Mama had talked back to Elaine. Talked over the storm. Pulled us in in the midst of it, kept us safe. This secret that is no longer a secret in my body: Will I keep it safe? If I could speak to this storm, spell it harmless like Medea, would this baby, the size of my fingernail, my pinkie fingernail, maybe, hear? Would speaking make it remember me once it is born, make it know me? Would it look at me with Manny’s face, with his golden skin, with my hair? Would it reach out with its fingers, pink, and grasp?
The sun will not show. It must be out there, over the furious hurricane beating itself against the coastline like China at the tin door of the shed when she wants to get out and Skeet will not let her. But here on the Pit, we are caught in the hour where the sun is hidden beyond the trees but hasn’t escaped over the horizon, when it is coming and going, when light comes from everywhere and nowhere, when everything is gray.
I lie awake and cannot see anything but that baby, the baby I have formed whole in my head, a black Athena, who reaches for me. Who gives me that name as if it is mine: Mama. I swallow salt. That voice, ringing in my head, is drowned out by a train letting out one long, high blast. And then it disappears, and there is only the sound of the wind like a snake big enough to swallow the world sliding against mountains. And then the wind like a train, again, and the house creaks. I curl into a ball.
“Did you hear that?”
It is Skeetah; I can barely see him. He is only a wash of greater darkness that moves in the dark opening of the hallway.
“Yeah,” I say. My voice sounds like I have a cold, all the mucus from my crying lodged in my nose. A train, Mama said. Camille came, and the wind sounded like trains. When Mama told me this, I put my nose in her knee. I’d heard trains before when we went swimming on the oyster shell beach, and the train that ran through the middle of St. Catherine would sound loudly in the distance. I could not imagine wind sounding like that. But now I hear, and I can.
“Where’s the lamp?”
“On the table,” I squeaked. Skeetah walked toward the table, bumping into things in the half-light, and fumbled the kerosene lantern to light.
“Come on,” Skeetah says, and I follow him to the back of the house, to his and Randall’s room, which seems smaller than it is, and close and hot and red in the light of a smaller kerosene lamp that Skeet must have found in the shed. He shuts the door behind us after eyeing Daddy’s open door. The wind shrieks. Trees reach out their arms and beat their limbs against the house. Skeet sits on his bed next to China, who sprawls and lifts her head to look at me lazily, and who licks her nose and mouth in one swipe. I climb onto Randall’s bed, hug my knees. The puppies’ bucket is quiet.
“You scared?”
“No,” Skeetah says. He rubs a hand from the nape of China’s neck over her shoulder, her torso, her thigh. She lets her head roll back and licks again.
“I am,” I say. “I never heard the wind sound like that.”
“We ain’t even on the bay. We back far enough up in the trees to be all right. All these Batistes been living up here all these years through all these hurricanes and they been all right. I’m telling you.”
“Remember when Mama told us that the wind sounded like that when Camille hit?” I squeeze tighter. “Elaine wasn’t nothing like this.”
“Yeah, I remember.” Skeetah rubs his fingers under China’s chin, and it is like he is coaxing something from her because she leans toward him and grins, tries to kiss him. “I can remember her saying it.” He stops rubbing China, leans forward to put his elbows on his knees, rubs his hands together, looks away. “But I can’t remember her voice,” he says. “I know the exact words she said, can see us sitting there by her lap, but all I can hear is my voice saying it, not hers.”
I want to say that I know her voice. I want to open my mouth and have her voice slide out of me like an impression, to speak Mama alive for him as I hear her. But I can’t.
“At least we got the memory,” I say. “Junior don’t have nothing.”
“You remember the last thing she said to you?”
When Mama was birthing Junior, she put her chin down into her chest. She panted and moaned. The ends of her moans squeaked, sounded like bad brakes grinding when a car stops. She never screamed, though. Skeetah and Randall and I were sneaking, standing on an old air-conditioning unit outside her and Daddy’s window, and after she pushed Junior out, once he started crying, she let her head fall to the side, her eyes like mirrors, and she was looking at us, and I thought she would yell at us to get down out of the window, to stop being nosy. But she didn’t. She saw us. She blinked slow. The skin above her nose cracked and she bit her lip. She shook her head then, raised her chin to the ceiling like an animal on the slaughter stump, like I’ve seen Daddy and Papa Joseph hold pigs before the knife, and closed her eyes. She started crying then, her hands holding her belly below her deflated stomach, soft as a punctured kickball. I had never seen her cry. But she hadn’t said anything, even after Daddy called some of their friends, Tilda and Mr. Joe, to the house to watch us, even after he carried her and Junior out to the truck and she slumped against the window, watching us as Daddy drove away. Shaking her head. Maybe that meant no. Or Don’t worry-I’m coming back. Or I’m sorry. Or Don’t do it. Don’t become the woman in this bed, Esch, she could have been saying. But I have.
“No,” I say. “I don’t remember.”
“I do,” Skeetah says, and he props his chin on his fists. “She told us she loved us when she got into the truck. And then she told us to be good. To look after each other.”
“I don’t remember that.” I think Skeetah is imagining it.
“She did.” Skeetah sits up, leans back in the bed again, and lays a still hand on China’s neck. She sighs. “You look like her. You know that?”
“No.”
“You do. You not as big as her, but in the face. Something about your lips and eyes. The older you get the more you do.”
I don’t know what to say, so I half grimace, and I shake my head. But Mama, Mama always here. See? I miss her so badly I have to swallow salt, imagine it running like lemon juice into the fresh cut that is my chest, feel it sting.
“Did you hear that?”
“What?” I sound stuffed again. Leaves slap the roof in great bunches. The rain is heavy, endless, hits the roof in quick crashing waves. At least the wind doesn’t sound like a train again.
“That,” Skeetah says, his head to one side, his ear cocked toward the window. His eyes gleam in the light of the lamp. He stands up, and China stands up with him, ears straight, tail pointed, tongue gone. Somewhere out in the storm, a dog is barking.
“Yeah,” I say, and then all three of us are at the window, peering out of the light edge left by the boards. We hear the dog but can’t see it; what we do see is the pines, the thin trees bending with the storm, bending almost to breaking. Even the oaks are losing leaves and branches in the gray light, the beating rain. The dog barks loudly, fast as a drum, and something about the way the bark rises at the end reminds me of Mama’s moans, of those bowing pines, of a body that can no longer hold itself together, of something on the verge of breaking. The high notes are little rips. It circles the house, its bark near and far. Is it one of Junior’s mutts, his mangy family member, seeking shelter, the cool bottom of a house and a knobby-kneed boy and no rain?