Free Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward Page B

sit on her lap and play with her hair, gray and straight and strong as wire. I would help her take her medicines: two handfuls of pills she had to take every day, by handing them to her one by one. She would feed me sweet figs, still warm as the day, we picked from a tree behind the house. She’d laugh at me, said I ate figs careful as a bird; her smile was black and toothless. And sometimes she was sharp, didn’t want to be hugged, wanted to sit in her chair on the porch and not be bothered. 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.
    I bend and slap away all the fleas. In the kitchen, Skeetah is panting and pulling in the corner, his whole body straining. Where yesterday he had a short ’fro, today his head is shaved clean, and is a shade lighter than the rest of him. His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.
    â€œJunior told me you was in here. What you doing?”
    â€œTrying to get this linoleum.”
    â€œFor what?”
    Skeetah was trying to peel it from the corner. A big piece flapped over in front of him like a dog ear.
    â€œIt’s in the dirt.” He pulled. I expected he would grunt, but no sound came out. His muscles jumped like popped gum. “The parvo. It’s in the dirt in the shed.”
    â€œSo what’s Mother Lizbeth’s floor going to do?”
    â€œIt’s going to cover the dirt.” He pulled, a loud pop sounded, and the tile gave. He threw it back and it landed in a pile with four or five others.
    â€œYou giving China a floor?” Daddy had started on our house once he and Mama got married. Hearing the stories about him and Papa Joseph when I was growing up, I always thought it was something a man did for a woman when they married: build her something to live in.
    â€œNo, Esch.” Skeetah slices at the underside of the next tile with one of Daddy’s rusty box cutters. “I’m saving them puppies. China’s strong and old enough to where the parvo won’t kill her.” He yanked. “They’re money.”
    â€œWhy’d you cut your hair?”
    â€œI got tired of it.” Skeetah shrugs, pulls. “What you doing today?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œYou want to go somewhere with me?”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œThrough the woods.” Skeetah gives another yank, and the next tile comes loose. He throws it wide. “You gotta run.” I’ve always been a fast runner. When the boys and I used to race when we were smaller, I was always in the top three. I beat Randall a few times, and almost beat Skeet once or twice. “I need your help.”
    â€œOkay.” He needs me. Before China had these puppies, I’d go days without seeing him. Days before I’d be walking through the woods looking for eggs or trying to see if I could find Randall and Manny, or walking to the Pit to swim, and I’d stumble on Skeetah, training China to attack and bite and lock on with an old bike tire or a rope. They’d play tug of war, send up clouds of dust and leave dry rivers in the pine needles. Or China’d nap while Skeetah ate razor blades, sliding them between the pink sleeve of his cheek and tongue and back out of his lips so fast I thought I was imagining it. I asked him why he ate them once, and he grinned and said, Why should China be the only one with teeth ?
    â€œYeah.” I say.
    The sound of Daddy’s tractor growls in the distance, comes closer. Skeetah picks up the tiles and begins pitching them through a window at the back of the house, where he knows that Daddy won’t come because the back door has been grown over with wisteria and kudzu for years. The front door is the only way in.