Authors: Jesmyn Ward
Salvage the Bones (25 page)
It is terrible. It is the flailing wind that lashes like an extension cord used as a beating belt. It is the rain, which stings like stones, which drives into our eyes and bids them shut. It is the water, swirling and gathering and spreading on all sides, brown with an undercurrent of red to it, the clay of the Pit like a cut that won't stop leaking. It is the remains of the yard, the refrigerators and lawn mowers and the RV and mattresses, floating like a fleet. It is trees and branches breaking, popping like Black Cat firecrackers in an endless crackle of explosions, over and over and again and again. It is us huddling together on the roof, me with the wire of the bucket handle looped over my shoulder, shaking against the plastic. It is everywhere. Daddy kneels behind us, tries to gather all of us to him. Skeetah hugs China, and she howls. Daddy's truck careens slowly in the yard.
Skeetah is hunched over, picking at his jeans. He takes off his pants, tries to hold them still in front of him; the legs whip in the wind. He shoves China's back legs into the crotch, and then he flings one pant leg over his shoulder, and the other he tucks under his underarm.
“Tie it!” Skeetah yells.
I tie it in a knot. My fingers are stiff and numb. I pull the wet fabric as hard as I can, test it. China's head and legs are smashed to his chest, pinned under the fabric. She is his baby in a sling, and she is shaking.
“Look!” Skeet says and points. I follow his finger to the hollow carcass of Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph's house. The top half and the eaves of the house are above water. “It's on a hill!” Skeetah screams.
“How are we going to get there?” Randall yells.
“The tree!” Skeetah is inching down the roof to a spreading oak tree that touches our house and stretches to MaMa's house. It rises like a jungle gym over the seething water. “We're going to climb the tree!”
“No!” Daddy yells. “We're going to stay here!”
“What if the water keeps coming?” Randall asks. “Better for us to take that chance than stay here and drown!”
Junior's teeth are sealed together, his lips peeled back. His eyes are blasted open. As Randall picks his way down the roof toward the branch, Junior looks back. Randall braces an arm across his chest, holds Junior's arm.
“Just like the first time we swam in the pit, Junior! Hold on!” Randall crouches at the edge of the roof with Skeetah, both of them hunched like birds, feathers ruffled against the bad wind, both of them holding their bundles closely. Skeetah leaps.
He catches the closest ricocheting branch, lands half in and half out of the water. China yelps and begins to struggle, but Skeetah grips her harder with one arm and pulls himself down the branch until it bows to the water. And then he leaps again, for the next whipping branch. He jumps and grabs. I reshoulder my bucket, pick my way toward the edge. The wind flattens me down to the roof. Randall leaps, lands on the same close branch with his stomach, his arms iron again, binding Junior to him. Both Skeetah and Randall scramble along the half-naked branches of the oak with one arm and both legs, using the limbs to pull themselves and their burdens until they reach water, when they kick their feet, scoot back up the branch, and leap for the next whipping limb. Randall stops, braces himself on the branch, looks back.
“Come on!” he yells.
I grip the tin with my toes, my fingers, crouched on my haunches at the edge of the roof. Readjust the bucket. My heart is a wounded bird, beating its wings against the cage of my ribs. I don't think I can breathe.
“Jump,” Daddy says.
I lean out and leap.
The hurricane enfolds me in its hand. I glide. I land on the thickest branch, the wood gouging me, the bucket clanging, unable to breathe, my eyes tearing up. I scramble at the wood, pull myself along the branch, my feet in and out of the water, the steel handle to the bucket digging into my shoulder, my living burden already so heavy. The bare bones of Mother Lizbeth's house are so far away; I do not know if I can carry it that far. I inch to the end of the branch where it plunges beneath the water to join the trunk of the tree, and I dig in with my hands and feet. Clutch. Jump. Catch the next branch, where Randall is waiting. The branches we are grasping and grabbing shudder, twist in the water and air. The little branches whip like clotheslines come unpinned. It is an animal, alive, struggling against the water, trying to shove us off its back.
I look back to see Daddy hurtling through the air. He hits the branch so hard with his torso that his body jackknifes and his face is almost in the water. He is shocked still; he's knocked the wind out of himself. He looks up at us, blinks. Whispers it, but we cannot hear it, only see it.
Go.
