praying the rosary, when she was in her seventies, and two years later, Mama, the only baby still living out of the eight that Mother Lizbeth had borne, died when having Junior. Since it’s just us and Daddy here now with China, the chickens, and a pig when Daddy can afford one, the fields Papa Joseph used to plant around the Pit are overgrown with shrubs, with saw palmetto, with pine trees reaching up like the bristles on a brush.
We dump our garbage in a shallow ditch next to the pit, and we burn it. When the pine needles from the surrounding trees fall in and catch fire, it smells okay. Otherwise it smells like burnt plastic. I dumped the glass into the ditch, where it sparkled on top of the black remains like stars. The water in the pit was low; we hadn’t had a good rain in weeks. The shower we needed was out in the Gulf, held like a tired, hungry child by the storm forming there. When there’s good rain in the summer, the pit fills to the brim and we swim in it. The water, which was normally pink, had turned a thick, brownish red. The color of a scab. I turned around to leave and saw gold. Manny.
“Been too dry,” he said. He stopped beside me, an arm’s length away. I might have been able to scrape him with my fingernails. “Ain’t no good to swim in right now.”
I nodded. Now that he was speaking to me, I didn’t know what to say.
“If your daddy’s right, we’ll get it soon, though,” he said.
I beat the side of my leg with the garbage lid, forgetting the dirt caked to the side. It drifted and fell like powder. I wanted to shut up, but it was my only thought, so I spoke.
“Why you ain’t out front?”
I looked at his feet. His once white Jordans were the color of orange sherbet.
“With them?”
“Yeah.” I glanced at his face, the sweat like glaze. My lips were open. Another me would’ve licked it off, and it would’ve tasted like salt. But this girl wouldn’t lean forward, wouldn’t smile as she mouthed his neck. This girl waited because she wasn’t like the women in the mythology book, the women who kept me turning the pages: the trickster nymphs, the ruthless goddesses, the world-uprooting mothers. Io, who made a god’s heart hot with love; Artemis, who turned a man into a deer and had her dogs tear him cartilage from bone; Demeter, who made time stop when her daughter was stolen.
“ ’Cause I don’t smoke weed,” Manny said, and his shoe slid next to mine. “You know I don’t do that no more.” His feet were in front of me, and suddenly, tall as he was, he was blocking the sun. “You know what I do.” He was really looking at me, bold, for the first time all day. He smiled. His face, marked with red sunburn and dimples and pockmarks and the glittering of scars from a car accident when he was seventeen and drunk and high in a car with his cousins upcountry at midnight, and they swerved to hit a deer; when he came out the window and hit the pebbly asphalt and glass, he scraped, and the road marked him with its own burn, broke him in places. He was the sun.
Manny touched me first where he always touched me: my ass. He grabbed and pulled, and my shorts slid down. His fingers tugged my panties, his forearms rubbed my waist, and the brush of his skin burned like a tongue. He had never kissed me except like this, with his body, never his mouth. My underwear slid down my legs. He was peeling away my clothes like orange rind; he wanted the other me. The pulpy ripe heart. The sticky heart the boys saw through my boyish frame, my dark skin, my plain face. The girly heart that, before Manny, I’d let boys have because they wanted it, and not because I wanted to give it. I’d let boys have it because for a moment, I was Psyche or Eurydice or Daphne. I was beloved. But with Manny, it was different; he was so beautiful, and still he chose me, again and again. He wanted my girl heart; I gave him both of them. The pines seemed to circle like a ring-a-rosy, and I fell.
China is licking the puppies. I’ve never seen her so gentle. I don’t know what I thought she would do once she had them: sit on them and smother them maybe. Bite them. Turn their skulls to bits of bone and blood. But she doesn’t do any of that. Instead she stands over them, her on one side and Skeetah on the other like a pair of proud parents, and she licks.
“She ain’t done yet,” Daddy says from the bed of his truck. “The afterbirth.” He disappears again off into the darkness with the sound of the bottles I cleaned rolling after him through the dirt.
It is as if China has heard Daddy. She backs into a corner, wedges herself between a stack of cinder blocks and what I think is most of a car motor. She makes no noise, just bares her teeth. Grimaces. Skeetah makes no move toward her. She does not want to share this; he will not make her. Her muzzle glistens pink and yellow with what she has licked from her puppies. There is a wet sound behind her, and she turns quickly, still leaking a thin line of mucus, to eat what has fallen. I squat and peer through Skeet’s legs. It looks dark purple, almost black, in the corner, and with a shake of her head, the glistening mess is gone. It had looked like the inside of the last pig that Daddy had, that he slaughtered and emptied into a tub before making us clean the intestines for chitterlings: it stank so bad Randall threw up.
“I heard they always eat the afterbirth,” Randall says. China walks past Skeetah, licks his pinkie. It is a kiss, a peck. She stands over the dirty towel that holds her puppies.
“Look,” I say.
There is something moving where she dropped, where she ate. Skeetah crawls over on his hands and knees, and picks it up.
“A runt,” he says. He carries it into the light.
It is brindle. Stripes of black and brown ride its ribs like a zebra’s. It is half the size of its brothers and sisters. Skeetah closes his fist, and it vanishes. “It’s alive,” he says. There is delight on his face. He is happy to have another puppy; if it lives, he can get maybe $200 for it, even if it is a runt. He opens his hand, and the puppy appears like the heart of a bloom. It is as still as a flower’s stigma. Skeetah’s mouth falls straight, his eyebrows flatten. He lays it down. “Probably going to die anyway.”
China does not lay down like a new mother. She does not suckle. She licks the big red puppy and then forgets him. She is looking past Skeetah to us. She bristles at us standing at the door. Skeetah grabs her neck collar, tries to calm her, but she is rigid. Junior pulls his way up Randall’s back. I think about hugging Skeetah before I go, but China is glowering, so I just smile at him. I don’t know if he sees me in the dark. He has done a good job. Only one puppy is dead, even though it is China’s first time birthing. China scratches at the earth floor of the shed as if she would dig a hole and bury the puppies from sight. In the ruins of the refuse-laden yard, Daddy is hitting something metal. We leave. Skeetah refastens the curtain behind us, pulling it tight against the still clear night. The shed falls dark.
I tell Junior to take a bath once we enter the house, but he ignores me, and it is not until Randall turns on the water and carries him to the bathtub that he washes off. Randall stands in the doorway watching Junior because he is convinced that when Junior closes the door to wash, he only sits on the edge of the bathtub and kicks his feet in the water. Junior hates bathing. I am the last to take a shower, and the water, even though I have only the cold spigot on, is lukewarm. August is always the month of the deepest heat, the heat that reaches so far in the earth it boils the water in the wells. When I go to bed, Junior is already asleep. The box fan in the window hums. I lie on my back and feel dizzy, light-headed, nauseous. I only ate once today. I see Manny above me, his face licking mine, the heat of his sweat, our waists meeting. How he sees me with his body. How he loves me like Jason. Junior snorts a baby snore, and I drift off with Manny’s breathing in my brain.
THE SECOND DAY: HIDDEN EGGS
Mornings after birth should be quiet; the air should muffle sounds. But quiet comes and goes here on the Pit like the pack of stray dogs that Daddy used to run off with his gun before Skeetah brought China here to stay. When Daddy kept hogs, in the morning the sows squealed at their sticky piglets. The chickens hatched the chicks from their hidden eggs, and they woke us with flapping and clucking. China’s pups’ first day in the world was no different. I woke up to hammering.
Outside, Skeetah looks clean. He’s wearing a different shirt at least, and his face is shining like he’s just
