Chapter 2
Leonie
Last night, after I hung up the phone with Michael, I called Gloria and got another shift. Gloria owns the country bar where I work up in the backwoods. It’s a hole-in-the-wall, slapped together with cinder blocks and plywood, painted green. The first time I saw it, I was riding with Michael upcountry to a river; we’d park under an overpass on the road that crossed the river and then walk until we reached a good swimming spot. What’s that? I asked, and pointed. I figured it wasn’t a house, even though it sat low under the trees. There was too many cars parked in the sandy grass. That’s the Cold Drink, Michael said, and he smelled like hard pears and his eyes were green as the outside. Like Barq’s and Coke? I said. Yep. He said his mama went to school with the owner. I called his mama years later after Michael went to jail, thanked God when it was her that picked up the phone and not Big Joseph. He would have hung up in my face rather than speak to me, the nigger his son had babies with. I told Michael’s mother I needed work, and asked if she could put in a good word with the owner. It was the fourth conversation we’d ever had. We spoke first when Michael and I started dating, second time when Jojo was born, and third when Michaela was born. But still she said yes, and then she told me I should go up there, up to the Kill, upcountry, where Michael and his parents are from, where the bar is, and I should introduce myself to Gloria, so I did. Gloria hired me for a probationary period of three months. You’re a hard worker, she said, laughing, when she told me she was keeping me on. She wore heavy eyeliner, and when she laughed, the skin at the sides of her eyes looked like an elaborate fan. Even harder than Misty, she said, and she damn near lives here. And then waved me back out front to the bar. I grabbed my tray of drinks, and three months turned into three years. After my second day at the Cold Drink, I knew why Misty worked so hard: she was high every night. Lortab, Oxycontin, coke, Ecstasy, meth.
* * *
Before I showed up for work at the Cold Drink last night, Misty must have had a good double, because after we mopped and cleaned and shut everything down, we went to her pink MEMA cottage she’s had since Hurricane Katrina, and she pulled out an eight ball.
“So he’s coming home?” Misty asked.
Misty was opening all the windows. She knows I like to hear outside when I get high. I know she doesn’t like to get high alone, which is why she invited me over, and why she opens the windows even though the wet spring night seeps into the house like a fog.
“Yep.”
“You must be happy.”
The last window snapped up and locked into place, and I stared out of it as Misty sat at the table and began cutting and dividing. I shrugged. I’d felt so happy when I got the phone call, when I heard Michael’s voice saying words I’d imagined him saying for months, for years, so happy that my insides felt like a full ditch ridden with a thousand tadpoles. But then when I left, Jojo looked up from where he sat with Pop in the living room watching some hunting show, and for a flash, the cast of his face, the way his features folded, looked like Michael after one of our worst fights. Disappointed. Grave at my leaving. And I couldn’t shake it. His expression kept coming back to me through my shift, made me pull Bud Light instead of Budweiser, Michelob instead of Coors. And then Jojo’s face stuck with me because I could tell he secretly thought I was going to surprise him with a gift, something else besides that hasty cake, some thing that wouldn’t be gone in three days: a basketball, a book, a pair of high-top Nikes to add to his single pair of shoes.
I bent to the table. Sniffed. A clean burning shot through my bones, and then I forgot. The shoes I didn’t buy, the melted cake, the phone call. The toddler sleeping in my bed at home while my son slept on the floor, just in case I’d come home and make him get on the floor when I stumbled in. Fuck it.
“Ecstatic.” I said it slow. Sounded the syllables out. And that’s when Given came back.
The kids at school teased Given about his name. One day he got into a fight about it on the bus, tumbling over the seats with a husky redhead boy who wore camo. Frustrated and swollen-lipped, he came home and asked Mama: Why y’all give me this name? Given? It don’t make no sense. And Mama squatted down and rubbed his ears, and said: Given because it rhymes with your papa’s name: River. And Given because I was forty when I had you. Your papa was fifty. We thought we couldn’t have no kids, but then you was Given to us. He was three years older than me, and when him and Camo boy went flipping and swinging over the seat, I swung my book bag at Camo and hit him in the back of the head.