Skeetah has worked his way to the middle of the tree, which buds out of the water, and he is swimming and thrusting from branch to branch. We follow him through the whipping branches, the undulating water. Through plastic bags that skim the surface of the flood like birds. Through the clothesline that knots the branches like fishing net. Through our clothes, swept from the flooded house. Through the plywood, ripped from the windows, pried away by the teeth of the storm. Through the rain that comes down in curtains, sluicing against Daddy's lazily spinning truck, the detritus, until we cluster at the end of the farthest-reaching branch, the one closest to the grandparents' house. We clutch each other and the swaying branches. China is pawing at Skeetah's breast, snapping her head back and forth. She is jerking away from him, and he clutches her with one white-tipped hand. The bucket feels like it's tearing the skin on my shoulder, feels like I'm carrying three grown dogs instead of three puppies. Where barely the top of the tree had been visible at our house, the branches here are clearly above the flood. The water here comes up to the middle of the closest window: the house must have been built on a small hill, and we never noticed it.
“I'ma swim, break the window. Y'all come in,” Skeetah says.
“Hurry,” Randall says.
“Esch, you come with me!” Skeetah says.
“This ain't the time!” Daddy yells.
“This ain't about the puppies!” Skeetah squints at me.
“She too small!” Daddy hollers. He grabs my free elbow with his good hand. Grips.
“She's pregnant.” Skeetah points.
Daddy's face shuts, and he pushes.
Daddy saw it, that second before he pushed me. My big T-shirt and my shorts fitting me like a second skin, sodden with water. Where I used to be all sharp elbows and thighs straight as pines and a stomach like a paved road, my wet clothes show the difference. Daddy saw the curve of a waist, the telltale push of a stomach outward. Daddy saw fruit. I'm flailing backward with the bucket, the squeaking puppies. And in that second after he pushes me, Daddy is reaching out with his good hand, his bad hand hooked to the branch he crouches on, his eyes open and hurt and sorry as I haven't seen him since he handed Junior over to me and Randall, said,
Your mama
âand I kick, grasping at the air, but the hurricane slaps me, and I land in the water on my back, the puppies flying out of the bucket, their eyes open for the first time to slits and, I swear, judging me as they hit.
“Esch!” Randall yells, and Junior tightens his legs like a looping shoestring across Randall's waist. Randall grips Junior's shins, those legs thin as rulers. Randall can't jump in. “Swim!” he screams.
I kick my legs and palm water, but I can barely keep my head above it. It is a fanged pink open mouth, and it is swallowing me.
“Fuck!” Skeetah yells. He looks down at China, who is thrusting up and against his sling.
“Esch!” Junior screams, and the water is dragging me sideways, away from the window, out into the yard, toward the gullet of the Pit. I snatch at the puppy closest to me, the brindle, which is limp in my hand, and shove it down my shirt. The white and the black-and-white have disappeared.
“Fuck!” Skeetah screams. He grabs China's head, whispers something to her as she scrabbles against him. Her teeth show and she jerks backward away from him. She writhes. Her torso is out of the sling he has made. Skeetah grabs China by the head and pulls and her body comes out and she is scrambling. She flies clear of him, twists in the air to splash belly first in the water. She is already swimming, fighting. Skeetah jumps.
The water swallows, and I scream. My head goes under and I am tasting it, fresh and cold and salt somehow, the way tears taste in the rain.
The babies
, I think. I kick extra hard, like I am running a race, and my head bobs above the water but the hand of the hurricane pushes it down, down again.
Who will deliver me?
And the hurricane says
sssssssshhhhhhhh
. It shushes me through the water, with a voice muffled and deep, but then I feel a real hand, a human hand, cold and hard as barbed wire on my leg, pulling me back, and then I am being pushed up and out of the water, held by Skeet, who is barely treading, barely keeping me and him afloat. China is a white head, spinning away in the relentless water, barking, and Skeetah is looking from her to me, screaming,
Hurry up! Hurry up!
at Randall, who is breaking what was left of the glass and wood of the window with his hands, his shoulders, his elbows, and diving through, while Junior clings to him close as a shell, and Skeetah is pushing me through the window, his hand a leash loop wrapped too tightly around my arm, his other hand treading, and he is calling,
China, come China
, but she is nowhere, and Daddy is swimming and sinking and jerking toward us, his bad hand flashing, and he is through the window and we are all struggling, grabbing at walls, at broken cabinets, at wood, until Randall stretches his way up to the open ceiling and hauls himself and Junior into the half-eaten attic, where the hurricane fingers the gaping roof, and Skeet pushes me up and through while Randall almost breaks my wrist with his grip as he hauls me up, and then Skeetah kicks off of something buried under the flood and is up and through the opening, and Daddy is on his back in the water below, treading with one hand and two feet, and Randall is hollering,
Help him!
