SPLIT SCREEN?
As we have observed in Lesson 7 and in earlier lessons dealing with plot and the arrangement of story events, how a given narrative represents time carries extraordinary significance and greatly affects our reading experience. Representing time through language (narrative discourse) comes with major challenges, but also opportunities for innovation. One of the most difficult things for literary narratives to deal with is capturing two or more significant story events that occur simultaneously. In a storyworld as in the real world, multiple important things can occur at the same time, but in different spaces/places. However, the constraints of conventional, linear written text on a page make it difficult to be in two different places at once. In a visual narrative—think television and film—one might use split screen techniques in order to show two or more events within the same frame so that viewers can observe and experience the simultaneity of these events. But how can a literary narrative transport us readers to two different spaces/places in the storyworld at the same time?
The scene(s) that conclude “The Sixth Day” takes on this very challenge. Skeetah is tending to China, who is out of sorts and behaving erratically, while at the same time Daddy is trying to tear down the chicken coop with the tractor.
Instructions
Start by carefully re-reading the last 4-5 pages of “The Sixth Day” (p.126-130). Then compose a 3-4 paragraph response that addresses the following:
- Describe the details of what’s happening: what are the two sets of actions taking place at the same time?
- Describe how the narrative attempts to represent or convey to the reader that these important events are taking place at the same time?
- Discuss how and why capturing and trying to represent the simultaneity of these story events is significant and meaningful. Consider what kinds of effects on your reading experience you think this created.
As you brainstorm and prepare your response, you might find this short video on split screen techniques in film interesting and helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-SnqRxXESA (Links to an external site.)
Lesson 7: Organizing Time & Space in Salvage the Bones
One of the great appeals of novels in comparison to “short stories” stems from the way the longer literary narrative form permits greater complexity, scope, depth, and intricacy. Obvious as it may be, a 250-page novel like Salvage the Bones has the capacity to represent a wider-ranging storyworld than a 30-page narrative like “Standard Loneliness Package” or TSHLOFM. While short stories, tend to focus on or cohere around a fairly singular conflict, relationship, or event, novels often present narratives with more expansive and/or richly textured storyworlds, longer and/or more intricate timelines and plots, and more multifaceted character conflicts and story events. As such, novels can convey narratives that prove dynamic in which complexity increases, conflicts evolve, shift, and multiply, and characters and relationships develop, grow, and accumulate. While novels aren’t under any obligation to pursue greater complexity, development, nuance, or scale than their shorter narratives counterparts, there’s no way around the fact that the novel’s greater volume affects our reading experience. In this lesson, we’ll consider some of the ways in which Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones organizes and manipulates time and space over its many pages in ways that craft an arguably quite immersive and viscerally stimulating storyworld.
COUNTING THE DAYS
We know by now that literary narratives are often occupied with matters of time: how the passage of time is represented, how the plot orders and arranges the sequences of story events in ways that may or may not coincide with the chronology of those events, how we readers may find ourselves awaiting important information from the past in order to better understand the present, and so on. Before the narrative even begins in earnest, Salvage the Bones alerts us to the significance and value of time and space/place in the story it will tell. Consider the opening chapter title, “The First Day: Birth in a Bare-Bulb Place.” Right out of the gate, the narrative triggers our impulse to question and anticipate. What’s happening? Birth. When is it happening? The first day. Where? A bare-bulb place. The subtitle, “Birth in a Bare-Bulb Place,” uses language that’s so particular and evocative that we have every reason to expect its significance will be made clear in the pages that follow. But what to make of the much vaguer phrase, “The First Day?” The first day of what exactly?
The power of the title “The First Day” comes from the way it taps into and exploits our perception of linear time. By and large, we tend to experience the passage of time as moving forward in one direction. From our vantage point in the present, we may be aware of the past and possess knowledge about it, but we can only more toward the future—a future about which we ostensibly don’t possess knowledge. The physical experience of reading literary texts often reinforces this perception of linear progression in time. We tend to turn/scroll through the pages in one, perpetual direction from the beginning of the book to its end. “The First Day” works like a timestamp insofar as it pins the chapter’s story events to a specific moment or spot on the storyworld’s timeline. Whether or not there are prior story events that will come to matter during the course of the narrative, the chapter title reinforces the sense of moving forward, even toward something. We anticipate the future ahead. And we also know—if only subconsciously—that whatever it is that happens in that future is important and thereby gives this first day some meaning or connotation that we will be able to fully appreciate only later. In other words, we know that this is the first day of something—some kind of large-scale story event or notable sequence of story events. Logic (and our familiarity with the linear progression of time) dictates that if we encounter “The First Day,” then there are more days to come, be they “The Second Day” or “The One Hundredth Day.” What we cannot know with any certainty—unless we step outside of the narrative and flip to later parts of the book itself—how many and which specific days lie ahead.
Even though the narrative begins in medias res by dropping us straight into the middle of a major story event (China giving birth to a litter of puppies), we’ve been given the sense from the chapter title that we’re actually at the start of something, something bigger than what’s going on right here and now. By the end of the first chapter, we’ve been able to decipher its subtitle, even though the meaning of “The First Day” remains obscure. Moreover, the elusiveness of its meaning becomes more powerful when we stare down the second chapter title: “The Second Day: Hidden Eggs.” By the time we get to “The Third Day: Sickness in the Dirt,” we can likely recognize an emerging pattern. First, the plot appears to arrange story events in a straightforward chronological order. Even though the past holds importance, we gain information about the past only through Esch’s allusions and recollections, not flashbacks. Second, the chapter titles track the passage of time on two scales or timeframes simultaneously: in effect, each chapter title serves as a calendar and a clock. The main titles (“The First Day,” “The Second Day,” etc.) mark the accumulation of days passing, while the subtitles document key story events that occur within the hours of the given day. Consequently, the narrative exploits our understanding and experience of time’s linearity in order to manipulate our readerly senses of expectation and satisfaction. In other words, the narrative plays with both our desire to understand what’s happening and our willingness to tolerate not knowing for some unannounced amount of time (this is basically how narratives create suspense). We don’t know the meaning “Hidden Eggs” or “Sickness in the Dirt” or “A Steady Hand” when we begin reading the second, third, and sixth chapters; but we come to feel assured that our questions about the meaning of these subtitles will be answered by the end of these chapters. Meanwhile, for a much longer stretch of the novel, the narrative delays and forestalls our sense of gratification and knowledge by withholding the meaning of the days tallied by the chapters’ main titles.