Last night, he smiled at me, this Given-not-Given, this Given that’s been dead fifteen years now, this Given that came to me every time I snorted a line, every time I popped a pill. He sat in one of the two empty chairs at the table with us, and leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. He was watching me, like always. He had Mama’s face.
“That much, huh?” Misty sucked snot up her nose.
“Yep.”
Given rubbed the dome of his shaved head, and I saw other differences between the living and this chemical figment. Given-not-Given didn’t breathe right. He never breathed at all. He wore a black shirt, and it was a still, mosquito-ridden pool.
“What if Michael’s different?” Misty said.
“He won’t be,” I said.
Misty threw a wadded-up paper towel she’d been using to clean the table.
“What you looking at?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t nobody sit and stare for that long on something this clean without looking at something.” Misty waved her hand at the coke and winked at me. She’d tattooed her boyfriend’s initials on her ring finger, and for a second it looked like letters and then bugs and then letters again. Her boyfriend was Black, and this loving across color lines was one of the reasons we became friends so quickly. She often told me that as far as she was concerned, they were already married. Said she needed him because her mother didn’t give a shit about her. Misty told me once that she got her period in fifth grade, when she was ten years old, and because she didn’t realize what was happening to her, her body betraying her, she walked around half the day with a bloody spot spreading like an oil stain on the back of her pants. Her mother beat her in the parking lot of the school, she was so embarrassed. The principal called the cops. Just one of the many ways I disappointed her, Misty said.
“I was feeling it,” I said.
“You know how I know you lie?”
“How?”
“You get dead still. People is always moving, all the time, when they speak, when they’re quiet, even when they sleep. Looking off, looking at you, smiling, frowning, all of that. When you lie, you get dead still: blank face, arms limp. Like a fucking corpse. I ain’t never seen nothing like it.”
I shrugged. Given-not-Given shrugs. She ain’t lying, he mouths.
“You ever see things?” I say. It’s out my mouth before I have a chance to think it. But at that moment, she’s my best friend. She’s my only friend.
“What you mean?”
“When you on?” I waved my hand like she’d waved hers moments before. At the coke, which was now just a little sorry pile of dust on the table. Enough for two or three lines more.
“That’s what it is? You seeing shit?”
“Just lines. Like neon lights or something. In the air.”
“Nice try. You tried to twitch your hands and everything. Now, what you really seeing?”
I wanted to punch her in her face.
“I told you.”
“Yeah, you lied again.”
But I knew this was her cottage, and when it all came down to it, I’m Black and she’s White, and if someone heard us tussling and decided to call the cops, I’d be the one going to jail. Not her. Best friend and all.
“Given,” I said. More like a whisper than anything, and Given leaned forward to hear me. Slid his hand across the table, his big-knuckled, slim-boned hand, toward mine. Like he wanted to support me. Like he could be flesh and blood. Like he could grab my hand and lead me out of there. Like we could go home.
Misty looked like she ate something sour. She leaned forward and sniffed another line.
“I ain’t a expert or nothing, but I’m pretty sure you ain’t supposed to be seeing nothing on this shit.”
She leaned back in her chair, grabbed her hair in a great sheaf, and tossed it over her back. Bishop loves it, she’d said of her boyfriend once. Can’t keep his hands out of it. It was one of the things she did that she was never conscious of, playing with her hair, always unaware of the ease of it. The way it caught all the light. The self-satisfied beauty of it. I hated her hair.
“Acid, yeah,” she continued. “Maybe even meth. But this? No.”
Given-not-Given frowned, mimicked her girly hair flip, and mouthed: What the fuck does she know? His left hand was still on the table. I could not reach out to it, even though everything in me wanted to do so, to feel his skin, his flesh, his dry, hard hands. When we were coming up, I couldn’t count how many times he fought for us on the bus, in school, in the neighborhood when kids taunted me about how Pop looked like a scarecrow, how Mama was a witch. How I looked just like Pop: like a burnt stick, raggedly clothed. My stomach turned like an animal in its burrow, again and again, seeking comfort and warmth before sleep. I lit a cigarette.
“No shit,” I said.
* * *
Jojo’s birthday cake doesn’t keep well: the next day, it tastes five days old instead of one. It tastes like paper paste, but I keep eating. I can’t help it. My teeth chomp and grind, even though I don’t have enough spit and my throat doesn’t want to swallow. The coke done had me chewing like this since last night. Pop’s talking to me, but all I can think about is my jaw.
