Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [27]
“Quick as I can.”
When Skeetah steps, his sneaker bears down on my thigh and the rubber grooves feel like cleats. It hurts. I can’t help but let a little sound come out of my throat, but then I close it off so that I can’t even breathe. He stands and grabs a ceiling beam behind the plaster. My leg is shaking.
“Right there,” Daddy says.
When Skeetah pushes off my leg and pulls with his arms, it feels like his foot is grinding into my skin. Another noise surprises its way out of my throat, and I breathe hard, ashamed. When we were little and we would fall and skin a knee and cry, Daddy would roll his eyes, tell us to stop. Stop. I straighten up and rub my leg.
“All right,” Daddy says. Daddy throws up the hammer and Skeetah moves over to the side of the attic where I can’t see and starts wrenching. I huddle over my leg, rubbing at the marks Skeetah’s left in my skin. The first board comes away fast. I look up to see Skeetah flinging it through the hole in the ceiling, and it lands too near Daddy’s feet. I jump out of the way. “Watch out, boy.”
Daddy hands me the plywood and motions toward the door. The other piece of plywood cracks and comes away, and I look back to see Skeetah sending it sailing through the ceiling like a paper airplane, directly for Daddy, who ducks.
“Shit!”
“Sorry,” Skeetah says as he jumps down, landing like a cat. The board has clipped Daddy, bounced off the wall to clatter to the floor. Skeetah is smiling.
“Gotdamnit, boy.”
“I said I was sorry.” Skeetah’s not smiling anymore, but when I push my board through the door, I smile into my shirt, because he has that same look on his face as he did the day he mastered the razor eating, and I know it’s for me.
Into the woods to the east of us, about a mile through pine and oaks so big and old their arms have grown to rest in the dirt, there is a pasture full of grazing cows. A wooden and barbed-wire fence rims the pasture. In the middle sits a big brown barn, and next to it, a small white house with a high sloped tin roof and small windows. White people live there.
Skeetah found the place one day by accident while we were playing an all-day game of chase in the woods, running in circles, hiding and seeking for hours in teams. He stumbled into a clearing where the pines had been cut brutally away so that stumps dotted the field beyond the fence like chairs that no one would ever sit on. Egrets picked their way through the grass, attentive and showy as fussy girlfriends at the cows’ sides. When I came crashing out of the woods, I forgot to touch Skeetah, startled at the way the sky opened up at the field, the way the land looked wrong. There was too much blue. A pickup truck slid soundlessly out of a shadow in a gap in the woods, which I figured must’ve been their driveway, and a cow lowed. An older white man and woman got out of the truck when it parked, waving away the cloud of dust they’d kicked up. Off in the distance, we heard a dog bark.
“Come on, Skeet,” I said.
He stood a moment longer, squinting at the house, his head to one side.
“I’ma leave you,” I said, and I turned to trot off back into the soft underside of the woods, the green reach of the trees. It wasn’t until I was deep in the gloom of the forest that I heard him running so quickly to catch up with me that I looked back scared, thinking the white people who lived in that house on the edge of the black heart of Bois Sauvage had come after us, but saw only Skeet jogging, his face so calm. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
This is where Skeetah says we are going when he comes into my room, changed out of the jeans he was wearing in Mother Lizbeth’s house into a T-shirt the color of pine needles and dark brown Dickies that have holes in both of the knees. He doesn’t have any socks on under his tennis shoes.
“You got to change,” he says. “Wear something green or brown or black. Don’t wear nothing white or tan.”
“Why not?”
“You got to blend in.” Skeetah leaves to wait in the hallway, and I dig through my drawers until I find a black T-shirt