CONFLICTS & OTHER EXPECTATIONS
The organization of time and space/place matters in a narrative only so far as we come to care about how it comes to bear on the story events and the characters that occupy, inhabit, and navigate he storyworld. That is to say, story events play out over the course of time, across the space/place of the storyworld. We know from our study of other narratives that our readerly interest and desire can be stoked through the creation of conflicts and tensions that need resolving. In many cases, this is how we come to know and invest in characters. We’re not merely interested in who they are; we’re interested in what problems and challenges they confront, what difficult decisions they face, what issues with other characters they must sort out, etc.
In the opening chapters of Salvage the Bones, we can observe three central conflicts or predicaments emerging in and around The Pit, each associated with one of the three main characters. Skeetah is entirely occupied with China and her puppies. He strives and struggles to protect the mother and her litter despite meagre resources and limited knowledge of how best to tend to their health and wellbeing. The passing hours and days serve as measurements of their potential for growth and survival. Meanwhile, Daddy proves to be similarly consumed by a singular obsession: the threat of a hurricane and his corresponding storm preparations. Much like his son Skeetah, Daddy’s priorities aren’t shared or much appreciated by other members of the family. In both cases, we observe tension between what they believe matters (and therefore demands attention and resources) and what the other family members care about (e.g., Randall’s basketball prospects). Esch—the first-person narrator whose perspective dominates our vision and access to these characters and the story events—is, in a sense, at odds with herself. Her pregnancy presents a mix of mental, emotional, and practical conundrums. We readers wonder, perhaps even worry, what all is going to happen if and when her pregnancy is made known to others (recall dramatic irony, see Lesson 2). While her brother and father actively try to recruit the family to their individual causes, Esch, by contrast, strives to keep this information to herself. Bound to the inexorable passage of time, Esch fears the point at which her changing body will reveal her secret regardless of her readiness to have it known.
As readers trying to get our bearings, we may find that these conflicts actually compete or vie for our attention and affective attachment. We may even be tempted to tacitly rank their comparative significance and invest our sympathies or anticipation accordingly. After the first handful of chapters have passed, are we mostly concerned with Esch and the challenges and consequences her pregnancy will inevitably usher in? Do we care that much about Skeetah’s dogs or feel like the stake are as high as his behavior suggests? Are we comfortable dismissing Daddy’s concerns as reflective not so much of any real, impending danger, but as the preoccupations of an alcoholic father who can’t seem to get his kids to pay a lick of attention to what he has to say? In the early stages of the narrative, some of the questions we might be asking ourselves correlate to the organization of time and space/place in the storyworld. Given the narrative’s complexity and overlapping storylines, we’re no doubt asking which of these conflicts and predicaments are actually going to matter in the long run (again, the narrative encourages us to perceive time moving toward a future that we cannot predict or fully anticipate). We might even wonder if all these competing, individual worries are evidence of a bigger overarching conflict that stems from the fact that the family simply doesn’t seem to be on the same page or working together all that well—let’s not lose sight of Mama’s absence and the ways in which her death continues to adversely affect this family. And so, we may find ourselves wondering about the possible consequences of this apparent familial dysfunction as the days progress.
EXPECTING…KATRINA
One of the most intriguing, fascinating, and awesome aspects of Salvage the Bones is the way in which its narrative tells a story about Hurricane Katrina without revealing that crucial detail until nearly halfway through the book. “The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina” (124). When we read that line, answers to some of our questions begin to reveal themselves. Indeed, if you didn’t know anything about this novel before you started reading and if you didn’t use the nearest internet-accessible device looking for a study guide and if you didn’t browse the reading group guides and other educational materials at the back of the book, then you should have arrived at this passage without its momentous revelation already spoiled.
The profundity of this passage compels us readers to look forward and backward at the same time. We look forward suddenly able to foresee the imminent danger that threatens the Batiste family. Knowing that the storm is in fact Hurricane Katrina requires that we revise our expectations about what may happen moving forward in the narrative. Given our historical awareness of Hurricane Katrina, we must update our sense of the narrative’s most urgent and pressing conflicts, tensions, and concerns.
At the same time, we also look backward spurred to rethink everything we have read to this point in light of this critical new information. We realize that regardless of how easy-to-dismiss Daddy’s fears have been, the Batiste’s have been under serious threat all along:
“‘This year’s different,’ Daddy said […] ‘Makes my bones hurt […] I can feel them coming.’” (6-7)
“Daddy’s crazy, I think, obsessed with hurricanes this summer” (46)
The early scene in which Skeetah, Randall, and Esch go to the store to buy dog food now takes on a haunting quality. We may recall how Esch noticed all the other customers buying up batteries and water and other supplies. As she waited amid the long checkout lines, she thought, “I feel like I should have a basket, wonder if these people look at us, they wonder where our supplies are” (28-29). At the time we read the passage, we may not have thought much of her observation. But what about now? Now, we suddenly realize the stakes of their unpreparedness and the ease with which Daddy’s anxiety and concern went unheeded. We also (finally!) have a plausible way of explaining the chapters’ main titles and the circumstances toward which the day-by-day plot progression has been steadily moving.
The news that Hurricane Katrina is growing not only forces us to adjust our view of where the narrative has been and is heading, but also changes our connection to the characters and their actions moving forward. Even as the hurricane coverage begins to saturate the news, Skeetah remains entirely focused on China and the dogfights about to take place. Esch, for her, part seems unsure; she remains preoccupied with the physical impact of her pregnancy and the emotional impact of the drama involving Manny, though she’s starts to wonder about veracity of her father’s earlier storm predictions.