“You don’t have to take them kids nowhere,” Pop says.
Most days, Pop is a younger man. Same way, most days, Jojo is stuck for me at five. I don’t look at Pop and see the years bending and creasing him: I see him with white teeth and a straight back and eyes as black and bright as his hair. I told Mama once that I thought Pop dyed it, and she rolled her eyes at me and laughed, back when she could laugh. That’s just him, she’d said. The cake is so sweet it’s almost bitter.
“I do,” I say.
I could just take Michaela, I know. It would be easier, but I know that once we get to the jail and Michael walks out, something in him would be disappointed if Jojo wasn’t there. Already Jojo looks too much like me and Pop, with his brown skin and black eyes, with the way he walks, bouncing on the balls of his feet, everything about him upright. If Jojo weren’t standing there with us, waiting for Michael, well, it wouldn’t be right.
“What about school?”
“It’s just two days, Pop.”
“It’s important, Leonie. Boy need his learning.”
“He smart enough to miss two days.”
Pop grimaces, and for the length of it I see the age in his face. The lines of it leading him inexorably down, like Mama. To infirmity, to bed, to the ground and the grave. This is coming down.
“I don’t like the idea of you with them two kids by y’all self out on the road, Leonie.”
“It’s going to be a straight trip, Pop. North and back.”
“You never know.”
I clench my mouth, speak through my teeth. My jaw aches.
“We’ll be fine.”
Michael’s been in jail three years now. Three years, two months. And ten days. They gave him five with the possibility of early release. The possibility’s real now. Present. My insides are shaking.
“You all right?” Pop asks. He’s looking at me like he looks at one of his animals when something’s wrong with it, the way he looks like when his horse limps and needs to be reshoed, or when one of his chickens starts acting funny and feral. He sees the error, and he’s dead committed to fixing it. Armor the horse’s tender hooves. Isolate the chicken. Wring its neck.
“Yeah,” I say. My head feels filled with exhaust fumes: light and hot. “Fine.”
* * *
Sometimes I think I know why I see Given-not-Given whenever I’m high. When I had my first period, Mama sat me down at the kitchen table while Pop was at work and she said: “I got something to tell you.”
“What?” I said. Mama looked at me sharp. “Yes, ma’am,” I said instead, swallowing my earlier words.
“When I was twelve, the midwife Marie-Therese came to the house to deliver my youngest sister. She was sitting a moment in the kitchen, directing me to boil water and unpacking her herbs, when she start pointing and asking me what I thought each of the bundles of dried plants did. And I looked at them, and knew, so I told her: This one for helping the afterbirth come, this one for slowing the bleeding, this one for helping the pain, this one for bringing the milk down. It was like someone was humming in my ear, telling me they purpose. Right there, she told me I had the seed of a gift. With my mama panting in the other room, Marie-Therese took her time, put her hand on my heart, and prayed to the Mothers, to Mami Wata and to Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, that I would live long enough to see whatever it was I was meant to see.”
Mama put her hand over her mouth like she’d told me something she shouldn’t have, like she could cup her words and scoop them back inside, back down her throat to sink to nothing in her stomach.
“Do you?” I asked.
“See?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” Mama said.
I wanted to ask her: What you see? But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and waited for her to talk. I might have been scared of what she would tell me if I asked her what she saw when she looked at me. Dying young? Never finding love? Or if I lived, bent by hard work and hard living? Growing old with my mouth twisted bitter at the taste of what I’d been accorded in the feast of life: mustard greens and raw persimmons, sharp with unfulfilled promise and loss?
“You might have it,” Mama said.
“Really?” I asked.
“I think it runs in the blood, like silt in river water. Builds up in bends and turns, over sunk trees.” She waved her fingers. “Rises up over the water in generations. My mama ain’t have it, but heard her talk one time that her sister, Tante Rosalie, did. That it skips from sister to child to cousin. To be seen. And used. Usually come around full-blown when you bleed for the first time.”
Mama worried her lip with her fingernails and then tapped the kitchen table.