and Skeet is laying next to the hole in the attic floor, looking at us, his face sick, twisted, and he is reaching a hand down to Daddy, hoisting him up, and the puppy must be dead in my shirt because it is not moving and I pull it out as I cough and cough up the water and the hurricane and the pit and I can't stop and Skeetah is braced, looking out the ravaged roof calling China, watching her cut through the swirling water straight as a water moccasin into the whipping, fallen woods in the distance, and Junior is rocking back and forth, squatting on the balls of his feet, his hands over his eyes because he does not want to see anymore; he is wailing
NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNO
.
We sat in the open attic until the wind quieted from jet fighter planes to coughing puffs. We sat in the open attic until the sky brightened from a sick orange to a clean white gray. We sat in the open attic until the water, which had milled like a boiling soup beneath us, receded inch by inch, back into the woods. We sat in the open attic until the rain eased to drips. We sat in the open attic until we got cold, and the light wind that blew chilled us. We huddled together in Mother Lizbeth's attic and tried to rub heat from each other, but couldn't. We were a pile of wet, cold branches, human debris in the middle of all of the rest of it.
I scooted past Daddy, whose eyes were closed as he mumbled against his maimed hand and his good hand, which were folded like he was praying, past Randall, who still held Junior, who still had his hands over his eyes, to Skeetah. He crouched where the attic's roof was mostly gone, near the front of the long, low half room, and leaned out the gaping absence. He looked like he wanted to jump. I touched him in the middle of his shoulder blades. His skin was warm, hot as if he'd been running, as if the day was blazing bright. He jerked but didn't look back at me as he scanned the boiling water, the trees popping and flying, the old washing machine spinning like a bumper car around the yard, the wind ripping the land away. The wood under me felt wet and spongy, like it wanted to give. I put my legs to either side of his thighs, scooted up behind him, slid my arms under his armpits, and rested my face on his shoulder.
“I failed her,” he said.
He blinked hard.
“No you didn't.” I spoke into his neck.
“Yes,” he said. His voice sounded like a rake being dragged over rocks.
“You didn't fail us,” I said.
He shook his head, and his cheek brushed my forehead. The muscles under his jaw were jumping. He started to shake. I hugged him tighter, held him the way I'd embraced those boys I'd fucked because it was easier to let them get what they wanted instead of denying them, instead of making them see me. My arms had never been so strong.
I squeezed. With my whole body, I squeezed. I could hold him together, but he jerked so hard it felt like he was trying to shake himself apart, separate at the knuckles, pop loose his ribs, dislocate his shoulders, and dislodge his knees: shudder into nothing, a pile of skin and bone and limp muscle. No Skeet.
“It's going to be all right,” I said.
The hurricane laughed. A tree, plucked from its branches, hopped across the yard and landed against Daddy's truck with a crunch, stopped short like it had won a game of hopscotch without stepping out of the lines. The sky was so close I felt like I could reach up and bury my arm in it.
Skeetah squinted into the storm, so I looked with him, searching for anything white, anything in the direction that China had whirled away, swimming furiously, barking. Plastic bags, a broken dryer, an old refrigerator. We could see nothing that held heat like China, nothing fighting. The hurricane gusted and peeled back a corner of our house, flung tin with a clatter into the air.
“It ain't steady now,” I said. “It's easing up.” I could see the living room, a messy doll's house. The trees cracked in protest around us. Skeetah hummed.
“China,” he said.
The tractor, which had been buried under the water, peeked its head out, the top of its hood appearing from under the water.
“When it gets to the middle of the tires, I'm going,” Skeetah said.
I said nothing, just hooked my fingers together, like I could've kept him there in a living chain.
When the first slice of rubber appeared over the rolling water, Skeetah started. He was a school of fish in my arms. The wind gusted and the trees clattered. There was a whirling sound in the sky, a whistle that was descending and rising, circling. The hurricane groaned, and it was like hearing a million Daddys moan and push back their chairs after eating plates full of fish fried whole, white bread for the bones, beer. The iron at the center of the tire peeked through, and it was an eye opening. Skeetah shrugged out of my embrace all at once: a school of fish exploding around a rock.
“Where you going?” I asked.
Skeetah was already past me, past Randall, in front of Daddy.
