Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

Randall crouches down to Junior, and he tells him how Mama taught us to find eggs. Look but don’t look, she said. They’ll find you. You gotta wander and they’ll come.

But he keeps walking, becoming larger and more real in the gloom and wind and shaking green of the day until his footsteps are louder than the insects, which quiet one by one as if he is the coming storm.

Randall bends, places the last egg in the pot, puts the pot in my arms, and talks to Manny but looks at me. “Yeah,” he says. “Can you start these?”

“The baby will tell,” I scream. “It’ll tell!” But the wind grabs my voice up and snatches it out and over the pines, and drops it there to die.

And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do.

We pick our way across the field, kicking at cow droppings and mushrooms. The grass seems denser, thicker.

Skeetah moves to leave Daddy’s room and comes into the light from the light bulb in the hallway like a swimmer surfacing from a dark swimming hole: Manny swimming up from the bottom of the black hole, eating light, splashing out, being born.

I chose a documentary on cheetahs.

Trees reach out their arms and beat their limbs against the house.

Skeetah kneels before her, takes her face in his hands, and smoothes her ears back so that her eyes are slits and she grins and her skin pulls tight and her head could be a naked skull.

Randall is waking up slowly. He stretches, talks through his yawn.

The bayou is where we had thought the water would come from, the reason we thought we were safe, but Katrina surprised everyone with her uncompromising strength, her forcefulness, the way she lingered; she made things happen that had never happened before.

Junior is scrambling onto Randall’s back again, and Randall loops and knots his arms under Junior’s legs.