Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [93]
“Come on,” Skeetah says, and I follow him to the back of the house, to his and Randall’s room, which seems smaller than it is, and close and hot and red in the light of a smaller kerosene lamp that Skeet must have found in the shed. He shuts the door behind us after eyeing Daddy’s open door. The wind shrieks. Trees reach out their arms and beat their limbs against the house. Skeet sits on his bed next to China, who sprawls and lifts her head to look at me lazily, and who licks her nose and mouth in one swipe. I climb onto Randall’s bed, hug my knees. The puppies’ bucket is quiet.
“You scared?”
“No,” Skeetah says. He rubs a hand from the nape of China’s neck over her shoulder, her torso, her thigh. She lets her head roll back and licks again.
“I am,” I say. “I never heard the wind sound like that.”
“We ain’t even on the bay. We back far enough up in the trees to be all right. All these Batistes been living up here all these years through all these hurricanes and they been all right. I’m telling you.”
“Remember when Mama told us that the wind sounded like that when Camille hit?” I squeeze tighter. “Elaine wasn’t nothing like this.”
“Yeah, I remember.” Skeetah rubs his fingers under China’s chin, and it is like he is coaxing something from her because she leans toward him and grins, tries to kiss him. “I can remember her saying it.” He stops rubbing China, leans forward to put his elbows on his knees, rubs his hands together, looks away. “But I can’t remember her voice,” he says. “I know the exact words she said, can see us sitting there by her lap, but all I can hear is my voice saying it, not hers.”
I want to say that I know her voice. I want to open my mouth and have her voice slide out of me like an impression, to speak Mama alive for him as I hear her. But I can’t.
“At least we got the memory,” I say. “Junior don’t have nothing.”
“You remember the last thing she said to you?”
When Mama was birthing Junior, she put her chin down into her chest. She panted and moaned. The ends of her moans squeaked, sounded like bad brakes grinding when a car stops. She never screamed, though. Skeetah and Randall and I were sneaking, standing on an old air-conditioning unit outside her and Daddy’s window, and after she pushed Junior out, once he started crying, she let her head fall to the side, her eyes like mirrors, and she was looking at us, and I thought she would yell at us to get down out of the window, to stop being nosy. But she didn’t. She saw us. She blinked slow. The skin above her nose cracked and she bit her lip. She shook her head then, raised her chin to the ceiling like an animal on the slaughter stump, like I’ve seen Daddy and Papa Joseph hold pigs before the knife, and closed her eyes. She started crying then, her hands holding her belly below her deflated stomach, soft as a punctured kickball. I had never seen her cry. But she hadn’t said anything, even after Daddy called some of their friends, Tilda and Mr. Joe, to the house to watch us, even after he carried her and Junior out to the truck and she slumped against the window, watching us as Daddy drove away. Shaking her head. Maybe that meant no. Or Don’t worry—I’m coming back. Or I’m sorry. Or Don’t do it. Don’t become the woman in this bed, Esch, she could have been saying. But I have.
“No,” I say. “I don’t remember.”
“I do,” Skeetah says, and he props his chin on his fists. “She told us she loved us when she got into the truck. And then she told us to be good. To look after each other.”
“I don’t remember that.” I think Skeetah is imagining it.
“She did.” Skeetah sits up, leans back in the bed again, and lays a still hand on China’s neck. She sighs. “You look like her. You know that?”
“No.”
“You do. You not as big as her, but in the face. Something about your lips and eyes. The older you get the more you do.”
I don’t know what to say, so I half grimace, and I shake my head. But Mama, Mama always here. See? I miss her so badly I have to swallow salt, imagine it running like lemon juice into the fresh cut that is my chest,