by Jesmyn Ward
“What you mean?”
Joshua spoke this into her shoulder. He tasted sweat and smelled cocoa butter. He breathed in the roasting grass and dense pine from outside.
“Ain’t nobody seen him. I was by Javon’s yesterday and Marquise and Big Henry was talking about how they ain’t seen him riding around or on his bike or nothing. They thought he might’ve went back to rehab or something. Javon say he ain’t seen him either. Then Tilda jump in and say she thought she saw him back up in that old house in the woods that you say you and Christophe used to throw rocks at, but when she called him, he disappeared. You know how the country is. Everybody think they know but nobody do. Skeetah say he saw somebody with a cast look like Sandman over in St. Catherine.”
He stroked her with the skin of his wrists, and she picked at the wrapping on his hands.
“You want to tell me what happened?” she asked him.
He kissed her shoulder, openmouthed. His breath was hot.
“Not yet,” he breathed.
Christophe woke quickly when Joshua sat next to him; he peered at the clock and it cleared and he saw that it was five-thirty in the morning. Christophe pushed the sheet away from his torso: it was hot, even for the morning: it was hurricane-heralding weather. Joshua was rewrapping his hands.
“Ma-mee up yet?” Christophe asked.
“She still sleep.” Joshua yanked at the yellowed, tangled gauze.
Joshua’s head was so close to Christophe that he could see that his brother hadn’t shaved; red-brown wiry hair sprouted from the side of his face and under his chin.
“You told them I tripped and fell at the river?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you do with all the weed that was in my pockets?”
“Threw it out the car on our way to the hospital . . . it was only about three or four dub sacks, though.”
“What about him?”
Joshua recounted the stories about Sandman Laila had told him.
“I figured he wasn’t dead . . . but still. Javon . . .”
“All he was worried about was hisself.”
Christophe kicked the sheet so that it shivered from his legs and bunched against the cushions. The floor fan hummed, and bits of dust set sail like dandelion seeds from its plastic frame to drift through the air. The skin around Joshua’s stitches was a light, pale pink. Christophe thought of the way only Javon’s head and hands had flushed red when he was toying with Sandman, of how the rest of him had seemed starkly white, of how he’d acted like he wanted to swing at Christophe, and how Sandman had disappeared. He would have never gone to Javon’s on that first day if he had known: he should have driven to the bayou, to one of the hidden boat launches and sat all day, regardless of the money and the weed and the way Javon had seen him in that kitchen. Javon had looked at him once: he was no killer. Still, where was Sandman? Rehab, jail, a hospital, with his people in Germaine or St. Catherine? Joshua opened and closed his hands, slowly, testing the skin. He rubbed his fingertips over the matching scars.
“I didn’t know I was going to hurt him that bad. I just did it.” He prodded his cuts. “All I could think about was saving you.”
“You think he knew it was me?”
“I don’t know. I was just . . . hitting him. Like I couldn’t hear nothing—I thought you was dying.”
“I couldn’t hear nothing either.” Christophe laid his hand flat across the bandage on his stomach.
“I think I almost killed him, Chris,” Joshua whispered. “If he’s even still alive.”
Christophe looked closely at his brother, noticed the way the muscle shrank into the hollows of his collarbone, the way the skin under his eyes seemed permanently smudged black. His teeth glistened.
“You was trying to save me, not kill him. It’s a difference,” Christophe replied.
“Is there?” Joshua asked him, his voice barely registering.
“Yeah, it is.
“You didn’t do nothing wrong. Javon ain’t no killer. Sandman probably just decided to leave, go back to rehab. Or maybe he in jail. The cops could’ve come picked him up. You know he ain’t never stayed no place long—at least, no place close to us.”
Outside, a loud car rumbled by. Christophe grabbed his brother’s wrist and held it, felt the blood beating beneath his fingertips, sat so still he heard his own blood pounding in his ears. Joshua’s pulse matched his own. Christophe’s arm began to ache, but he sat that way, holding his brother, and Joshua remained still. Christophe cleared his throat and broke the silence.
