Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [54]
Skeetah releases China from her chain, and then loops the metal around and around his forearm and shoulder until it is a solid silver wing. China pads to her corner, flops down all at once, instead of her usual graceful sitting first, the gentle roll onto her flank, her side. She lays her head on the linoleum that Skeetah must have swept clean, because she does not raise dust. Skeetah walks toward the door, lays the chain on the oil drum, arranges it just so, lingers over the links. He cannot bear to look at her.
“You think that did it?” Big Henry asks.
“I don’t know,” Skeetah says.
“Maybe she just tired,” I say to them, because I hope the words will pull Skeetah’s brow smooth, untangle the yarn-knotted furrow of it. Hope that they will make him stop looking at his hands. Big Henry shifts from foot to foot, leans on the door jamb. When he moves, the locusts and cicadas and grasshoppers sound loud, disgruntled.
“You ran her for a while.”
“Yeah.” Skeetah plays with the links the way he used to play with liver, with oatmeal, with beets from the can shaped like tubes of cranberry sauce. This was before he grew older, before his knees gained muscle and his shoulders knotted and he began shoveling his food, lima beans or mushrooms or chitterlings, as if he didn’t care what he ate anymore.
“And she still nursing. She probably just tired.”
Daddy’s tractor growls from the darkness, bullies the insects. It rolls over branches, discarded plastic garbage cans, detached fenders. They crack and break. Daddy leaves splinters. Randall and Junior follow in its wake, stumbling through the detritus. Skeetah shakes his head.
“He’s going to have them out there all gotdamn night.” Skeetah grabs China’s bowl from where he has secreted it high on a shelf; it is so high he has to stand on his toes. Randall or Big Henry could have grabbed it without even reaching. Daddy leaves the tractor running and swings one leg over and is down. Skeetah pours China’s food, sets it on top of the drum. “Hold on.”
Big Henry moves to let Skeetah walk out of the doorway, and then he smiles at me. The moon shines like a fluorescent bulb behind his head. A piping wind blows, and where my hair escapes and touches my face, it feels like a spider’s web unanchored, adrift. Randall climbs up the tractor and sits. Junior hoists himself up and begins scaling the metal.
“What you doing?” Daddy asks Junior.
“Helping Randall.”
“No you’re not. Get down.”
“I won’t be in the way.”
“Get down.”
“Please.”
“I said no.”
Randall scoots forward on the seat, motions behind him.
“He can sit behind me. He won’t be in the way.”
Junior is leaning back to please Daddy, to make him think that he is on the verge of obeying, of jumping off, but still he grips the seat with his hands, and he does not step down.
“Please, Daddy.”
Daddy clears his throat and spits. His T-shirt has a gaping hole at the neck, and it is uneven at the hem, as if someone has been pulling at it.
“Hurry up,” Daddy says.
Daddy waves Junior up to the tractor, and Junior climbs up, slides behind Randall, wraps his arms around Randall’s waist with the expectant look of a child on a carousel ride. Skeetah bangs out of the back door of the house with a cup of something in his hand. Moths flit about his head like mussed ash. He walks by and I smell bacon drippings.
“She has to eat,” Skeetah says as he dribbles the drippings, the color of pine sap, over China’s dried food. China looks at him, then away. He slides the bowl toward her, but she ignores him. His eyes are a darkness in his face. “Come on.”
China grimaces at him, a showing of tooth and red gum. The puppies are twitching toward her over the linoleum, as if they smell the milk through her breasts, through the pink meat of her. Her nipples look like chewed-up gum.
“Come on.” Daddy waves the tractor forward. “This the corner. Right here.”
“All right,” Skeetah breathes,