and laughs. He has eyes the color of bleached-out asphalt, and when he smiles, they shrink to fingernails in his face.
“Your dog wouldn’t be able to breathe. And he’d hate you,” Skeet says.
All the checkout lines are long. All the steel baskets are full. Skeetah rocks from side to side on his feet, and me and Big Henry bump into each other and don’t know what to do. He ricochets back and rocks the candy and magazine rack, and I cross my arms and pinch my elbows. I feel like I should have a basket
, wonder if when these people look at us, they wonder where our supplies are. The cabinets at home have enough food to get us through a few days until the stores are back up and running, and if the cabinets don’t, Daddy will make sure to stock them if a storm hits. But the way the cashier’s apron hangs off one shoulder, like she hasn’t had the time to pull it up with all the groceries she’s been scanning, makes me nervous. She’s made up of all the reds: red hair in a ponytail, red cheeks, red hands. I put my hands in my pockets, and the pregnancy test I ripped out of the box and tucked into the waistband of my shorts when I wandered away from Skeetah on a trip to the bathroom scratches my side.
Maybe it’s China that made me get it. I know something’s wrong; for weeks I’ve been throwing up every other day, always walking around feeling like someone’s massaging my stomach, trying to push the food up and out of me. Some months when I eat a little less because I’m tired of ramen or potatoes, I’m irregular. But the sickness and the vomiting make me think I should get a test, that and me being two months irregular, and the way I wake up every morning with my abdomen feeling full, fleshy and achy and wet, like the blood’s going to come running down any minute-only it doesn’t. I think back to all the times I’ve had sex, and it seems like every memory has gold and silver condom wrappers, like chocolates covered in golden foil to look like coins, that the boys leave behind once they get up, once we pull apart. This is what I’m thinking when I see the woman laying half in the road, half in the grass.
“That’s a woman,” I say.
“That’s a car,” Skeetah says. And there, caught in the pines like a cat ascending a trunk, is a car. It looks as if it jumped there, as if it wanted to see what bark felt like, and flipped over to grip the tree.
“Didn’t they know to slow down coming through here?” Skeetah asks. “Got signs everywhere.”
