Chapter 14
Leonie
When I got home with my load of cemetery rocks, Michael left in my car. The weight of the stones in my shirt was heavy, remind me of what it felt like to carry Jojo and Michaela, to bear another human being in my stomach. After I picked up the stones I’d dropped in Mam’s room, I bang out the door to find Phantom Given. His head is cocked to the side, and he’s looking down the shotgun line of the house, through the living room, through the kitchen, out the back door. He’s listening. I stop where I am.
“What?” The word comes out like a little slung dart. Even though I know it must be the dregs of the meth I swallowed, I still feel sober as a lead weight, and here Given is, burnished and tall, in the living room. His mouth is moving like he’s repeating something that someone else is saying, and if he could speak, it would be a mumble. Whatever he’s hearing, whatever he’s mimicking, makes him run to the open doorway of the room, to pause on the threshold of the kitchen, to bow his head and grip the frame. Last time I saw him here, he was living. The blood beating through him like drums. He and Pop had just argued over something, over the Nova or his middling grades or the fact that besides the bow and arrow, he didn’t seem to have any passion for anything besides playing football. You need direction, son, Pop had said to him. Given had been sitting on the couch, and he watched Pop walk out the back door, slumped down, and winked and whispered at me: And you need to take the stick out your ass, Pop.
Given-not-Given’s shoulder blades bunch together like fists under his shirt. He shakes his head at me once. Then again at whatever he hears.
“I’m going crazy,” I tell myself. “I’m going fucking crazy.”
I walk past Given to look out the screen door. Pop and Jojo are hunched down in the backyard, in the dirt by the pigpen, talking. I can’t hear anything from this far away, but Given can, and whatever he hears makes his head shake faster and faster, his fist punch noiselessly, once and again, in the molding. It leaves no mark. I expect to feel the brush of his T-shirt against my arm when I walk past, but feel nothing but misty cool. Given’s mouth moves, and I can make out what he’s saying without words. Pop, he mouths. Oh, Pop. I squint. It looks like Jojo is rubbing Pop’s back. Hugging Pop, and I realize I ain’t never seen Pop on the ground before if he wasn’t pushing a seed into it or wrestling some animal or pulling up weeds.
A dog bark rips through the creaking kitchen, and Given starts and turns to me, mouths one word, hands open and beckoning me like he could pull an answer from me. Who? he mouths. Who is that? He runs to the screen door. Casper barks again, a sound that shies up to a panicked yip. Pop seems to be sinking, Jojo holding him up. I don’t know this world. Given holds his arms up in front of him like he could block something. I wonder if this vision of my brother is an aftershock of yesterday’s high, a shaky meth tremor that comes once, if the massive hit I swallowed has unsewn my body and mind, unseamed me. Given is still there. As the dog’s bark rises, Given bleeds. I don’t see wounds, but he bleeds anyway, from his neck, from his chest. Where he was shot. He braces himself on the wood frame of the closed screen door, his arms and legs straining. Something is pulling him outside. Pop and Jojo are curled in two, and the dog is still barking, but I don’t see nothing, don’t see anything until I blink, and like a dark flash at the corner of my eye I see a churning black cloud come to earth in the yard, but then I blink again and it’s gone. Given slumps and runs his hands up and down the doorsill; he did this when he was alive, wore the wood of the sills in the house smooth with his rubbing. He freezes and looks at me, and I wish he was alive, was flesh, because I’d kick him. Kick him for not being able to speak. Kick him for seeing whatever it is he sees or hears out in the yard and not sharing that with me. Kick him for being here, now, for taking up space in the waking, sober world, right before me. For knocking the world sideways—birds flying into glass windows, dogs barking until they piss themselves in fear, cows collapsing to their rumps in fields and never rising—still winking and smiling, every dimple and tooth declaring the joke. For dying. Always for that. Given shakes his head again, but this time, slowly—but still, his face blurs. I reach out and step toward him, to push him, maybe, to see if I can feel his brown arms, the calluses on his hands like patches of concrete, but Michaela’s cry pierces the air, and he’s gone.
* * *
Michaela’s standing on the sofa, walking from one end of it to another, yelling. Sleep-matted hair, sleep-swollen face. Her little legs clumsy with waking, she trips and falls face-first and mouths the cushion.
