Men We Reaped

by Jesmyn Ward

  I knew then, dimly, how the world was changing, how America was hemorrhaging blue-collar jobs overseas, how factory jobs like the one my father had once supported a family on were becoming a rarity while only dead-end service jobs remained, and my brother was burning through those in search of something with a future.

  “What you watching next?” I said, and sat on the edge of his bed. He made room for me, assessed his VHS collection.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Want to watch Total Recall?”

  He shrugged, and I saw my father in him then, in the lovely lean globes of his muscled shoulders, in the straight, clean line of his collarbone, in the dimpled seat of his neck. He’d been husky so long it was a surprise to see him before me, suddenly a muscular, square-shouldered man.

  “Okay,” he said.

  I settled in the dark to watch the movie with him, waiting for him to say something else, but he squinted at the television, and there was a line between his brows, his black-brown eyes serious. He rubbed the bottom of his foot on the carpet, and the smell that was him, that aroma of cut hay and coconut oil and salt, settled in the room. I drew my knees into my chest, set my chin on them, and watched Arnold fight the alien predator that threatened to kill him. He was outmatched and outmuscled. He was scrappy with brawn and foolish hope.

  There was only one time that summer that I felt like the big sister to his little brother. Most of the time I felt like the little sister, since Joshua had managed to find work and get his own car and tell me things that emphasized how naive I was about my life and his, repeatedly. I’d spent all the money I’d saved in college, around $3,000, to buy a used white Toyota Corolla in the summer of 2000. It was old and loud, and I was ashamed to drive it. Shit, I’d drive it, Joshua had said when I complained about the car. One day I called my father, asked him if he would change the oil in my car if I bought it and a filter, and he said yes, so I asked my brother if he would ride with me to the auto parts store because I had no idea which filter and how many quarts of oil to buy.

  It was fall and chilly, so I cracked the windows, but it was warm enough that we rode without heat. Josh wore a dark blue plaid jacket, and he was large in my small car. Some of our friends from the hood, Rob and Pot and Duck, had given him the name Ojacc. Because he looks like a big-ass lumberjack, Pot said.

  “Stop driving like a old woman,” he said.

  “What you talking about?” I said.

  “You drive too slow.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “And why you act like you scared to pull out?” He laughed, and I shrugged. I felt chastened, his little sister. “You can’t drive.”

  We drove through the backwoods, evergreens tall at the sides of the road, the sky a pale blue strip above our heads, quiet houses here or there, the smell of the country in fall strong in the air: burning wood rich with the scent of pine needles and smoke. Josh lit a cigarette.

  “You need to stop smoking,” I said.

  “I’m stressed out,” he said. He’d seemed so much older than me for so long that I was surprised when he began talking about his girlfriend, who was living with us for a time because an older male relative had tried to sexually assault her.

  “I love her,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. What do you do when you love someone this much? What about trust?” As a member of a community where trust—between children and fathers, between lovers, between the people and their country—was in short supply, my brother was struggling. Joshua drew in deep, blew the smoke out of the crack of the window; some of it butted against the glass and wove back into the car. She had cheated on him earlier in their relationship. He was asking me for advice. I tried my best.

  “You just got to try,” I said. “Forgive them. Trust them even though they did you wrong.”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I mean, I think that’s how it is. If you’re meant to be together, it will work.”

  “I just love her so much,” he said.

  “I hear you,” I said. It was the only thing I could think to say to let him know I took my designation seriously. “I hear you.”

  In the auto store, he led me to the oil and filters and then to the counter. After I paid, he grabbed the bags and carried them to the car. My head came to his shoulder. This was only the second or third time we’d been in the car together while I drove: we’d learned to drive at the same time, and since I’d never had a car before, while he’d acquired one early, he usually did all the driving. He was better at it, drove with one tattooed arm, the words Sunshine and Scorpio on it, resting on the sill, and the other, the words Dedeaux and Ojacc on it, at the wheel. At the exit from the auto store parking lot, I revved the engine, and in an effort to prove to him that I wasn’t afraid to drive, I peeled out with speed. This was a mistake. The exit to the parking lot masked a large dip, and the car bounced down, the front bumper hitting the concrete and sounding a loud boom before bouncing back out. I swerved out into traffic.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  Joshua looked behind us. I expected to hear a dragging sound.

  “I fucked my bumper up,” I said. “I know it.”

  “It’s probably all right,” he said. Always level. Mature. One time I’d gotten mad at my mother, worked myself into a fury. Joshua had laughed at me. Calm down, he said. Just calm down. “We’ll look at it at Daddy’s house.”

  At my father’s house in Gaston Point, we stood in a trio and assessed the damage.

  “It’s fine,” Josh said.

  “Naw, look at it,” I said. “There’s a gap between the bumper and the car body. That wasn’t like that before.”

  “I don’t see it,” Josh said, his arms folded, his hip cocked to one side.

