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Salvage the Bones: A Novel
Salvage the Bones: A Novel
Salvage the Bones: A Novel
Ebook327 pages5 hours

Salvage the Bones: A Novel

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Winner of the National Book Award

Jesmyn Ward, two-time National Book Award winner and author of Sing, Unburied, Sing, delivers a gritty but tender novel about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.


A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.

As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family--motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce--pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 30, 2011
ISBN9781608196272
Salvage the Bones: A Novel
Author

Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. From 2008-2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010-2011 academic year. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living Award. She lives in Mississippi.

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Rating: 3.9793341303099883 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Outstanding. A fine, fine novel filled with compassion, filial love and dogfighting.

    There were a couple of set pieces in here that took my breath away - running through the woods after stealing from the neighbors, everything around Randall's basketball game, THE dogfight and then the arrival of Katrina. But the in between bits are equally stunning - Esch's body awareness, Skeetah's stubbornness and Junior's fragility, and the giant ache of motherlessness that affects them all and binds them to each other. Beautiful.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Grimy and heartfelt and grim and sweet, this is a really great book. The final section is memorably eerie, not unlike The Road - only based on our real, very recent past.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book gathers poetry and intensity as the hurricane approaches
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was such a hard book to read -- the writing was gorgeous, but the story is heartbreaking and will pull at you. I had to put it down several times. I'm very glad I read it though.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reading this book felt like riding waves. The protagonist/narrator has a heart clenched tight around her family. Even as everything around her fails and lets her down, they are knit into her very existence. The narrow days are matching steadily toward a storm, literal and figurative, and she is coping every way she knows how. This book is a snapshot, an imagining, a fight, a lesson, an admonishment. It asks questions that demand answers: What is family when it hurts you? What is government worth when it ignores pain? When destitution and poverty are the black inheritance (a forcible inheritance by us whites, I add), how can all of us hope to build a grounded future?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I would not have picked up Salvage the Bones if it wasn't assigned for school, but I'm glad I read it. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to and got really involved. It has a sort of addicting quality to it.From the back: A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch’s father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn’t much to save. Lately, Esch can’t keep down what food she gets; she’s fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull’s new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child’s play and short on parenting.Jesmyn Ward is a very good writer, especially when it comes to communicating emotions. On the other hand, Salvage the Bones can be vague and confusing at points.Reading this, I felt a lot of sympathy for Esch. She's a poor fourteen year old girl with a dead mother and low self worth. Yes, she makes some mistakes, but I think they are understandable given her circumstances. From the beginning it's clear that Esch is very intelligent - she talks about how much her English class means to her, and she's constantly referring to Jason and Medea. It's a pleasure to see her find her strength by the end of the book.I think this should be fairly obvious, but if you're going to enjoy Salvage the Bones you need to suspend moral judgement. A girl in a our small discussion group spent a lot of time being angry at Esch for becoming pregnant, and she really didn't get anything out of the book. There's also a dog fighting sequence which was pretty rough to read.Salvage the Bones takes place over twelve days, with the threat of the impending hurricane looming over everything. This helped give it a sense of urgency and foreboding that worked very well for it.I think Salvage the Bones dealt a lot with the idea of motherhood. Esch is obviously about to become a mother, and her brother's dog has just given birth. What I got from the book is the idea that motherhood makes you stronger.This was an unexpected find for me, and I don't really know who I would recommend it to.Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, the radio warns of an impending hurricane, but the Batiste children aren’t worried. Only their hard-drinking, widowed father is concerned that this hurricane will be worse than all of the others his family has experienced.As Daddy prepares for the hurricane, Esch, our fifteen-year-old narrator, struggles with her discovery that she is pregnant; Skeeter takes care of his prized pit bull, China, and her newborn puppies; Randall practices for an important basketball game; and Junior, the youngest, is just gets into everyone else’s business.Beginning ten days before Hurricane Katrina and ending the day after, Salvage the Bones is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of Southern poverty and one of the greatest natural disasters to hit the U.S. Esh is a young girl surrounded by brothers and male friends, and in an environment that doesn’t empower her, she finds it easier to sleep with the boys who are after her than to resist. As a result, she becomes pregnant by Skeeter’s best friend, Manny, who uses her for sex but doesn’t have any real feelings for her. However, being a love-starved 15-year-old, Esch is in love with him and desperately wishes for him to care about her.I found Esch to be a very believable character. She is more in love with the idea of Manny than with his actual character — who hasn’t been there? She also has this naive hope that the man who is screwing her will change and love her, which is frustrating to read but relatable. Perhaps my favorite thing about her is her love of Greek mythology. She is assigned to