Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

I used to kneel in the water up to my neck and watch her when we ran into her and her folks swimming at the river. She was golden as those candles, so perfect that I wanted to hate her. And I did, some. But sometimes I would say her name when I was walking along, talking to myself, and I liked the way it sounded, the way it rolled around my tongue like a mouthful of ice cream. Citronella.

My belly is solid as a squash, because there is this baby inside me, small as Manny’s eyelash in mid-sex on my cheek. And this baby will grow to a fingertip on my hip, a hand on the bowl of my back, an arm over my shoulder, if it survives.

When she died, Mama told me that she had gone away, and then I wondered where she went. Because everyone else was crying, 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.

Whenever she would walk me through the store or through a crowd when we were out in public, holding the back of my neck with her hand, I’d feel the scar and see those pelicans. Up close, their beaks were etched with dark like the barnacles on a ship’s hull, the same color as Mama’s hand, and they were sharp as knives. They didn’t like us swimming close to them. Her hand was special, her own, one. Mama.

“I need your help, Esch.” I have never seen one part of Randall soften when he’s awake, not the long line of his arms, his legs like steel posts, his face, always changing and making and saving and shooting things. But now, just for a breath, his face goes soft, and he looks like the baby pictures Mama took of him, pictures of a Randall I’d never seen before. “Please, Esch.”

Her hands were small and quick as hummingbirds, and just as light. She made potted meat sandwiches, and when one of her brothers brought over a small generator, she hooked the refrigerator up to it from an extension cord along with a small fan, and this she put in the window in the living room, and pointed it at Daddy’s face, which was gray and twisted.

“You wrong,” Big Henry says. He looks away when he says it, out to the gray Gulf. There is a car out there in the shallows of the water. The top gleams red. “This baby got a daddy, Esch.” He reaches out his big soft hand, soft as the bottom of his feet probably, and helps me stand. “This baby got plenty daddies.” I smile with a tightening of my cheek. My eyes feel wet. I swallow salt. “Don’t forget you always got me,” Big Henry says.