  “You talking about right here?” my father asked. His long black hair was pulled back into a braid, which snaked down his back. He was in his early forties then, and his hair was still undiluted by gray, his physique still that of a young man, his skin still unmarked by wrinkles. I could tell he was proud that my brother was taller than he was, that he had grown into a serious young man, able to work on cars and provide for himself. “You sure that wasn’t there?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “You sure?” Josh asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on, son,” my father said. He and Joshua leaned on the bumper in tandem, trying to push it back into the body of the car. Joshua slid his tall frame under the front of the car, pulled, grew warm in the weak autumn sun and had to unzip his jacket. My father hauled him from under the car and helped him to stand. Joshua brushed his pants off and I went around to his back, swiping at the dirt and gravel and grass on his back and messy braids.

  “It ain’t doing nothing,” my father said.

  “It’s alright,” Josh said.

  The car was already old and junky and now I done fucked up the grille, I thought. So stupid.

  “You can hardly even see it,” Josh said.

  I breathed hard and imitated his stance, but folded my hands into my armpits for warmth. Josh was attempting to comfort me.

  “You still want your oil changed?” my father asked. Years later, this ordinary memory gains heft, representative of all the ordinary days we shared, all the ordinary days we lost. It generates so much heat, it makes my fingers ache like a phantom limb as I imagine my brother alive and close enough to touch, how he would be warm on that cold day: the keloids of his scars, his scalp the color of butter.

  My father changed my oil because I couldn’t afford to pay anyone else to do so. When my timing belt broke while I was riding to Pass Christian with my sisters and nephew in the car, one of my mother’s brothers fixed it. My credit card debt climbed to over $5,000. I’d resorted to applying for a job at the local Barnes and Noble; they didn’t hire me. I was desperate. When my former college roommate, Julie, told me she had a friend who worked at Random House, a book publisher in New York City, I asked her to send along my con
tact information and my resume and cover letter. My college boyfriend was living there, working in banking, and so was another close friend from college who was working for a record company. I knew a few people. If I was offered an interview, I’d make a four-day trip. If they hired me, I’d return to Mississippi, pack my bags, and move to New York City. If I had to, I’d leave.

  Joshua and I met in the hallway. This is my last real memory of him, and I hate it. I cannot remember the last time I actually saw him. I only remember this.

  Joshua saw my suitcase on the floor in my room.

  “Where you going?” he said.

  “To New York to interview for a job,” I said. I looked down and away and back to his face, tilting my head back. I wanted to say: I’m coming back right after or I might not get the job anyway.

  “To stay?” he said.

  I wanted to say: It’s just a visit. “Yes,” I said.

  His face fell. I have read that expression in books before, and it is true: his expression slid from his forehead over his beautiful eyelashes, his brown eyes, to his mouth, where it settled in a frown. My brother did not want me to leave again, to lead. I frowned.

  I felt I had no choice: I had graduated in March and it was now September, and I still had no job and had racked up debt. I charged a round-trip plane ticket to New York City and arranged to stay with my boyfriend while I was interviewing. My mother and grandmother took me to the airport, and as we stopped at the end of Hill Road, I sank down into the seat, feeling terrified and cornered.

  “I forgot my ring,” I said. My grandmother had gifted me a ring for my tenth birthday, which, on threat of never receiving another gift from her, she warned me against losing. It was gold and white sapphire, she told me, but later I found out the stone was glass. I’d worn it every day since I turned ten, and thirteen years later, in the back of that car, I didn’t have it. “It’s in the bathroom. I took it off before I took a shower. Please get it,” I said.

  “Okay,” my mother said over her shoulder. She and my grandmother continued their conversation and I slid down in the backseat so my mother could not see my face in the rear-view mirror as I cried silently, wiping my tears away with the backs of my hands. I didn’t want her to see the irrational fear I felt at taking that trip to New York to interview; I wanted to appear brave and adventurous and smart, be the child she’d always wanted, the kind who took advantage of all the world offered, who journeyed forth from Mississippi with no remorse. I had no idea what I was doing.

  When I arrived in New York City, I went directly to my college boyfriend’s apartment, in a brownstone in Cobble Hill, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. I was in NYC for four days for interviews, from October 1 to October 4, which I’d scheduled so that I could return home for Charine’s fifteenth birthday on October 5. On October 3, I had an interview in the afternoon, with a placement agency in a high-rise somewhere in midtown. The woman who talked to me asked me questions and listened to my answers as if I were some sort of oddity. She smiled to herself at the South still evident in my voice, and perhaps wondered if that was going to be a problem with potential employers. When I exited the building, I looked up at the thin strip of sky between buildings, felt the city like a giant hand closing over me. I felt the energy of the place, the feel of limitless possibility and potential, but I was afraid. So many people, and how could I live without the sky? Without trees? I got lost on the subway, went uptown before realizing I had to head south through the Village to return to my boyfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn, but I was proud of myself for eventually finding my way, alone, when my previous forays into public transportation had been limited to taking the bus from Stanford to San Francisco. In Brooklyn, I rounded the corner that led to my boyfriend’s brownstone, which was on the edge of the neighborhood and next to a highway, and he was at the door. He was a banker, and he worked eighteen-hour days. What was he doing at his door?