“Marie-Therese herself could hear. Could look at a woman and hear singing: If she was pregnant, could tell her when she going to have a baby, what sex the baby going to be. Could tell her if she going to see trouble and how she could avoid it. Could look at a man and tell him if the ’shine done ate up his liver, done cured his insides like sausage, could read it in the yellow of his eyes, the shake of his hands. And something else, she said. How she might hear a multitude of voices ringing from any living thing, and how she followed the loudest voices, ’cause these was the most likely. How the clearest voices sang over the jumble of the rest. She could hear sound come from one woman’s face in the supply store: Flip slice me across the face for dancing with Ced. From the man that run the store who had a leg that sang: The blood turns black and pools, the toes rot. How a cow’s belly said: The calf is coming hooves first. How she first heard the voices when she came to puberty. And when she explained it like that, I realized I had been hearing voices, too. When I was younger, my mama complained about her stomach, how she had ulcers. They was sounding to me, saying, We eat, we eat, we eat; I was confused and kept asking her if she was hungry. Marie-Therese trained me, taught me everything she knew, and when your pop and me got married, that was my job. I was busy birthing babies and doctoring folks and making gris-gris bags for protection.” Mama rubbed her hands like she was washing them. “But it’s slow now. Don’t nobody but the old folks come to me for remedies.”
“You could deliver a baby?” I asked. The other thing she’d said, about the gris-gris bags, sat unspoken on the table between us, as matter-of-fact as a butter dish or a sugar bowl. She blinked and smiled and shook her head, all of which meant one thing: yes. In that moment, Mama became more than my mother, more than the woman who made me say my rosary before I went to sleep with the words Make sure you pray to the Mothers. She’d been doing more than mothering when she put homemade ointments on me when I broke out in rashes or gave me special teas when I was sick. That half smile hinted at the secrets of her life, all those things she’d learned and said and seen and lived, the saints and spirits she spoke to when I was too young to understand her prayers. The half smile angled to a frown when Given walked in the door.
“Son, how many times I got to ask you to take off your muddy boots when you walk in the house?”
“Sorry, Ma.” He grinned, bent to kiss her, and then stood and walked backward out the door. He was a shadow through the screen as he slipped out of his shoes by stepping on the toes. “Your brother can’t even hear what I tell him, never mind what the world sings. But you might. If you start hearing things, you tell me,” she said.
Given crouched down on the steps, beating his shoes on the wood, shaking out the mud.
* * *
“Leonie,” Pop says.
I wish he would call me something else. When I was younger he would call me girl. When we were feeding the chickens: Girl, I know you can throw that corn farther than that. When we were weeding the vegetable garden and I complained about my back hurting: You too young to know pain, girl, with that young back. When I brought report cards home with more As and Bs than Cs: You a smart one, girl. He laughed when he said it, sometimes just smiled, and sometimes said it with a plain face, but it never felt like censure. Now he never calls me by anything but my name, and every time he says it, it sounds like a slap. I throw the rest of Jojo’s birthday cake in the garbage before filling a glass with tap water and drinking it so I don’t have to look at Pop. I can feel my jaw tick every time I gulp.
“I know you want to do right by that boy and go pick him up. You do know they’ll put him on a bus, don’t you?”
“He’s my kids’ daddy, Pop. I got to go get him.”
“What about his mama and pappy? What if they want to go get him?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I place the empty glass in the sink and leave it there. Pop will complain about me not washing my dishes, but he usually only fights with me about one thing at a time.
“If they were coming to get him, he would have told me that. But he didn’t.”
“You can wait for him to call again before you decide.”
I catch myself massaging the back of my neck and stop. Everything hurts.
“No, I can’t do that, Pop.”
Pop steps away from me, looks up at the kitchen ceiling.
“You need to talk to your mama before you leave. Tell her you going.”
“Is it that serious?”
Pop grips a kitchen chair and jerks it an inch or two, straightening it, then stills.
Given-not-Given stayed with me for the rest of the night at Misty’s. He even followed me out to the car and climbed into the passenger seat, right through the door. When I pulled out of Misty’s gravel driveway into the street, Given looked straight ahead. Halfway home, on one of those dark two-lane country roads, the asphalt worn so bare the grind of the car’s tires made me think it wasn’t paved, I swerved to avoid hitting a possum. It froze and arched its back in the headlights, and I could swear I heard it hissing. When my chest eased and didn’t feel like a cushion studded with hot pins anymore, I looked back over to the passenger seat, and Given was gone.
