Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [84]
Randall shakes his head and walks around the washing machine, the lawn mower, the old broken RV like he is finding his way through a maze. The chickens cluck at him, ruffle and settle their feathers against the pushing air as he passes. I am hungry.
“We could use more eyes,” I say. “Mama taught you how to do it, too, and you know Junior don’t know how to spot them yet.”
“In a minute.” Skeetah shrugs. China, at his knee, lets her head fall to the side, tongue out, as if it is the first time she’s ever seen me. Her ears fold over like napkins.
I sigh, don’t even know if he can hear it over the wind, and follow Randall into the detritus of the yard to hunt. The wind pushes against me so hard that I imagine it is the wind Medea called up after she slew her brother, to push the boat so quickly that the wake was a bloody froth; I barely have the energy to walk, to push back. On mornings like this when I am hungry, the nausea is always worse. There is the sound of China’s scrambling against Skeetah, of the tin shed shaking, of him laughing and China barking, but I leave them to it behind me and keep my eyes on the ground.
The chickens have made their own plans for the storm; they have packed their eggs away, hidden them well. As Randall and Junior and I spread out underneath the oaks and the pines, hunting, Randall crouches down to Junior, and he tells him how Mama taught us to find eggs. Look but don’t look, she said. They’ll find you. You gotta wander and they’ll come. She’d leaned over like Randall, her strong hand soft on the back of my neck, steadying me like a dog. They’re usually brown and have some feathers stuck to them, she’d say, pointing. The eggs look that way because of the mama. Whatever color the mama is, that’s what color the egg is. Her lips were pink, and when she leaned over like that I could smell baby powder drifting from the front of her dress, see the mole-marked skin of her chest, the soft fall of her breasts down into her bra. Like me and you, she said. Like me and you. See? She smiled at me, and her eyelashes met her eyelashes like a Venus flytrap. Her thick arm would rub against mine, and I would follow her pointing, and there would be a whole treasure of eggs, nestled one against the other: cream and white and brown and dark brown and speckled so that they almost looked black. The hens would lurk, murmuring. The cock, he always running off being a bully, she said. But the mama, the mama always here. See?
The pines shrug in a sky that covers like a wet T-shirt. Below, Randall fills Junior’s shirt with eggs that they gather from the most difficult places, places that only Junior, with his pin fingers, can reach: in the elbows of the dump truck’s engine, between the bottom of an old stinking refrigerator and the earth, wedged into the coils of a mattress chewed bare by animals. I search and find nothing.
The eggs in the front of Junior’s shirt are warm; they pull the front of the neck down to a V, and where his collarbones meet, it looks like two marbles against the skin. I set the eggs in the black pebbled pot that Mama used to cook gumbo in, count them as they roll and settle. Randall holds the sides of Junior’s shirt because Junior seems to be bending to the roll of the eggs. Twenty-four. There are twenty-four eggs to boil, to save, to eat. They are something.
When Manny appears, there is no sun to reach out its hand, to stroke him like a dog, to make him blaze and shine. He does not burn, but still there is something about him that glows, like a fire that is dying and the heat lives in the ashes, plain. I see him first because I am sitting on the steps. Junior’s and Randall’s backs are to him as they place the eggs in the pot. When Manny sees me looking at him, he catches on the secret mid-walk, like it’s a untied shoestring, and his eyes go wide, whiter in his face. But he keeps walking, becoming larger and more real in the gloom and wind and shaking green of the day until his footsteps are louder than the insects, which quiet one by one as if he is the coming storm. Where do they go?