Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [30]
The path to the road is less thick. Here the trees are mostly the kind that lose their leaves in the winter, but they are green and full with summer. The wind makes them clap as we pass. The road is narrow, and from what I can see of the house, we only have around three-fourths of the field between us and where we started. A vein of oyster shells runs down the middle of the road, but the rest is paved with small rocks that look like they come from the river. Sand rises up in little hills at the road’s edges, and Skeetah and I kneel next to them as he squints down the drive, his right hand up to me. Wait, his lacy knuckles say.
Insects sizzle and answer us. Heat. A little further down the drive, a snake sleeps. Skeetah waves me forward, and we run across the road. Our feet over the stones are light as skipped rocks.
The drive is endless, winks out in the distance where the trees on either side meet in the middle. For a year, we were very unlucky, and St. Catherine schools changed our bus route so that we were picked up at 6:30 A.M. and for the next hour we rode up and out of the black Bois that we knew and into the white Bois that we didn’t that spread out and upcountry, past churches and one-room stores selling cigarettes and hot fries, chips and cold drinks in glass bottles and penny candy, the kind of stores that have one gas tank out front with the writing scratched off. Randall would sleep with his head on the glass, Skeetah would do homework, and I would study all the other houses in other lonely fields; the trailers, the long low brick homes, small wood shacks that looked slapped together, that couldn’t be bigger than two rooms. And all the kids we picked up were white: broad-shouldered, thick boys with wiry hair on their lips and little girls with red cheeks and eyes watery blue, their faces scrubbed rough. I wonder if they have their own Skeetahs and Esches crawling around the edges of their fields, like ants under the floorboards marching in line toward sugar left open in the cabinet.
The house is plain from all angles: its white is faded to tan by the sun, and all the windows are shut with white curtains drawn over them. It’s a blind house with closed eyes. There’s a raised concrete porch running across the front of the house, and some rocking chairs, painted bright blue, the kind of bright blue I’ve seen on the lizards that live in the seams of our walls, that crouch still on the front porch. The barn is unpainted and tall, and the doors are shut. The wood is old and dark, like the kind of wood Papa Joseph used to build Mother Lizbeth’s house. It looks similiar, as if all the walls are so old they’re about to peel away from each other at the edges.
“Shhhh,” Skeetah breathes, and I don’t know if he’s telling me to be quiet or calling my name. But he is standing still, so I stop behind him. He points. There, in the cove of trees where we first viewed the house and barn, in the cove of trees that leads to the Pit—someone is there.
Skeetah moves with his back curved, his fingers touching the ground as we scoot forward from shadow to shadow. We hug the trees. It’s not until we’re laying on our sides, peeping over a red dirt hill, that I see things I think I know, like the rubber band swing of an arm, a careful sway and settle of limbs. Randall and Big Henry. And then a piping. Junior.
“Who house is that?”
“Some white people’s, Junior,” Randall answers.
“You sure you saw them heading this way?” Big Henry asks.
“Soon as me and Junior jumped the ditch to the yard, we saw them running off back in here. Fast.”
“How you know they came here?”
“I don’t,” Randall breathed. “But this all