“I have to go. We have to go.”
“Why?” Pop says. It almost sounds soft. The worry he feels makes his voice an octave lower.
“Because we his family,” I say. A line sizzles from my toes to my belly and up to the back of my head, a lick of what I felt last night. And then it goes, and I’m static, still, a depression. The corners of Pop’s mouth pull tight, and he’s a fish pulling against a hook, a line, something much bigger than him. And then it’s gone, and he blinks at me and looks away.
“He got more than one, Leonie. The kids got more than one, too,” Pop says, and then he’s walking away from me, calling Jojo.
“Boy,” he says. “Boy. Come here.”
The back door slams.
“Where you at, boy?”
It sounds like a caress, like Pop’s singing it.
* * *
“Michael’s getting out tomorrow.”
Mama pushes her palms down on the bed, shrugs her shoulders, and tries to raise her hips. She grimaces.
“He is, now?” Her voice is soft. Barely a breath.
“Yeah.”
She lets herself fall back against the bed again.
“Where’s your pop?”
“Out back with Jojo.”
“I need him.”
“I got to go to the store. I’ll get him on my way out.”
Mama scratches her scalp and lets out a breath. Her eyes close to seams.
“Who going get Michael?”
“Me.”
“And who else?”
“The kids.”
She’s looking at me again. I wish I could feel that sizzling lick, but I’ve come all the way down, and I’m left with a nothing feeling. Hollow and dry. Bereft.
“Your friend ain’t going with you?”
She’s talking about Misty. Our men are in the same penitentiary, so we ride up around once every four months. I hadn’t even thought to ask.
“I ain’t asked her.”
Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once a year or so, I see it in Pop, how he got leaner and leaner with age, the tendons in him standing out, harder and more rigid, every year. His Indian cheekbones severe. But since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that, too. Can eat a person until there’s nothing but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left. How it can eat your insides and swell you in wrong ways: Mama’s feet look like water balloons set to burst under the cover.
“You should.”
I think Mama’s trying to roll on her side, because I can see the strain in her, but in the end all she does is roll her head to the side and look at the wall.
“Turn on the fan,” she says, so I scoot Pop’s chair back, and I switch on the box fan propped in the window. The air ululates through the room, and Mama turns back to face me.
“You wondering . . . ,” she says, and stops. Her lips thin. That’s the place I see it most. Her lips, which were always so full and soft, especially when I was a girl, when she kissed my temple. My elbow. My hand. Even sometimes, after I had a bath, my toes. Now they’re nothing but differently colored skin in the sunken topography of her face.
“. . . why I ain’t fussing.”
“A little,” I say. She’s looking at her toes.
“Pop stubborn. You stubborn.”
Her breath stutters, and I realize it’s a laugh. A weak laugh.
“Y’all always going to fuss,” she says.
She closes her eyes again. Her hair is so threadbare, I can see her scalp: pale and blue-veined, hollowed and dimpled, imperfect as a potter’s bowl.
“You full grown now,” she says.
I sit, cross my arms. It makes my breasts stick out a little. I remember the horror of them coming in, budding like little rocks, when I was ten. How those fleshy knots felt like a betrayal. Like someone had lied to me about what life would be. Like Mama hadn’t told me that I would grow up. Grow into her body. Grow into her.
“You love who you love. You do what you want.”
Mama looks at me, only her eyes looking full in that moment, round as they ever were, almost hazel if I lean in close enough, water gathering at the edges. The only thing time hasn’t eaten.
“You going to go,” she says.
I know it now. I know my mother is following Given, the son who came too late and left too early. I know that my mother is dying.