read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, a book that I devoured in high school, and is obsessed with the Medea story. She keeps trying to draw parallels between herself and this mythological woman, and it felt so realistic.Jesmyn Ward also does a great job of portraying the life of this poor family and the culture of their community. It’s not a culture I’m familiar with, and I was impressed by Ward’s ability to write about the Batiste’s poverty in a neutral way; it is simply a fact of their existence, and they get along the best they can.However, her descriptions of dog fighting may be problematic for some readers. She portrays dog fighting not as abusive but as an accepted part of the culture, and there is one long description of dog fighting that is very graphic and violent. It was hard to read, and I was revolted by the attitude the boys have that fighting their dogs is a matter of macho honor.Ward’s writing is gorgeous, full of ice and fire and lush descriptions. Her descriptions of the woods are lovely, her writing about the fierce power of the hurricane is glorious, and Esch’s observations of Katrina’s aftermath are heartbreakingly powerful. However, as much as I love rich prose, the metaphors were sometimes a little too thick on the ground — and how often does she really need to describe the sweat glinting off her characters’ bodies?I would definitely recommend reading Salvage the Bones. The writing is beautiful, lyrical, and rhythmic, and Esh makes an intriguing narrator. It’s also an interesting look into another culture and has interesting themes of family loyalty and the meaning of motherhood.More book reviews at Books Speak Volumes.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Salvage the Bones is about a family living in Mississippi in 2005 as Katrina is getting ready to hit. The focus is on Esch being pregnant, her brothers, dog fighting, her alcoholic that sometimes there father and the impending hurricane in the Gulf. The kids mother died giving birth to the youngest child and they have pretty much been left to fend for themselves making them a close knit family. I went in expecting the book to be more about the family preparing, fighting and surviving the hurricane and it isn’t, it was still a good read, but I was looking forward to that based on the description. Some scenes are hard to read, like puppies being born, dog fights, and detailed injuries. They are hard to read because they are well written to the point it makes you cringe. With that said, I did not like the dog fighting parts. There was some glamorizing of it and that annoyed me. I’m giving it three stars because it was an interesting read, but I think there was just too much going on to make it an emotional read. It was almost there, but not quite.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Esch, 15 years old, lives with her father & three brothers near the gulf coastal region of Mississippi. Her family is poor, she & her siblings are motherless, and her father drinks moderately. Each family member is dealing with their own personal struggles, and in the meantime, Hurricane Katrina is on its way in. This was not an easy read for me. The story is fairly dark and depressing and it includes a few somewhat disturbing scenes. I would describe it as very raw and visceral. I thought it was well written, but I often found myself just not enjoying the story. Perhaps it was just outside my white-bread comfort zone and if that is indeed the case, I may need to start broadening my reading horizons a bit more. I will be anxious to discuss this at our book club's next meeting, and I do still want to read Jesmyn Ward's more recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Set in rural Mississippi just 10 days before Katrina strikes. Randall (basketball may be his way out), Skeetah (raising & fighting pit bulls may be his), Esch (female narrator - discovers she's pregnant, she has no way out), Junior ( 9 yrs younger - their mother died during childbirth), Daddy (alcoholic). Sad story, but with a ray of hope at the end.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fifteen-year-old Esch lives with her three brothers and their dad on the gulf coast of Mississippi. It's late August, 2005. Over the course of eleven days Esch spends time with her brothers and her brothers' friends and her dad. Her oldest brother is trying to get a basketball scholarship, her middle brother's champion fighting pitbull has newborn puppies, and her youngest brother generally gets into trouble. And at the end of eleven days is Hurricane Katrina.This book was easier to get through than I expected, and I mostly enjoyed reading it. There was a lot in the middle of the book that was about dog fighting that I did not care for at all. But most of the book is about a family who loves each other basically, and realistically. They are neither too rough (not even the alcoholic dad) nor inspirationally saccharine. This is not so much a book about what happened during Hurricane Katrina, or what life was like afterward, or what recovery was like. It's about the lives people had before, and what they had to lose. While the plot didn't especially speak to me, I loved reading about this family and I would gladly do so again.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This has had such outstanding reviews, but it is grim to the core. What some call beautiful writing, in places, I was just confused, and at other times, caught by the beauty of the writing style. Esch is the only girl in a motherless family in rural Mississippi. Her life is overshadowed by the needs and wants of all the men around her. Her brother, Randall, is a promising basketball player; her brother Skeetch is consumed by caring for an fighting a white pit bull named China; her younger brother, Junior, is needy for love and attention. Fifteen year old Esch is taken advantage of by all the men in her life but especially by Manny, a neighbor, and fellow dog fighter. Esch is raped repeatedly but is tolerant of it as she so desperately wants Manny's love. This is a story of a totally dysfunctional family, but one that still hangs together especially when Hurricane Katrina hits. Their home is destroyed along with the community where they live. Some of the scenes of the rape in a public bathroom and the dog fight in the woods are difficult to read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A moving and interesting story. I will be interested in reading this writer as she matures - I thought the writing had a lot of wonderful elements, but there were at least three similes per page which got very tiring, very quickly.