“Wasn’t nothing here for him anyway.”
“I’m sorry about hitting you. I didn’t know.”
Christophe closed his eyes, but did not remove his hand from his brother. He shrugged. His brother, their wounds, Ma-mee dimming like a bulb, his parents’ places unknown and orbiting them like distant moons: it was enough.
“Me too. When the sun start going down, let’s go fishing.”
Joshua gave his brother his pain pills, and Christophe fell asleep. Joshua lay down on the floor, folded his arms into a pillow, and nodded off on the scratchy carpet. Minutes later, Ma-mee found them like that, and turned the fan higher. The bright sun tried to ease its way around the edges of the curtains, to suffuse the room with heat and insect chatter and the babble of pines, mimosas, pecan, and oak. Ma-mee shut the screen door against the drowsy gossip of the bees on the fuchsia flower clusters of the crepe myrtle, cleaned, and listened to her boys sleep.
Dunny drove them to the bayou. They’d decided to go to one of the smaller bridges, one that was only as long as two cars, to fish. There was no traffic. The sun perched on the tip of the marsh grasses in the distance, framed by egrets and still pine trees. The water was dark brown and deep and muddy and smelled of eggs, and the twins sat on the grass at the edge of the bayou and dangled their poles out over the water. The rusted steel rigging of a sunken fishing boat protruded from the feathered lap of the small bay in which they fished. Joshua balanced his pole with his fingertips as he clenched it between his knees; he had to ask Christophe to thread the bait onto the hook. Christophe wasn’t even holding his own pole; Dunny had balanced it for him between two buckets. Dunny lounged in the sandy, stubby grass and smoked a black and mild cigar. Sweat ran across Christophe’s belly and leaked into his wound and itched.
“People talking,” said Dunny.
“About what?” said Joshua.
“About Sandman. Wondering where he at and why he disappeared,” Dunny replied.
Joshua cranked in his reel and shook his pole.
“I went over by Javon’s house the other day,” Dunny continued. “He had some old fucked-up Band-Aids hanging off his hand. Said he cut himself by accident last week.”
The wind puffed disconsolately at Christophe’s face and he let his head loll back on the hard, dirty plastic of the bait cooler.
“Bad luck everywhere,” Christophe spoke to the pink striated sky.
Dunny sat up and hugged his knees and then rolled back. He eyed the twins.
“Y’all telling me y’all ain’t have nothing to do with none of this?” Christophe reached for Dunny’s black, but Dunny stopped him. “It’s bad for you.”
“Come on, Dunny.”
“Y’all going to answer my question or what?” Dunny said.
Joshua yanked hard on his line, pulled it upward, and unclenched his knees. He reeled the line in with his fingertips. Christophe saw a hawk gliding on updrafts in the distance.
“No,” Joshua said.
“I ain’t stupid.”
“Neither is we,” Christophe breathed to the clouds.
The pain medicine made him feel that he was floating. He could see faint wisps of white moving with infinitesimal patience north. The winds were moving; the storm was coming. He watched Joshua reel his line in; a small, silver brown fish gasped and flopped at the end of the line. It twisted piteously and sprayed Joshua and Christophe with warm bayou water.
“Here.” Dunny
grabbed the line and enclosed the small fish in his hand. Christophe could not see it anymore. He heard it there, flapping wetly against Dunny’s skin. Dunny began to pull the hook from the fish’s mouth, and Christophe could see a faint line of blood on the metal.
“I don’t know why y’all niggas wanted to go fishing anyway. Chris can hardly move, and if you get fish juice in your hand it’ll probably rot off and die. Y’all some goddamn geniuses.”
Dunny pulled the hook from the fish’s mouth cleanly and let the fish fly. The sun caught it and turned it pure silver, and then it dropped to the water with a crystal plop. Joshua threaded a piece of raw meat on the hook and threw the line out again.
“I was drunk at the river,” Christophe said.
“Yeah?” replied Dunny.
“Yeah.”
“We got into a fight,” said Joshua.
“Over what?”