“Skeet?” Randall asked. Junior buried his face in Randall's muddy shirt.
Skeetah was at the hole we'd climbed through. The glass in the window had cut his face, his thighs, his chest, and his skin was running red. Then I looked at my arms, Randall, Junior, Daddy; we were all bleeding, all gashed.
“Boy,” Daddy said.
“I got to find her,” Skeetah said.
“The storm ain't over.” Daddy rolled to his side, lifted his knees, and settled again as if he was trying to get more comfortable, find purchase to stand up, but none of us could with the bones of the ceiling folding so low.
Skeetah turned in his crouch. All that jumping, stilled. He was one animal again, or at least he thought he would soon be.
“She's waiting for me,” he said, and jumped down through the ceiling, splashing in the water below.
“Skeet!” Randall yelled.
I looked out of our ragged window, the ripped roof, and saw him wade out into the yard, the water at his waist, his head up, his shoulders back, his arms raised, and his hands extended palms down inches over the water, as if he could calm it.
“Be careful,” Daddy breathed, and I watched my brother walk almost naked out into the departing storm. He headed toward the Pit, the water swirling around him, the broken tops of the trees, the debris rising like a labyrinth up out of the water. He paused, turned his head, and looked back at us. I waved through the ruined window. The air was getting cold. He turned and vanished around a tree growing sideways, into the maw of the maze. He left a thin wake.
When the water left, the front part of Daddy's truck was sitting on top of the smashed gas tank. The lower half was on the ground. All the water that had been in the car was out, and it left a muddy slime on the windows. The yard was one big puddle that we waded, so icy at our ankles, the first cold water we'd felt since the March rains, to the back door of the house, which was blasted open. The screen door was gone. The inside of the house was wet and muddy as Daddy's truck. The food we'd gotten had been washed from the shelves, and we hunted for it like we did for eggs, finding some silver cans of peas. We found Top Ramen, still sealed, in the sofa. We put them in our shirts. My hands were pink with Skeetah's blood from hugging him earlier. I washed them in a puddle in the living room.
“We can't stay here. We need shelter.” Randall grimaced. “Your hand, and the water ⦔ Randall trailed off. “Who knows what the water had in it.”
Daddy shook his head, his lips weak as a baby's. He looked dazed. He stared at his truck, the ruined house, the yard invisible under the trees and the storm's deposits.
“Where,” he said, and it was a statement with no answer.
“By Big Henry,” Randall said.
Junior was on Randall's back, his eyes finally uncovered and open. He looked drunk.
“What about Skeet?” I asked.
“He'll find us,” Randall said. “Daddy?” He raised an arm to Daddy, flicked his head toward the road.
“Yeah.” Daddy cleared his throat.
“We can fix it,” Randall said.
Daddy looked down at the ground, shrugged. He glanced at me and shame flittered across his face like a spider, sideways, fast, and then he looked past the house to the road and started walking slowly, uneven, limping. There was a gash in the back of his leg, bleeding through his pants.
We picked our way around the fallen, ripped trees, to the road. We were barefoot, and the asphalt was warm. We hadn't had time to find our shoes before the hand of the flood pushed into the living room. The storm had plucked the trees like grass and scattered them. We knew where the road was by the feel of the stones wearing through the blacktop under our feet; the trees I had known, the oaks in the bend, the stand of pines on the long stretch, the magnolia at the four-way, were all broken, all crumbled. The sound of water running in the ditches like rapids escorted us down the road, into the heart of Bois Sauvage.
The first house we saw was Javon's, the shingles of his roof scraped off, the top bald; the house was dark and looked empty until we saw someone who must have been Javon, light as Manny, standing in front of the pile of wood that must have been the carport, lighting a lighter: a flicker of warmth in the cold air left by the storm. At the next nearest house, when the neighborhood started to cluster more closely together, we saw what others had suffered: every house had faced the hurricane, and every house had lost. Franco and his mother and father stood out in the yard looking at each other and the smashed landscape around them, dazed. Half of their roof was gone. Christophe and Joshua's porch was missing, and part of their roof. A tree had smashed into Mudda Ma'am and Tilda's house. And just as the houses clustered, there were people in the street, barefoot, half naked, walking around felled trees, crumpled trampolines, talking with each other, shaking their heads, repeating one word over and over again:
alive alive alive alive
. Big Henry and Marquise were standing in front of Big Henry's house, which was missing a piece of its roof, like all the others, and was encircled by six of the trees that had stood in the yard but that now fenced the house in like a green gate.