* * *
Given played football with single-minded purpose his senior year, the fall before he died. Recruiters from local community and state colleges came every weekend to see his games. He was tall and well muscled, and his feet didn’t touch the ground once he got the pigskin in his hand. Even though he was serious about football, he was still social when he wasn’t at practice or on the field. Once he told Pop his teammates, White and Black, were like brothers to him. That it was like the team went to war every Friday night, came together and became something more, something greater than themselves. Pop looked down at his shoes and spat a brown stream in the dirt. Given said he was going up to the Kill to party with his White teammates, and Pop cautioned him against it: They look at you and see difference, son. Don’t matter what you see. It’s about what they do, Pop had said, and then spit the whole mess of chew out. Given had rolled his eyes, leaned into the hood of the ’77 Nova they were fixing up for him to drive, and said: All right, Pop. Looked up at me and winked. I was just grateful Pop hadn’t sent me inside, glad I could hand them tools and fetch them water and watch them work because I didn’t want to go in the house just in case Mama decided to give me one of her plant lessons. Herbs and medicine, she’d told me when I turned seven, I can teach you. I was hoping somebody, Big Henry or one of the twins, would walk down the street, emerge whole out of the green, so we’d have somebody else to talk to.
Given ignored Pop. Late that winter, in February, he decided to go hunting with the White boys up in the Kill. He saved up his money and bought a fancy hunting bow and arrow. He had bet Michael’s cousin that he could kill a buck with a bow before the boy could take one down with a rifle. Michael’s cousin was a short boy with a wandering eye who wore cowboy boots and beer T-shirts like it was a uniform; he was the kind of boy who dated and hung out with high schoolers even though he was in his early thirties. Given practiced with Pop. Shot for hours in the backyard when he should have been doing homework. Started walking straight as Pop since he spent so long drawed up tight, every line on him as taut as the bow, until he could sink an arrow into the middle of a canvas tied between two pine trees fifty yards away. He won that bet one cold overcast winter sunrise, in part because he was so good, in part because everybody else, all the boys he played football with, tussled in the locker room with, sweated almost to breaking on the stadium field with, woke up drinking beer like orange juice that morning because they figured Given would lose.
I didn’t know Michael yet; I’d seen him around school a few times, his blond hair thick and curly, always looking like it was on the verge of matting because it wasn’t ever brushed. He had ashy elbows and hands and legs. Michael didn’t go hunting that morning, because he didn’t want to get up that early, but he heard about it once his uncle came to Big Joseph in the middle of the day, the cousin sobering up, a look on his face like he smelled something bad, something like a rat dead on poison driven inside the walls by the winter cold, and the uncle saying: He shot the nigger. This fucking hothead shot the nigger for beating him. And then, because Big Joseph had been sheriff for years: What we going to do? Michael’s mama told them to call the police. Big Joseph ignored her and all of them went back up into the woods, an hour in, and found Given lying long and still in the pine needles, his blood a black puddle beneath him. Beer cans all around him from the boys throwing them and running once the cousin with the bad eye aimed and fired, once the shot rang out. How they scattered like roaches in the light. The uncle had slapped his son across the face, once and twice. You fucking idiot, he’d said. This ain’t the old days. And then his cousin had put his arms up and mumbled: He was supposed to lose, Pa. A hundred yards off, the buck lay on his side, one arrow in his neck, another in his stomach, all of him cold and hard as my brother. Their blood congealing.
Hunting accident, Big Joseph told them once they got back to the house and sat around the table, phone in hand, before the cousin’s daddy, short as his son but with synced eyes, called the police. Hunting accident, the uncle said, speaking on the phone with the light of the cold noon sun slicing through the curtains. Hunting accident, the lazy-eyed cousin said in court, his good eye fixed on Big Joseph, who sat behind the boy’s lawyer, his face still and hard as a dinner plate. But his bad eye roving to Pop and me and Mama, all in a row behind the DA, a DA who agreed to a plea deal that sentenced the cousin to three years in Parchman and two years’ probation. I wonder if Mama heard some humming from the cousin’s bad eye, some feelings of remorse in its wandering, but she looked through him, tears leaking down her face the whole time.
A year after Given died, Mama planted a tree for him. One every anniversary, she said, pain cracking her voice. If I live long enough, going to be a forest here, she said, a whispering forest. Talking about the wind and pollen and beetle rot. She stopped and put the tree in the earth and started beating the soil around the roots. I heard her through her fists. The woman that taught Marie-Therese—she could see. Old woman looked damn near White. Tante Vangie. She could see the dead. Marie-Therese ain’t never had that talent. Me neither. She dug her red fists into the dirt. I dream about it. Dream I can see Given again, walking through the door in his boots. But then I wake up. And I don’t. She started to cry then. And I know it’s there. Right on the other side of that veil. She knelt like that until her tears stopped running, and she sat up and wiped her face and smeared blood and dirt all over it.
