Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [0]
The First Day: Birth in a Bare-Bulb Place
The Second Day: Hidden Eggs
The Third Day: Sickness in the Dirt
The Fourth Day: Worth Stealing
The Fifth Day: Salvage the Bones
The Sixth Day: A Steady Hand
The Seventh Day: Game Dogs and Game Men
The Eighth Day: Make Them Know
The Ninth Day: Hurricane Eclipse
The Tenth Day: In the Endless Eye
The Eleventh Day: Katrina
The Twelfth Day: Alive
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
For my brother, Joshua Adam Dedeaux, who leads while I follow.
See now that I, even I am he, and there is no god with me; I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, neither is there any can deliver out of my hand.
—DEUTERONOMY 32:39
For though I’m small, I know many things,
And my body is an endless eye
Through which, unfortunately, I see everything.
—GLORIA FUERTES, “NOW”
We on our backs staring at the stars above,
Talking about what we going to be when we grow up,
I said what you wanna be? She said, “Alive.”
—OUTKAST, “DA ART OF STORYTELLIN’ (PART I),” AQUEMINI
THE FIRST DAY: BIRTH IN A BARE-BULB PLACE
China’s turned on herself. If I didn’t know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way. Won’t let nobody touch her but Skeet. When she was a big-headed pit bull puppy, she stole all the shoes in the house, all our black tennis shoes Mama bought because they hide dirt and hold up until they’re beaten soft. Only Mama’s forgotten sandals, thin-heeled and tinted pink with so much red mud seeped into them, looked different. China hid them all under furniture, behind the toilet, stacked them in piles and slept on them. When the dog was old enough to run and trip down the steps on her own, she took the shoes outside, put them in shallow ditches under the house. She’d stand rigid as a pine when we tried to take them away from her. Now China is giving like she once took away, bestowing where she once stole. She is birthing puppies.
What China is doing is nothing like what Mama did when she had my youngest brother, Junior. Mama gave birth in the house she bore all of us in, here in this gap in the woods her father cleared and built on that we now call the Pit. Me, the only girl and the youngest at eight, was of no help, although Daddy said she told him she didn’t need any help. Daddy said that Randall and Skeetah and me came fast, that Mama had all of us in her bed, under her own bare burning bulb, so when it was time for Junior, she thought she could do the same. It didn’t work that way. Mama squatted, screamed toward the end. Junior came out purple and blue as a hydrangea: Mama’s last flower. She touched Junior just like that when Daddy held him over her: lightly with her fingertips, like she was afraid she’d knock the pollen from him, spoil the bloom. She said she didn’t want to go to the hospital. Daddy dragged her from the bed to his truck, trailing her blood, and we never saw her again.
What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. China’s sweating and the boys are gleaming, and I can see Daddy through the window of the shed, his face shining like the flash of a fish under the water when the sun hit. It’s quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isn’t. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn.
“Get out the doorway. You making her nervous.” Skeetah is Daddy’s copy: dark, short, and lean. His body knotted with ropy muscles. He is the second child, sixteen, but he is the first for China. She only has eyes for him.
“She ain’t studying us,” Randall says. He is the oldest, seventeen. Taller than Daddy, but just as dark. He has narrow shoulders and eyes that look like they want to jump out of his head. People at school think he’s a nerd, but when he’s on the basketball court, he moves like a rabbit, all quick grace and long haunches. When Daddy is hunting, I always cheer for the rabbit.
“She need room to breathe.” Skeetah’s hands