“It's a miracle,” Big Henry said. “All the trees fell away from the house.”
“We was just about to walk up there and see about y'all,” Marquise said.
Big Henry nodded, swung the machete he had in his hand, the blade dark and sharp.
“In case we had to cut through to get to y'all,” Marquise explained.
“Where's Skeet?” Big Henry asked.
“Looking,” Randall said, hoisting Junior farther up on his back.
“For what?” Marquise asked.
“The water took China,” I said.
“Water?” Big Henry asked, his voice high at the end, almost cracking.
“From the creek that feeds the pit.” Randall said. “The house flooded through. We had to swim to the old house, wait out the storm in the attic.”
I wanted to say:
We almost drowned. We had to bust out of the attic. We lost the puppies and China.
“We need a place to stay,” I said.
“It's just me and my mama,” Big Henry said. “Plenty of room. Come on.” He flicked the machete blade, threw it to Marquise, who caught the handle and almost dropped it.
“You all right, Mr. Claude?” Big Henry asked Daddy.
Every line of Daddy's face, his shoulders, his neck, his collarbone, the ends of his arms, seemed to be caught in a net dragging the ground.
“Yeah,” Daddy said. “I just need to sit for a while. My hand.” He stopped short. Big Henry nodded, placed one of those big careful hands on Daddy's back, and escorted us through the milling crowd, the crumbled trees, the power lines tangled like abandoned fishing line, to his home. He looked at me over his shoulder, and the glance was so soft, so tentative and tender, I wanted to finish my story. I wanted to say,
I'm pregnant
. But I didn't.
Amongst the older women in hair curlers and oversized T-shirts and slippers, the girls in sweatpants and tank tops, the boys riding their bikes, the men gathered in clusters pointing at each other and at the sky, I saw Manny. He was sitting in the back of a white and silver pickup truck parked half in, half out of the road, surrounded by the tops of ripped trees. He was staring across the crowd at us, and from that far away, he was all muscled shoulders and golden skin and black, black eyes. There were wide smears of mud all across his legs, his chest. He raised one forearm in a short, stiff wave. Randall hunched over next to me, eyeing Daddy's and Big Henry's backs.
“Is it him?” he whispered.
I nodded, looked down at the ground.
“I knew you had a crush on him, butâ” Randall cleared his throat. “I didn't think he'd do anything about it.”
“I wanted to,” I said.
“I'm going to beat the shit out of him,” Randall said, the words whistling out of him.
A girl separated herself from the crowd, sat down next to Manny on the truck, laid her head on his shoulder. Shaliyah. Manny sat there stiffly beside her, still looking at me, at Randall, waiting for a wave, a nod, anything. I slid my fingers into the crook of Randall's elbow, and Junior's leg rubbed the back of my hand. His skin, and Randall's skin, was warm; I walked so that Randall was my shield, my warm cover, my brother.
“No, Randall,” I said. “You don't need to. I already did.”
Randall snorted, but he didn't let Junior go, and he squeezed his forearm to his waist, folding my arm into his, pulling me with him. We walked to Big Henry's front door together.
Big Henry's mother, Ms. Bernadine, is half Big Henry's size, with wide hips and thin shoulders, and now I know where he gets his careful hands. She settled Daddy on the sofa in the dark, hot house, unwrapped and cleaned and rewrapped his hand in the light from the open door and the open windows. Her hands were small and quick as hummingbirds, and just as light. She made potted meat sandwiches, and when one of her brothers brought over a small generator, she hooked the refrigerator up to it from an extension cord along with a small fan, and this she put in the window in the living room, and pointed it at Daddy's face, which was gray and twisted.
Marquise had run up to the house to find Skeetah and took his dog along: Lala gleamed like melted butter, untouched by the havoc of the hurricane. He said when he got to the house, Skeetah heard his dog barking and came out of the woods. Skeetah was wearing wet, muddy shorts he'd salvaged from the wreckage, but he was still barefoot. When Marquise tried to get him to come down to Big Henry's house, he'd asked for Marquise's lighter, said he'd camp out at the house because he was waiting for China to come back. Marquise had argued with him, but Skeetah ignored him, so Marquise left. When Marquise told us the story, he chewed the inside of his cheek, looked ashamed that he hadn't been able to drag Skeetah down into Bois. “He's stubborn,” Randall said. “You can't make him do nothing he don't want to do.”