“Gotdamnit.”
Daddy’s pickup eases into the yard so slowly that I can hear him curse above the gurgle of the engine. This is how he drives when he is bombed-out drunk. Very slowly, and with his brights on. His headlights break the golden bubble that encases Skeet and flood the yard with light. Skeetah raises the arm with the hammer and shades his eyes. Daddy parks parallel to his dump truck, which has sat rust-barnacled and silent since I attempted to crank it this morning. Daddy leaves his headlights on and gets out of the truck.
“I said, gotdamnit!”
Daddy tries to punctuate this by slamming the door of his truck, but he fails. His hand slips from the metal, and it closes so quietly I can’t even hear it from my seat on the toilet next to the window.
“Gotdamn Van’s Salvage,” Daddy mutters, “didn’t even have the part I needed.” He leans against the side of his truck like it’s a human being, speaks this almost as low as he used to on the nights he came home dazed drunk when Mama was alive. Mama would walk out to meet him, gather him to her like a child. She was only a few inches shorter than him and could bear all of his weight. He would whisper to her as they walked up the concrete slabs that made up the steps to the front porch. We never heard what he said to her. I imagine that he told her that he loved her, soaked tender with moonshine.
“You left your lights on,” Skeetah says.
“Now how I’m going to make money after the storm?” Daddy slaps his truck, but it is awkward, at odds. It slides into a caress. “What you say?”
“I said you left your lights on.” Skeetah is prying at a reluctant nail, his head down, concentrating. He watches Daddy out of the corner of his eyes.
“Oh.” Daddy reaches into the truck and pushes the knob to turn off the headlights. He walks toward Skeetah slowly. This is his drunk walk: purposeful, plodding. “What you doing?”
“Nothing.” Skeetah stills, stops pulling at the nail, but stays bent over.
“Nothing?”
“At all.”
“I see you doing something, so you can’t be doing nothing.”
“Ain’t you tired?”
“What?”
“You been busy trying to get parts for that dump truck all day.”
“Damn right,” Daddy says. “The U-Pull-It, the Salvage, all looked at me crazy. No dump truck parts. No help when I was looking through the cars. Look at me like they don’t know when a man’s talking when I tell them a bad storm’s coming.”
Skeetah straightens, balances on the balls of his feet, preparing to outwait Daddy. The hammer is on his knee.
“Them’s boards. You been in my piles?”
“Naw.”
“I got them gathered for the house. You always meddling. You want the windows to shatter?”
“Daddy, I ain’t mess with your wood.”
“Well, where you get it from, then?”
“Found it off up in the woods.” Skeet is running the hammer back and forth on his leg. He is waiting for the step that turns Daddy mean.
“You ain’t found shit in them woods.” Daddy is waving his hand in the air as if he is waving away night beetles startled to flight, wading through the glossy brown bugs with shells as hard as butterscotch candies. He spits. “Did you?”
“Yes.” Skeetah is very quiet. The hammer is still.
“Bullshit!” Daddy yells. “Everything I do for y’all and y’all don’t appreciate shit!” He raises his arms again, as if he has stirred more bugs to motion. He reaches to grab Skeetah’s arm, to pull him to standing and then shove him, probably. This is what he does when he wants to manhandle, humiliate; he pulls one of us toward him, shakes, and then shoves us hard backward so that we fall in the dirt. So that we sprawl like toddlers learning to walk: dirt on our faces and our hands, faces wet with crying or mucus, ashamed. Skeetah is rigid, as straight as the hammer hanging at his side. Daddy tries to shove him but he is slow to let go; it is as if his hands are deaf to what his brain wants them to do, and they grip Skeetah’s shoulders, hard. He shakes Skeetah.
“Let me go, Daddy.” This is so quiet that I can barely hear it.
China is standing in the doorway of the shed. She does not growl. She does not bark. She only stands, head cocked to one side, her forelegs locked wide, her breasts adding more bulk to her, the rest of her lost to the darkness of the shed. She is still.
“Let go!”
“All I do!” Daddy shoves Skeet so hard that Daddy lurches backward with the force of it, but he catches himself before falling.
Skeetah stutters backward but lands crouching, still on his feet. China darts forward. Skeet holds the hammer like a baton.
“Hold,” Skeetah calls. “Hold!” There is wetness to his voice. China stops where she is. She is one of the flaking statues at the graveyard next to the park, an angel streaked by rain, burning bright.
“I wish she would,” Daddy says, his arms straight as his sides. “I wish she would.”
Skeetah edges sideways to China, lays down the hammer, and puts his hand over her muzzle. She is marble under his fingers.
“I’d take her upcountry and shoot her.”
“No.”
“Call the county pound. Make you watch them take her away.”
Skeetah has his arm around China’s back, tucked over and under her stomach, his hand lost somewhere in her breasts. China does not turn and lick him. She watches Daddy still. Skeetah rubs her chest with his other hand, smoothes the fur in broad downward strokes again and again.
“I’m trying to save us,” Daddy says. Skeetah crouches. “Y’all need to learn to appreciate me. You hear me?”
The nightbugs answer back yesssssssss. Skeetah ignores Daddy, rubs China, glances back and forth between them.
“Put them gotdamn boards back where you found them. You hear me?”
China’s tail lowers, but her ears are still laid back down her skull like a crest of feathers. Skeetah is whispering to her, murmuring.
“You hear me?” Daddy yells, takes a halting step toward Skeet. China’s tail rises.
“Yes,” Skeetah says. He is facing Daddy, staring at him plainly, his face smooth and open, only his mouth barely moving when he speaks. “Yes.”
“Good.” Daddy steps back. Skeet leans on China to stop her from moving. Daddy turns to walk into the house. He shuffles sideways, slow and deliberate, watching Skeet and China watch him leave them to the abandoned hammer, the fallen frame, the dark expanse sounding of bug and wood and wind spreading out and away from the two of them like a bride’s train.
THE SIXTH DAY: A STEADY HAND
Daddy is knocking down what is left of the chicken coop. The chickens and rooster have long abandoned it. After summers of heavy rain the wood grew soft and rotten, and then the short, knuckle-freezing winters dried it up and hollowed the woody pulp out, and it began to sag and buckle into the earth. It used to have Mama’s clothesline tied to it with the other end fixed to a pine tree. After Mama died, Daddy moved the clothesline to a closer tree, but he didn’t tie it tight enough, so when Randall and I wash clothes and hang them out with wooden clothespins, the line sags, and our pants dangle in the dirt.
Skeetah slept out in the shed with the dogs after he faced Daddy with the hammer last night. I have been sitting on the sofa near the living room window, waiting for him to come into the house, because I know he will circle around and enter the front door to avoid passing Daddy in the back. But Skeet has not surfaced. He could always hold his breath the longest when we first began swimming in the pit, crouched on the silty, junk-reefed bottom; we would circle him like anxious boats, calling him to the surface, but he would remain still and bubbling below. I take breaks and sneak cans of Vienna sausages in the bathroom, swallowing all five quickly. They are so light they could be air. I tried to read this morning, but I stopped in the quest for the Golden Fleece, distracted again by Medea, who can only think of Jason, her face red, her heart aflame, engulfed by sweet pain. The goddess struck her with love, and she had no choices. I could not concentrate. My stomach was its own animal, and thoughts of Manny kept surfacing like swimmers in my brain; I had my own tender pain. I slid my book between the wall and my bed and slunk to the kitchen, filching Daddy’s hurricane supplies. I eat, and nothing touches my stomach, nothing tells me it is full with food, with something more than food.