“Over me getting a job,” said Christophe.
“He acted like he didn’t want to work,” said Joshua.
“I was going to talk to you about that shit,” said Dunny.
“Well, ain’t no need now,” said Christophe.
“Joshua let go with his temper, huh?” asked Dunny.
“We was drunk and that nigga would not shut up,” said Christophe.
“I should’ve known to leave him alone, but he said some shit about Laila always being over at the house,” Joshua said.
“I didn’t really care about that shit. The way he kept rubbing his job in my face was what really pissed me off.”
“I got drunk and didn’t know when to stop.”
“He would not shut up. So I told him he could kiss my ass and took off running toward the car and that log jumped up and next thing I knew I was bleeding.”
“I thought he was playing for a minute, but when he didn’t get up . . .”
“He must’ve carried me to the car. I don’t remember nothing after that except waking up in the hospital feeling like I just got over the flu or something.”
“Y’all niggas is wild,” Dunny replied. “And I don’t believe a word y’all just said.” He passed the black to Christophe.
“Thank you.” Christophe inhaled and passed it back.
“I heard they got openings down at the shipyard again—working on government contracts and shit,” Dunny said, as he shook out his ash into the grass. A whistling bird flew off into the distance, trilling along until it disappeared into a line of moss-covered Spanish oaks arching over the water. “I could take you down there on my half-day Friday.”
“Who knows?” Christophe pulled up a bunch of grass and let it fall from his fingers. “I could get lucky, right?” Joshua reeled in yet another small, brownish fish. Dunny snatched the line away from him again.
“What the fuck is it with all these fucking small-ass mullets you pulling out the water, Joshua?” Dunny carefully pulled the thread of the hook away from the fish’s mouth. It thrashed a little slower than the last one, with less effort. “What was this one trying to do, commit suicide?”
“With the water smelling like that, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Christophe said.
“We need some rain,” Joshua spoke. Dunny wound his arm back like a baseball pitcher and threw the fish farther out into the water. The fish was so small, it created no waves when it disappeared with a throaty plop. “And it’s coming.”
“Why don’t you go jump in?” Christophe asked Dunny. “It’s hot enough.”
“You crazy? You know they got alligators and snakes and shit in this water.”
“I don’t see none,” said Joshua.
“That’s ’cause both you and Christophe ain’t all there.”
“You think it do any good to throw them back?” Christophe asked.
“What you mean?” asked Joshua, his eyes dark.
“I mean, do you think either of them will survive?”
Dunny wiped his hands on his pants and began rooting in his pockets. Dunny pulled out a lighter and threw it on the ground next to him as he rummaged. The cattails quivered. The sky was turning purple in strokes, and the sun was setting the pines in the distance ablaze. Dunny twirled a found black between his fingers and lit it; he spoke around it with the corner of his mouth.
“Eze told me he done seen mullet that’s seventeen pounds. Don’t think just ’cause they little now, they ain’t about shit. Them some little savages.”
Joshua resettled his pole between his knees and slowly brushed sand from his wrappings. Christophe eyed the sun burning orange as molten metal on the horizon through slitted eyes. Somewhere along the shoreline, Christophe heard a heavier plop, as if a turtle or a baby alligator had catapulted itself into the cool, dark, still water. The Spanish moss in the oaks hung thick and limp as a woman’s hair, and Christophe could imagine the mullet sliding into the obscure, mulch-ridden water. He could see them angled at forty-five degrees, sucking mud and muck from the bottom, growing long and striped.
They would float along with the smooth, halting current that was slow and steady as a heartbeat. He could imagine them sliding along other slimy, striped fish and laying eggs that looked like black marbles as the sun set again and again over the bayou and hurricanes passed through, churning them to dance. He could imagine them running their large tongues over the insides of their mouths and feeling the scars where the hooks had bit them, remembering their sojourn into the water-thin air, and mouthing to their children the smell of the metal in the water, the danger of it. They would survive, battered and cunning. He imagined schools of mullet dying old and fat, engorged with marsh and water to bloated proportions until the river waters that fed into the brackish wetlands swept them along with the current. Out and out through the spread of the bay until their carcasses, still dense with the memory of the closed, rich bayou in the marrow of the bones, settled to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and turned to black silt on the ancient floor of the sea.