    I think this would be a great book for middle schoolers to learn about katrina. And also similes. Although the teen pregnancy and dog fighting might keep it off many teacher's shelves
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Why do I keep finding books that contain animal cruelty, which is exactly the last thing I want to read about? This novel, in the main about Hurricane Katrina, also features dog fighting, which is so primitive a 'sport' that only small-membered men would ever want to participate, and teenage pregnancy, thrown in for good measure. I thought I was reading about Depression era Mississippi, so backwards are the characters, until the storm they're preparing for is named as Katrina (2005). The author lived through the devastation, so the atmosphere and sense of danger are the strongest elements of the story. I felt sorriest for China the dog and her puppies, though.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have no problem recommending this National Book Award winner to anyone. It takes place in a small Mississippi Gulf Coast town over the 10 or so days as Hurricane Katrina is building in the coast. The characters are real and endearing. Esch, the 14 year old narrator, is the surrogate mother for her three brothers (Their mother died giving birth to the youngest brother; the two other brothers are older than Esch). She is grappling with the fact that she may be pregnant. Her oldest brother Randall is a high school basketball star who lacks the means to go to an important basketball camp. Skeetah has a pitbull named China, who has just given birth to a litter of puppies. Despite his clearly conveyed deep love for his dog, Skeetah endangers her in brutal pitbull dog fights. He hopes to win the funds to allow Randall to attend the basketball camp. The youngest child, Junior, just wants to make sure that he doesn't miss out on anything. The hurricane remains in the background for much of the book. The children are vaguely aware that it is out there, but are not at all apprehensive. Ward, however, skillfully builds the tension each day, to the point that I began to wonder how she was ever going to pull off the drama of the storm itself. Needless to say, she did.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's just so good.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a great novel, the best I've read so far this year. I wasn't hooked immediately; the novel is told from Esch's point of view and it took me a while to settle into her voice. Once I did, though, it made for a really compelling read. The chapter that describes Hurricane Katrina is one of the finest pieces of writing I've read in some time; it's haunting, and lovely, and perfect.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I can see why this book won the National Book Award, you could feel the depths of the poverty and the wrath of the storm. Although the Hurricane is only two chapters you could sense a storm brewing up to the point of the actual hurricane. The dog fight scenes are horrific and hard to understand how any honor can be found in this activity is beyond me and it is clear that it is done illegally. The storm is not the only force of destruction in this story but it is the force that allows for a chance of new beginnings.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I finished this one last night, and I'm still digesting it, most likely will be for some time. This is a beautiful, brutal, heartbreaking portrait of rural, poverty-stricken Mississippi during the time leading up to, during, and following Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane itself is in the background for most of the book, which is really how she was until she came ashore with full force and destroyed the Mississippi gulf coast. The book is more about family, love, and loss, with a young 14-year-old pregnant girl at the center. It's not an easy read, with punches to the gut coming all too frequently, but it's beautiful and not to be missed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Bloody hell. This is a tough, tough book to read - a poor black family in rural Louisiana somewhere scraping lives together in the shadow of the looming Hurricane Katrina. The writing is stunning - building dread and sadness throughout, bringing out the tough bonds forged between siblings and completely occupying the voice of Eche, the 14 year old narrator. Like the storm itself, Salvage the Bones builds and builds, slowly upping the tension, before exploding into a finale as ragged, breathless and overwhelming as the hurricane.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Powerful and poetic. Jesmyn Ward creates a vivid world of Southern poverty in the days leading up to and through Hurricane Katrina as seen through the eyes of a motherless fifteen-year-old African-American who has just found out she's pregnant. This is a story about the meaning of family and community.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I had a hard time reading this book. I was waiting for Katrina to hit the coast but found the descriptions of the dog raising and dog fighting to be brutal subject matter and tough to get through. Despite my squeamishness, it's a powerful coming of age story about a pregnant teenager who discovers her own power and voice in a world that's been ravaged by poverty, addiction and epic destruction by hurricane Katrina in the bayou of Louisiana
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Really good story but also quite depressing. This is the kind of book everyone should read but no one will re-read.This is the story of Esch and her family, dirt poor, motherless and living in rural Mississippi right before Hurricane Katrina hits. I rarely cry but this made me tear up. It is disturbing knowing that people live like this in our own country. I really hated the dog fighting scenes, though. Wondering about the fate of China, her brother's beloved pit bull, an her puppies, was just as nail-biting as the rest of the book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    wonderful and moving
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was surprised at how much I struggled to get through this book. I found the writing very hard to follow. Sometimes the writing was simple and sounded like something the protagonist would say or think and at other times it was straight out of a literary magazine. The author has an MFA and this certainly shows in her writing. I often felt like I was reading a required book for school. I did find the characters believable and found the writing about the hurricane itself to be quite descriptive but neither of those were enough to carry the story as a whole.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book left me stunned!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A superb novel, grim and desperate but also beautiful. Published for adults, but a story I can see some older teen readers appreciating. An example of Ward's stunning prose:

