Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

He curled around China like a fingernail around flesh.

Big Henry’s air-conditioning brushes across my face and chest, light as cotton candy, and melts like the heat is a tongue.

He is wearing a white shirt with white buttons, and the blood has made a beauty contestant sash across his chest.

dogs so skinny their bones looked like a school of fish darting around under their skin.

I lay for so long that when I raise my head from my arm, my hair has marked cursive I can’t read into my skin. The floor tilts like the bottom of a dark boat.

The squirrels like the oaks best, run along their black, hard branches highway overpasses. These are their solid houses; they will withstand a storm, if she comes. The smell of baked pine is strong.

the sky burst to color above us, and then the sun sank through the trees so that the color ran out of the sky like water out of a drain and left the sky bleached white to navy to dark.

Bats whirl through the air above us, plucking insects from the sky while they endlessly flutter like black fall leaves.

The screen door has long disappeared, and the front door hangs by one hinge. I have to push the wood, which flakes away to dust in my hands, and squeeze sideways through cobwebs tangled with leaves to get into the house. The house is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of living salvaged over the years.

I clung like a monkey to Mama, my legs and arms wrapped around her softness, and I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain. And then Mama died, and there was no one left for me to hold on to.

When Skeetah isn’t smiling, the corners of his lips turn down. Now that he’s mad, his chin looks hard, and his mouth is a straight line.

Into the woods to the east of us, about a mile through pine and oaks so big and old their arms have grown to rest in the dirt,

“Let’s go.” We run out the door, scatter the chickens before us, and they whirl about like crape myrtle petals blown loose by summer rain. Brown and rust red and white, the only sound the swish of their wings. China interrupts, barks.

China is white as the sand that will become a pearl, Skeetah black as an oyster, but they stand as one before these boys who do not know what it means to love a dog the way that Skeetah does.

Randall tugs Daddy up, gets his chest in the air, but Daddy’s legs drag, and Daddy hangs there limp as sheets on a clothesline before they’ve been stretched and pinned.

The wire that had seemed to line his bones before the accident, before the hurricane, that made him so tall when he stood next to Mama, has softened to string.

suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.

Randall is the last to start walking, and he glances back again and again at the gym that was there but isn’t.

A house sits in the middle of the track. It is yellow, and its windows have been blasted open by the storm, but its curtains remain. They flutter weakly. We climb around it, look east and west along the track, and see many houses lining it: it is a steel necklace with wooden beads.

all the storm left are boards and siding stacked like pancakes flung on plates of concrete slabs.

The hurricane has left a few steel beams, which stick up like stray hairs, from concrete foundations.

tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.