Acknowledgments
My agent, Jennifer Lyons, believed in me from the first line. She, along with Doug Seibold and everyone at Agate Publishing, gave me invaluable feedback and incredible opportunities. I never could have written this book and become the writer whom I am without the University of Michigan, and the great writers that I worked with and met while I was there: Peter Ho Davies, Nicholas Delbanco, Laura Kasischke, Eileen Pollack, and the members of the cohorts above, in, and below mine. I would especially like to thank Elizabeth Ames, Natalie Bakopoulos, Joel Mowdy, and Raymond McDaniel. Thanks are also in order for those who nurtured my beginnings: Nancy Wrightsman, Kristin Townsend, the Crounse family, and Dr. Robert J. C. Young.
Many of my friends gave me fortitude along the way, especially Mark Dedeaux, Maurice Graham, Jillian Dedeaux, Clinton Starghill, Brenna Powell, Mariha Herrin, and Julie Hwang. Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Norine Dedeaux, for always providing, and my father, Jerry Ward, for always listening. I would also like to thank my sisters, Nerissa and Charine, for being and believing, my grandmother Dorothy for inspiring, my cousin Aldon for holding my hand, and all of the members of my extended family for giving me a place where I belong.
A SCRIBNER READING GROUP GUIDE
* * *
WHERE THE LINE BLEEDS
A NOVEL
JESMYN WARD
This reading group guide for Where the Line Bleeds includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
The first novel from National Book Award winner and author of Sing, Unburied, Sing Jesmyn Ward is a timeless Southern fable of brotherly love and familial conflict—“a lyrical yet clear-eyed portrait of a rural South and an African-American reality that are rarely depicted” (The Boston Globe).
Joshua and Christophe are twins, raised by a blind grandmother and a
large extended family in rural Bois Sauvage, on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. They’ve just finished high school and need to find jobs, but after Katrina, it proves more difficult than they’d hoped. Joshua gets work on the docks, but Christophe’s not so lucky and starts to sell drugs. Christophe’s downward spiral is accelerated first by crack, then by the reappearance of the twins’ parents: Cille, who left for a better job, and Sandman, a dangerous addict. Sandman taunts Christophe, eventually provoking a shocking confrontation that will ultimately damn or save both twins.
Topics and Questions for Discussion
1. Why are the boys so sure they want to stay in Bois Sauvage after they graduate? If they didn’t have Ma-mee to think of, would they have been so set on staying?
2. Joshua reflects that “on average now, [Cille] talked to them less and gave them more”. Why does Cille support them but keep her distance? How does Joshua feel about Cille? How does Christophe feel about Cille? Do they want the same things from their mother?
3. Dunny tells Christophe, “You could find a way to make it. A broke way, but a way”. Why does he call it a broke way? What else is broken about Christophe’s opportunities in Bois Sauvage?
4. Why do you think the twins’ father, Samuel, is known as Sandman in the neighborhood? What associations does the nickname bring up? Why do Joshua and Christophe avoid calling him by name in conversation?
5. When Joshua and Christophe play basketball together after Joshua is called back to the dock, it’s a relief for both of them. Joshua reflects, “They were talking again . . . for the first time in days, even if they only opened their mouths to grunt, to bare their teeth, and to emit forceful breaths like expletives when they suddenly stopped to shoot, to spin, to score”. How is “talking” through the game a way for them to communicate even when they’re not speaking? Discuss other ways the twins communicate without words.
6. As Ma-mee frets over telling the boys about Sandman’s visit, she thinks about making them dinner to ease the pain. And when Joshua lets them know Cille is coming for a visit, Ma-mee “wanted them lying on the floor and lounging on the sofa together. She would cook them a big meal, make them lazy and easy with food”. Why is food so important to Ma-mee? What does it mean to her?