    "I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and 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."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I quite liked this NBA-winner. Ward is writing within a well-established genre and knows it, but she uses it well and honors her predecessors. What makes it such a moving, universal story to me is that essentially it's about vulnerability: of poverty, of gender, of hope and striving, of love itself. Beautifully told.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Beautiful and scary (not boo scary, more like tragic scary). A favorite of 2012.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The voice of a young girl age 15 in charge of caring for her alcoholic father and siblings because of the early death of her mother. She struggles to understand, make sense of and prepare for Hurricane Katerina and deal with her own pregnancy. She is intertwined with her brother's pit dog having a litter and losing some. Her own understanding of life is limited yet a part of her knows life is different in some places. She brings out controversial subjects of racism, alcoholic ism, teen pregnancy and more.
    At times the character's voice seemed a bit mature for this little one, alas her life had been difficult. Minor editorial issues but a good read.A fiction writing based on actual events of Katrina.

Book preview

Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward

Ward

The First Day: Birth in a Bare-Bulb Place

China’s turned on herself. If I didn’t know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way. Won’t let nobody touch her but Skeet. When she was a big-headed pit bull puppy, she stole all the shoes in the house, all our black tennis shoes Mama bought because they hide dirt and hold up until they’re beaten soft. Only Mama’s forgotten sandals, thin-heeled and tinted pink with so much red mud seeped into them, looked different. China hid them all under furniture, behind the toilet, stacked them in piles and slept on them. When the dog was old enough to run and trip down the steps on her own, she took the shoes outside, put them in shallow ditches under the house. She’d stand rigid as a pine when we tried to take them away from her. Now China is giving like she once took away, bestowing where she once stole. She is birthing puppies.

What China is doing is nothing like what Mama did when she had my youngest brother, Junior. Mama gave birth in the house she bore all of us in, here in this gap in the woods her father cleared and built on that we now call the Pit. Me, the only girl and the youngest at eight, was of no help, although Daddy said she told him she didn’t need any help. Daddy said that Randall and Skeetah and me came fast, that Mama had all of us in her bed, under her own bare burning bulb, so when it was time for Junior, she thought she could do the same. It didn’t work that way. Mama squatted, screamed toward the end. Junior came out purple and blue as a hydrangea: Mama’s last flower. She touched Junior just like that when Daddy held him over her: lightly with her fingertips, like she was afraid she’d knock the pollen from him, spoil the bloom. She said she didn’t want to go to the hospital. Daddy dragged her from the bed to his truck, trailing her blood, and we never saw her again.

What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. China’s sweating and the boys are gleaming, and I can see Daddy through the window of the shed, his face shining like the flash of a fish under the water when the sun hit. It’s quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isn’t. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn.

Get out the doorway. You making her nervous. Skeetah is Daddy’s copy: dark, short, and lean. His body knotted with ropy muscles. He is the second child, sixteen, but he is the first for China. She only has eyes for him.

She ain’t studying us, Randall says. He is the oldest, seventeen. Taller than Daddy, but just as dark. He has narrow shoulders and eyes that look like they want to jump out of his head. People at school think he’s a nerd, but when he’s on the basketball court, he moves like a rabbit, all quick grace and long haunches. When Daddy is hunting, I always cheer for the rabbit.

She need room to breathe. Skeetah’s hands slide over her fur, and he leans in to listen to her belly. She gotta relax.

Ain’t nothing about her relaxed. Randall is standing at the side of the open doorway, holding the sheet that Skeetah has nailed up for a door. For the past week, Skeetah has been sleeping in the shed, waiting for the birth. Every night, I waited until he cut the light off, until I knew he was asleep, and I walked out of the back door to the shed, stood where I am standing now, to check on him. Every time, I found him asleep, his chest to her back. He curled around China like a fingernail around flesh.