“The TV is low […] On the screen, there is a map of the Gulf, and Katrina spins like a top, as if the long arm of Florida has just spun it loose.” (155)
“The air that had been still before swoops and tunnels through the clearing, raising dust, making the boys close their eyes. Maybe Daddy is right; maybe Katrina is coming for us.” (163)
In Salvage the Bones, we know what’s at stake the minute we discover that Hurricane Katrina is part of the story being told, because we have prior knowledge of real, historical events that are suddenly brought to bear upon the fictional storyworld. In fact, we can even go so far as to pinpoint the days, the month and the year during which these story events take place history (Hurricane Katrina hit the coast of southeastern Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi as a category 5 hurricane in late August 2005). However, none of this knowledge about Hurricane Katrina come from the content of the narrative itself. Instead, it’s knowledge that exists and is available to us outside of the narrative that we readers bring to the fictional storyworld. This is an example of information that we can describe as paratextual. And there’s a lot of different kinds of paratextual material—basically, content and information that exists outside of a narrative text that nonetheless impacts our encounter with and reception of that narrative text. Recall the old adage “don’t judge a book by its cover”: a cover illustration is paratextual but can still influence our reading experience.
For the first half of the book, there’s hints and clues and at least some recurring motifs that allude to the possibility of an impending hurricane. But because Esch is narrating the story in ways that downplay his anxiety and his behaviors, we’re encouraged to share her outlook and probably don’t put much stock into Daddy’s worrying. When we discover that it is actually Hurricane Katrina that’s been growing and developing as a storm, we have a revelatory experience that comes not from Esch, but from our access to paratextual information about the historical scale and significance of the actual hurricane. Keep in mind, that Esch cannot reveal this information to us readers any earlier, because she simply doesn’t possess have it. For the final 5-6 chapters of Salvage the Bones, we readers not only possess more information than the characters about the gravity and scale of the situation, but we continue to read while knowing or at least anticipating that certain story events are likely coming that the characters have no power to foresee or avoid. So, when Esch thinks to herself, “Maybe Daddy is right; maybe Katrina is coming for us,” we find ourselves in the extremely exciting but terrible situation of knowing that a much larger, much more urgent and dangerous threat looms than what the Batiste’s can possibly recognize or prepare for. And just like that, whatever conflicts, concerns, other tensions we thought might matter most are totally eclipsed and so too are our expectations for what’s coming.
Daddy is knocking down what is left of the chicken coop. The chickens and rooster have long abandoned it. After summers of heavy rain the wood grew soft and rotten, and then the short, knuckle-freezing winters dried it up and hollowed the woody pulp out, and it began to sag and buckle into the earth. It used to have Mama’s clothesline tied to it with the other end fixed to a pine tree. After Mama died, Daddy moved the clothesline to a closer tree, but he didn’t tie it tight enough, so when Randall and I wash clothes and hang them out with wooden clothespins, the line sags, and our pants dangle in the dirt.
Skeetah slept out in the shed with the dogs after he faced Daddy with the hammer last night. I have been sitting on the sofa near the living room window, waiting for him to come into the house, because I know he will circle around and enter the front door to avoid passing Daddy in the back. But Skeet has not surfaced. He could always hold his breath the longest when we first began swimming in the pit, crouched on the silty, junk-reefed bottom; we would circle him like anxious boats, calling him to the surface, but he would remain still and bubbling below. I take breaks and sneak cans of Vienna sausages in the bathroom, swallowing all five quickly. They are so light they could be air. I tried to read this morning, but I stopped in the quest for the Golden Fleece, distracted again by Medea, who can only think of Jason, her face red, her heart aflame, engulfed by sweet pain. The goddess struck her with love, and she had no choices. I could not concentrate. My stomach was its own animal, and thoughts of Manny kept surfacing like swimmers in my brain; I had my own tender pain. I slid my book between the wall and my bed and slunk to the kitchen, filching Daddy’s hurricane supplies. I eat, and nothing touches my stomach, nothing tells me it is full with food, with something more than food.
Thwack, thwack, thwack, sounds the hammer. The wood creaks. One panel falls off. Daddy begins cussing, calling down sonofabitches, fuck this’s, and gotdamnits. I am tired of waiting. I grab another can of sausages, stick it in the pocket of my shorts. I will go to Skeetah like Medea went to her brother when they fled on their great adventure with the Argonauts. I will offer my help.
Skeetah looks like somebody’s punched him in both eyes. The sound of Daddy’s hammer in the shed threads through the door, and it steadily pulses like blood. China is reclined, the puppies squealing at her tits. Her head is laid on her paws, and she does not look up when I step over the threshold. Junior is a crow, perched on a metal drum beside the door, eating a pack of peanut butter crackers. It makes me hungry.
“Something’s wrong,” Skeetah says. He is sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. He lets his head roll back, and his Adam’s apple bulges so prominently it looks like bone. petting China, lets his hand rest on the warm globe of her skull. She sighs and kicks another puppy away. The triangle of sunshine disappears and appears again on the floor, hidden by clouds and then free again; when Skeetah looks up at me, he squints.
“Fine. Watch her.” Skeetah stands, walks to the door, shoves Junior in passing so that he almost falls off the barrel.
“Scab!” Junior yells.
“And don’t let Junior touch nothing.”
China feebly kicks at the puppies. She scoots along on her back to get away from them, and only stops twitching when her back is against the wall. The puppies make little squeaking noises, paw the air, roll helplessly on their sides. Their eyes are slivers of fingernails. There are four: the white China clone, the red one that looks like Kilo, the brindle runt, and the black-and-white one with patterns on the fur. They wobble away from China. I crouch in the door, my belly pushing out so that it pushes against my thighs, my knees; I pull my T-shirt away from my stomach. China eyes us all lazily, and then puts her head to her paws, closes her eyes, and, as far as I can tell, falls asleep.
“Esch?”
“What, Junior?” The puppies are flailing across the floor. Junior jumps down from his perch, lands with a thud in the dirt next to me, and crouches.
“They need to go back by China,” he says. He lets his hands hang across his knees and dangle down, but even then, it still looks as if he is reaching out to them. “They going to go out the door.”
“How they going to do that with us sitting here?”
“They got gaps.” Junior brushes his hand between us. “Here.”
“Don’t touch them.” I pull at my T-shirt again. Junior’s breath smells like peanut butter. I’m so tired; it washes through me like blinding, heavy rain. China’s ear twitches in her sleep. I wish she could talk.
