Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [79]
“She gave it to him!” Junior wails. His voice is a siren. “And it wasn’t no good for him no more!” He sobs. “I wanted it!” He wails. “Her!”
Skeetah laughs when we tell him what Junior did.
“He’s dead wild.”
“He’s bad.”
“Did y’all at least find it? He going to be up in there trying to stash it somewhere.”
“I did,” I say. It was on my bed, and I’d picked it up with a handful of toilet paper and washed it off in the sink. The gold was dull and old, an almost silvery pale, and nothing about it looked like it had ever touched Mama’s skin. “It was covered in blood.” I’d thrown up after I cleaned it.
Junior is hiccupping, bent over double into the top of the toolbox on the back of Daddy’s truck, picking out nails. His sobbing hiccups echo up and out of the metal, loudly. He drops the nails he finds on the truck bed, and they ping.
“What’d you do with it?” asks Skeetah.
“I put it in my top drawer,” I say.
Skeetah laughs. His teeth are milky, his smile wide.
“We should look for the fingers. That’s free protein.” He laughs. “We could feed them to China.”
“Shut up. That is so nasty,” I say.
“Don’t know what’s wrong with him.” Randall shakes his head.
Skeetah laughs as he walks into the shed, pulling the wood behind him, but we can still hear him chuckling and talking to himself minutes later. When Big Henry drives up to pick Skeetah up, Skeetah is tugging the tin back over the doorway of the shed, smiling into his shirt. Big Henry parks and walks up slowly, a cold drink in his hand, and I’m surprised it’s not a beer. I nod at Big Henry but stand with my arms folded in the truck bed behind Junior, who is still hiccupping and dripping snot into the toolbox.
“What’s wrong with him?” Big Henry asks, and I glance over to see that he is looking at me, asking me. He’s shaved the stray hair and goatee off his face, so it is smooth and lighter than the rest of him, and looks soft with the sweat making it shine. I look at Junior’s narrow, bony back; he drops another nail. Ping.
“Come on,” Skeetah laughs, and they leave.
Cover the windows.
I make Junior hold the nails in his shirt and stand next to Randall and me as we try to match board size up to windows, drag them around the house, set them down where they will be nailed. Randall has the one hammer with a full handle we could find. It is my job to hold the wood in place at the bottom, at least as far as I can reach, while Randall drives the nails in. Junior is breathing in shudders. He is trying to swallow his lip each time. There is always glass showing after we nail the boards, an eye’s worth or a hand’s worth, no matter how we switch the wooden pieces and shuffle. Randall concentrates, but he still smashes two of his fingers, skipping around in tight circles like he is running a drill, cussing under his breath. Junior breaks his hiccup breathing to giggle then. So do I. The clay has turned to dust for want of rain, and when Randall nails, the board shivers and drizzles red down on my head from where the dirt is caked.
Bring the jugs of water in.
The glass jugs me and Junior fished from under the house are sitting in the kitchen in clusters. They look like tadpole sacs, huddled together, sticking to each other for company: cloudy at the heart. When Junior and I brought them in, they were dusty, opaque. I rinse a dishrag for Junior and one for me, and we sit on the floor in the kitchen and we scrub. This is a hurricane eclipse, the wood over the windows, the inside of the house so dark that the white of Junior’s shirt is the brightest thing. We sit in the square of light left by the open door, and we wipe the rags pink. This is what we will drink. This is what we will use to cook. Randall is trying to fill the holes in the wood, but he can’t. There isn’t enough wood. Light cuts through the house, slinky and thin as electricity lines from the chinks of exposed glass. Daddy gets up out of bed, cussing and banging into things, and stumbles to the bathroom. He throws up.