I want to see. Junior is hugging Randall’s legs, leaning in to see but without the courage to stick in more than his nose. China usually ignores the rest of us, and Junior usually ignores her. But he is seven, and he is curious. When the boy from Germaine brought his male pit bull to the Pit to mate with China three months ago, Junior squatted on an oil drum above the makeshift kennel, an old disconnected truck bed dug in the earth with chicken wire stretched over it, and watched. When the dogs got stuck, he circled his face with his arms, but still refused to move when I yelled at him to go in the house. He sucked on his arm and played with the dangling skin of his ear, like he does when he watches television, or before he falls to sleep. I asked him once why he does it, and all he would say is that it sounds like water.

Skeetah ignores Junior because he is focused on China like a man focuses on a woman when he feels that she is his, which China is. Randall doesn’t say anything but stretches his hand across the door to block Junior from entering.

No, Junior. I put out my leg to complete the gate barring Junior from the dog, from the yellow string of mucus pooling to a puddle on the floor under China’s rear.

Let him see, Daddy says. He old enough to know about that. His is a voice in the darkness, orbiting the shed. He has a hammer in one hand, a clutch of nails in another. China hates him. I relax, but Randall doesn’t move and neither does Junior. Daddy spins away from us like a comet into the darkness. There is the sound of hammer hitting metal.

He makes her tense, Skeetah says.

Maybe you need to help her push, I say. Sometime I think that is what killed Mama. I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.

She don’t need no help pushing.

And China doesn’t. Her sides ripple. She snarls, her mouth a black line. Her eyes are red; the mucus runs pink. Everything about China tenses and there are a million marbles under her skin, and then she seems to be turning herself inside out. At her opening, I see a purplish red bulb. China is blooming.

If one of Daddy’s drinking buddies had asked what he’s doing tonight, he would’ve told them he’s fixing up for the hurricane. It’s summer, and when it’s summer, there’s always a hurricane coming or leaving here. Each pushes its way through the flat Gulf to the twenty-six-mile manmade Mississippi beach, where they knock against the old summer mansions with their slave galleys turned guesthouses before running over the bayou, through the pines, to lose wind, drip rain, and die in the north. Most don’t even hit us head-on anymore; most turn right to Florida or take a left for Texas, brush past and glance off us like a shirtsleeve. We ain’t had one come straight for us in years, time enough to forget how many jugs of water we need to fill, how many cans of sardines and potted meat we should stock, how many tubs of water we need. But on the radio that Daddy keeps playing in his parked truck, I heard them talking about it earlier today. How the forecasters said the tenth tropical depression had just dissipated in the Gulf but another one seems to be forming around Puerto Rico.

So today Daddy woke me up by hitting the wall outside me and Junior’s room.

Wake up! We got work to do.

Junior rolled over in his bed and curled into the wall. I sat up long enough to make Daddy think I was going to get up, and then I lay back down and drifted off. When I woke up two hours later, Daddy’s radio was running in his truck. Junior’s bed was empty, his blanket on the floor.

Junior, get the rest of them shine jugs.

Daddy, ain’t none under the house.

Outside the window, Daddy jabbed at the belly of the house with his can of beer. Junior tugged his shorts. Daddy gestured again, and Junior squatted and slithered under the house. The underside of the house didn’t scare him like it had always scared me when I was little. Junior disappeared between the cinder blocks holding up the house for afternoons, and would only come out when Skeetah threatened to send China under there after him. I asked Junior one time what he did under there, and all he would say is that he played. I imagined him digging sleeping holes like a dog would, laying on his back in the sandy red dirt and listening to our feet slide and push across floorboards.

Junior had a good arm, and bottles and cans rolled out from under the house like pool balls. They stopped when they hit the rusted-over cow bath Daddy had salvaged from the junkyard where he scraps metal. He’d brought it home for Junior’s birthday last year and told him to use it as a swimming pool.

Shoot, Randall said. He was sitting on a chair under his homemade basketball goal, a rim he’d stolen from the county park and screwed into the trunk of a dead pine tree.

Ain’t nothing hit us in years. They don’t come this way no more. When I was little, they was always hitting us. It was Manny. I stood at the edge of the bedroom window, not wanting him to see me. Manny threw a basketball from hand to hand. Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly.

You act like you ancient—you only two years older than me. Like I don’t remember how they used to be, Randall said as he caught the rebound and passed it back to Manny.

If anything hit us this summer, it’s going to blow down a few branches. News don’t know what they talking about. Manny had black curly hair, black eyes, and white teeth, and his skin was the color of fresh-cut wood at the heart of a pine tree. Everytime somebody in Bois Sauvage get arrested, they always get the story wrong.