“Aw, Esch.” Junior leans forward on his haunches, tipping over toward the puppies, slowly. “I’m just going to put them back. See?” He grabs the white one by the nape, pinches it with his whole hand, and moves it a foot back so it is closer to China. She breathes sleepily. Junior looks back at me, smiling, his lips closed over his teeth, the multiple gaps, the digs of decay in the crevices. “See?”
“You do it, but quick.” China’s tail jerks in her sleep, and then she is still. “Before she wakes up.”
“What’s wrong?” I say. His eyes burn like he has fever.
“She been too—easy. Usually she let them suck and then fight them off when they done had enough, but they been sucking for almost an hour and she ain’t moved.”
“Maybe she just tired, like you said yesterday.”
Daddy’s hammer beats at the room.
“That ain’t it.”
“Well, then what?”
“I think I gave her too much.”
“You did what Manny said.”
“How you know Manny knew what he was doing?”
“Rico probably showed him how.”
“And who say Rico going to show him the right way to do it if he know Manny going to show me?”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“Who?”
“Manny.” I swallow his name. He has to be better than that. I know it.
Skeetah speaks to the ceiling, his eyes wide, his elbows hanging from his knees with his hands clasped; this is his prayer.
“You don’t know,” he says.
“Everybody ain’t always plotting against you and China, Skeet.”
He crawls across the floor, waves his hand in front of China’s face. She follows him with her eyes, sighs so hard she raises dirt on her linoleum floor in a dusty wave.
“Ain’t nobody said that, Esch.” Skeetah puts his hand on China’s neck, as careful as Mama used to take biscuits from the oven. China breathes hard again, pushes one of the puppies away from her desultorily. “That’s my girl.”
“She probably just need to eat something.”
“I can’t lose her.” Skeetah’s bald head looks muddy from sleeping on the dirty floor of the shed. Mama’s arms would look like that when she was pulling greens in the small garden plot she kept behind the house. It was fenced off with wooden slats from an old baby crib Daddy had found at the side of the road. There is danger in what Skeetah says, in even thinking China could die. Reckless to say it aloud, to call it down, to make it possible.
“Why don’t you go take a bath?” I imagine the gashes at his side, seeing them turn red with infection under Randall’s old wrap. We catch boils on the Pit as easily as we used to catch stray dogs, and I know enough about them to understand that they are bacterial infections. He’s not going to want to go to the hospital, and Daddy isn’t going to want to take him if it comes to that. “Your stomach.”
“I’m all right.” He is rubbing China’s head to the beat of Daddy’s hammer.
“You need to be clean at the fight. Healthy. So do she. If you hurting, what she going to do?” This is the way to his heart. His pride. He stops “Okay.” Junior picks up the red puppy, drops it next to its sibling. His lips part over his teeth, and he is really smiling.
“Hurry,” I whisper. I want to sleep like China, lie down on the cool dirt of the shed.
“All right,” he whispers. The spotted one wiggles a little in his hand, feeble and blind as an earthworm, before he sets it down.
“You can’t touch them again,” I breathe. A muscle spasms in China’s side: a white sheet flapping in the wind on a clothesline. “Hear?”
Junior grabs the last puppy, the brindle runt, around the belly. His thumb and middle finger touch as he grabs its rib cage. The puppy is skinny, not growing milk fat like the others. Junior brings it to his nose; this close, its fur looks like it’s moving. Fleas thread their way through its downy hair. Its head falls to the side, and it yanks it back in the other direction. I’m surprised its neck is so strong when it is only a child’s handful of fur and skin and bones.
“Hear?”
“Yeah.” Junior is not moving.
“Put it down!” I hiss. I want to slap Junior, but I know it will wake China. Junior is sniffing the puppy, and I swear that if I weren’t there, he would lick it. China lets out a mewling sleep growl.
“Gotdamnit!” I grab the slim stick of his arm hard. Dig my fingernails in. Hope he can feel the fear in my hands.
“All right, Esch!” Junior whines, pulling from me, still clutching the puppy. China kicks.
“Do it!” I dig. I am sweating, hot under my arms. I am burning. “Junior!”
“All right.”
Junior’s smile is gone. His mouth pulls tight at the corners, baring his bottom gums. That is his crying face. His back is narrow and hard as a ruler. He leans over, lets the puppy roll from his hand. It tumbles on its side, stops, and sweeps its head along the floor. Junior yanks his arm away, cradles it to his chest, and refuses to look at me. Instead he gazes at the puppies, whispers furiously through his downturned lips.
“That hurt, Esch. That really hurt.”
“What if Skeet had come in? What if China had woke up?”
My hands feel weak now that they are not gripping Junior. When he was a baby, Randall and I would pass him back and forth on the sofa, feeding him, rubbing his stomach, palming his head. Randall said that he frowned like Mama.
“You made me bleed.” Junior spits on his hand, rubs it back and forth across his forearm where I have left red marks that look like winking eyes. “You didn’t have to do it so hard.”
“You don’t listen,” I say. Junior never cried when he was little.
“Still.” He wipes his spitty hand across his eyes.
“You never know,” I say. China huffs in her sleep again. “You know that Junior, don’t you?” My hand flops in China’s direction. “You know her.”
China sleep-growls again, high and sharp. I touch Junior’s back, feel down the marble chain of his spine. He yanks away, still holding his arm, and looks at me, his eyes like the dark heart of an oyster. I look back to China to make sure she is asleep, make sure that her puppies aren’t straying too far away, make sure that my shirt is still pulled away from my stomach. I am tired again. Junior sits on his legs in the dirt, far enough away from me so that I can’t grab him, but still next to me. I had expected him to run under the house.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Junior bends over and braces himself on his arms in the dirt, his butt in the air. He nods at the puppies. When he was a baby, this is how he would fall asleep on the sofa, in the bed with Randall. The puppies are swimming blindly, as if through very deep water, away from China, toward him again. I wonder if he has been sneaking into the shed when we are gone with China, whether he has already been playing with them.
“Can we go to the park today?” he asks. Daddy beats the coop twice, then swears. He is hung over. He will be mean. I peel back the top of the sausage can, take one out, and hand it to Junior. China rolls on her back to face the wall, to escape her puppies in sleep the best that she can, and I nod.
“Yeah, we can go.”