“The boy, the black bird,” she sobs.
I kneel next to the sofa, pat her hot little back.
“What boy, Michaela?”
“The black bird. The Black boy.”
She stands, runs to the arm of the sofa farthest from me, straddles, and slides off.
“He flies!”
She wakes up like that all the time, trailing the blankets of her dreams behind her. She’s still sleepy. I catch her under one armpit, swing her up, put her head down on my shoulder.
“Go back to sleep,” I say.
When Michaela kicks, her toes are little shovels digging into my belly, trying to break the dirt of the softest part of me. It used to be my walk rocked her to sleep. She dreamed in my womb with sightless blue eyes. Now she flails, smashes my mouth with her hand, and will not let me hold her.
“He want Mam!” she screams, and at that my arms go dead, and Michaela slides down my front, noodle-limp. She lands running, straight to Mama’s door, and knocks at it with her little fists. Each little thud married to a breathy whine. Her eyes rolling like a panicked colt’s.
“Michaela.” I kneel. “Ain’t no man trying to take Mama nowhere.” Her little knobby knees brush the wood as she hangs from the doorknob, trying to turn with her weight. What I say is mangled truth: no man wants to take Mama, but what she’s tasked me to do will usher her away. I move to Michaela on my knees, floorboards grinding my bones, and I wonder at the fear spilling through my chest, scalding-hot grits. I wonder at my short, round toddler with her toes grazing the door, at the future and what it will demand of me. Of her. Michaela’s fingers lose their grip on the knob, and I turn it, open it, point at Mama with an upturned palm. “See?”
I am not prepared to see.
Mama hangs half off the bed, half on, her toes on the floor, her legs bound up in sheets, twisted around her, stretched tensile and thin as rope here, wide and voluminous there: Mama caught like a prized sailfish. The one who sails through the air, silver and white, still with the silky feel of the salt water on her: the one who shivers in the sun and fights. It is colder than a spring morning warrants in the room, cold as a November morning, and yet Mama sweats and moans and kicks. Michaela hops into the room, sniffs the air, takes hesitant steps, and reaches to the ceiling. She breathes one little word, again and again.
“Bird,” she says.
The room smells like Mama has been turned inside out. Like piss and shit and blood. Like intestines, a heartbeat away from rot. Her eyes are wild. Her arms are pinned in the sheets. Mama struggles to shrug them off.
“Mama?” I say, and my voice seems high and small as Michaela’s. “Let me help.”
“Too late,” Mama says. “Too late, Leonie.”
I have to grab her arm hard to free it. My fingers leave shallow ditches in a row in her flesh, my handprint visible on her with every touch. Mama moans. I try to touch lighter, to hurt less, but I can’t.
“What you mean?” I say.
Mama is bleeding under the skin. Everywhere my hands touch, there is blood. Trenches in the sand filling with seawater. Underneath: doom.
Mama looks beyond me, to the corner where Michaela has seated herself, still except for the song she is singing as she squints and then glares at Mama. Mama’s eyes skitter to my face, up to the ceiling, down at her ruined body. Away, away.
“I heard him,” she whispers. “Thought it was a . . .” She pants. “Cat.”
“Who, Mama?”
“Ain’t never seen them. Sometimes heard them.”
“What?”
“Like somebody talking three doors down. In another room.”
I free one hand, balled to a fist.
“Said he’d come for me.”
All these petals of blood.
“Ain’t lè mistè.” No spirit. No God. No mystery.
On her wrist.
“He lè mò.” The dead.
Her forearm.
“Young. Full of piss and vinegar.”
Rotting flowers.
“Vengeful as a beat dog.”
Fruitfulness gone to seed.
“Pulling all the weight of history behind him.”
Her breath whines.
“Like a cotton sack full of lead.”
She’s right.
“But still a boy.”
I’m too late.
“Hungry for love.”
The cancer done broke her.
“Says he want me to be his mama.”
Broke her clean through.
“I always thought—”
Mama claws at my arm as I free her other hand.
“It would be your brother.”
I stop.
“The first dead I see . . .”
I can’t breathe.
“Would be him.”
