Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [90]
Skeetah moves to leave Daddy’s room and comes into the light from the lighbulb in the hallway like a swimmer surfacing from a dark swimming hole: Manny swimming up from the bottom of the black hole, eating light, splashing out, being born.
“Everything deserve to live,” Skeetah says. “And her and the puppies going to live.”
“Skeet,” Randall says, and Skeet and China stop in their walk, all three of them meeting in the doorway, China’s ears flat on her head, tail up, still and tense as Skeetah.
“What?” Skeetah barks. They are on either side of a crooked mirror, one short, the other tall, both muscle and tendon, tension, wounded knuckles, hands curling.
“I ain’t sleeping in the room with her.” Randall reaches. His good hand grabs.
“Stop!” Daddy’s voice is hard, loud. He slumps like it was all he had in him to breathe it out. “No. No fighting.”
I have to lean to hear him. He sways, punches his good arm in the mattress to hold himself up.
“It’s a category five,” Daddy says. “Woman on the news say it’s a category five.”
“Oh,” I say, but it is more a breath than a word. Daddy has faced a category 5, but we’re too young to remember the last category 5 hurricane that hit the coast: Camille, almost forty years ago. But Mama told us stories about that one.
“She stay in the room, Skeet. If I see her once out, I’m kicking her out in the middle of the storm, you hear? Randall, make do.”
Daddy’s arm buckles.
“I need some soup, Esch.”
Skeetah folds his arms, cocks his head at Randall like a dog. Randall shakes his.
“We usually sleep in the living room anyway, Randall,” I say, whispering, remembering how tender he was when he found me in the ditch.
“Esch,” Daddy breathes. He lays back on his side, facing the door.
“Yeah, Daddy,” Randall says. “I’ll get it.” He brushes by, stiff-armed, and leaves me and Skeetah standing in the hallway. The gas hisses on in the kitchen.
“Everything need a chance, Esch,” Skeet says, and he and China turn into his doorway. China sprawls on the floor, ears pointed to the ceiling again. Her tail thumps, and she smiles. The skin on either side of her scabbed breast pulls tight. Skeetah takes the puppies out one by one, cupping their round bellies, and lays them on the floor, where their noses start twitching and they begin jerking toward China. She looks at them like she looked at the chickens earlier. She licks. “Everything,” Skeetah says and looks through me.
THE ELEVENTH DAY: KATRINA
When mama first explained to me what a hurricane was, I thought that all the animals ran away, that they fled the storms before they came, that they put their noses to the wind days before and knew. That maybe they stuck their tongues out, pink and warm, to taste, to make sure. That the deer looked at their companions and leapt. That the foxes chattered to themselves, rolled their shoulders, and started off. And maybe the bigger animals do. But now I think that other animals, like the squirrels and the rabbits, don’t do that at all. Maybe the small don’t run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us. The squirrels pack feathers, pack pine straw, pack shed fur and acorns from the oaks in the bowels of their trees, line them so that they are buried deep in the trunks, so safe they can hardly hear the storm cracking around them. The rabbits stand in profile, shank to shank, smell that storm smell that hits them all at once like a loud sound, and they tunnel down through the red clay and the sand, down until the earth turns black and cold, down past all the roots, until they have dug great halls so deep that they sit right above the underground reservoirs we tap into with our wells, and during the hurricane, they