When we were younger and Mama had to get us up in the morning for school, she would touch us on our backs first. And when she felt us twitch under her hands, felt us move toward morning, she would softly tell us to wake up, that it was time for school. When she died and Daddy had to wake us up, he wouldn’t touch us. He’d knock on the wall next to our door, hard: shout, Wake up. When Skeetah comes back out to the shed in a black wifebeater and jean shorts, he’s already sweating. He wakes China like Mama used to wake us. The puppies roll away from him. He puts them in a larger box, where they scuffle and scratch unseen.
“She needs to get up,” Skeet says. When we tell him that we are walking to the park, he is resolved. “She needs to work it out.”
Skeetah puts her on a leash and then picks her up, slinging her over one shoulder. Her hind legs tangle in his thighs and make it hard for him to walk. He hasn’t done this since she was a puppy. Then she would smile over his shoulder, licking the salt from his ear and neck. Now she frowns, her eyes half closed, nodding to sleep. A thin line of spit stretches to his back. Skeetah hoists her up again and again, and it is only when we have rounded the house, circled an old tub, the husk of a car I never remember seeing run, and jumped the ditch to the ragged asphalt road does he set her down. Pines sway on both sides with a sudden wind, and China lists with them. She is shaking. Her white hair dusts Skeetah’s shoulders, which look hard. He is frowning. He yanks at her leash.
“Come on.”
Junior bumps me in the side.
“I’ll be right back.” Junior says, and then he is running away toward the house.
China looks desultorily after him. Skeetah yanks her leash, again, and begins walking. She drags herself into motion, pads after him. The chain pulls at her ears, circles her head like a garrote. Skeetah walks leaning forward and doesn’t look back. A hawk circles over our heads, riding a draft. It glides down in a spiral and then flaps off and vanishes in the feathery tops of the trees. Our house is the color of rust, nearly invisible under the oaks and behind the rubbish, lopsided. The cement bricks it sits on are the color of the sand. I follow Skeetah, who is walking so quickly, his figure dwindles in the high, hot day. I expect Junior to come back with a ball, but then I hear the grab and grind of bike tires, and he is peeling down the road, standing up. The dull black bike wobbles from side to side with each pedal. It is too small even for Junior to ride. When he swerves next to me, I realize it has no seat. This is why he is standing. I laugh.
“Where did you get that from?”
“Found it,” Junior huffs. His smile is more like an exhale, and then he is huffing again, wheeling away from me to ride circles around Skeetah. Where China would have usually chased anyone on a bike, she saunters, head down, and ignores Junior. Skeetah ignores her in turn, walking straight ahead, his back curved, his silhouette one tense, worried line. The leash remains taut. I run to catch up with them.
As we walk into the center of Bois Sauvage, away from our Pit, the houses appear gradually, hidden behind trees, closer to one another until there are only ragged lots of woods separating them. We walk past Big Henry’s incongruously narrow shotgun house. Marquise’s small pink house, which has only three windows and sits in a yard so clustered with azalea, seems like one more faded flower. Rich boy Franco’s house is green, and for some reason, someone in his family has painted the bottom two feet of the tree’s trunks in his yard white. Some older boys named Joshua and Christophe have a blue-gray house with a screened-in porch along the side with bougainvillea grown to riot under the oaks in the yard, and then there is Mudda Ma’am’s yellow house faded to tan, choked with wisteria. Manny’s trailer is on the other side of Bois Sauvage, away from this side of the neighborhood: the small Catholic church, the haphazard cemetery Skeetah mowed, the county park with the dirt parking lot, which strives to impose some order, some civility to Bois. It fails. The woods muddle the park’s edges. Mimosa trees arch over it with a basketball player’s long, graceful arms and drop pink flowers like balls. Pines sprout up in the ditches along the edge of the park, aside the netless basketball goals, under the piecemeal shade of the gap-toothed wooden play structure sinking into the earth, beside the stone picnic tables with their corners worn smooth by rain, even in the middle of the baseball field overgrown with grass. Maintenance workers, usually county convicts in green-and-white striped jumpsuits, come out once a year and halfheartedly try to trim back the encroaching wood, mow the grass set to bloom, the pine seedlings. The wild things of Bois Sauvage ignore them; we are left to seed another year.
Junior whoops away from me, the rubber of his underinflated tires sounding like a saw grinding through a stump. He swoops down in the ditch and upward, his bike sailing for a moment in the air before he lands, with a jolt so jarring it almost pinions him to the non-seat. He glances back and crows in pride, and then fishtails into the park. Skeetah still resolutely drags China, whose tail and head hang low in shame. He does not follow Junior into the park toward the basketball goals where people are playing.
“What you doing?”
“I’m making her walk it out.”
“Y’all done already walked damn near two miles to the park. You don’t think she sweated it out yet?”
“No.” Skeetah snaps China’s chain and sets off at a trot, away from me and toward the graveyard. The heat is a wet blue blanket. I turn, follow Junior toward the court. Under the trees in the small, warped wooden bleachers, there are people sitting; I see long dark shadows framing their faces, long glistening legs crossed at the thigh, small shorts: two girls. Clouds trail the sun, and there are clear faces: Shaliyah, her cousin Felicia. I stop where I am, on the periphery of the court, opposite the shade under the oak tree and the bleachers, and I sit ungracefully in the grass. It feels like falling.
Manny is on the court, spinning, unfurling like a streamer to fling the ball into the basket. I wonder if she can tell his injury like I can, see it in the way his arm snaps back down after he lays up the ball too fast, as if he cannot extend it far enough. I wonder if she notices the way he swings his arm back and forth across his chest when he runs, as if he still holds hope that he can work past the rip, heal it, make his body as seamless and perfect as it used to be. I wonder if she notices that he favors it during sex, that he places most of his weight to his left so that he is always at my right ear, breathing. An ant crawls over the bone of my ankle, smelling with its antennae. I wave it away into the spiky grass. Sweat has bloomed on my shirt between my breasts, which throb gently. They always hurt now. My skin feels like the darkness of it is pulling heat, so I cannot help but glance toward the shade, see the bit of metal that Shaliyah wears on her arm catch the sun through the tree and throw it back gold. I will not sit there.