Three years ago, I did a line and saw Given for the first time. It wasn’t my first line, but Michael had just gone to jail. I had started doing it often; every other day, I was bending over a table, sifting powder into lines, inhaling. I knew I shouldn’t have: I was pregnant. But I couldn’t help wanting to feel the coke go up my nose, shoot straight to my brain, and burn up all the sorrow and despair I felt at Michael being gone. The first time Given showed up, I was at a party in the Kill, and my brother walked through there with no bullet holes in his chest or in his neck, whole and long-limbed, like always. But not smirking. He was shirtless and red about the neck and face like he’d been running, but his chest was still as stone. Still as he must have been after Michael’s cousin shot him. I thought about Mama’s little forest, the ten trees she’d planted in an ever-widening spiral on every death day. I ground my gums sore staring at Given. I ate him with my eyes. He tried to talk to me but I couldn’t hear him, and he just got more and more frustrated. He sat on the table in front of me, right on the mirror with the coke on it. I couldn’t put my face in it again without putting it in his lap, so we sat there staring at each other, me trying not to react so I wouldn’t look crazy to my friends, who were singing along to country music, kissing sloppily in corners like teenagers, walking in zigzags with their arms linked out into the dark. Given looked at me like he did when we were little and I broke the new fishing pole Pop got him: murderous. When I came down, I almost ran out to my car. I was shaking so hard, I could hardly put my key in the ignition. Given climbed in next to me, sat in the passenger seat, and turned and looked at me with a face of stone. I quit, I said. I swear I won’t do it no more. He rode with me to the house, and I left him sitting in the passenger seat as the sun softened and lit the edges of the sky, rising. I crept into Mama’s bedroom and watched her sleep. Dusted her shrine: her rosary draped over her Virgin Mary statue in the corner, nestled among blue-gray candles, river rocks, three dried cattails, a single yam. When I saw Given-not-Given for the first time, I didn’t tell my mama nothing.
* * *
A phone call to Michael’s parents would tell me everything I need to know. I could just pick up the receiver, dial the number, and pray for Michael’s mama to answer the phone. This would be our fifth conversation, and I’d say: Hello Mrs. Ladner I don’t know if you realize but Michael’s getting out tomorrow and me and the kids and Misty is going to get him so y’all don’t need to all right ma’am bye. But I don’t want Big Joseph to answer, to hang up on me after I sit on the line and breathe into the mouthpiece and don’t say nothing while he says nothing. At least then I’d know if I call back, he’d let Mrs. Ladner pick up the phone to deal with whoever it is: prankster, bill collector, wrong number dialer, his son’s Black babymama. But I don’t want to deal with all that: to talk to Michael’s mother in halting starts and stops, or to suffer Big Joseph’s heavy silence. This is why I am riding upcountry to the Kill, my trunk packed with gallon jugs of water and baby wipes and bags of clothes and sleeping bags, to leave a note in their mailbox way down at the end of their driveway, a breathless note. What I would have said in a rush. No punctuation. The note signed: Leonie.
