Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [88]
The boards of the house are more even, more secure. They are not a patch-up of boards of different sizes like our house; there is no glass left peeking through cracks, only plywood closed smooth and tight as eyelids.
“Here.” Randall tries to slide his finger between the board and the wall, but only his fingernail fits. “You try,” he says, but my fingers will not go in either. I don’t even think Junior’s could. “We should’ve brought a crowbar.”
I shake my head.
“Fuck!” Randall yells. He punches the plywood and it dints, dimples in the middle, and there is the sound of breaking wood and breaking glass. When he pulls his fist back, he’s split the skin, smashed it, and he leaves blood on the board. He holds his hand. His face looks like how I imagine the glass behind the board looks; hard and lined, each piece sliding away from the other where they split, black in the cracks. His eyes look wet. “Shit.” The blood pools in the valleys between his knuckles, rolls to waterfall between his fingers. He looks at me. “I couldn’t do it even if I did have a crowbar.”
“You ain’t Skeet,” I say. The taste of my tears is like raw oysters.
“We have to, Esch.”
“It’s too thick.”
“We have to try.”
Randall knees his chest like he is putting on pants and then he kicks his heel hard into the center of the plywood where he dented it. The glass behind it shatters. He kicks again and the wood splits; it sounds like a shot. Randall stops, and we both look around, scared, but there is no old man swinging a gun like an axe, no pink-dressed woman, just the cows lowing in the barn in the dark, the wind rustling past the trees, the air so wet and hot it could be rain.
“One more time,” Randall says, and then he kicks again, all of his muscle straining against the hot day, the sealed gingerbread house, and the board cracks in two but will not fall because of the nails, and Randall is crouching on the ground, clutching his bad knee.
“The wrong knee,” he says, and blows on his kneecap like he’s scraped it bloody and he is trying to blow away the pain and grit, like Mama did to our scrapes when we were younger. If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles. “Look inside.”
I put my eye to the slit and there is darkness and the gauzy blow of curtains. Under the darkness, there is the empty smell of potpourri and Pine-Sol. Two fingers can fit through the crack, nothing more.
“There’s nothing there. It smells clean. Probably took everything when they evacuated.”
Randall rubs the skin around and below his knee.
“She looked like the type of woman that wouldn’t leave nothing to spoil.”
Randall laughs, but it is dry and scrapes past his throat like brown leaves scratched along the ground by wind.
“Come on,” Randall says.
Randall clutches his hand to his chest when he walks, hopping on his bad knee. I stop at the edge of the clearing and look back at the barn, the cows safe inside it. I can see them brushing against one another in the rank hay dark, their wet noses turned up toward the ceiling, wondering where the blue has gone, the bitter green grass, their bird familiars. How they’d crave the touch of a wing.
On the walk back, it is weird to see Randall walking without swinging his long loose arms. The wood is a sleeping animal: still empty. It is all wrong. I hear the rustling before Randall does, and I have to reach out to stop him, since he has been watching his bad knee.
“Look.”
It is China. She drops something rust-colored and then shoves her nose in it from side to side like a screwdriver. Then she points with her head and dives into what she has dropped, rolling in it; she moves like smoke, the pink pads of her feet waving in the