Given is in the corner of the room, stretched along the seam where the walls join. He looms over Michaela, rigid and fierce as Pop, and for the first time, I am afraid. In life, there was a joke in every line of him, humor that ran along the bones of him, that everyone read in the hang of his shoulders, the shake of his head, his smile. There is none now. The weight of time he never bore in life holds him rigid now, cloaks him somber, whittles him sharp as Pop. He shakes his head, and speaks.
“Not.”
Michaela’s little song sinks.
“Your.”
Mama begins to fight me.
“Mother.”
Mama looks beyond me, up to the cracked ceiling, pocked with thousands of little stalactites like the roof of a cave. Pop spent hours dipping a broom in paint and then stabbing the ceiling with the bristles, making circles and loops and swirls, shaping the paint into stars and comets. Mama opens and closes her mouth but makes no sound. I follow her gaze but don’t see nothing but the ceiling, that sorry drywall, turning gray from humidity. But Michaela, who whispers her song and waggles her fingers like she does when she sings “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” does.
“Not.” And Given, who speaks, the planes of his face converging and turning sharp as knives, does.
“Your.”
And Mama does. She rolls her eyes to the corner of the room where Given looms. She bares her teeth in something like a smile, something like a rictus.
“Mother,” Given finishes.
Mama slaps me. Where her hand hit burns. She cuffs me with an open palm on the other side, and my ear throbs with blood. Her right fingers grab my cheek, dig into my eyebrow ridge, and she’s holding my face straight, whispering against whatever is above us, at my back, whatever awful thing that’s come for her. I hear a whisper above me.
“Come with me, Mama,” he says. “Come on.”
“No,” she says.
Her fingers pull my eyelids up, up, painfully.
“Not my boy,” she says.
Feel like she’s peeling the skin.
“Given,” she breathes.
I yank my head away.
“Baby. Please.”
It’s the word baby that makes me jump off the bed. Because I hear her say it now and I’m her baby again, soft-gummed and wet-eyed and fat, and she is whole and sweet-milked. Her hands fall away from me like husks from corncobs, land just as brittle and dry on the bed before she whips them up, faces them out palms up.
“No, boy. No,” Given says.
I sweep the cemetery rocks from the floor where they’ve fallen, dumping them on the altar to join the rest of it I’ve already gathered. From the bathroom: cotton balls. From the cupboard: cornmeal. From my trip to the liquor store yesterday: rum.
“Say it,” Mama says. She’s let her hands fall. “The litany,” she says again, and her breath rattles in her throat. She doesn’t turn her head to the side, to look at the wall beyond me where Given stands, thrashing against some invisible thing that holds him there. Her mouth opens: a silent wail. Michaela is crying in a way I’ve never seen her cry before: mouth working, but no sound. There’s no time. This moment done ate it all up: the past, the future. Do I say the words? I blink, and up on the ceiling there is a boy, a boy with the face of a toddler. I blink again, sand scouring my eye, and there is nothing.
“Mama,” I choke, and it’s as weak and wanting as a baby’s. “Mommy.” My crying and Mama’s entreaties and Michaela’s wailing and Given’s shouting fill the room like a flood, and it must have been as loud outside as it is in here, because Jojo runs in to stand at my elbow and Pop’s at the door.
“You got what you came for. Now get,” Jojo says.
At first I think he’s talking to me, but then he’s looking through me and up, and I know who he’s talking to. There’s strength in his voice, so much that I’m speaking even as I’m crying and pulling Mama up to my heart.
“For Maman Brigitte, Mother of all the Gede. Mistress of the cemetery and mother of all the dead.” I breathe hard and it is a ragged sob.
“No, Leonie,” says Jojo. “You don’t know.” He glares up at the ceiling.
“Leonie,” Mama chokes.
“Grande Brigitte, Judge. This altar of stones is for you. Accept our offerings,” I say. Mama’s eyes are steady rolling, steady rolling to the ceiling, where the boy with the smooth face hovered, needy and balled up like a baby.
“Shut up, Leonie. Please,” Jojo says. “You don’t see.”
Mama’s eyes steady rolling to the wall where Given has stopped thrashing. They turn to me, beseeching. “Enter,” I say.
“Go,” Jojo says. He looks up at where the boy flashed. “Ain’t no more stories for you here. Nobody owe you nothing here.” He raises a hand to Given, and it is as if Jojo has unlocked and opened a gate, because Given pushes through whatever held him.
