Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

Where the Line Bleeds

Contents

Copyright 2011 by Jesmyn Ward

First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2011
This e-book edition published in 2011

Electronic edition published in 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Ward, Jesmyn.
Salvage the bones : a novel
Jesmyn Ward.1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-60819-522-01 (hardback)
African American childrenFiction. 2. African American teenage girlsFiction. 3. Brothers and sistersFiction. 4. Motherless familiesFiction. 5. African American familiesMississippiFiction. 6. Rural poor-MississippiFiction. 7. Hurricane Katrina, 2005Fiction. 8. Gulf Coast (Miss.)Fiction. I. Title.

PS3623.A7323S36 2011
813.6dc22
2010053025

E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-627-2 (ebook)

www.bloomsburyusa.com

For my brother, Joshua Adam Dedeaux, who leads while I follow.

See now that I, even I am he, and there is no god with me; I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, neither is there any can deliver out of my hand.

DEUTERONOMY 32:39

For though Im small, I know many things,

And my body is an endless eye

Through which, unfortunately, I see everything.

GLORIA FUERTES, NOW

We on our backs staring at the stars above,

Talking about what we going to be when we grow up,

I said what you wanna be? She said, Alive.

OUTKAST, DA ART OF STORYTELLIN (PART I), AQUEMINI

Chinas turned on herself. If I didnt know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way. Wont let nobody touch her but Skeet. When she was a big-headed pit bull puppy, she stole all the shoes in the house, all our black tennis shoes Mama bought because they hide dirt and hold up until theyre beaten soft. Only Mamas forgotten sandals, thin-heeled and tinted pink with so much red mud seeped into them, looked different. China hid them all under furniture, behind the toilet, stacked them in piles and slept on them. When the dog was old enough to run and trip down the steps on her own, she took the shoes outside, put them in shallow ditches under the house. Shed stand rigid as a pine when we tried to take them away from her. Now China is giving like she once took away, bestowing where she once stole. She is birthing puppies.

What China is doing is nothing like what Mama did when she had my youngest brother, Junior. Mama gave birth in the house she bore all of us in, here in this gap in the woods her father cleared and built on that we now call the Pit. Me, the only girl and the youngest at eight, was of no help, although Daddy said she told him she didnt need any help. Daddy said that Randall and Skeetah and me came fast, that Mama had all of us in her bed, under her own bare burning bulb, so when it was time for Junior, she thought she could do the same. It didnt work that way. Mama squatted, screamed toward the end. Junior came out purple and blue as a hydrangea: Mamas last flower. She touched Junior just like that when Daddy held him over her: lightly with her fingertips, like she was afraid shed knock the pollen from him, spoil the bloom. She said she didnt want to go to the hospital. Daddy dragged her from the bed to his truck, trailing her blood, and we never saw her again.

What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. Chinas sweating and the boys are gleaming, and I can see Daddy through the window of the shed, his face shining like the flash of a fish under the water when the sun hit. Its quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isnt. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn.

Get out the doorway. You making her nervous. Skeetah is Daddys copy: dark, short, and lean. His body knotted with ropy muscles. He is the second child, sixteen, but he is the first for China. She only has eyes for him.

She aint studying us, Randall says. He is the oldest, seventeen. Taller than Daddy, but just as dark. He has narrow shoulders and eyes that look like they want to jump out of his head. People at school think hes a nerd, but when hes on the basketball court, he moves like a rabbit, all quick grace and long haunches. When Daddy is hunting, I always cheer for the rabbit.

She need room to breathe. Skeetahs hands slide over her fur, and he leans in to listen to her belly. She gotta relax.

Aint nothing about her relaxed. Randall is standing at the side of the open doorway, holding the sheet that Skeetah has nailed up for a door. For the past week, Skeetah has been sleeping in the shed, waiting for the birth. Every night, I waited until he cut the light off, until I knew he was asleep, and I walked out of the back door to the shed, stood where I am standing now, to check on him. Every time, I found him asleep, his chest to her back. He curled around China like a fingernail around flesh.

I want to see. Junior is hugging Randalls legs, leaning in to see but without the courage to stick in more than his nose. China usually ignores the rest of us, and Junior usually ignores her. But he is seven, and he is curious. When the boy from Germaine brought his male pit bull to the Pit to mate with China three months ago, Junior squatted on an oil drum above the makeshift kennel, an old disconnected truck bed dug in the earth with chicken wire stretched over it, and watched. When the dogs got stuck, he circled his face with his arms, but still refused to move when I yelled at him to go in the house. He sucked on his arm and played with the dangling skin of his ear, like he does when he watches television, or before he falls to sleep. I asked him once why he does it, and all he would say is that it sounds like water.

Skeetah ignores Junior because he is focused on China like a man focuses on a woman when he feels that she is his, which China is. Randall doesnt say anything but stretches his hand across the door to block Junior from entering.

No, Junior. I put out my leg to complete the gate barring Junior from the dog, from the yellow string of mucus pooling to a puddle on the floor under Chinas rear.

Let him see, Daddy says. He old enough to know about that. His is a voice in the darkness, orbiting the shed. He has a hammer in one hand, a clutch of nails in another. China hates him. I relax, but Randall doesnt move and neither does Junior. Daddy spins away from us like a comet into the darkness. There is the sound of hammer hitting metal.

He makes her tense, Skeetah says.

Maybe you need to help her push, I say. Sometime I think that is what killed Mama. I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.

She dont need no help pushing.

And China doesnt. Her sides ripple. She snarls, her mouth a black line. Her eyes are red; the mucus runs pink. Everything about China tenses and there are a million marbles under her skin, and then she seems to be turning herself inside out. At her opening, I see a purplish red bulb. China is blooming.

If one of Daddys drinking buddies had asked what hes doing tonight, he wouldve told them hes fixing up for the hurricane. Its summer, and when its summer, theres always a hurricane coming or leaving here. Each pushes its way through the flat Gulf to the twenty-six-mile manmade Mississippi beach, where they knock against the old summer mansions with their slave galleys turned guesthouses before running over the bayou, through the pines, to lose wind, drip rain, and die in the north. Most dont even hit us head-on anymore; most turn right to Florida or take a left for Texas, brush past and glance off us like a shirtsleeve. We aint had one come straight for us in years, time enough to forget how many jugs of water we need to fill, how many cans of sardines and potted meat we should stock, how many tubs of water we need. But on the radio that Daddy keeps playing in his parked truck, I heard them talking about it earlier today. How the forecasters said the tenth tropical depression had just dissipated in the Gulf but another one seems to be forming around Puerto Rico.