Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [28]
“Let’s go.”
We run out the door, scatter the chickens before us, and they whirl about like crape myrtle petals blown loose by summer rain. Brown and rust red and white, the only sound the swish of their wings. China interrupts, barks.
Away from the Pit, the pine trees reach skyward, their green-needled tops stand perfectly still. Once in a while, they shiver in the breeze that moves across their tops. They seem to nod to something that I cannot hear, and I wonder if it is the hum of José out in the Gulf, singing to himself. The breeze doesn’t touch us down here. Down here, the air is thick and hot. The trees are so dense that there’s only a little undergrowth, and the bushes fight for their bright spots on the hard-packed, shadowy earth. There are birds, like yesterday, but these are small and brown, so small that they could fit in the middle of my hand or in the maw of China’s mouth. They are following us. As we walk through the wood on an unseen trail, the tiny birds fly from tree to tree, chattering sharply with each other, keeping pace with us. In the dense air, the oaks stand apart from the piney clusters: solemn, immovable. Spanish moss hangs from their arms, gray as an old king’s beard. Skeetah grabs my hand, and I almost jump away from him, surprised at the feel of it around mine, his fingers hard, the small calluses on his palm from China’s leash now dry and scratchy as old bread. He pulls and we run through a corridor of pines, oaks, birch, birds. I can’t help it. I lean back against his pull, and I laugh.
We fall into a pace. My face feels tight and hot, and the air coming into my nose feels like water. I am swimming through the air. My body does what it was made to do: it moves. Skeetah cannot leave me. I am his equal. Skeetah sprints a little faster, and when the slack in my arm is still there because I am still at his side, he looks back at me quickly and smiles widely. There, silver. He has a razor in his cheek. Is this how Medea ran with her brother, hand in hand, away from their father’s hold to join the Argonauts? Did every step feel like the running leap a bird takes before flight? When we come to the edge of the clearing, he lets my hand go. I sink to my knees, lean forward, and bury my face in the pine straw, breathing in the baked sap of the fallen leaves, feeling the sweat dripping off of me everywhere. I need to pee; there is a wet weight that makes me think of the baby. I find a bush. When I come back, Skeetah is flipping the razor over his scarred knuckles, his shirt in his hand. He wipes his pale head, drying stinging sweat. I don’t want to bare my stomach, so I don’t wipe my face with the hem of my heavy shirt. Beyond the barbed wire and the lolling cows, the barn and house sit, small in the distance. The house must have been added on to over the years because it is uneven: on one end of the house there is a lean-to shed, and with the roof of the sloping front porch, it looks like a ship manned by rowers on each side. We are here.
“You got to keep watch.”
“Where you going?”
“I’m going to see if I can get into the barn. See that little window on the side? The one right above that trailer?”
“Yeah.”
“I bet you they don’t even lock them.”
“Why do you want to go in a barn?”
“They got cow wormer in there. I know it.”
“You can’t give your dogs cow wormer.”
“Yes, I can. Rico was talking about it when his dog and China was mating. Say that’s the best kind of wormer to give a dog. Make them a