Big Henry, Marquise, Javon, Franco, Bone, and Randall are all on the court. They breathe in sobs. Cut curses. All shirtless except for Big Henry, they elbow each other, fall and let the concrete peel the skin of their hands, their knees, their elbows away like petals. There is an openmouthed excitement on each of their faces, the same kind of look that Skeetah has when he is wrapping China’s chain around his fist, pulling it so that it indents into his skin, when he says, Watch ’em, watch ’em—GET. It’s the same kind of face that most of them have when they are fucking. Under the oak, Shaliyah waves at her face with a candy box, fanning. She rubs one arm and then the other, and flips her hand as if she is flinging off the sweat she finds there. She is calm and self-possessed as a housecat; it is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for them anchors them deep as a tree’s roots, holds them still as the oaks, which don’t uproot in hurricane wind. Love as certainty. It is the way I imagine China feels, even as I look back and see Skeetah running the perimeter of the baseball field, the leash still taut. Manny calls a time-out, walks over to the goal nearest me, his eyes closed, his breath catching. He leans on the pole, stretches his arm, pulls back with his hips. Randall stares out at the road, his hands locked behind his head, at Skeetah and China running in the distance. Manny waves his arms in wide arcs, stretching out the muscles in them, eyeing the sidelines, and when he sees me sitting in the grass, feet away from him, his mouth twists.
“Come on,” Manny yells.
The game begins again and Manny is like China when she is beset by mites in her ear. She runs in circles, chasing her tail, lashing her head against bushes, hoping to shake them out until Skeetah clasps her between his knees, holds her head, and treats them. Manny runs like that up and down the court, weaving through Big Henry and Marquise for layups. He pulls up for jump shots on Randall, who inevitably slaps them away and out of the court, and even though Manny’s shots begin falling short because of his bad arm, he still shoots, ignoring Franco’s calls for passes. The look on Manny’s face becomes China’s the first time she caught the ear mites; she was still half grown, still short in the torso and long in the leg. When the ear mites became more agitated in the heat and began biting her frantically in her ear, she turned on the last stray dog of Junior’s, black and brown and missing an ear, and she tore the other ear off. Bone passes Manny the ball, and Manny catches it, wincing at the pull in his arm, and he rushes Big Henry under the goal, even though Bone is the other big man inside, and even though Big Henry is easily half a foot taller than Manny and twice as big. Big Henry locks his knees, and they both fall. They slide across the concrete.
“This ain’t football!” Marquise squeaks.
“Foul!” Manny yells, jumping to his feet.
“What the hell you talking about?” Big Henry asks, bewildered, picking himself up by his toes and fingertips.
“Just play!” Randall says. He waves his arm out toward the road, to where Skeetah has disappeared in the distance. “Let’s just fucking play.” He puts his hand on Manny, who is on his toes before Big Henry, and with a squeeze to Manny’s shoulder, he is Skeetah to China. Manny calms. The pace is slower, and when he calls his last time-out, he rests on the pole opposite Shaliyah. He waves his fingers, and she laughs.
The game fades away to a lazy, trickling finish, which is Randall pulling up from half-court and sinking the ball with a three-pointer. Marquise trots to the water spigot, Franco behind him. Randall lets the ball roll to a stop in the grass and walks over to me before putting his hands on his knees. Sweat drips from him like water, and he is winded as a horse. Big Henry alights in the grass next to me, graceful as a heron, and then falls back and throws his arms over his eyes because the sun surfaces from behind the clouds and blinds us.
“Good game,” Randall says.
“Thanks,” Big Henry breathes.
“What the hell is Skeet doing?” Randall spits sweat when he speaks.
Manny is walking over toward the bleachers, toward Shaliyah.
“Running China.”
“I see that. But what for?”
“He wormed her yesterday and he say she sick today.”
“Yeah?”
“I think he afraid he gave her too much.”
Randall screws his mouth up like he’s eating a sour scupadine; he is chewing the pink inside of his cheek.
“What can he do.” It is a statement. I shrug and look under the bleachers. Shaliyah must have bought Manny a sports drink because he is standing under the oak and tilting the bottle back so that the liquid runs down straight into his throat. The sun is shimmering through the oak leaves and catching his skin, so his whole body shines fractured as the glass scar on his face.
“What?”
“What can he do?” This time Randall asks it as a question.
“Nothing,” Big Henry says. His arms are flung out at his sides. He is looking at me. He’s not really fat, but the bigness of him is all over: his hands like baseball mitts, his head like a melon, his chest like a steel drum barbecue pit, his legs like branches reaching from an indomitable trunk. “Can’t do nothing,” Big Henry says. I feel like he can see through my shirt to my swollen breasts, my stomach that pouches just too far when I sit so that it is more than fat. He grins, tentative and gentle as he moves, but it is like an afterthought.
“Well, shit.” Randall folds himself in half and wipes his face on his basketball shorts. “Shit.”
“You ready for the summer league game tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” Randall’s voice is muffled in his shorts; the cloth makes it quaver.
“They going to pay for basketball camp this year?”
“Don’t know. Coach say it’s between me and Bodean.”
“Nervous?”
“They only choose one, and I score two to Bodean’s one every game. I work harder than him.”
“You already imagining all them scouts at the camp, ain’t you?” Big Henry laughs.
“Figure I look best in a black jersey.” Randall leans back and cradles his skull in his hands. “Or baby blue.” Randall smiles, but I know that a part of him is serious, that he already knows what college he wants to go to.
Big Henry pushes himself up off his elbows. Manny sits down next to Shaliyah on the bleachers, leans over to her, rubs his sweaty shoulder into hers. She squeals and tries to jump up, but he clutches her to him. She squirms and squeals again, laughing. The sun is bearing down on me, burning, evaporating the sweat, water, and blood from me to leave my skin, my desiccated organs, my brittle bones: my raisin of a body. If I could, I would reach inside of me and pull out my heart and that tiny wet seed that will become the baby. Let them go first so the rest won’t hurt so much.
“That grass going to make you itch.”
“I know,” Randall says. He stretches the waistband of his shorts. “Water.” He walks to the spigot across the grass, and he is fluid and tall and black.
“I know you hot out here.” Big Henry touches the back of my hand with two fingers, presses.
“Yeah.” Manny is rubbing the sweat from his forehead into Shaliyah’s cheek. Her squeal becomes a shriek. Her teeth are so white.