  “What are you doing here?”

  He was tall, slim, movie-star handsome, which made sense to me in some way since he was from L.A. He was from an upper-middle-class African American family, and while I’d been born red, he’d been born golden. His father was a doctor, and his mother’s family had connections in Hollywood. He’d done all the popular, normal things in college: he’d joined a frat, been an RA, played intramural sports. What was not normal about his college experience was dating me. We came from such vastly divergent backgrounds. Every time some ill luck befell my family, some unique confluence of events that bespoke what it meant to be poor and Black and southern, it shocked him. He hadn’t signed up for that. He wanted to be young and moneyed and have fun, and all the messy facts of my life, my history, who I was and where I came from, were anything but fun. He was the first real boyfriend I’d had, possessed of the same preternatural beauty my father had, and in the end he walked away just as my father had.

  My boyfriend shook his head, didn’t say anything, but his mouth was tight. He unlocked the front door and I followed him up the stairs, and he turned to me in the hallway and in a weird, slumped-over posture hugged me. He was breathing heavily. He let me go, and there were tears. Now his face was slack.

  “You’re scaring me,” I said, but that wasn’t true. I was nervous.

  “You need to call your dad,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He led me to the phone.

  “Just call your dad.”

  I sat on his bed. Now I was afraid. I’d been sweating during the interview and I began to sweat again. The phone, black and cordless, was slippery in my hands. My boyfriend sat on the bed and watched me dial.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Daddy, it’s Mimi.”

  “Hey, Mimi.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I have something to tell you.” He breathed, and the breath broke. “Josh was in an accident last night.”

  “Is he okay?”

  Again that broken breath.

  “He didn’t make it.”

  The phone came away from my ear and I leaned forward and opened my mouth and sounded—I could call it a keening, a groan, a cry—something inside me, broken. My boyfriend’s arms were around me but I leaned away from him, thought I would vomit on his bed. What am I doing here? I thought. Why am I here and they are there? Where is my brother? Where is he? But my daddy said, my daddy said, he just said he didn’t make it he’s gone he’s gone. He’s dead. What? He’s dead he’s dead he’s dead. And then: My brother is dead.

  Joshua’d gone to work on the afternoon of October 2. He hadn’t been scheduled to work, but he went in anyhow to pick up extra hours, to make a little extra money. He’d worked his shift, parked expensive cars and not so expensive cars, left his body’s warmth and indent in their seats. Nerissa and Charine drove to the casino to pick up Nerissa’s check: she worked in a restaurant on the top floor of the casino’s hotel. With check in hand, Nerissa and Charine stood near the main employee entrance, hoping to catch a glimpse of Joshua coming in to work. They’d seen him drive past the entrance of the casino in his gray-blue Cutlass, sitting high in his front seat, looking straight ahead, his face serious, his hair coming out of his messy braids, his profile sharp. They waited around fifteen minutes, and when he didn’t walk through the entrance that was closest to the parking garage, Nerissa and Charine decided to leave, assuming Josh had walked into the casino through another entrance. That is the last memory they have of him. I wish we would have stayed, Nerissa says. Five more minutes, Charine says. We grasp at minutes, seconds, milliseconds. Years later, I would be grateful my family waited until October 3 to tell me Josh died: I’d had seventeen more hours wherein, for me, Joshua was still alive.

  The night of October 2, he clocked out, and instead of driving up Highway 49 to take I-10 to the DeLisle exit, to home, he decided to take the beach road. I’d like to think it was a beautiful night, which is why he would have taken Highway 90 home. That the moon was full out over the Gulf, that it shone cool and silver in the cl
ear sky, that the water glittered with its reflection. That the barrier islands were thin eyelashes on the dark horizon. That the air swooped down from the north and was unseasonably cool for October, so when Josh walked out of work and started his car, he rubbed his arms and said, I love this shit, loved the chill air on the down that wouldn’t turn to beard on his cheeks, loved that he could look out of his window and see an open horizon over the water, where the waves from the Gulf quietly lapped the shore, where the oak trees in the median stood witness over centuries to wars, to men enslaving one another, to hurricanes, to Joshua riding along the Coast, blasting some rap, heavy bass, ignorant beats, lyrical poetry to the sky, to the antebellum mansions our mother cleaned and whose beauty we admired and hated. Eventually he split from Highway 90 and turned onto Scenic Drive, a silent, stately road set off from the highway by another median, by million-dollar real estate, when the drunk driver, a White man in his forties, sped up on my brother from behind in a white car he’d borrowed from a friend and hit Joshua’s car at eighty miles per hour. Josh pressed his brakes by instinct, leaving black rubber smeared across the road, but there was so much momentum, so many bodies and cars and histories and pressures moving all at once, that my brother could not stop his car. He skidded sideways on to the front yard of one of those mansions. His car hit a fire hydrant, which came up through the floor, peeled back the metal like the lid of a sardine tin, and smashed into his chest. There was no mercy in this motion: the car plowed along, glancing off an oak tree before rolling and landing upside down on an immaculate lawn.