* * *
Michael had never spoken to me before. During lunch break at school one day, a year after Given died, Michael sat next to me on the grass, touched my arm, and said: I’m sorry my cousin is a fucking idiot. I thought that was it. That after Michael apologized, he’d walk away and never speak to me again. But he didn’t. He asked me if I wanted to go fishing with him a few weeks later. I said yes, and walked out the front door. Wasn’t no need to sneak out anymore, my parents wrapped up in their grief. Spider-bound: web-blind. The first time me and Michael went on a date, we went out to the pier off the beach with our poles, me with Given’s held out in front of me like some sort of offering. We talked about our families, about his father. He said: He old—a old head. And I knew what he meant without him having to say more. He would hate that I’m out here with you, that before the night’s through, I’m going to kiss you. Or, in fewer words: He believes in niggers. And I swallowed the fact of his father’s bile and let it pass through me, because the father was not the son, I thought. Because when I looked at Michael in the piecemeal dark underneath the gazebo at the end of the pier, I could see a shadow of Big Joseph in him; I could look at his long neck and arms, his lean, muscled torso, the fine shank of his rib cage, and see the way years would soften him to his daddy. How fat would wreathe him, and he would settle into his big frame the way a house settles into the earth underneath it. I had to remind myself: They are not the same. Michael leaned over our poles and his eyes changed color like the mountainous clouds in the sky before a big storm: darkest blue, water gray, old-summer green. He was just tall enough that when he hugged me, his chin rested on my head, and I was cupped under him. Like I belonged. Because I wanted Michael’s mouth on me, because from the first moment I saw him walking across the grass to where I sat in the shadow of the school sign, he saw me. Saw past skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.
* * *
Big Joseph and Michael’s mother live at the top of a hill in a low country house, the siding white, the shutters green. It looks big. There are two trucks parked in the driveway, new pickup trucks that catch the sun and throw it back into the air, shooting sparks off the angles. One red truck, one white. Three horses roam around the segmented fields that abut the house, and a gaggle of hens scamper across the yard, under the trucks, to disappear around the back. I pull over to the side of the road, stop feet from their mailbox; the grassy shoulder is not so wide here, bordered by a ditch at least hip-deep, so I have to get out of the car and walk, can’t just pull up next to it and slide the note inside. It’s been some days since we had rain. When I walk around to the box, the grass sounds with a dry crunch. There are no other cars on this road. They live way up in the Kill, nothing but houses and trailers in great spreading fields, off a dead-end road.
Just as I’m pulling the mailbox door down, I hear a buzz, which loudens to a humming, which loudens to a growl, and then a man is riding around the side of the house on a great lawn mower with a steel bolted deck, the kind that’s so expensive it’s as big as a tractor. It costs as much as my car. I slide the note into the mailbox. The man angles toward the north end of the pasture, turns left, and begins making his way toward the road. He must mean to cut the yard from top to bottom, riding in long, clean lines.
I reach for the handle, pull it open, and it shrieks, metal grinding against metal.
“Shit.”
He looks up. I get into the car.
The lawn mower speeds up. I turn the key. The car stutters and stalls. I turn it back, look down at the dashboard like I could make it start if I just stared long enough. Maybe if I prayed.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
I turn the key again. The engine groans and catches. The man, who I can see now is Big Joseph, has decided to abandon his plan of cutting the top of the yard first and is cutting diagonally across the yard, trying to reach me and the mailbox. And then he is pointing, and I see the sign nailed to a tree feet away from the mailbox. No Trespassing.
He accelerates.
“Goddamnit!”
I shift the car to drive, look back to check the street, and see a car advancing, a gray SUV. Fear rises to my shoulders, up my neck, a bubbling choke. I don’t know what I’m afraid of. What can he do but curse me? What can he do? I’m not in his driveway. Doesn’t the county own the sides of the road? But something about how fast he’s gunning that lawn mower, the way he points to that tree, the way that tree, a Spanish oak, reaches up and out and over the road, a multitude of dark green leaves and almost black branches, the way he’s coming at me, makes me see violence. I press the gas and swerve out into the street, the car behind me skids and its horn sounds, but I don’t care. My transmission switches gears with a high whine. I sling the car around and go faster. The gray SUV has pulled into a driveway, but the driver is waving his arm out the window, and Big Joseph is passing under the tree, stopping at the mailbox I just abandoned, lumbering off his lawn mower, striding toward the box. He is taking something off the seat of the mower, a rifle that was strapped there, something he keeps for wild pigs that root in the forest, but not for them now. For me.
When I pass him, I stick my left arm out the window. Make a fist. Raise my middle finger. I see my brother in his last photo: one taken on his eighteenth birthday, leaning back on the kitchen counter while I hold his favorite sweet potato pecan cake up to his face so he can blow his candles out; his arms are crossed on his chest, his smile white in his dark face. We are all laughing. I accelerate so quickly my tires spin and burn rubber, throwing up clouds of smoke. I hope Big Joseph has an asthma attack. I hope he chokes on it.