“You heard my nephew,” Given says. “Go, Richie.”
I don’t see anything, but something must have happened, because Given walks unbothered toward the bed. Pop has slid down the wall, all the upright parts of him crumbling as he looks at Mama, makes himself look at Mama, for once. He’s been orbiting her like a moon, sleeping on the sofa with his back to the door, searching the yard and woods for pens and bins and machines to fix so he can repair in the face of what he cannot.
Mama’s breath is a jagged wind, coming slower and slower. Her eyes lowered to slits. Her body: ruined and still. Jojo steps out of Given’s way. He scoops Michaela, who’s crying, “Uncle.” Jojo swallows and looks right at Given. Jojo sees him. He recognizes him. He nods, and Given is Given again, only for a breath, because he smiles and there’s the joke again in his dimple.
“Nephew,” Given says.
Mama’s breath slows to a choke. She looks at me, her face twisted.
“Enter. Dance with us,” I whisper.
Given’s next to the bed, climbing into it, curling around her, saying “Mama,” saying, “I come for you, Mama,” saying, “I come, Mama,” and Mama takes one long, ripping breath, her breath and blood and spirit beating frantic as a moth caught in a spider’s web, and then “Shhhh,” Given says, “I come with the boat, Mama,” and then he moves his hand over her face, from her air-starved chin to her flared nostrils to her eyes, open and open, looking from me to Given to Jojo and Michaela to Pop at the door and then back to Given. Given’s hand flutters above her face like he is a groom and Mama is a bride and he has pulled the veil from her head and let it fall back so they can look upon each other with love, clear and sweet as the air between them. Mama bucks and goes still.
Time floods the room in a storm surge.
I wail.
* * *
We cry in chorus. Pop folded over in the door, me with Mama’s warm nightgown still in my hands, and Michaela with her face smashed into Jojo’s shoulder. But not Jojo. His eyes are shiny but nothing comes from them, not even when he asks:
“What did you say?”
I can’t speak. Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.
“Leonie!”
Anger spreads through me: oil over water.
“She asked,” I say.
“Naw.” Jojo bounces Michaela in his arms, looks at Mama like he’s waiting for her to open her eyes, turn her head, say: Silly Jojo. “Your words. They let in a river. That’s what took her and Uncle Given away.”
“Yes.” He doesn’t understand what it means, to have the first thing you ever done right by your mama be to usher in her gods. To let her go.
Pop is sliding his way up the door to stand. But there’s still a curve there at the top of his back: his shoulders a bowl. His head swings on his neck like a pendulum. His throat: broken.
“She did, Jojo.” Pop’s voice is the only thing about him with some hardness to it: a sheathed knife. “She couldn’t bear that pain.”
“Mam wouldn’t leave us. Not even with Uncle Given.”
Jojo gains what Pop’s lost of his bearing. First, a brace across his thighs, all the bowlegged softness of his preadolescence dissolved to a granite stance.
“She did,” I say.
Then across his chest, which makes his shoulders crowbar straight.
“She said—” Jojo says.
“It was a mercy, son,” Pop says.
And then the headpiece so that the baby face, the last of the milk fat, is steel-still, frozen for war. Only Jojo’s eyes peer out, carrying some of the boy in them.
“What you want?” I ask. “To say I’m sorry?”
Those eyes.
“To say I ain’t want to?”
I can’t control my voice. It whistles, high and whip-thin. There is a rope of fire from my eyes, behind my nose, down my throat, and it coils in a noose in my stomach. Mama is still warm.
“ ’Cause I ain’t. I did what she needed me,” I say.
She could be sleeping. I ain’t seen her face this smooth, without tension, in years. I want to slap her awake, for asking me to let her go. I want to slap Jojo, for looking at me like I had a choice. And I want to bring Given back from the dead and make him flesh again just so I can slap him, too, for leaving. For taking her. There’s too much blank sky where a tree once stood. All wrong. The noose tightens.
“Nothing,” Jojo says. “You can’t give me nothing.”
He looks at Mama when he says it, and I stop smoothing her hair back from her still face. And then he’s looking at me and he’s hard as Pop and soft as Mama. Censure and pity. I’m a book and he can read every word. I know this. He sees me. He knows it all.
