Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

“It’s the weather,” Misty says. “One day it’s freezing, the next it’s in the eighties. Damn Mississippi spring.”

If we had another baby, we could get it right.

Where the road meets the Gulf, it skirts the beach for miles. I wish it ran straight over the water, like the pictures of the bridge I’ve seen that links the Florida Keys to the coast, wish it was an endless concrete plank that ran out over the stormy blue water of the world to circle the globe, so I could lie like this forever, feeling the fine hair on his arm, my kids silenced, not even there, his fingers on my arm drawing circles and lines that I decipher, him writing his name on me, claiming me.

It’s afternoon. The clouds are gone, the sky a great wash of blue, soft white light everywhere, turning Kayla gold, turning me red. Everything else eating light while Richie shrugs it off. The trees clatter.

It was a small mercy that I never surfaced in the old Parchman, the one where Riv and I lived. I only visited that Parchman in memory, memories that rose like bubbles of decay to the surface of a swamp.

“I done did everything I could. Brewed all the herbs and medicines. Opened myself to the mystère. For Saint Jude, for Marie Laveau, for Loko. But they can’t enter. The body won’t let them,”

“Shush. I don’t know if it’s something I did. Or if it’s something that’s in Leonie. But she ain’t got the mothering instinct. I knew when you was little and we was out shopping, and she bought herself something to eat and ate it right in front of you, and you was sitting there crying hungry. I knew then.”

feeling I want to throw up all the food that I ever ate.

Riv hugs them even when he’s not in the same room with them, even when he’s not touching them. The boy, Jojo, and the girl, Kayla. Riv holds them close.

I would give anything to taste bread made with such care:

Whenever Pop done told me his and Richie’s story, he talked in circles. Telling me the beginning over and over again. Telling me the middle over and over again. Circling the end like a big black buzzard angles around dead animals, possums or armadillos or wild pigs or hit deer, bloating and turning sour in the Mississippi heat.

says “Shhh” like she remembers the sound of the water in Leonie’s womb, the sound of all water, and now she sings it.