"That’s journalists. Weatherman’s a scientist," Randall said.

He ain’t shit. From where I was, Manny looked like he was blushing, but I knew his face had broken out, tinged him red, and that the rest of it was the scar on his face.

Oh, one’s coming all right. Daddy wiped his hand along the side of his truck.

Manny rolled his eyes and jerked his thumb at Daddy. He shot. Randall caught the ball and held it.

There ain’t even a tropical depression yet, Randall said to Daddy, and you got Junior bowling with shine bottles.

Randall was right. Daddy usually filled a few jugs of water. Canned goods was the only kind of groceries Daddy knew how to make, so we were never short on Vienna sausages and potted meat. We ate Top Ramen every day: soupy, added hot dogs, drained the juice so it was spicy pasta; dry, it tasted like crackers. The last time we’d had a bad storm hit head-on, Mama was alive; after the storm, she’d barbecued all the meat left in the silent freezer so it wouldn’t spoil, and Skeetah ate so many hot sausage links he got sick. Randall and I had fought over the last pork chop, and Mama had pulled us apart while Daddy laughed about it, saying: She can hold her own. Told you she was going to be a little scrappy scrawny thing—built just like you.

This year’s different, Daddy said as he sat on the back of his trunk. For a moment he looked not-drunk. News is right: every week it’s a new storm. Ain’t never been this bad. Manny shot again, and Randall chased the ball.

Makes my bones hurt, Daddy said. I can feel them coming.

I pulled my hair back in a ponytail. It was my one good thing, my odd thing, like a Doberman come out white: corkscrew curls, black, limp when wet but full as fistfuls of frayed rope when dry. Mama used to let me run around with it down, said it was some throwback trait, and since I got it, I might as well enjoy it. But I looked in the mirror and knew the rest of me wasn’t so remarkable: wide nose, dark skin, Mama’s slim, short frame with all the curves folded in so that I looked square. I changed my shirt and listened to them talking outside. The walls, thin and uninsulated, peeling from each other at the seams, made me feel like Manny could see me before I even stepped outside. Our high school English teacher, Ms. Dedeaux, gives us reading every summer. After my ninth-grade year, we read As I Lay Dying, and I made an A because I answered the hardest question right: Why does the young boy think his mother is a fish? This summer, after tenth grade, we are reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. The chapter I finished reading day before yesterday is called Eight Brief Tales of Lovers, and it leads into the story of Jason and the Argonauts. I wondered if Medea felt this way before she walked out to meet Jason for the first time, like a hard wind come through her and set her to shaking. The insects singing as they ring the red dirt yard, the bouncing ball, Daddy’s blues coming from his truck radio, they all called me out the door.

China buries her face between her paws with her tail end in the air before the last push for the first puppy. She looks like she wants to flip over into a headstand, and I want to laugh, but I don’t. Blood oozes from her, and Skeetah crouches even closer to help her. China yanks her head up, and her eyes snap open along with her teeth.

Careful! Randall says. Skeetah has startled her. He lays his hands on her and she rises. I went to my daddy’s Methodist church one time with my mama, even though she raised us Catholic, and this is what China moves like; like she has caught the ghost, like the holiest voice moves through her instead of Skeetah’s. I wonder if her body feels like it is in the grip of one giant hand that wrings her empty.

I see it! Junior squeals.

The first puppy is big. It opens her and slides out in a stream of pink slime. Skeetah catches it, places it to the side on a pile of thin, ripped towels he has prepared. He wipes it.

Orange, like his daddy, Skeetah says. This one’s going to be a killer.

The puppy is almost orange. He is really the color of the red earth after someone has dug in it to plant a field or pull up stones or put in a body. It is Mississippi red. The daddy was that color: he was short and looked like a big red muscle. He had chunks of skin and flesh crusted over to scabby sores from fighting. When he and China had sex, there was blood on their jaws, on her coat, and instead of loving, it looked like they were fighting. China’s skin is rippling like wind over water. The second puppy slides halfway out feet-first and hangs there.

Skeet, Junior squeaks. He has one eye and his nose pressed against Randall’s leg, which he is hugging. He seems very dark and very small, and in the night gloom, I cannot see the color of his clothes.

Skeetah grabs the puppy’s rear, and his hand covers the entire torso. He pulls. China growls, and the puppy slides clear. He is pink. When Skeetah lays him on the mat and wipes him off, he is white with tiny black spots like watermelon seeds spit across his fur. His tongue protrudes through the tiny slit that is his mouth, and he looks like a flat cartoon dog. He is dead. Skeetah lets go of the towel and the puppy rolls, stiff as a bowling pin, across the padding to rest lightly against the red puppy, which is moving its legs in small fits, like blinks.

