Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [98]
“No!” Daddy yells. “We’re going to stay here!”
“What if the water keeps coming?” Randall asks. “Better for us to take that chance than stay here and drown!”
Junior’s teeth are sealed together, his lips peeled back. His eyes are blasted open. As Randall picks his way down the roof toward the branch, Junior looks back. Randall braces an arm across his chest, holds Junior’s arm.
“Just like the first time we swam in the pit, Junior! Hold on!” Randall crouches at the edge of the roof with Skeetah, both of them hunched like birds, feathers ruffled against the bad wind, both of them holding their bundles closely. Skeetah leaps.
He catches the closest ricocheting branch, lands half in and half out of the water. China yelps and begins to struggle, but Skeetah grips her harder with one arm and pulls himself down the branch until it bows to the water. And then he leaps again, for the next whipping branch. He jumps and grabs. I reshoulder my bucket, pick my way toward the edge. The wind flattens me down to the roof. Randall leaps, lands on the same close branch with his stomach, his arms iron again, binding Junior to him. Both Skeetah and Randall scramble along the half-naked branches of the oak with one arm and both legs, using the limbs to pull themselves and their burdens until they reach water, when they kick their feet, scoot back up the branch, and leap for the next whipping limb. Randall stops, braces himself on the branch, looks back.
“Come on!” he yells.
I grip the tin with my toes, my fingers, crouched on my haunches at the edge of the roof. Readjust the bucket. My heart is a wounded bird, beating its wings against the cage of my ribs. I don’t think I can breathe.
“Jump,” Daddy says.
I lean out and leap.
The hurricane enfolds me in its hand. I glide. I land on the thickest branch, the wood gouging me, the bucket clanging, unable to breathe, my eyes tearing up. I scramble at the wood, pull myself along the branch, my feet in and out of the water, the steel handle to the bucket digging into my shoulder, my living burden already so heavy. The bare bones of Mother Lizbeth’s house are so far away; I do not know if I can carry it that far. I inch to the end of the branch where it plunges beneath the water to join the trunk of the tree, and I dig in with my hands and feet. Clutch. Jump. Catch the next branch, where Randall is waiting. The branches we are grasping and grabbing shudder, twist in the water and air. The little branches whip like clotheslines come unpinned. It is an animal, alive, struggling against the water, trying to shove us off its back.
I look back to see Daddy hurtling through the air. He hits the branch so hard with his torso that his body jackknifes and his face is almost in the water. He is shocked still; he’s knocked the wind out of himself. He looks up at us, blinks. Whispers it, but we cannot hear it, only see it. Go.
Skeetah has worked his way to the middle of the tree, which buds out of the water, and he is swimming and thrusting from branch to branch. We follow him through the whipping branches, the undulating water. Through plastic bags that skim the surface of the flood like birds. Through the clothesline that knots the branches like fishing net. Through our clothes, swept from the flooded house. Through the plywood, ripped from the windows, pried away by the teeth of the storm. Through the rain that comes down in curtains, sluicing against Daddy’s lazily spinning truck, the detritus, until we cluster at the end of the farthest-reaching branch, the one closest to the grandparents’ house. We clutch each other and the swaying branches. China is pawing at Skeetah’s breast, snapping her head back and forth. She is jerking away from him, and he clutches her with one white-tipped hand. The bucket feels like it’s tearing the skin on my shoulder, feels like I’m carrying three grown dogs instead of three puppies. Where barely the top of the tree had been visible at our house, the branches