“Girl,” Pop says.
And then it stops tight and I am raging, hateful at this world, and I let Mama slide to the mattress and I stand and run at Jojo, who backs away, but he is not quick enough because I am there, and when I hit his face, pain cracks through my palm, pings through my fingers. So I do it again. And I do it again before I realize Michaela’s squalling in his arms, scrambling up his chest, trying to get away from me. And Jojo’s straight, straight as Pop, all the little boy gone from his eyes: the tide gone out, the sun scorching the residue of water away, leaving hot sand baking to concrete. And Pop’s at my side, his body folding over me like a kite falling from the sky as he grabs both of my arms and pulls them together so that my palms touch.
“That’s enough,” Pop says. “No more, Leonie.”
“You don’t know,” I say. “You don’t!” Jojo’s rubbing his face into Michaela’s little shirt, and I want so much. I want to hit him again and I want to hold him to me and palm his head again like when he was a hairless baby and I want to tell Jojo, We a family, and I want to ask him: What you seen, boy, what you seen? But I don’t do none of that. Instead, I yank away from Pop, walk past Jojo and Michaela, and leave Mama on the bed, her face up to the ceiling, her eyes open, all the warmth gone from out the middle of her. Cold at the heart, time worming its way through her hardening veins.
* * *
When Michael comes back, I’m on the porch. He ignores the steps and leaps to where I am sitting. The wood creaks when he lands, and I imagine it crumbling, dry-rotted and warped from the heat, me falling through where I sit on the floor down to the clay earth underneath, that opening up, a hole straight down: an endless well. It is the first hot day of the spring, a foretaste of the damnation that will suffuse the air in the summer, that will make everyone and everything bend.
“Baby?”
“Let’s go.”
“What? I just got back. I figured we could take the kids up to the river today.”
“Mama’s gone.” I can’t stop my voice breaking between the two words. Can’t stop the cry that comes out of my mouth instead of the sigh.
Michael sits on the floor next to me, pulls me into his lap: arms, rump, legs, and all, so that I am a great baby, and I slump into him, knowing that he can bear me. Will bear me. I put my nose in his stubble-roughened neck.
“Let’s go.”
“Shhhh,” he murmurs.
“Up to Al’s.”
Michael knows. He knows what I’m really asking for: the seed at the pulpy heart of the fruit.
“We can just leave.”
To get high. To see Given again. Even as I think it, I know he won’t come. That wherever he has gone with Mama is final. But the part that Mama looked at in pity across the table, that part hopes.
“We can’t,” he says.
“Please.” The word is small and acid as a burp. It lingers between us. Michael grimaces as if he can smell the horror and grief in it, all of it distilled to one pungent syllable.
“The kids.”
The sky has turned the color of sandy red clay: orange cream. The heat of the day at its heaviest: the insects awoken from their winter slumber. I cannot bear the world.
“I can’t,” I say, and there are so many other words behind that. I can’t be a mother right now. I can’t be a daughter. I can’t remember. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. And he hears them, because he rolls forward and stands with me, picks me up, and carries me off the porch to the car. He puts me in the passenger seat, closes the door, and climbs behind the wheel. The car shrinks the world to this: me and him in this dome of glass, all the hateful light and dogs shying into ditches and docile cows and crowding trees, the memory of my words, of Mama’s gray paper face, of Jojo’s and Michaela’s reaction to my slaps, of Pop’s shrinking, and of Given’s second leaving. Our world: an aquarium.
“Just a ride,” Michael says.
But I know that if I continue to ask, sour the air of the car with pleases, he will drive to Misty’s, get her to call her friends up north, call Al, make one last call to Pop to say: Just a few days. That he will drive for hours into the black-soiled heart of the state, back toward the cage that held him, drive so far the horizon opens up like a shucked oyster shell. That if I ask, he will go. Because something in him also wants to leave his teary hug with his mother, his fight with his father, my death-crowded household, behind. We move forward, and the air from the open windows makes the glass shudder, alive as a bed of mollusks fluttering in the rush of the tide: a shimmer of froth and sand. The tires catch and spit gravel. We hold hands and pretend at forgetting.