Shit, China. Skeetah breathes. Another puppy is coming. This one slowly slides out headfirst; a lonely, hesitant diver. Big Henry, one of Randall’s friends, dives into the water at the river like that every time we go swimming: heavy and carefully, as if he is afraid his big body, with its whorls of muscle and fat, will hurt the water. And every time Big Henry does so, the other boys laugh at him. Manny is always the loudest of them all: his teeth white knives, his face golden red. The puppy lands in the cup of Skeetah’s palms. She is a patchwork of white and brown. She is moving, her head bobbing in imitation of her mother’s. Skeetah cleans the puppy. He kneels behind China, who growls. Yelps. Splits.

Even though Daddy’s truck was parked right beyond the front door and Junior hit me in my calf with a shine bottle, I looked at Manny first. He was holding the ball like an egg, with his fingertips, the way Randall says a good ball handler does. Manny could dribble on rocks. I had seen him in the rocky sand at the corner of the basketball court down at the park, him and Randall, dribbling and defending, dribbling and defending. The rocks made the ball ricochet between their legs like a rubber paddleball, unpredictable and wild, but they were so good they caught to dribble again nearly every time. They’d fall before they’d let the ball escape, dive to be cut by shells and small gray stones. Manny was holding the ball as tenderly as he would a pit puppy with pedigree papers. I wanted him to touch me that way.

Hey, Manny. It was an asthma squeak. My neck felt hot, hotter than the day. Manny nodded at me, spun the ball on his pointer finger.

What’s up?

’Bout time, Daddy said. Help your brother with them bottles.

I can’t fit under the house. I swallowed the words.

I don’t want you to get them. I want you to rinse them. He pulled a saw, brown with disuse, from his truck bed. I know we got some plywood somewhere around here.

I grabbed two of the nearest jugs and brought them to the faucet. I turned the knob and the water that burst out of the spigot was hot as boiling water. One of the jugs was caked with mud on the inside, so I let the water run through the top. When the water bubbled up at the rim, I shook the jugs to clear them. Manny and Randall whistled to each other, played ball, and others arrived: Big Henry and Marquise. I was surprised that they all came from other places, that one or two of them hadn’t emerged from the shed with Skeetah, or out of the patchy remains of Mother Lizbeth’s rotting house, which is the only other house in the clearing and which was originally my mama’s mother’s property. The boys always found places to sleep when they were too drunk or high or lazy to go home. The backseats of junk cars, the old RV Daddy bought for cheap from some man at a gas station in Germaine that only ran until he got it into the driveway, the front porch that Mama had made Daddy screen in when we were little. Daddy didn’t care, and after a while the Pit felt strange when they weren’t there, as empty as the fish tank, dry of water and fish, but filled with rocks and fake coral like I saw in Big Henry’s living room once.

What’s up, cousin? Marquise asked.

I was wondering where y’all was. The Pit was feeling empty, Randall said.

The water in the bottle I held was turning pink. I rocked on my feet with the sloshing, tried not to glance at Manny but did. He wasn’t looking at me; he was shaking Marquise’s hand, his wide, blunt fingers swallowing Marquise’s skinny brown hand almost to nothing. I set the bottle down clean, picked up the next, began again. My hair laid on my neck like the blankets my mother used to crochet, the ones we still piled on in the winter to keep warm and woke up under in the morning, sweating. A bottle of dishwashing liquid landed at my feet, slapping mud on my calves.

All the way clean, Daddy said as he stalked off with a hammer in one hand. The soap made my hands slippery. Suds blanketed the mud. Junior quit searching for bottles and sat next to me, playing with bubbles.

Only reason Manny was up here so early was because he was trying to get away from Shaliyah. Marquise stole the ball. Although he was smaller than Skeetah, he was almost as quick, and he dribbled to the raggedy hoop. Big Henry winked at Manny and laughed. Manny’s face was smooth and only his body spoke: his muscles jabbered like chickens. He spread himself over Marquise, guarding him from the goal, and Randall clapped his hands at the edge of the beaten dirt court, waiting for Manny to steal and pass the ball. Big Henry shouldered against him, guarding. He was almost as tall as Randall but much wider, graceful and light as a spinning top. It was a real game now.

The crack of the bottle I was shaking sounded like change clattering in a loose fist. The bottle shattered, and the glass fragmented, slid along my palms. I dropped what I held.