“You want to come sit in my car? It’s parked in the shade. Windows down.” Big Henry glances over at the bleachers and then rolls to his side and stands in one quick motion. Sometimes I forget he was an athlete.
“Okay.” The clouds are slower now, hang off in the distance above the tree line as if they are wary of the sun. “Okay.” I look at the ground when I rise, when I turn away from the court, when I walk. Barely resisting the urge to look back. I don’t even see when Junior barrels up next to me, whooping, swerving at me on his bike. He is laughing. Under the trees in the dirt parking lot, Javon is parked. His car gleams like the approaching sunset. Marquise is leaning on his bumper. Randall runs over behind us, reclines on Big Henry’s hood and the front windshield so that his wet back looks like pudding. Inside the car, Big Henry and I sit with the doors open, one leg out, heads back. Big Henry plays Outkast.
Randall makes jokes and Big Henry laughs. When the sun rests on the rim of the trees, we leave, and Manny is on the court now with his girl. They are playing a game of one-on-one, and he is taunting her, knocking the ball out of her hand so that it ricochets across the court. Her laughter carries on the softening pink wind. Big Henry closes his door. I slam mine, and Randall scoots over to the passenger side of the windshield. Junior holds the top of the door, still standing on his bike, and Big Henry folds his big paw over Junior’s. Big Henry taps the gas and then eases, and this is how we follow Skeetah and China, who are both running now, both sucking dark and blazing bright under the setting sun and the scudding clouds, all the way home.
The puppies are whining for milk. They have been listening to Daddy hammering at the coop, dismantling it nail by board, into the pine-black evening. They writhe against each other. Skeetah lifts them out one by one by their necks, sets them on the floor before China, who is still nosing the ground. He has not taken off her chain yet, so it pools in the dirt next to her, as heavy and sharp as a bike chain. She breathes through her mouth, but something wet seems to catch at the back of her throat with each exhale. She nods with each breath. Her legs are still, but the sweat Skeetah worked up on her catches the red dust on her coat, channels it so that it runs down her back like watercolor paint. Under the bulb, my arms seem blacker, seem dirtier than I’ve ever seen them. I pull my hair back, tie it by taking a tendril of hair from the bottom and knotting it around the rest. I want it out of my face. Mama was wrong: I have no glory. I have nothing.
“Randall!” Daddy yells. It is strange to hear the night without his hammering.
“Yeah,” Randall says from the doorway of the shed. Big Henry is beside him. Junior is clinging to Randall’s back, grasping at his shoulders, his biceps, losing his grip and sliding with the sweat. Skeetah looks toward the door, shakes his head at Daddy’s call, China’s chain slack in his hands. She looks as if she is eating the earth.
“Come here.”
Randall sighs, grabs Junior’s forearms while he bends over and hoists him back up.
“Yeah, yeah.”
I slide into his place in the doorway next to Big Henry so I can see everything. Junior is licking his fingers as Randall walks, swiping them in Randall’s ears.
“Ugh. I told you to stop.” Randall rubs his ears, but I know he can’t get the wet out. “I’m going to put you down.”
“No, Randall. Please.”
“Well, then stop. That shit is so nasty.” Randall stops, links his long arms into a seat under Junior’s butt, and hoists again. “What?”
Daddy has only knocked down one of the chicken coop’s walls. The chickens wander drunken and bewildered around his feet, seemingly mystified that he is dismantling their house, even though they haven’t roosted in it in years. In the half-light from the bulb from the shed and Daddy’s headlights, they look black. Daddy lets his hammer fall, and the chickens scatter, fluttering away like leaves in a wind.
“The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina.”
“There’s another storm?” Randall asks.
“What you think I been talking about? I knew it was coming,” Daddy says. Like the worst, I repeat. A woman. He shakes his head, frowns at the coop. “We going to try something.”
“What?”
“I want you to get on my tractor and I’m going to direct you to this wall right here.” Daddy points at the longer wall. “And we going to knock this damn thing over.”
Randall hoists again. Junior’s face rests on Randall’s shoulder.
“I can’t drive that thing.”
“All you got to do is put it in gear and press the gas. You know how to steer.”
“We got to do it in the dark?”
Daddy steps to the side and I can see his head, barely coming up to Randall’s shoulder. His face says he is smiling, but his voice says he is not.
“What you mean, ‘We gotta do it at night?’ That depression out in the Gulf done became a hurricane. We ain’t got enough wood to board the windows up and you going to sit here and ask me why we gotta do this at night?”
Randall is silent. Junior is sliding again.
“She headed toward Florida. She come up slantways and who you think she going to hit?’
“Florida,” Randall sighs. “Don’t they usually fade out after they hit?” Randall doesn’t hoist Junior, who is trying to clutch at Randall’s waist with his feet. Junior is losing. Junior’s chin disappears behind Randall’s shoulder, and his head sinks to Randall’s shoulder blades. “All’s I’m saying is that you could drive it better than me.”
“I know I can.” Daddy waves away the compliment. Usually when Randall gives them, they work. “But I can’t see to get it at the right angle. If you do it, I can tell you how to hit it so that the whole thing comes down at once.”
Junior’s feet are at Randall’s knees. Junior comes down in the dirt and barely catches himself. I want to call him back to the shed because I know he’s getting on Daddy’s nerves and will only make Daddy worse, but I don’t. He is the Patroclus to Randall’s Achilles tonight.
“Come on.” Daddy walks into the darkness without waiting to see if Randall follows. Randall rounds the corner with his hands linked behind his neck, shaking his head. Junior shadows him.
Skeetah releases China from her chain, and then loops the metal around and around his forearm and shoulder until it is a solid silver wing. China pads to her corner, flops down all at once, instead of her usual graceful sitting first, the gentle roll onto her flank, her side. She lays her head on the linoleum that Skeetah must have swept clean, because she does not raise dust. Skeetah walks toward the door, lays the chain on the oil drum, arranges it just so, lingers over the links. He cannot bear to look at her.
“You think that did it?” Big Henry asks.
“I don’t know,” Skeetah says.