Move, Junior! I said. My hands, which moments before had been pink, were red. Especially the left. I’m bleeding! I said under my breath. I didn’t yell; I wanted Manny to see me, but not as a weak, sorry girl. Not something to be pitied because I couldn’t take pain like a boy. Randall caught Manny’s rebound and walked over to me as I kneeled, my left hand under the faucet, a ribbon of red making for the mud at my feet. He threw the ball backward. The cut was the size of a quarter, bleeding steadily.

Let me see. He pushed around the wound, and it pulsed blood. I felt sick to my stomach. You got to push on it until it stops bleeding. He put my thumb, which had been stopping the head of the bottle, over the cut. You push, he said. My hands are too dirty. Until it stops hurting. It was always what Mama told us to do when we went running to her with a cut or a scrape. She would push and blow at the wound after putting alcohol on it, and when she’d stopped blowing, it wouldn’t hurt anymore. There. See? Like it never happened.

Manny was throwing the ball back and forth with Marquise so quickly it sounded like the fast beat of a drum. He glanced over at Randall kneeling over me; his face was even redder than it usually is, but then he hissed like he always does when he’s playing basketball, and I knew he was excited, not concerned. You got to push … until it stops hurting. My stomach tilted. Randall squeezed once more and stood, and the glimpse I saw of Mama in his mouth when he’d told me to push was gone. Manny looked away.

China’s next puppy is black-and-white. The white circles his neck before curling away from his head and across his shoulder. The rest of him is black. He jerks and mewls as Skeetah lays him on the blanket, clean. His mewl is loud, makes itself heard among the crickets; and he is the loudest Mardi Gras dancing Indian, wearing a white headdress, shouting and dancing through the pitted streets of the sunken city. I want him because he comes out of China chanting and singing like the New Orleans Indians, like the Indians that gave me my hair, but I don’t think Skeetah will give him to me. He is worth too much money. His bloodline is good. China is known among the pit bulls in Bois Sauvage for locking on to dogs and making them cur. She pulls tendons from necks. The daddy dog from Germaine, a few towns over, is equally fierce. Rico, his owner and Manny’s cousin, makes so much money fighting him he only has a part-time job as a mechanic at an oil change shop, and he spends the rest of his time driving his dog in his pickup truck to illegal dogfights set back in the woods.

I wish he was all black, Skeetah says.

I don’t care, I say in return to Skeetah, to everyone, to the dogs multiplying in the shed, but no one hears me over China. She yelps. She sounds like I do when I let go of the swinging rope that hangs from the tall tree over Wolf River: terrified and elated. Her clipped ears curl forward. The puppy slides from her. It looks yellow, streaked with black, but when Skeetah wipes it off, the black vanishes.

Blood look black at night, Randall says.

The puppy is pure white. She is her mother in miniature. But while her mother moans, she is silent. Skeetah bends over her. The other puppies are opening their jaws, twitching legs. We’re all sweating so badly we look like we just ran into the shed from a hard, heavy summer rain. But Skeet is shaking his head, and I don’t know if it’s all sweat or if he’s crying. He blinks. He scrapes his pointer over the pure white skull, down the puppy’s chest and her belly. Her mouth opens and her belly inflates. She is her mother’s daughter. She is a fighter. She breathes.

I tied the strip of an old rag around my hand and kept washing until I had all the glass bottles lined up on the wall inside the kitchen. Junior had run off into the woods surrounding the house after declaring that he was going to hunt armadillos. The boys had finished playing basketball; Big Henry pulled the old Caprice his mama had bought him for his sixteenth birthday into the yard next to the house after drinking from the faucet, wetting his head, and shaking it like a wet dog to make me laugh. Randall and Manny were arguing about the game. Marquise was lying on the hood in the shade of the oak trees, smoking a cigar. Big Henry only has two six-by-nine speakers that work because he blew his amp and his bass, so their talk was louder than the music. I picked up the jug I broke and put the shards in an old half of a garbage can lid. I knelt and stared for glass, wondered if I could find the piece that had cut me. When I finished, I walked toward the back of the property, the woods. My eyes wanted to search for Manny so badly the want felt like an itch on my temple, but I kept walking.

My mama’s mother, Mother Lizbeth, and her daddy, Papa Joseph, originally owned all this land: around fifteen acres in all. It was Papa Joseph nicknamed it all the Pit, Papa Joseph who let the white men he work with dig for clay that they used to lay the foundation for houses, let them excavate the side of a hill in a clearing near the back of the property where he used to plant corn for feed. Papa Joseph let them take all the dirt they wanted until their digging had created a cliff over a dry lake in the backyard, and the small stream that had run around and down the hill had diverted and pooled into the dry

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