“Maybe she just tired,” I say to them, because I hope the words will pull Skeetah’s brow smooth, untangle the yarn-knotted furrow of it. Hope that they will make him stop looking at his hands. Big Henry shifts from foot to foot, leans on the door jamb. When he moves, the locusts and cicadas and grasshoppers sound loud, disgruntled.
“You ran her for a while.”
“Yeah.” Skeetah plays with the links the way he used to play with liver, with oatmeal, with beets from the can shaped like tubes of cranberry sauce. This was before he grew older, before his knees gained muscle and his shoulders knotted and he began shoveling his food, lima beans or mushrooms or chitterlings, as if he didn’t care what he ate anymore.
“And she still nursing. She probably just tired.”
Daddy’s tractor growls from the darkness, bullies the insects. It rolls over branches, discarded plastic garbage cans, detached fenders. They crack and break. Daddy leaves splinters. Randall and Junior follow in its wake, stumbling through the detritus. Skeetah shakes his head.
“He’s going to have them out there all gotdamn night.” Skeetah grabs China’s bowl from where he has secreted it high on a shelf; it is so high he has to stand on his toes. Randall or Big Henry could have grabbed it without even reaching. Daddy leaves the tractor running and swings one leg over and is down. Skeetah pours China’s food, sets it on top of the drum. “Hold on.”
Big Henry moves to let Skeetah walk out of the doorway, and then he smiles at me. The moon shines like a fluorescent bulb behind his head. A piping wind blows, and where my hair escapes and touches my face, it feels like a spider’s web unanchored, adrift. Randall climbs up the tractor and sits. Junior hoists himself up and begins scaling the metal.
“What you doing?” Daddy asks Junior.
“Helping Randall.”
“No you’re not. Get down.”
“I won’t be in the way.”
“Get down.”
“Please.”
“I said no.”
Randall scoots forward on the seat, motions behind him.
“He can sit behind me. He won’t be in the way.”
Junior is leaning back to please Daddy, to make him think that he is on the verge of obeying, of jumping off, but still he grips the seat with his hands, and he does not step down.
“Please, Daddy.”
Daddy clears his throat and spits. His T-shirt has a gaping hole at the neck, and it is uneven at the hem, as if someone has been pulling at it.
“Hurry up,” Daddy says.
Daddy waves Junior up to the tractor, and Junior climbs up, slides behind Randall, wraps his arms around Randall’s waist with the expectant look of a child on a carousel ride. Skeetah bangs out of the back door of the house with a cup of something in his hand. Moths flit about his head like mussed ash. He walks by and I smell bacon drippings. “She has to eat,” Skeetah says as he dribbles the drippings, the color of pine sap, over China’s dried food. China looks at him, then away. He slides the bowl toward her, but she ignores him. His eyes are a darkness in his face. “Come on.”
China grimaces at him, a showing of tooth and red gum. The puppies are twitching toward her over the linoleum, as if they smell the milk through her breasts, through the pink meat of her. Her nipples look like chewed-up gum.
“Come on.” Daddy waves the tractor forward. “This the corner. Right here.”
“All right,” Skeetah breathes, heedless of the creeping puppies as he pushes China’s bowl so close to her that she could lay her head down in it. The lines between Skeet’s muscles looked filled in with charcoal.
“All right!” Daddy yells. “Now keep coming straight forward, right there.” Randall guns the tractor and it surges forward. Junior’s head snaps back, but he hangs on. There is a crack of wood and then a metal whine as Randall presses the gas again and the tractor jerks forward. “Hold it! You got chicken wire stuck in the grille.”
Daddy tugs at the wire, pulls at the grille and hood. He yanks, leans forward so far he almost puts his face in the grille, detangles, and then he begins pulling at the wire again. Randall is still.
“Do it,” Skeetah commands China.
China’s ears are flat as plastic knives laid on her head and her mouth is wet and pink as uncooked chicken, except here the bone shows. She is quivering, her muscles beset by a multitude of tics. She is shaking all over, now eye to eye with Skeetah, seemingly ignoring the dirt-red puppy rounding her bowl, waddling for milk. He is the one that is a model of the father, of Kilo; he is the fattest, the most well fed, the bully. Turgid with the promise of living. When their eyes eventually open, I think that his will be the first.
The tractor idles and the engine turns, sounds as if it going to move.
“Don’t do it!” Daddy yells against his tugging, but his grunts eat the Don’t, and I don’t know what Randall hears, but he lets up on the brake and slips it in gear, and the tractor eases forward. “Stop!” Daddy yells. He is pulling back, his hand clenched in the wire, and he twists so hard his arm looks long and ropy.
The red puppy creeps forward, rounds China’s bowl, noses her tit. China is rolling, rising. The rumble of the tractor is her growl. Her toes are pointed, her head raised. Skeetah falls back. The red puppy undulates toward her; a fat mite. China snaps forward, closes her jaw around the puppy’s neck as she does when she carries him, but there is no gentleness in it. She is all white eyes. She is chewing. She is whipping him though the air like a tire eaten too short for Skeetah to grab.
“Stop!” Skeetah yells. “Stop!”
Randall puts the tractor in gear, switches it to park, but the small hillock the coop is on pulls the tractor back as the engine idles.
“No!” Daddy calls.
Daddy flings his hand free. There is oil on it. He holds to his chest. His shirt is covered in oil. Daddy’s jaw is slack. He is walking toward the light of the shed. The oil on his T-shirt turns red. The sound coming out his open mouth is like growling.
“No!” Skeetah calls.
The blood on Daddy’s shirt is the same color as the pulpy puppy in China’s mouth. China flings it away from her. It thuds on the tin and slides. Randall comes running. Big Henry kneels with Daddy in the dirt, where what was Daddy’s middle, ring, and pinkie finger on his left hand are sheared off clean as fallen tree trunks. The meat of his fingers is red and wet as China’s lips.
Skeetah kneels in the dirt, feeling for the mutilated puppy; he knocks into metal drums and toolboxes and old chainsaws with his head and his shoulders.
“Why did you?” Skeetah wails.
“Why?” Daddy breathes to Randall and Big Henry standing over him, the blood sluicing down his forearm. They are gripping Daddy’s wrist, trying to stop the bleeding. Skeetah is punching the metal he meets. China is bloody-mouthed and bright-eyed as Medea. If she could speak, this is what I would ask her: Is this what motherhood is?
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